Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Spring/Section24/Henry Garner

Henry Garner
Henry Garner (born circa 1886, death date unknown), was a white labor foreman from North Carolina. He was interviewed about his life by Mary A. Hicks in 1939 as part of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP).

Early Life
Garner spent his early life on a prison farm in North Carolina, as his father worked on the premises as a guard. Garner’s paternal grandfather had spent his entire career as a guard at the same prison. Garner attended school as a child but his father, who expected Garner to continue the family tradition of prison work, did not place much value on education. After completing fourth grade at the age of 14, Garner left school and his father got him a job overseeing prison livestock farmers. Two years later, Garner received a promotion and began overseeing a squad of convicts in the field, for which he received $25 a week (up from $3 a week at his previous position).

Adult Life
At the age of 21, Garner married an 18-year-old girl named Bessie, with whom he grew up on the prison farm and attended school. In their first year of marriage, Garner lived at a prison camp while Bessie kept a homestead on the prison farm. During their time apart, Garner had many affairs with prostitutes and showgirls and, unbeknownst to Bessie, contracted syphilis and gonorrhea on multiple occasions. About a year after their wedding, Bessie gave birth to their first child, Alice.

Alice was born with a severe birth defect in the form of a “water head”, which Garner suspected was a result of his syphilis. Garner took out a $500 loan to take Alice to a specialist hospital, where doctors told him there was no treatment and offered to euthanize her. Garner refused and took his daughter home for Bessie to take care of. Under Bessie’s care, Alice survived to the age of 26 but was bedridden for her entire life. She died in 1940.

Eight years after Alice’s birth, Garner’s doctor told him he no longer had syphilis or gonorrhea and that there was no risk of him conceiving another child with birth defects. A year later, Garner’s son James was born, and Bessie gave birth to another son, Robert, four years after that. Immediately after Robert’s birth, Bessie had to receive surgery and was pronounced infertile. The doctor told Garner that Alice’s defect and Bessie’s infertility were a result of his prior syphilis infections. Garner blamed growing up around prisoners, who often talked about and performed sex with one another, for his sex addiction in adulthood. Because of this, he decided to break with tradition and educate his sons to be white-collar workers instead of finding them jobs at the prison. After discovering the consequences of his syphilis, he started beating prisoners and withholding their paroles if they talked about sex in front of him. As a result, Garner’s squad became the most productive in the prison and Garner was assigned to reform the most deviant prisoners.

Garner was laid off from his prison job at the start of the Great Depression. He was then hired as a labor foreman under the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Despite making the same $65-a-month wage in his new position as he did at the prison and receiving government-subsidized rent, Garner wanted his old job back, stating in his FWP interview that he’d “go anywhere and leave [his] friends and neighbors to get back on at a prison and do the work [he understood]”.

Garner's time and place of death are unknown. The last record of his life is the 1940 United States Census, in which he reported that he lived on farm in Cary, North Carolina, with his wife and two sons. He was 54 years old at the time.

Syphilis Outbreak of the 1930s
In the United States in the 1930s, the spread of the venereal disease syphilis was a major threat to public health. Following the conclusion of World War I in 1918, many American soldiers returned home from Europe, where syphilis was particularly widespread, carrying the disease. This spurred an outbreak that peaked in the 1930s, during which an estimated 1 in 10 American adults contracted syphilis. In 1939 alone, about 20,000 Americans died from syphilis infections. Syphilis was particularly dangerous in the 1930s because a safe cure for the disease had yet to be discovered. During this time, the recommended treatment for the disease was a combination of arsenic, mercury, and bismuth known as Neosalvarsan, which was pioneered by German physician Paul Erlich in 1912. Although Neosalvarsan was sometimes effective in curing syphilis, it was extremely difficult to administer properly, caused severe side effects such as liver damage, and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of patients annually. Because of the risks involved with taking Neosalvarsan, many Americans who contracted syphilis were not treated and ultimately succumbed to the disease itself. Another factor that precipitated a severe syphilis outbreak was the stigma attached to the contraction of a sexually-transmitted disease. At the time, having a sexually-transmitted disease such as syphilis was seen by many as shameful, particularly because of its prevalence in the sex worker community. Because of this, many Americans who had syphilis refused to get tested for the disease, causing them to unknowingly carry and spread it throughout the population. In order to combat the stigma of the disease and encourage more Americans to get tested, the Works Progress Administration commissioned hundreds of artists to design posters that provided information about syphilis. The artists created and displayed over 2,000 posters across the country, most of which highlighted the dangers of leaving the disease untreated and reassured civilians that getting tested for syphilis wasn't shameful. These posters increased public awareness of the outbreak, which led to an increase in syphilis testing. This slowed the transmission of the disease, while the creation of a safe and effective penicillin treatment for syphilis in 1943 led to a sharp decrease in syphilis mortality. Because of these public health solutions, new syphilis cases fell by 95% between 1947 and 1957.