One sweltering August night a dirt-poor ten-year old girl was lifted up on to the top of a chicken coop and encouraged to look up at the stars and dream.

That girl, Maggie Louise, was born more than 80 years ago and 4,000 miles away - the daughter of a cotton tenant farmer in Depression-era America. She seems remote in every way, but that little girl is a warning to us in Britain now. Don't, she says, fail the children of this recession in the way that I was failed. Don't, she says, think that you are protecting them by protecting the British industries that are falling behind and down.

The car industry is far from being the same as cotton, but similar principles apply. When Gordon Brown talks, as he loves to do, about brokering a “new” New Deal for our economy, he should first find out what the New Deal did to Maggie Louise.

The person who lifted Maggie Louise up on to the roof behind her shack was James Agee, a somewhat sleazy young poet on a magazine assignment from New York. His editor wanted some poverty porn for the magazine's well-heeled readers, and asked him to get the dirt on the suffering of cotton farmers in Alabama.

Times Archive, 1933: Mr Roosevelt's promise of action

'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself'

• Topic: The New Deal

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The resulting book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, became a classic of American Depression-era literature, but that's not to say that Agee was a reputable person or that the book is earnest. For weeks Agee lived rather too closely in the shacks of three sharecropping families - falling heavily in lust with one of the wives.

“If only Emma could spend her last few days alive having a gigantic good time in bed...with me,” he wrote wistfully.

But the girl he fell in love with, spiritually, was Maggie Louise. She was very bright and earned the top grades in her school, even though she missed so much of it bloodying her hands with the cotton harvest. But more than that, he was struck by her piercing, “wise and pure” grey eyes: she was looking to the future. To look into the eyes of Maggie Louise was “scary as hell, and more mysterious than frightening”, wrote Agee.

The girl and the man become friends: she questioned everything, and he was the person finally to give her hope that there was a life beyond. She asked him about eternity, stars, New York and whether she could achieve her ambition to become a nurse or a teacher. Agee told her that she could do anything. Although he worried whether that was true, he thought if anyone could overcome terrible circumstances, she could. Then he was gone.

What happened to her? Fifty years after Agee, another journalist, Dale Maharidge, went back to see what had become of the families. His Pulitzer prize-winning book, And Their Children after Them, is not a poetic meditation like Agee's, but a forensic analysis of what does and does not help to lift people out of wretched lives.

It was 1986, and the rest of America was in its yuppie boom-time. But Maharidge, in talking to 128 descendants of the original families, found a parable of millions betrayed by the New Deal and by later, just as well-intentioned government efforts.

In the 19th century, “King Cotton” had been the South's gold-rush. It was woven into the fabric of that society. But America's leaders failed to make a leap of imagination, failed to see that when one product faltered, life could and should move on. At the beginning of the 1930s, the United States supplied nearly half the world's cotton, at a profit. Then, to help the small, depression-ridden farmer to survive, the Government started propping up the prices of cotton with public money. It raised cotton prices so high that the farmers were priced out of the world market.

At the same time, a technological leap introduced synthetic fibres. Cotton had to be produced more cheaply than ever before - but the subsidies retarded that change. By 1956, Maharidge wrote, the government subsidy of about $1,000 to each cotton farm cost American taxpayers $1billion.

Maggie Louise and her family were none the better for it. In fact, Maharidge found that propping up the cotton industry had let its workers down. Kind, but cruel.

“If that $1bn had been used to educate and train them to enter more useful professions, it would have been money better spent. But that would have smacked of social engineering and been politically unacceptable,” Maharidge wrote.

Our present recession is not, despite the doomsayers, the Great Depression, and Britain's poor are not the gap-toothed white peasants of Agee's Alabama. But still we find it hard to think of ourselves without a car industry of its current size. It accounts for 10 per cent of our manufacturing turnover and 850,000 jobs.

Surely Mr Brown's £2.3 billion bailout package to the car industry - probably not the last - is essential until things get back to normal?

Maybe. But that's what they thought about cotton. Maybe our car companies were overproducing and too heavily invested in technology that is becoming obsolete.

The lesson of Maggie Louise is for everyone - leaders, bosses, and employees - to stay flexible. Adapt to changing times. Do not be trapped into preserving the past. Instead, keep your eyes fixed on the future.

What did become of Maggie Louise? Without the money to support her through school, she married at 15 and swiftly became a teenage mother. Despite her fierce hatred of cotton, she - and what she found most heartbreaking, her daughters - returned to work the fields.

Eventually, like most of the other four million cotton tenants, she was forced off the land and into a succession of breadline jobs.

Agee had described her as “magical, indefinable, and matchless”, but Maharidge discovered that “each passing year mocked the dreams she had dreamed with Agee”.

One February afternoon, aged 45, she bought a bottle of rat poison and calmly drank it. She committed suicide, but her sister said that “cotton had killed her”.

“How had that special, vibrant 10-year-old child of James Agee's pages...come to such an end?” asked Maharidge.

“Maggie Louise's life seems to recite clearly the old lesson that a life not lived to its full potential, or close to it, will be destroyed by bitterness.” You could say the same about our bright nation, if it is “protected” from achieving its full potential.

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