 
at the very bottom of the economic scale the conditions may perhaps best be 
suggested by two brief quotations. 
the first, from jonathan norton leonard's "three years down," describes 
the plight of pennsylvania miners who had been put out of company villages 
after a blind and hopeless strike in 1931: 
reporters from the more liberal metropolitan papers found thousands of them 
huddled on the mountainsides, crowded three or four families together in 
one-room shacks, living on dandelions and wild weed-roots. 
half of them were sick, but no local doctor would care for the evicted 
strikers. 
all of them were hungry and many were dying of those providential diseases 
which enables welfare authorities to claim that no one has starved. 
the other quotation is from louis v.[armstrong's "we too are the people," 
and the scene is chicago in the late spring of 1932: 
one vivid, gruesome moment of those dark days we shall never forget. 
we saw a crowd of some fifty men fighting over a barrel of garbage which 
had been set outside the back door of a restaurant. 
american citizens fighting for scraps of food like animals!... 
it was a strange time in which to graduate from school or college. 
high schools had a larger attendance than ever before, especially in the 
upper grades, because there were few jobs to tempt anyone away. 
likewise college graduates who could afford to go on to graduate school 
were continuing their studies, after a hopeless hunt for jobs, rather than be 
idle.... 
the effects of the economic dislocation were ubiquitous. 
not business alone was disturbed, but churches, museums, theatres, 
schools, colleges, charitable organizations, clubs, lodges, sports 
organizations, and so on clear through the list of human enterprises; one and 
all they felt the effects of dwindling gifts, declining memberships, decreasing 
box-office returns, uncollectible bills, revenue insufficient to pay the 
interest on the mortgage. 
