In its brief time, the CWA put some four million Americans to work, and is credited with building some half a million miles of roads, as well as work on thousands of schools, playgrounds, airports, and other public facilities in which individual workers and entire communities could take pride. Its successor agencies, like the Works Progress Administration (WPA), understood that to restart America, it must offer a hand up, not a handout.
The County Poorhouse, which took in the homeless from Canton and the surrounding area, like Family Services, underwent a succession of names, each reflecting an attitudinal shift—from County Poorhouse in 1837 to County Infirmary in 1850 to County Home in 1924. Its purpose remained largely unchanged. But during the Depression its meager capacity to hold a few hundred homeless men and women was no match for the numbers in need. Ironically, it provided shelter and sustenance in another, less direct way: one of the jobs the WPA came up with for the unemployed was archiving the records of the poorhouse.
But for many in need that December of 1933, Roosevelt and the promises of a New Deal were still just that, mere promises. The day the B. Virdot offer appeared in the Canton Repository, Roosevelt amended yet again an executive order related to the National Emergency Council. To the hungry in Canton who even bothered to follow such bureaucratic minutiae, such news only fed their suspicions that help was still a ways off. Frank Walker, a wealthy lawyer for Anaconda Copper, was named acting executive director of the council, and Time magazine on December 18, 1933, noted wryly: “To outsiders this looked like a new title for an old job. . . . On a nation-wide scale his Council’s representatives were to steer befuddled citizens through the fog of new Washington agencies to the particular bureau that could supply the relief needed.”
Compared to such shuffling and reshuffling of the bureaucratic deck and the growing proliferation of agencies and boards, there was something utterly refreshing about B. Virdot’s offer. It was direct, free of politics, and immediate.
Left Behind
It was an intense source of pride among even the neediest that winter of 1933 that they had not given in and sought help from Family Services. As long as they had the strength to resist that temptation they could claim that they were not yet defeated. For some, even Sam Stone’s anonymous offer of help was too close to a handout. What they wanted was work.
George Hensel wrote, “We have asked for no charity all through the depression. . . . I would like to have work for a Christmas present for I have no shoes. You may think I have nerve writing this, but if you have been in need as long as my wife and I have you know how it feels to eat only one meal a day. . . . I walk so much every day and come home hungry and not much to eat. It makes you feel pretty bad. . . .” In a postscript he added, “There will be no Xmas for us.”
Before the Depression, Hensel had worked for years in a steel mill. Now he was going door-to-door peddling his wife’s doughnuts and cupcakes, but almost no one had any money to buy them. It was all made that much more uncomfortable wearing a pair of shoes he’d long since worn out. In the fierce competition for jobs, employers often looked to hire those who most needed work, but need was defined in ways that disadvantaged the likes of George Hensel, who had only his wife and himself to support. That put him at the back of every line. “We have no children,” he wrote, “and folks thinks we do not have to live.”
Such triaging for work was common during the Depression. Alwyn C. McCort, who had long worked on Canton’s streetcars and in a steel mill, had been out of work for three years and was trying to provide some support to his aging parents, Henry and Anna. From B. Virdot, he wanted only a job. “Now I am not asking for charity,” he wrote, “but thought since you are interested in unfortunate people you might be able to help me get a job. I get turned down again and again because I am single but my parents need my help very badly and I would like to be able to help them and know once more what money looks like.”
But it was the women, married, widowed, and unmarried alike, who often had the most difficult time during the Depression. Employers large and small presumed, often wrongly, that men were the principal supporters of families and women merely supplemented their incomes. But many of the letters to B. Virdot were from women who had no other support than whatever they earned, and on whom others—fatherless children, aging parents, and disabled spouses—counted for their survival.
Catherine Miller, the mother of two children, a daughter aged seven and a son aged four, faced the bleakest of holidays. “I have to support myself and they are both in school,” she wrote to B. Virdot. “They have never known what Christmas is. My husband is in a penal institution at present in York Pa. The children are both in need of clothing and I don’t get any help from any Society.” Days later, her check from B. Virdot arrived.
