President Reagan's social programmes - 22 July 1983

I remember once, down in the inland lake country of Florida, stopping the car by the roadside and watching a black woman with two young men trudging up and down the citrus groves, plucking clusters of oranges with a single gesture and dumping them in sacks.

It was early summer and the heat was about as ferocious down there as it is everywhere this summer. The sun, which used to be called "Old Hannah" by the people we used to call negros burned away there from dawn to dusk.

Suddenly, the black woman saw us and almost with an air of defiance, threw her head back and released one of the purest, the most beautiful, soprano voices I've ever heard "Go down old Hannah", she sang, "don't you rise no more".

I was on a BBC assignment – it was war time – to drive round the country the whole continent for five months and record what the people had to say and the blacks had to sing about their various and innumerable war jobs.

It shows how long ago this was, the magic box that made this possible was called a portable recording machine and conceivably it would have been portable if Hercules or Muhammad Ali were the porter. It was about the size of a one-and-a-half-ton air conditioner such as they have today in large flower shops and chocolate retailers.

Furthermore, since there was a war on, our discs were 16-inch platters made of glass and the recording head was made of some sort of thorn that you had to sharpen.

I strolled over to them and, in those days, they were instantly suspicious of an approaching white man, but also instantly cowed, not cowed so much as submissive. Today, they might be either instantly cordial or suspicious, they would not be cowed.

I explained as simply as I could what we were up too and I wondered if they would mind recording their work songs for us, they had a raft of them and they did it gladly, being actually a little shy and awkward about being paid. The men hummed or sang in close harmony behind this soaring voice of the woman.

This week, swishing by in a cool car past a gang of men stripped to the waist, banging away at some road repairs, I thought of that quartet down in Florida and I heard that marvellous voice again singing "Go down Old Hannah, don't you rise no more" and thought it would serve just now as a national anthem.

I also wondered what had happened to those four blacks; that was 40 years ago and one thing I know for sure, they really if ever, saw a Republican. Those were the days when the whole South, from the Potomac River that laps at Washington DC to the Gulf of Mexico was known as the solid South, which meant solidly, monotonously, Democrat. There was no point in an ambitious young politician trying to run as a Republican, he'd have been swamped.

Well as the song says, there have been some changes made.

Through the 1960s, the bad, the explosive decade of race riots and Vietnam marches and the hippies and burning flags, a lot of white Southerners, indeed a huge majority of them who'd always thought of themselves as conservative Democrats realised that they were more conservative than Democrat.

In fact, as the two parties became less and less separate coalitions of regional groups and began to harden their ideological split, the white Southerners made the astounding discovery that they'd been Republicans all along and they ran as such and they won as such, so much so that in 1972 the South was solid again, only this time solidly Republican. All except 11 stubborn Virginians, the only electors in the whole South who refused to be counted as Nixon men.

But today, I'd like to bet the grandchildren of those Florida songsters are being visited by the Republican county chairman, for an even more astonishing discovery has been made inside the White House, though it's a secret everybody had access to who could read an almanac and look at the 1980 Election returns.

It is that the Republicans suffer from what is now called a "colour gap" and a "gender gap". What that means, in rude English, is that blacks and women of any colour are by an alarming majority agin Mr Reagan, North, South, East and West.

The women – white, black, brown – doggedly resent his stand against abortion and, perhaps even more, his strong rejection of the proposed amendment of the Constitution, which would have stated very simply and very briefly that equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

This amendment was passed by the Congress, it then required the legislature of 38 of the 50 States to rectify it within 10 years. It didn't make it, it failed by three.

Well in a word, in a phrase at least, the president is working – last week through his Vice President – to go and speak before women, even more before blacks and try and correct their general view that this administration does not care enough for the plight of the 22 million blacks whose unemployment rate is twice – and with youngsters between 15 and 22 – three times, the national average. We'll go into this; it's a much subtler, if not more grievous, problem than appears. We'll go into this again.

But at the very moment that Vice President Bush was a telling a national conference of blacks (to polite boos) that this administration does care for them, the government itself, one of its non-partisan agencies called the General Accounting Office – which keeps a running investigation of how the government's being run by way of cost and efficiency and right or wrongdoing – the Accounting Office comes out this week with a report on hunger in America.

The very word sounds like an echo of the Great Depression, but the government says that in the past two years there is more hunger than there's been since the Great Depression.

Another body, which is impromptu a caucus, the United States Conference of Mayors of all the cities, says that hunger is the most prevalent and the most insidious problem that faces the cities. This is a real shocker.

Mind you, listeners should not preen themselves on the comparative situation in their own country, I never forget how in the mid-1930s President Roosevelt, in a memorable speech, with that resounding voice of his said, "I said one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed" and all the comfortable people of Europe shuddered and said "One- third of America, how awful, how scandalous, how barbaric".

Shortly afterwards, the League of Nations, applying the same standard that Roosevelt had applied to his own country, disclosed that the figure of the ill-housed, ill-fed and ill-clothed in Britain and France was a little worse than one third.

But we – I was a comfortable resident of Mr Stanley Baldwin's government at the time – we didn't make these studies or face these facts. Americans, as you know, have this sometimes numbing passion for statistics, but it has to be said that they chart the warts just as accurately as the dimples.

What the General Accounting Office is defining as hunger is not what, say, India or Brazil or the Philippines would have in mind, they're saying that now fewer Americans are getting food stamps than they got two years ago, so that poor families who fed themselves on free food stamps are now having to seek handouts or go traipsing off to an institution we thought had vanished by, say, 1939 – mainly the soup kitchen.

So it's not hard to see why so many black people, with their fierce unemployment rates, and so many scraping unemployed whites, and all liberal editorials are repeating the lament that President Reagan, in his social programmes, favours the rich and is uncaring towards the poor.

This charge very much exasperates the people in the White House, for an understandable reason. Put it this way – if you stopped 100 Americans on the streets and asked them by how much Mr Reagan had cut food stamps, welfare and the rest of the social programmes and by how much he'd increased defence or military spending, I'm sure that at least 80 people would give you rough but pretty lurid figures implying that the man's obsessed with fattening the military and starving the poor.

The exasperating fact for Mr Reagan is that he's spending more of the tax dollar on social programmes than Mr Carter did.

Reagan, to howls of derision, proposes to spend about a quarter of the budget on defence; Kennedy spent nearly half of it to no complaints, but Reagan has the misfortune to be the first president in the past 20 years to look at the appalling mounting deficit the country's been running up and say "It's got to stop".

Ten, five years ago, practically nobody in Congress, no Democrats, certainly bellowed warnings about the national deficit, so the attempt to reduce an inheritance of 200 billion plus deficit – four times what Carter inherited – means you have to start doing something very unpopular, trimming millions here and there.

When Nixon was president, the government spent just over $1billion on food assistance; Carter spent 16 billions. This year, Mr Reagan, with all his cuts, will spend 18 billions – the highest outlay there's ever been on food assistance to the poor. So if you're talking round figures, you have to say that cruel Reagan has cut the money for food help down to 18 billions from kindly Carter's 16.

The catch here, of course, is that the population grows and grows – by 14 million since Jimmy Carter was elected seven years ago, so there are always more and more mouths to feed, more and more children leaving school for whom jobs have to be found.

By the same cruel fact of burgeoning life, the government has to find roughly one million new jobs a year just to stay in the same place on these statistical tables. One of the ironies of Mr Reagan's job is that the country under his administration has created more jobs in two years than any previous administration since the Second War.

There are more people at work – over 102 millions – than ever in American history. There are also more people unemployed than at any time since the Great Depression. Would you like to be president?

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