Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Fall/105/Section059/Earl M. Lasker

Biography

Earl M. Lasker was a white man who lived in Newton, North Carolina during the Great Depression. Earl Lasker was married to the love of his life, Ada Moser, and they had two children together. Neither Earl nor his wife completed their high school education and both of them entered straight into the workforce after they got married in 1926. Earl worked in cotton mills to support his family but preferred his nurse profession. He worked whenever he got the chance, although sometimes companies didn’t have the resources to pay their employees the correct amount of money. The cotton mill profession also had horrible working conditions, which prompted Lasker to pursue his interest in nursing. Although Lasker was never formally educated to be a nurse, he was able to teach himself the important skills in order to treat sick patients. He even ended up saving his wife’s life when she contracted a cancer-like disease, called “hiccoughs.” The couple fell in and out of debt, causing her to almost lose her life several times during their marriage and leaving Earl with the responsibilities of curing his wife and taking care of their two daughters. This period of the 1900’s proved to be the worst economic depression ever in America, leaving citizens to battle the challenges of severe unemployment and deflation all over the world. Obviously large cities were devastated throughout the Great Depression, but small towns and farms also experienced damage that would make this time challenging for all. Crops were hard to maintain and citizens in small towns, including Lasker and his family, found it almost impossible to provide for their families. This was exemplified in Tom Morain’s article about the Great Depression. He said, “Town families could not produce their own food. Many city dwellers often went hungry. Sometimes there were soup kitchens in larger cities that provided free meals to the poor, but rarely on the farms. Winters were an especially hard time since many families had no money to buy coal to heat their houses.” Lasker definitely understood all of these hardships during the midst of the Great Depression.

Social Context:

Lack of Access to Health Care and Education

During the Great Depression, sickness and disease ran rampant among Americans. Although most of the common illnesses were not deadly, the lack of healthcare meant the illnesses were in fact, something to be afraid of. The lack of health care was due to the hospitals’ failure to hire enough health care workers to keep the facilities running. This was traced back to the lack of education available during this time. Hospitals were not comfortable with hiring nurses who had not gone through the formal education to become a nurse, because they didn’t know if they could trust them with incoming patients. This became a problem as not many people during this time had the money to pay for this higher-level education. This was explained further in Khalid Kisswani’s article as he said, “White students found themselves in a situation where they had to drop out of school and participate in the labor market by looking for a job to support their families. This could explain why the educational loss was captured by the regression.” Hospitals were missing out on intelligent people, who had taught themselves how to be a successful nurse instead of paying to attend school. This situation was frustrating for those who had trouble looking for jobs with strong credentials, but also difficult for the patients who desperately needed to be treated in a hospital but were not able to find a location with enough resources to properly treat their illness/injury.

Need for Political Transformation

Citizens in America were desperate for political innovation during this time. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was an attempt to cope with the problems of poverty, unemployment, and the disintegration of the American economy. This program was enacted to restore the economy which was so broken during the Great Depression and provided people with opportunities to make a living in order to support their families. The people were essentially banking on this program to turn the economy around and bring an end to the Great Depression. For example, “In North Carolina, then primarily an agricultural state, the deflation of crop prices was devastating. In 1933 gross farm income was only 46 percent of its 1929 level. The banking community that was so closely linked to the farming community consequently grew weaker and more desperate, and the absence of credit for farmers compounded an already miserable situation.” With a trail of poverty running through North Carolina, federal aid was extremely helpful for workers and farmers in small towns. “By 1933 in North Carolina, 27 out of every 100 persons were on relief.” This statistic alone proves the vast ways in which these programs worked to improve the lives of people in the rural areas of North Carolina.

Sources

·      Kisswani, Khalid. “Did the Great Depression Affect Educational

Attainment in the US?” Economics Bulletin 9, no. 30 (January 1, 2008): 1–10.

https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/12302/1/MPRA_paper_12302.pdf.

·      Stuckler, David, Christopher Meissner, Price Fishback, Sanjay

Basu, and Martin McKee. “Banking Crises and Mortality During the Great

Depression: Evidence from US Urban Populations, 1929-1937.” Epidemiology and Community Health 66, no. 5 (April 2, 2012): 410–19. https://jech-bmj-com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/content/66/5/410.

·      Wickersham, Mary Eleanor, and Robert Yehl. “The Cotton Mill

Village Turned City: A Retrospective Analysis of Three of Georgia’s Smallest Cities.” Journal of Urban History 40, no. 5 (May 6, 2014): 917–32. https://journals-sagepub-com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/doi/full/10.1177/0096144214533080.

·      Morain, Tom. “The Great Depression Hits Farms and Cities in the

1930’s.” Iowa Pathways. Iowa Pathways. Accessed September 29, 2002.

http://www.iowapbs.org/iowapathways/mypath/great-depression-hits-farms-and-cities-1930s.

·    “Nursing During the Great Depression.” Scrubs Magazine. Scrubs

Magazine, August 17, 2018. https://scrubsmag.com/nursing-during-the-great-depression/4/.