find a good deal of unrest—'farm holiday' spirit. I can't say that I did. They seemed almost too patient for me". In December 1933, Eleanor wrote her: "Mr. Hopkins said today that your reports would be the best history of the Depression in future years". In December 1933, Hickok went on a two-month tour of the American South, where she was horrified by the poverty, malnutrition, and lack of education that she encountered. Hickok found life in the South even worse than on the Great Plains, which she previously found to be very "depressing". In January 1934, she reported that she had seen in rural Georgia "half-starved Whites and Blacks struggle in competition for less to eat than my dog gets at home, for the privilege of living in huts that are infinitely less comfortable than his kennel...If there is a school system in the state, it simply isn't functioning. It can't. The children just can't go to school, hundreds of them because they haven't the clothes. The illiterate parents of hundreds of others don't send them. As a result you've got the picture of hundreds of boys and girls in their teens down here in some of these rural areas who can't read or write. I'm not exaggerating...Why, some of them can barely talk!". In Savannah, a relief director told her: "Any Nigger who gets over $8 a week is a spoiled Nigger, that's all...The Negroes regard the President as the Messiah, and think that they'll all be getting $12 a week for the rest of their lives". In Florida, she wrote that she found seasonal farm workers on the citrus farms living in "peonage" while the hotels on the coasts were "comfortably filled". The citrus farmers of Florida had she wrote "got the world licked...for being mean-spirited, selfish and irresponsible". In February 1934, she reported from North Carolina about sharecropping: "The truth is that the rural South never has progressed beyond slave labor...When their slaves were taken away, they proceeded to establish a system of peonage that was as close to slavery as it possibly could be and included Whites as well as Blacks." From the textile mill towns of the Carolinas, Hickok wrote about the "blocks and blocks of shabby, tumbledown little houses" inhibited by the "lintheads" as the textile workers called themselves who were not normally paid cash, but rather company scrip which could only be