Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Spring/105/Section 56/A. J. Gourley

Biography
A. J. Gourley was a white worker born in 1871-1872 who lived to be sixty seven. He worked for a time as a traveling salesman, and later worked as a tombstone maker, despite having only a week’s worth of formal education. Gourley was an adamant Christian, who talked to his God often and followed the guidance that he received with complete faith. He married young and quickly bore six children. After his first wife passed away, he was left to take on hard labor to provide for his children. This led to him contracting Dengue fever, and subsequently being committed to a mental asylum for seven years. The atrocious treatment and abuse he endured at the hands of the guards made such a negative impression on him that he preferred to strike off seven years from his age, as if those years had never happened. Despite this, he went on to remarry and bear six more children with his second wife. His children, taking on his hard working spirit in the midst of a growing economic crisis, went on to become farmers, preachers, and radio stars.

Mental Healthcare
By the late 1800's, mental asylums were facing a slow decline from their glory years as bastions of "moral treatment". A drop-off in public funding in the 1890's and a wave of elderly individuals pushed into the asylums by local politicians to gain tax cuts caused the asylums to become overcrowded, and the quality of care began to decrease. Many patients were institutionalized for a long period of time, despite the hospital's mission to cure patients, and they came out with a lack of skills and knowledge, due to their extended stay inside. This shift away from the practice of caring for the patients as people first would set the stage for massive abuses in the early 1900's like lobotomies and Insulin coma therapy. Even at this point, patients were often mistreated. According to one institutionalized woman, “She said the nurse then tied her hands and feet, threw a sheet over her head to muffle her screams, and put her in a bathtub of cold water.” Additionally, the quality of care received by patients, while in theory was meant to be equal in a post-slavery era, "in practice class, race, and ethnicity promoted a different quality of care for different patients."

Youth Culture and Stagnation
Southern states were among the last to adopt compulsory education laws. Almost all Northern states had instituted some form of compulsory education by 1900, but they were only followed afterword by the South, as Mississippi was the last state to institute such laws, in 1918. Even Northern states had poor rates of attendance until well until the 20th century, as many children were needed in working-class and rural families to support their parents. It was not uncommon for a family to birth over 10 children, as some of these children would die at a young age, and as many hands were needed as possible to help around a farm. Teenagers were hit especially hard by job cuts during the Great Depression, as by the end only one in twenty-one children between the ages of 10-15 were employed, as opposed to one in five at the start of the century. As such, many teenagers turned to vandalism out of boredom, destroying local businesses and wandering the streets. Young women at the time continued to fulfill their societal roles as housekeepers, without any opportunities for education or enfranchisement. These women often performed as much work maintaining the house and taking care of children as men did at their jobs, but these women were not fairly compensated.