Families in trouble / Earl Lomon Koos.

  • Koos, Earl Lomon, 1905-1960
Date:
1946
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Families in trouble / Earl Lomon Koos. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Methodology 7 New York is full of con game guys who'll rip you, and anyway, that nobody gives a damn about you [native-born chauffeur]. I couldn't believe the story you told was true. Why should any¬ body be interested in my troubles? In this country, nobody cares— in my own country we didn't have much but everybody in my vil¬ lage was willing to share what he had anyway. Here who cares? Your next-door neighbor don't even speak to you here, so I couldn't think you really meant what you said [foreign-born Czech janitor]. Even if we haven't got much money, people think we're suckers. I don't know why, but the less you have the more somebody tries to take it away from you. There's always somebody banging at your door and trying to soak you with something. I thought you had some skin game up your sleeve—Tve learned to say no to anybody who comes to my door [native-born sanitary inspector]. I thought you was a social welfare person, and boy, did we get a belly-full of them a couple of years ago. We had to try to get relief after I lost my job in the depression when I was sick, and Jeez, what a ride that gal took us for. You'd thought Td committed a crime, the way she put the screws on me. So when you started in I thought you were a guy from that welfare office [native-born la¬ borer] . These statements indicate that institutionahzed anonymity, the impersonahty of tenement hfe, the vulnerabihty of the poor in finan¬ cial matters, and the underlying distrust of the social welfare per¬ son, all operate to render the low-income person suspicious of the outsider. It seems reasonable that if the vulnerability of the poor operates in situations like this, it also operates where the family is beset by trouble and needs to turn to an outside source for help. what are troubles? One of the most difficult problems confronting this study at its inception was that of defining a trouble. What was to be considered as trouble as contrasted with the ordinary exigencies of life? One of
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