Wrote another woman, intent upon not throwing herself on the mercies of charity, “I am a widow with an only child, a daughter, and have been struggling to send her to school, and feed her and myself, and often I have gone with nothing to eat, as long as she, who is growing gets it, for she needs it worse than I do. As long as I know my little girl is not hungry it’s all right even though I am.”
These women shared the men’s disdain for charity and the dole. They were no less proud. But in the depths of the Depression, they had fewer options than men. Unlike their male counterparts, few had served apprenticeships or acquired the skills sought by Canton’s mills and factories. They were the first to lose their jobs, as companies, assuming that men were the families’ primary breadwinners, furloughed en masse all married women. It was a sign of how different the times were that there were no uprisings or challenges to such edicts and that these measures were generally greeted as prudent under the circumstances. For these women, such decisions were devastating. Those who made their way through the Depression on their own without recourse to charity or Family Services were a special breed—tough, resourceful, and resilient. B. Virdot’s offer was addressed not only to the men of Canton but to the families that allowed for women too to come forward, and they did.
My grandmother Minna would not have had it any other way. As a teenager and an only child, she provided essential support to her mother and father, a veteran of the Spanish-American War who returned with a disabling case of malaria. Minna would never have allowed Sam to ignore the appeals of women, even if he were inclined to do so, and he was not. Sam had known nothing but strong and independent-minded women in his family. His mother was not to be trifled with, and two of his three sisters had wrenching struggles with poverty. Minna was a feminist with a fierce social conscience whose influence over Sam in such matters could not be overstated. She would have read every incoming letter, doubtless helped him triage the worthiest from the rest, and championed the case of the women. She knew exactly what they were up against.
Years later, in World War II, as men marched off to war, women like the much-celebrated “Rosie the Riveter” filled the industrial ranks. But it was not for lack of ambition or need that the women of the Depression eyed those same positions. Given half a chance, the generation of Rosie’s mother would gladly have rolled up their sleeves in Canton’s mills and factories, and no one thought less of those who were able to do so. In Canton, the fortunate found work as nurses, secretaries, shopgirls, and maids, and did piecework in factories. But as the Depression deepened, they were the first to be let go.
A photo from the 1920s taken at the Hoover vacuum plant shows a vast room filled with women sitting row upon row at sewing machines. But in March 1931, the order went out—all married women must go. No inquiry was made as to whether their husbands had jobs or whether they were their family’s sole support. The next year, Hoover launched a national ad campaign “based on the powerful appeal that the Hoover was the one possession which enabled the women of modern means to enjoy equal luxury with their wealthier sisters.” The appeal fell flat. In 1933 the company began a marketing drive built around the slogan “Elmer is the key to ’33.” The idea was that in Hard Times, Hoover’s sales force should concentrate on the husbands—the “Elmers”—who alone had the authority to purchase costly items like sweepers. Sales sank even further. The company had failed to show women due respect, either as employees or as consumers.
Gumption
For many women the Great Depression represented a bewildering descent into poverty. Many had been working even before they reached puberty. Their struggles echoed those of their mothers, whose hardships became templates for their own lives. Childhoods, such as they were, had been cut short by the demands of family and their own survival. In Canton, as across the country, there was nothing novel about the idea that a woman would have to support herself and others, but opportunities were rare.
So it was with Rachel DeHoff, who was among those who reached out to B. Virdot. She never enjoyed any delusions that life was going to be easy. The daughter of William and Elizabeth Davis, she was born in August 1897. Her father, William, the son of Welsh immigrants, was a gritty-faced coal miner, a veteran of the Civil War who was born in 1836, already sixty-one when daughter Rachel was born. Her mother was a Scottish immigrant, twenty-nine years younger than her husband. Their bare-bones home in the rural coal-mining village of Somerdale, Ohio, relied on an outside pump, an outhouse, and a crudely dug-out fruit cellar. In 1905 her father died, leaving Elizabeth, then a forty-one-year-old widow, to house and feed her three daughters on her husband’s meager Civil War pension.
