In an interview given later in his life, Nielsen explained what had moved him to the "left (I would never have so called it then)" by telling two stories from his childhood about class and race: "I grew up in a little Midwestern American town during the Great Depression where I saw, as a little boy, a number of things that left their mark on me. My parents did financially well during the Depression, as they had before and did after it. For example, we had a maid to pick up after us, particularly me. But across the ravine from our house lived a bunch of poor people and, as you know kids will do, I used to go home after school with some of my schoolmates to play ball with them. In one of the houses I visited, the only ball they had was something they had tied together with string. I remember that the house was unheated and the mother’s face looked ravaged. There was almost no furniture. The father was away on the road looking for work. Many of the houses in our town were like that. But when I came home, I had a maid that picked up my clothes and books wherever I threw them. I had warmth and comfort and plenty to eat. I couldn’t believe that this difference could be right. I realized then there was something wrong with the kind of society that would allow this. I had various awarenesses of this. Seeing, for example, people that worked on Work Projects Administration (the Roosevelt Administration’s project for creating jobs), standing in lines leaning on their shovels. I remember asking my father (who was conservative, though I, in those days, never thought about this) as we drove by our big car – a predecessor of the Cadillac – “Who are these people?” And he said, “People hired by Roosevelt for the Works Project Administration. They could get real jobs if they wanted them. They don’t have to live off the dole.” It was experiences like this that impressed me and rooted what would become my turn to the left, later my firm socialism. If only my father would have read
Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle. Another example, this one racial: One of my close schoolboy friends was black – a Negro, as we said then. One day after school, I invited him to come home with me to play. I noticed when we entered the house that our maid, who was Swedish, looked startled when she saw him. When he left, my mother came to me and said, “Don’t ever bring George back here again.” And my father, to stamp this in, called up George’s father and told him not to allow George to come back." == Education ==