Eminent writers were among the very poor in 1932, and some have left a record of what transient life was like. John Steinbeck washed his clothes with soap made from pork fat, wood ashes, and salt. He couldn’t even afford postage on his manuscripts; his agent paid it, although none of them sold then. The prospect of illness, he later recalled, frightened the nomads most of all: “You had to have money to be sick then. Dentistry was out of the question, with the result that my teeth went badly to pieces.” Steinbeck was in the country. City caravansaries were more foul. Thomas Wolfe regularly visited the public latrine in front of the New York City Hall, watching men quarrel over the possession of stools while foraging in their tattered overcoat pockets for crusts of bread or old bones with rancid shreds of meat still clinging to them. The nomads there, he wrote:
…were just flotsam of the general ruin of the time—honest, decent, middle-aged men with faces seamed by toil and want, and young men, many of them boys in their teens, with thick, unkempt hair. These were the wanderers from town to town, the riders of freight trains, the thumbers of rides on highways, the uprooted, unwanted male population of America. They drifted across the land and gathered in the big cities when winter came, hungry, defeated, empty, hopeless, restless, driven by they knew not what, always on the move, looking everywhere for work, for the bare crumbs to support their miserable lives, and finding neither work nor crumbs. Here in New York, to this obscene meeting place, these derelicts came, drawn into a common stew of rest and warmth and a little surcease from their desperation…. The sight was revolting, disgusting, enough to render a man forever speechless with very pity.
Years later Mrs. Lyndon Johnson would remember her husband’s excited shout when he managed to get boys “out of boxcars and into jobs.” That was the essence of the transients’ problem. To workers in the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the National Association of Travelers’ Aid Societies it sometimes seemed that the youth of a nation was being destroyed on the rails. Paying Pullman passengers would find only one or two berths in a car occupied in 1932, but on the rods beneath them, and in the freight cars, humanity was dense. An average of seven hundred train hoppers a day passed through Kansas City. In twelve months, the Southern Pacific Railroad reported, its guards had thrown 683,000 people off freights. Riding the rods was dangerous. Testifying before a subcommittee of the Seventy-second Congress, R. S. Mitchell, chief special agent of the Missouri Pacific Railway, mentioned that he had taken “official notice” of 387,313 Depression nomads, of whom 335 had become casualties. He was asked for details.
SENATOR COSTIGAN: Have you observed any ill effects on the health of people traveling under these conditions?
MR. MITCHELL: The health conditions in the winter… is a very serious thing. It is a very serious thing for a tender individual not properly clothed, to ride outside in winter weather. I do not see how they can escape pneumonia.
SENATOR COSTIGAN: There is considerable exposure?
MR. MITCHELL: Yes, sir.
There were other kinds of exposure. Forty years ago the line between the sexes was sharply drawn, and girls, joining nomad caravans for the first time, frequently disguised themselves as boys. But they were soon unmasked; among other things, they lacked the strength and dash of boys who could hide in culverts at daybreak and raid passing produce trucks. To earn their keep, they offered themselves to fellow travelers. But the going rate for nomad prostitutes was only ten cents, and for a dime the girl was risking not only pregnancy—with the unlikelihood that a physician could be found nine months later—but also eventual venereal infection.
In the South there was an additional hazard. Both races were riding the freights. Intercourse between them was a crime, and a white girl under suspicion of working what was called “the black market” was strongly tempted to cry rape—with fatal consequences for her customer. In fact, this had happened the previous year on a slow gondola car between Chattanooga and Scottsboro, Alabama, giving rise to one of the great liberal causes of the decade. Nine illiterate Negro youths were sentenced to death on testimony from two white southern mill girls with police records, one of whom gave evidence in language so foul that reporters could not use any of it. The case went through countless appeals and two Supreme Court reversals of conviction until, twenty years later, the last of the Negro prisoners died of cancer. The Communist party made “the Scottsboro boys” known around the world, and their persecution provided incalculable fuel for black despair and, later, militancy.
But in 1932 you didn’t have to be black to suffer on the road. Prison was often regarded as a godsend; as Agent Mitchell told Senator Costigan, when nomads were threatened with arrest, “they would laugh at the officers and say, ‘That is what we want. That will give us a place to sleep and eat.’” To find out why they preferred jail fare, Thomas Minehan, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, dressed in rags and joined a gang of young transients. Nourishment, he found, was acquired at breadlines, which might be in missions, churches, hospitals, Salvation Army flophouses, or municipal welfare stations. The lines should more accurately have been called soup kitchens: “the soup is invariably—I write from experience—thin, watery, lukewarm, tasteless, and served without even stale bread, and never with soda crackers. A portion equals about a small cupful.” No second bowl was ever given, and eviction after the first or second day was inevitable.
