One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression

by Richard Lowitt, Maurine H. Beasley, Lorena A. Hickok

Book Overview

Between 1933 and 1935, Lorena Hickok traveled across thirty-two states as a "confidential investigator" for Harry Hopkins, head of FDR's Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Her assignment was to gather information about the day-to-day toll the Depression was exacting on individual citizens. One Third of a Nation is her record, underscored by the eloquent photographs of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and others, of the shocking plight of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0252010965
• ISBN13: 9780252010965
• Release Date: May 1983
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Length: 440 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

fascinating

the author sends in reports to describe the conditions of different areas of our country during the depression to see how the New Deal was helping. she is writing to Truman's administator of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, Harry Hopkins. It is the best description i have read on the lives of the suffering during those most difficult times. I could almost feel their agony. Excellent job and a great read if you have any interest in the lives of the starving during the depression

Great human insights into depression conditions

Lorena Hickok, special investigator for Harry Hopkins, traveled the country reporting on the human dimension of life during the Depression, while at the same time evaluating the impact of New Deal policies and programs and support for Roosevelt. Her reports read like letters, honest and open, down to earth. She talked to governors, tenant farmers, labor leaders, children working in the fields, social workers, down and out transients, former press colleagues, people on the edge of survival - and everyone in between. Hickok struggles with issues of white collar workers on relief vs the working class and chronically poor. Her ignorance on race issues is apparent when visiting the South and Southwest, but reading these reports is also instructive on attitudes of the times. I picked up this book because I was interested in the life of Lorena Hickok, who was the AP's highest paid female reporter before taking the job with Hopkins, and intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. What I got was a window into her world, but much more than that. Highly recommended for those interested in the US in the 1930s, the Depression years, and for fans of Hick.