Obscene in the Extreme by Rick Wartzman

Author:Rick Wartzman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs

Since Ham and Eggs has been defeated

I’m feeling kinda blue

For it’s hard to make a livin’

When your family is more than two

I guess I was too optimistic

For I thought it sure would pass

But there was too many voted

From the moneyed class

More than anything, though, most migrants seemed to feel a deep sense of shame at having become a public millstone. “I hate to look a man in the face with him knowing I’m on relief and feeling that I’m such a failure in life,” said Don Jackson, who had moved west to California for work, only to find himself reliant on the state for survival in the late ’30s. He recalled once going into the J. C. Penney in Bakersfield to do some shopping and striking up a conversation with a clerk about whether the sales tax might be lowered. “Never a chance as long as the SRA exists,” the clerk told Jackson, and then he pointed to some customers who were using their relief checks to buy shoes. “Take that for example,” the clerk said. Recounted Jackson: “Of course that hurt my feelings because I happened to be one of them. That’s not the only time I’ve run into such occasions . . . . Each and every one hurt, and are things that will never be forgotten. There’s not much I can do about a situation like that but just try to shield myself, for no man is proud of relief, and I happened to have my wife with me. It hurt her, too.”

At the Shafter FSA camp, a migrant named Lester Hunter put similar sentiments to song:

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