I do it to myself every April. I over schedule myself. This
year I have 22 appointments or events on my day planner for this month and part
of that is because it’s the end of winter when some biannual stuff needs to
take place: a trip to dentist and the internist, an irrigation system turn
on/off. Then there are the repeating stuff that happens every month: haircuts and dog grooming, two gal
pal brunches and two Mad Hatter teas, book club, and the Movie and Lunch Club. I
also add to the schedule senior hall events when their newsletter comes out and
it’s time to email RSVPs for spring. Who, for example, could pass up a lecture
on the history of the poor farms in Michigan? Uh-oh, am I seeing a bunch hands
raised out there at the other end of this internet connection? (I need an eye
rolling emoji here.)
Actually the poor farm lecture was extremely well attended. Although
some of the people there might have missed the part about it being a lecture
about history and thought it was about a place we could sign up to go to live
out our final days. Either way when the speaker---a research librarian---asked
for a show of hands on how many people had a family connection to a poor farm
or poor house about of forth of the crowd responded with an affirmative hand in
the air. Imagine my shock when one of my ancestors was later named as a keeper
of one of the county poor farms in 1857 but thankfully he was not one of the
keepers embroiled in a scandal that made the local newspaper. Scandals like the
keeper who butchered a disease-ridden cow and fed it to the people in his care.
A lot scandals were going on back when the state was paying twenty-five cents a
day per person to house and feed the poor.
I was also surprised at how far back there has been public funding
and support in the United States for caring for people who couldn’t take care
of themselves---laws have been on the books mandating care as far back as the
1830s. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until the first third of the 1900s before they started
separating the mental ill from the physically ill so I would imagine the term ‘snake
pit’ would have aptly applied to some of these places. Although from what I’m
been able to learn the term snake pit to describe a place where groups of sick people
lived in deplorable conditions wasn’t used until the 1940s, popularized by the
book and movie, The Snake Pit. Both were based on the true story of a woman’s experiences living in a state
mental institution. I remember seeing that movie and it scared the crap out of
me.
Anyway, back on point. It was not a boring lecture by any
stretch of the imagination but I found one fact particularly interested in the
light of what’s going on now at our southern border. The poor farms and poor
houses separated children from their parents. A man and wife could reside in
the same place only in different wings set up for men and women but the kids,
if they were old enough, were ‘farmed out’ to work and live in the community
and the babies were given to those who wanted them which was what happened to
my mom and her siblings when their mother died. People who lived at these poor
farms were expected to work if they were able---either in the gardens or fields,
the kitchen or laundry or to clean. And when they died they often ended up in
unmarked graves. Sometimes they were given train tickets to go back to the
counties where they were born, since by law each county was mandated to care
for their own poor.
When you think about it, we’ve been a nation that has tried
to care for the down and outers for a very long time, and I personally believe
the resentment of doing so now is a new ‘phenomenon’ in this century. Maybe
because we’re losing the Christian/Judeo ethics we once prided ourselves on
having as a nation that makes it easier for some to justify why they belong in
the group of haves and others belong in a group of have nots. Maybe because we
no longer send the poor off to live in group housing---out of sight, out of
mind---that we think we have the right judge whether or not someone truly needs
public assistance. Or maybe we’ve grown too cynical to trust the system to make
those judgements. Maybe we’re so far removed from knowing people who lost it
all through no fault of their own that we’ve become less compassionate about
individual hard-luck stories. Famine and World Wars of past centuries, the Dust Bowl, the
Great Depression touched our grandparents and other ancestors more deeply than
the generations to follow. Could that be it? Who knows why the resentment of
the poor is out there, but we were just told by our president that our country
is “full” and we can no longer take in “…your tired, your poor, your huddled
masses yearning to breathe free…” and if I could find that eye rolling emoji in
my Word program I’d end this post with a baker’s dozen of them. ©
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| Offer May Vary |
NOTE: Drawing at the top is of the poor farm in Calhoun County Michigan
