used to purchase food at company stores . She urged Eleanor to visit a tent city of homeless ex-miners in Morgantown, West Virginia, an experience that led Eleanor to found the federal housing project of Arthurdale, West Virginia. In March 1934, Hickok accompanied Eleanor on a fact-finding trip to the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, reporting afterward to Hopkins that the island's poverty was too severe for FERA to usefully intervene. One of her most important conclusions was the Great Depression did not just plunge a prosperous nation into poverty, but rather that there was an "old poverty". Hickok reported that even before 1929 there were about 40 million Americans which included virtually the entire non-white population, almost the entire rural population and most of the old who were already living in poverty, and all the Depression had done was merely make things worse for people who were already struggling. Hopkins praised her for discovering "a volume of chronic poverty, unsuspected except by a few students and by those who always experienced it". In the town of Calais, Maine she found that most of the unemployed were Catholic French-Canadians while the relief workers were WASPs. Owing to religious and ethnic prejudices, Hickok reported "the people on relief in that town are subjected to a treatment that is almost medieval in its stinginess and stupidity". From Tennessee, she reported that she found relief workers "whose approach to the relief problem is so typical of the old line social worker, supported by private philanthropy and looking down his—only usually it was her—nose at God's patient poor, that it made me gag a little". In Texas, she visited an "intake" facility (where people applying for relief were assessed) and wrote: "Mr. Hopkins, did you ever spend a couple of hours sitting in an intake? Intake is about the nearest thing to Hell that I know anything about. The smell alone—I'd recognize it anywhere. And take that on top of the psychological effect of having to be there at all. God!" Hickok reported many of the people applying for relief were full of guilt and shame. The ethos of the "American Dream" had been so deeply engraved into the minds of so many Americans that those who found themselves without a job tended to blame themselves, feeling that their unemployment was due to some personal flaw that had condemned them to be failures in