School was a luxury Rachel DeHoff could not afford. After the fourth grade, she had to look for work. Not long after her elder sister Esther moved to Canton, Rachel joined her. At thirteen she was working in Canton’s massive Dueber-Hampden watch factory, one of three thousand employees in what was then one of the world’s largest makers of pocket watches. Since the plant’s arrival in Canton in 1888, it had been a magnet for labor and one of the driving forces in Canton’s rapid growth. The sprawling industrial edifice, with its turrets, clock towers, formal gardens, and fortresslike presence, dwarfed the little girl from the village of Somerdale. Three years later, at sixteen, she married Howard DeHoff, who would become a machinist with Timken Roller Bearing Company, another of Canton’s gargantuan employers. The couple saved and built a new home in 1927, had two sons, and appeared well on their way to living out the American dream. Then the bottom dropped out of Rachel DeHoff s world.
First came the Depression. Then, in 1932, Howard fell ill. His urine turned dark and smoky-colored, his back ached, and he was feverish. Something was wrong with his kidneys. Returning by train from the Mayo Clinic, he crawled into bed. Two days later, on March 1, 1932, he died. They said it was Bright’s disease. Howard DeHoff was forty-two. Into the hands of the Great Depression fell his thirty-five-year-old widow, Rachel, and two sons, along with a crushing mortgage and little or no savings. For Rachel, history had repeated itself.
Less than two years later, as Christmas 1933 approached, Rachel DeHoff noticed the B. Virdot ad in the Canton Repository. She waited a day to respond. On December 19, she took up a fountain pen and, across a small pad of lined manila paper, wrote these words:
Dear Mr. B. Virdot
I saw in last nights paper the most human thing I have ever seen in print before. Instead of giving to some church or organization to have your name mentioned over the pulpit, or in the news paper, you have chose the silent way of celebrating Christs birth, which you surely will be repaid. No wonder prosperity has returned to you, and yours. May it never look dark again for you is my prayers—Well I will write a few things about my circumstances. You mentioned men—but I am not a man but I am taking the Responsibility of a man. As Father + Mother. My husband died 2 yrs ago this March left me with 2 Boys to support one in McKinley High another 9 yrs old -I have worked every day at Real Estate, and you know what a uphill job that has been, but I have been able to keep my home & Boys with food & clothing by the effort I have put forth. It looks pretty dark sometimes but we still hold on to that ray of hope—that this terrible depression will soon be over—and I want to state that I have never received charity of any kind or have never complained to anyone before but after I read your letter I made up my mind to write to you, not asking, just telling you my circumstances, but if you think I am deserving of part of your Xmas cheer that you are giving I assure you it will be greatly appreciated & spent for the right kind of things for my boys & myself.
May God Bless you & Wishing you a Merry Xmas & a prosperious new years- I remain—
MRS. R. DEHOFF
3039 9TH ST
CANTON
Days later, she received a check for five dollars signed by B. Virdot. To what use she put the money is not known, but there was little reason to fret for Rachel DeHoff. She was hell-bent on providing for her small family. In the months before her husband died, she had begun to study for the real estate test and to prepare herself for a career. She was one of the first women in the state to become a real estate agent and she shrewdly navigated the harshest of markets. In those dire times, few homes were sold. Many had been foreclosed on and were owned by the banks, which feared nothing as much as vandals in the empty houses. DeHoff understood that and initially focused on renting the houses, thereby assuring the bank that someone was there to watch the property. She arranged to take half the first month’s rent in such homes, giving her an income stream that allowed her to hold on to her own house even as she provided other families with at least temporary housing. She was tough and tireless and, notwithstanding a mere four years of schooling, deft at running numbers, calculating mortgages, and projecting her financial needs.
And she was compassionate. Just as her sister had taken her in, so she took others into her home. One of these was a childhood friend in need of shelter. Nola Walters would live with the family for years, and in return for cooking and cleaning she was given not merely lodging but a family to call her own. Christian spirit or not, no one got something for nothing. That was the singular axiom of the Great Depression. Hoboes would come to Rachel DeHoff’s back door, as they did to so many homes, and offer to shovel coal or, in winter, clear the sidewalk, and in return they received a sandwich they would eat on the back porch—a scene repeated hundreds of thousands of times across the nation. And such generosity was repaid in kind by neighbors and shop owners.
