A Social Sign of Hope and Relief – Sunshine, maybe?
One sunny day in February 1953, and upon my returning home from school, my mother introduced me to a Miss Carol with whom she had been conversing over a cup of coffee and a piece of home-made marble cake. Miss Carol, whom I would get to know and like, in the coming months and years, was, apparently, a social worker at the Massachusetts Social Security office, probably out of Boston. Someone with an interest in our well-being had contacted her office regarding our plight.
Even today, 68 years later, I do not know for sure who stepped forward in appealing to the State of Massachusetts to evaluate the seriousness of our family situation. The grown-ups living in our immediate area lacked the know how to effectively deal with the bureaucratic hurdles in reaching a governmental welfare worker in his/her Boston office. However, Uncle Lucien, an Army Lieutenant Colonel living in State College, PA, might have intervened in our behalf.
The official jury is still out on this ruling. Sometimes, life provides no easy answers.
Except for the Charbonneau political connections that were mentioned above, no one in our strata of society qualified as worthy of an interview with anyone of bureaucratic importance. Yet, this connection had been completed and an effort launched to, hopefully, assist us.
Issues around Social Security and government assistance to a particular set of distressed individuals had been the subject of political debate in the US Congress since the middle of the Depression years, or around 1935.
These disagreements had clearly fashioned the opinions and attitudes of both Republican and Democratic voters in my home state and, particularly, in the minds and feelings of Lowell’s minority groups, namely the Irish, Franco-American, Greek, Polish, Lithuanian, Jewish, Russian, Portuguese and native Yankee persons. Nothing had been cleanly resolved, but World War II had temporarily set aside these brewing, political conflicts.
But, in 1953, attitudes regarding the U.S. government providing even marginal assistance to destitute persons or families could easily ignite a mini bonfire of acrimonious debates in any local bar of the city.
“We were not Russian Communists!”.
However, as a newly minted fourteen-year-old, such political harangues going back to the mid-1930s were outside my immediate scope of political awareness. For purely practical reasons, my family and I needed some attention forthwith. A government agency called Mother’s Aide, which had grown out of the Social Security Act of 1935 carried the more official moniker of “Aid for Families with Dependent Children, AFDC, might be there to help in our case.
Special attention was being afforded to single mothers, widows usually, with two or more young children, especially if this caregiver lacked the required workplace skills needed for gainful employment. The main idea was to allow such children to live with the mother in the safety of a home.
Maybe, such assistance was also available to a husband in such a situation, i.e. widower with several young children and someone having no marketable skills. But, in my cursory readings, this situation never came up for discussion.
As a staunch, Franco-American, Republican mother of four, and the daughter of a successful, entrepreneurial, Republican father from a generation before, my mother must have felt deeply torn between accepting welfare assistance from the government and her own family values with those rock-ribbed achievements and goals.
However, she, too, had seen personal friends being crushed during those long years of unemployment, which might have rendered her final decision easier. Yes, she decided to accept a modest, monthly, family allocation from Mother’s Aid, which in addition to our Uncle Lucien’s check for $25.00 per month, permitted all five of us to survive, but just barely. Plain and simple, we had become wards of the state – not an envious label to carry.
However, we were, fortunately, never expected to wear a public badge to make all comers aware of our dilemma. Such a token of shame might have been required in 12th century France, which might have prompted local troubadours in public squares to fashion new rhymes outlining the pitfalls of penury.
Later, my mother confided in me that the days of the Depression were harder for those people at home than during the long years of World War II.
As for my brother and two sisters, our stay-at-home mom managed to keep us all well fed and on the straight and narrow. Also, her continued but clandestine activities as a hairdresser out of our home brought in some cash. This was plus the income from our two, strong paper routes.
In summary, after checking out several empty trails, all promising real relief (un grand soulagement), only Mother’s Aid came through for us in the winter of 1953 when more belt tightening no longer calmed our stomach pains. Yet, however, even after things calmed down, we no longer could hold our heads quite as high. Even though my father had held four jobs, one regular and three part-time, he had not succeeded in being able to take care of his family. Curious but true.
End of Part #3