Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2021/Fall/Section018/Earl M. Lasker

Overview    

Earl M. Lasker was North Carolinian man and a mill worker who spent his early adult life struggling to care for his wife, Ada Moses. Married at a young age, Earl and Ada faced many financial challenges because of Ada’s poor health and the Great Depression. Earl recounts the generosity of his mill coworkers and bosses lending him money and time to take care of his wife. Earl was trained as a nurse, not a mill worker. A profession he found came in handy when he nursed his fatally ill wife back to health. At times to make extra money, Earl provided nursing treatment to his mailman’s father for reduced rates because, at the time, everyone was tight on money. Unlike many people at the time, Earl was not afraid to say he relied on the charity of others and, doing, so saved Earl’s family. Earl was interviewed as a part of the Federal Writer's Project on June 14, 1939 by Ethel Deal and Mary Northrop.

Biography

Early Life

Prior to getting married to Ada Moses, Earl M. Lasker was trained to be a nurse. Lasker mentions that he never had any formal secondary education, so he came about his training rather usually. Having gotten hurt up in Virginia and staying in a hospital for a long time, Earl decided to take up a job there because he was used to the hospital and liked it. One day the superintendent of nurses, Miss Tomlinson, noticing how well he worked with sick people, suggested that Earl take up training as a nurse. Earl mentions that he worked in Johns Hopkins Hospital for a while as a nurse.

Life after Marriage

According to Earl, he married Ada Moses "the day [he] met her" in 1926 in Newton, North Carolina. A few months after their marriage, Earl and Ada moved to Morganton, North Carolina and Ada had her first bout of hiccoughs, a new disease that doctors were unsure of how to treat. Earl and Ada had to go to Statesville, North Carolina to Doctor Davis' hospital where she would receive several weeks of treatment. Because money was tight and there were bills to be paid, Earl and Ada had to move back with her parents. After getting over her illness and paying off their hospital debt, Earl and Ada decided to live on their own again eventually moving to Maine in 1928, but sadly it was only for three month since Ada got sick again. For many years, as Earl and Ada's little family grew, Ada would be in and out of the hospital. During this time they faced many financial difficulties, most notably when Earl got heat stroke while Ada was in the hospital so she couldn't come home at once the medical bills were paid. At one point, Ada was sent home and given thirteen days to live, so Earl, using a combination of wive's tale methods, nursed his dying wife back to health.

Life on the Mill

Earl started out by working for a cotton mill. During their financial struggles, Earl and Ada relied on the support of the mill community. Multiple times, Earl mentions how kind the mill people were when they would give him money to pay off his debts and bills in times of need. Earl was eventually offered a job at a silk mill where he would make about $450 a week in today's money. For the sake of his wife, Earl knew he had to take the job. When Earl was nursing Ada back to health, Earl describes how his family relied on charity and how "the mill men were kindness itself." Earl raised his family in a tight-knit mill community that, at the time of his interview, was completely understanding of his part-time job as a nurse to earn extra money to pay off his debts.

Social, Political, and Cultural Issues

FDR, Healthcare, and the Health of America

In the 1930s, America saw a rise in diseases like heart disease, cancer, pneumonia, and infections like influenza, tuberculosis, and syphilis. One of the more serious problems was polio, having numerous outbreaks in the 1930s. Before the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act was amended in 1938 that required vaccines to be tested and licensed, there was an outbreak of polio caused by faulty vaccines. Without health insurance to cover costs many Americans struggled to pay off medical expenses. Even going to the hospital to receive treatment was out of the question for many Americans. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) was an essential part of using the federal government to improve public health. He helped create the March of Dimes which aims to prevent preterm birth and in the New Deal created agencies that provided medical insurance, childcare, disability programs, and boosts in public health campaigns. It wasn’t until the 1930s that the Blue Cross (1933) and Blue Shield Plan (1939) were put into place to help people pay for hospital and other medical costs.

There has also been the debate of having mandatory health insurance for Americans and FDR was a notable figurehead in the fight to give Americans that right. The 1920s changed the debate around heath insurance when medical expenses were starting to become an important part of the family budget. But throughout the 20th century, regardless of the events and societal changes that took place, the effort to have universal national health insurance failed because of ideological differences, strong anti-communism, and anti-socialism movements, and the fragmentation of public policy. Such struggle to achieve universal national health insurance is highlighted in this quote, “Just as the [American Association of Labor Legislation] AALL campaign ran into the declining forces of progressivism and then WWI, the movement for national health insurance in the 1930’s ran into the declining fortunes of the New Deal and then WWII.”

The Great Depression

The Great Depression brought new normals to American society. Blue collar jobs like cotton and textiles, coal mining, and railroads suffered the most and lead to widespread unemployment and poverty. It didn't help that there was an agricultural depression among cotton that started after the WWI demand in areas like North Carolina where cotton mills where prevalent. Long hours, low wages, and unhealthy working conditions became the norm for mill workers during the depression. Certain industries helped push economic development and better working conditions. The Cotton Textile Institute helped influence the development of the National Recovery Administration (NRA). The NRA, along with the New Deal, helped to create hundreds of codes that helped increase wages, increase prices of industrial products, and increase employment. It was also during this time the development of unions helped put pressure on various industries demanding better pay and better working conditions.

Many mills outside of the Rocky Mount cotton mill were prone to strikes because business was so bad. Yet, a common theme among many mill communities was a strong, close-knit community. Quotes from Community Histories Workshop written about the Rocky Mount mills describe a similar type of community described by Earl, “Workers shared and cheaply sold the resources they had with each other to make sure no one went hungry or without necessary living items.”

References

Bishop, RoAnn. “Farm and Factory Struggles in the 1920s.” Edited by NCpedia Editors. NCpedia. State Library of North Carolina, January 1, 2004. https://www.ncpedia.org/industry/farm-factory-struggles.

Community Histories Workshop. “The Great Depression.” Digital Rocky Mount Mills. Community Histories Workshop, July 2016. https://rockymountmill.prospect.unc.edu/mill-history/narrative/great-depression/.

Deal, Ethel, and Mary Northrop. “Folder 355: Deal and Northrop (Interviewers): I'm a Good Nurse.” Federal Writers Project Papers, June 14, 1939. https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/03709/id/707.

"Industry, Effects of the Great Depression on." Encyclopedia of the Great Depression. Encyclopedia.com. (September 22, 2021). https://www.encyclopedia.com/economics/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/industry-effects-great-depression.

Palmer, Karen S. “A Brief History: Universal Health Care Efforts in the US.” PNHP. Physicians for a National Health Program, May 3, 2021. https://pnhp.org/a-brief-history-universal-health-care-efforts-in-the-us/.

"The 1930s Medicine and Health: Overview." U*X*L American Decades. Encyclopedia.com. (September 22, 2021). https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/culture-magazines/1930s-medicine-and-health-overview