Cruelty to poor is the moral hazard

In 1934, a Lawndale, California, citizen identifying herself only as “Mrs. I. H.” sent a desperate note to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “I am a mother of seven children, and utterly heart broken, in that they are hungry, have only 65 cents in money,” she wrote. “The father is in L.A. trying to find something to do — provisions all gone — at this writing — no meat, milk — sugar — in fact, about enough flour for bread for two meals — and that’s all.”

Her letter, one of thousands sent to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1930s, reminds us that we rise up by helping each other. And we can do it again, if we listen to the people who are hurting instead of to the party threatening to hurt them even more.

I speak of the Republican Party.

The U.S. Labor Department has reported that the coronavirus pandemic has sent unemployment to its highest rate since the Great Depression. Food insecurity has skyrocketed, as well: nearly 1 in 5 mothers with young children say their kids aren’t getting enough to eat.

The GOP response? Let them eat cake. Or something.

Democrats are pressing for a 15% increase in food stamps. But Republicans in Congress vow to block that effort as well as a Democratic attempt to extend unemployment benefits beyond the July deadline set by the recent coronavirus package.

Republicans say that too much public assistance will create a “moral hazard,” removing Americans’ incentive to provide for themselves. Why work, the argument goes, if the government is going to feed you while it pays you to stay home?

But that assumes there’s work to be found, of course, so people who can’t find it must be lazy. The real moral hazard here is the cruelty of the Republican Party, which wants to blame jobless and struggling Americans for their own plight.

That’s what Republicans did a hundred years ago, too. Herbert Hoover, whom Roosevelt unseated in 1932, insisted that the assistance programs in FDR’s New Deal would “destroy the very foundations” of American society. So did Roosevelt’s GOP challenger in 1936, Alf Landon, who carried just two states. “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont,” Roosevelt’s campaign manager chirped.

But millions of Americans continued to embrace the GOP myth about the evils of government aid, as the letters to the Roosevelts also reveal. “We have always had a shiftless, never-do-well class of people whose one and only aim in life is to live without work,” an Indiana woman wrote. “Let each one paddle their own canoe, or sink.”

These correspondents assumed that the poor and dispossessed didn’t want to work. But the letters from people like Mrs. I. H. proved the opposite.

Her 62-year-old husband was a “good carpenter,” she wrote, “but Industry won’t hire a man this age.” And while her 17-year-old son was an accomplished French horn player, jobs for musicians had dried up.

“O President, my heart is breaking, as I see him go from home with half enough to eat, and go all day without a bit of lunch,” Mrs. I. H. wrote of her son, who was still in high school. “Our pride isn’t all gone. Our story is this: if we have a chance we can care for ourselves and be happy.”

That’s all Americans want. They’re a proud people, and they don’t like asking for help. But they have no choice. Our story is this: we take care of each other, so we can care for ourselves. Shame on anyone — from any party — who forgets that.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of the upcoming “The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America.”