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get free fishing licenses. The rush of applicants overwhelmed town clerks and state conservation officers, who turned the free license trade over to local welfare offices.
    And the health authorities had more to deal with than malnutrition and exposure. For many, medical and dental care were unattainable luxuries. Tuberculosis was the biggest preventable killer of adults. Infant deaths were commonplace because pregnant women could not afford prenatal care. For youngsters already weakened by lack of food, childhood diseases such as measles, mumps, whooping cough, and chicken pox could be lethal. Nor were any of these conditions equal-opportunity afflictions. In cities from Denver to New York, the death rate for white adults was 55 per 100,000 population, while among blacks it was almost six times higher. Even outside the South, where the term “Jim Crow” described a system of overt brutality against them, blacks faced not only abysmal health conditions but also job discrimination, official neglect, and police abuse.

6. THE PROBLEM WITH LAISSEZ-FAIRE
    T he economic crisis had exposed grotesque disparities between the rich and poor. There were two Americas, and they were vastly different. The assets of the rich had swelled to unbelievable levels during the boom of the late 1920s. One percent of the people owned 59 percent of America’s wealth by 1929, yet simultaneously more than half the country’s population of 123 million struggled in poverty, trapped below a minimum level of subsistence.
    These millions had little recourse if they had no work. There was nothing of what would later be called a “safety net.” In this Darwinian struggle for survival, there were always more workers waiting to take the place of those who dropped from illness, frayed nerves, or exhaustion. There were a few rules governing child labor, life-threatening working conditions, job safety, and workdays that stretched human endurance: Oregon had passed a law limiting women in laundries and factories to a ten-hour workday, Massachusetts set a minimum wage for women, and all but nine states barred factory workers under the age of fourteen. But laws such as these specifically applied to women and children, and even so, they often worked for less than $2.50 a week. There were no such protections for men, nor was there job security or insurance against unemployment. In the view of John E. Edgerton, the longtime head of the National Association of Manufacturers, attempts to impose social goals through legislation were nothing more than meddling jealousy: “Society in general continues through political processes to unload its obligations upon industry, penalizing at every opportunity the silently rebuking superiorities of accomplishment.”
    Edgerton owned woolen mills in Tennessee, which like other industries were working below capacity and had slashed the hours of employees. Testifying before a committee of the U.S. Senate, he said it concerned him not at all that families could not live on one or two days’ wages a week. “Why, I’ve never thought of paying men on the basis of what they need. I pay for efficiency,” he said.
    Efficiency meant work practices such as the speedup and the stretch-out. On the Ford production lines, where men made $4 for a ten-hour workday, it was common practice for supervisors to increase the speed of the belts that moved the cars past the men assembling them. This made their jobs a trial of endurance, a whirlwind of bolting, riveting, and welding that left workers shaken and spent at the end of the day. Those who couldn’t keep up were fired. Henry Ford believed that “the average man won’t really do a day’s work unless he is caught and cannot get out of it.”
    The stretch-out was favored by textile mill owners in New England and the South. Its essence was the same as the speedup—making workers do more work in less time for the same amount of money. Textile workers were paid even more poorly than