Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Fall/Section009/Delia Underwood

Overview

Delia Underwood, also possibly known as Annie, was a white mother of five who lived in Yadkin County. She faced a lot of suffering through her life in the farm industry, both during and before the great depression in rural North Carolina. She was interviewed by Claude V. Dunnagan as a part of the Federal’s Writers Project March 29^th, 1939 (Underwood 1939).

Biography

Early Life

The only known information about Delia’s life comes from the time after she married Joe Underwood. The interviewer Claude Dunnagan did not ask any questions pertaining to Delia’s pre-marital life, causing this part of her story to be left unknown. It is unknown why there is such a gap in her story, and since Dunnagan did not record his questions asked the reason is unknown.

Working Life

Delia and Joe worked up from buying a small 6 acre farm up to gaining a 26-acre plot to farm on. This journey was hard as their crops faced blight and fertilizer cost nearly as much as the crops would sell for. In the early days their house even completely burned down. Due to a charitable local community and family connections Delia and Joe were able to get everything back they lost. Despite hardship things were looking up and their farm was bringing in money. Delia started to dream of sending their crippled son, Little Jimmie, to Johns Hopkins University. Before this could happen, a hail storm struck their farm, destroying everything they worked for thus far in their lives. Hail Insurance for tobacco was too expensive to afford, costing nearly 10 dollars per 100 according to Delia.

After the hail storm destroyed the farm the family moved out to a small two room house by a tobacco warehouse in Edgeville, Guilford County. Delia and her family only survived off of government grants of Rural Rehabilitation and the “back to the farm movement” (Underwood 1939, 8).

Delia gave birth to five children, each time the pregnancy forced her to stop working and made her sick, nearly killing her. One such birth the child was deformed, Little Jimmie, and her sickness was blamed for the deformation. The birth of her last child, her fifth, the baby was sick and the doctor blamed her thin hips for causing the illness.

Life After Work

Little Jimmie died from one of his many fights with pneumonia and about a year later Joe, Delia’s husband, died in a horrific car accident, in which he burned to death. After Joe’s death Delia continued to live with her children who caretake for her through constant sicknesses.

The thing that gives Delia strength throughout her struggles, according to her, is the community and faith she has had in the local Methodist church. Delia mentions how she doesn’t know why god did these terrible things to her, yet as a 'poor mortal' she believes in his ultimate wisdom and path for her. Delia, like many women during this time, used church as a community hub and a way to find comfort through the terrors of life (Underwood 1939, 9).

Social Issues

Changes in Health Practices in the Early 20th Century

Child Birth

Until the 1920’s child birth was handled at homes with midwives and family members, after the act of child birth became more surgical and less social, happening more often at doctor offices and hospitals rather homes. To mark this change in North Carolina, there was a large movement for more nurses to be certified and further join public rather than private practice, as seen in a news article from The Daily Advance in 1920. During this time of change between procedures and the culture around child birth both many positive, and some negative findings were discovered. Such as hospitals, while cleaner, still lacked proper cleanly methods as “mortality rates did not begin to decline until the late 1930’s, in large part because hospitalization fostered the routine use of risky interventionalist procedures”, on top of this women reported the experience as “alienating, isolating, and fearsome” (Dye 1980, 106).

Growing Concerns Surrounding Pneumonia

In the 1900, pneumonia and tuberculosis were the two largest causes of death in America. In 2010 the danger of Pneumonia has decreased tremendously from a rate of 202.2 out of 100,000, in 1900, to only 16.2 out of 100,000 people by 2010 (Tippett 2014). It was only until the early 20^th pneumonia became a real public health concern. Public health professionals around America in the 1920s began efforts to engage in a ‘war’ against diseases infecting the lungs, and in 1920 North Carolina has twenty-two nurses working on curing tuberculosis (The Elkin Tribune 1920, 2). In 1928 a serum, in which creation was headed by Lloyd Felto, was proven to work, lowering mortality rates to just 20.9% (Podolsky 2006, 58). The issue with treating pneumonia became less of the medicine needed and more so how to. In areas in Massachusetts and New York a decentralized system for spreading the serum was tested, in which found great success with “only 10.6 percent had died comparing favorably… with the 25.9 percent mortality found among 349 incidentally untreated patients” (Podolsky 2006, 60). This system started in urban counties in the North East began to spread as pneumonia control programs that not only helped heal those ill with the disease but also spread awareness through propaganda.

Struggling Agricultural in the Early 20th Century

While the roaring 20’s took place in across urban America, the rural farming economy suffered. Their income from farming severely decreased due to overproduction of cash crops, falling crop prices, rising farm costs, poor conservation, and other problems. In fact, income gained from farming halved in the three years between 1917 and 1920 (Giovanni 2005, 953). Because of the struggling farming economy entering the 1930’s federal aid became necessary as states didn’t have the funding to meet the needs among American citizens.

Rural Rehabilitation

One such loan and grant organization developed by the federal government was called rural rehabilitation, “Designed to aid destitute and low-income farm families in becoming self-supporting at a decent standard of living” (Oppenheimer 1937, 1). This program that granted vocational loans and grants helped to support the damaged and ever-weakening farm economy during the great depression. Being one of many programs that were developed leading to the passage of the Social Security Act (Oppenheim 1937). Through following decades and a variety of government programs modern welfare systems were created.

Bibliography

Dye, Nancy Schrom. “History of Childbirth in America.” Signs 6, no. 1 (1980): 97–108. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173968.

Federico, Giovanni. “Not Guilty? Agriculture in the 1920s and the Great Depression.” The Journal of Economic History 65, no. 4 (2005): 949–76. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3874910.

N/A. 1920, “Asks Nurses to Submit Drafts.“ The Daily Advance (Elizabeth City, NC), February 14

N/A. 1920, “The Tuberculosis Nurse.” The Elkin Tribune (Elkin, NC), November 18

Oppenheimer, Monroe. “The Development of the Rural Rehabilitation Loan Program.” Law and Contemporary Problems 4, no. 4 (1937): 473-488. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1877&context=lcp.

Podolsky, Scott H. 2006. Pneumonia before antibiotics: therapeutic evolution and evaluation in twentieth-century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10188503.

Tippett, Rebecca. 2014. “Mortality and Cause of Death, 1900 v. 2010.” Carolina Demography. June 16, 2014. https://www.ncdemography.org/2014/06/16/mortality-and-cause-of-death-1900-v-2010/.

Underwood, Delia. “A lot of Punishin.” Interview by Dunnagan, Claude, March 29, 1939, Folder 366, Federal Writers Project Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC Chapel Hill.