Browse Primary Sources
"Panhandling Undercover" - Raymond Rendleman - Lake Oswego Review
"Spears, 33, served for a year in the U.S. military's Iraq operations before using the 9/11 G.I. Bill to pay the costs for earnng an economics and political science degree from George Fox University this spring. "Standing for 80 hours on the OC exit ramp started as a project to satisfy his own curiosity during summer break before his senior year. With his eye-opening findings, he successfully raised $5,000 through an online kickstarter campaign to launch his literary career."
Pamplin Media 2014-01-30
VI-"The Underpaid and Under-Protected" - Chester Goolrick and Paul Lieberman - Atlanta Constitution
"Throughout the Atlanta Constitution's examination of the underpaid, reporters found people like Mrs. Raines whose words and work habits suggest that the old-fashioned American work ethic survives at the lowest-paid level of the work force."
Atlanta Constitution 1979-12-06
"In the Biggest New York Tenement" - Nellie Bly - New York World
New York World 1894-08-05
II-"City Slave Girls" - Nell Nelson - Chicago Daily Times
I did not realize the ignominious position of respectable poverty till I went to Ellinger's cloak factory, 262 Madison street, where labor is bondage, the laborer a slave, and flesh and blood cheaper than needles and thread. Corporations are said to be without heart, but this concern is a commercial inquisition. it puts its help on the plane of slavery and nothing but civil law prevents the use of the lash. The factory is on the third floor of the large brick building at the east end of Madison street bridge on the south side of the street. Elevator? Not much. An elevator is a luxury and luxuries have no place at Ellinger's You will be short of breath when you reach the top of the fourth flight, but in recovering, you have time to take in the surroundings - a great barn of a place with the single charm of good light. There is plenty of vacant room but the women are huddled together, elbows touching along the line of the machines. Beneath the west windows flows the river; at the south end of the room, not ten feet from the crowded table, is a tier of closets, and on hot days the combined odor of the two is shocking. Nobody in his employ dare complain about smells, cold, head, work, wages, or rules. But whoever heard of martyrs complaining?
Chicago Times 1888-07-31
XIV-"I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days" - Ray Sprigle - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Black of the rich earth and green of the springing cotton plants stretch from horizon to horizon. This is the fabulous Mississippi Delta, last outpost of feudalism in America. Here is land more fertile than any other in the world. Here close to half a million Negroes toil from childhood to the grave in the service of King Cotton, from sunup to sundown if they share-crop, from 6 to 6 if they work by the day. Here are feudal baronies that run from 5,000 to 20,000 acres, where as many as 6,000 sharecropper families, wives and children, parents and grandparents follow the one mule plow and the chopping hoe all their lives. On these tight little Delta principalities "The Man" (the landlord), is the middle justice, the high and the low. Mississippi law stops dead in its tracks at their boundaries. No sheriff, no peace officer takes a man, black or white off these acres until "The Man" tells him he may
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 1948-08-24