Everywhere Minehan saw signs of malnutrition—prominent ribs, concave abdomens, arms and legs on which the skin was loose and baggy, hungry eyes, and nervous mannerisms. Newton D. Baker asked, “Can we afford to permit permanent injury to this generation of youth?” Baker was dismissed as a windy politician. Yet eight years later, when the children of the Depression were called to the draft, he was vindicated. National Physical Fitness Director John B. Kelly (father of Grace Kelly) found that 40 percent of the young men examined were unfit. Most rejections were for bad teeth. Other defects, in the order of prevalence, were poor eyesight, diseases of the heart and circulation, deformities of arms and legs, and mental disorders. To those were added the invisible scars inflicted in hobo jungles by thieves, drug addicts, and hardened inverts—men like the strapping homosexual who tried to seduce young Sevareid for a quarter.
Henry Ford said, “Why, it’s the best education in the world for those boys, that traveling around! They get more experience in a few months than they would in years at school.” If President Hoover believed otherwise, he never said so. Certainly nothing in his personal experience contradicted it. Because he couldn’t bear to watch suffering, he never visited a breadline or a relief station, despite the pleas of William Allen White. He never turned his head when his limousine swept past apple salesmen on street corners. Not until that autumn did his train leave Washington to cross states he had never visited since taking his oath of office on March 4, 1929. It was then, staring out of his guarded car at night, that he saw the campfires of hundreds of thousands of his people, mostly boys and girls who, Gene Smith wrote, “were aimlessly traveling the highways by day and sleeping near them at night.”
Hoover had considered economy in the White House kitchen, then decided that would be bad for the country’s morale. Each evening he entered the dining room wearing black tie—he was the last President who unfailingly dressed for dinner—and addressed himself to seven complete courses. The reporter who had coined the 1928 Republican campaign slogan (“A chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage”) was broke and pleading for loans to support his three children, but the chief executive believed that America would despair if its first family lost faith in the return of prosperity.
Usually some of the courses were out of season; so were the cut flowers on the table. A custom-built humidor held long thick cigars handmade in Havana to the President’s specifications; he smoked twenty a day. As the Hoovers ate, a remarkable number of men stood around and watched. The butler and footmen—all had to be the same height—stood at attention, absolutely silent, forbidden to move unbidden. In the doorways w
ere duty officers from the company of marines who stood by wearing dress blues, to provide ceremonial trappings, and there were buglers in Ruritanian uniforms whose glittering trumpets announced the President’s arrival and departure from the nightly feast, even when the only other diner was his wife Lou. Hoover was proud of Lou. She spoke five languages fluently, was president of the Girl Scouts of America, and set what was conceded to be the finest table in White House history. Sometimes she wondered whether the President really appreciated the food. He wolfed it down with such incredible speed.
***
By the fourth year of his administration, Herbert Clark Hoover had become a national riddle. A sardonic Texan had written a bonus marcher, “Of course, you won’t have to worry about chow, being so close to the world’s greatest food administrator.” Yet that is precisely what Hoover had been; his feat in rescuing starving Belgium is still one of the brightest chapters in the long history of American humanitarianism. Maxim Gorki had written him, “You have saved from death 3,500,000 children, 5,500,000 adults.” Finland added a verb to its language; to “hoover” meant to help.
Now it was all turned round. As the nation’s anger deepened and darkened, stories were spread that he had made a fortune in Belgium, that dogs instinctively disliked him, that he was the mastermind behind the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s son in March 1932. Junky shantytowns of tin, cardboard and burlap were Hoovervilles—Manhattan had two big ones, below Riverside Drive and near the obelisk in Central Park. The unemployed (an adjective which had become a noun in these years) carried sacks of frayed belongings called “Hoover bags.” In North Carolina the rural poor sawed the fronts off broken-down flivvers, attached scrawny mules, and called the result “Hoovercarts.” (The government tried to change the name to “Depression chariots,” but no one bought it.) “Hoover blankets” were old newspapers which park bench tenants wrapped around themselves for warmth. “Hoover flags” were empty pockets turned inside out. “Hoover hogs” were the jackrabbits hungry farmers caught for food. Vaudeville comedians called out, “What? You say business is better? You mean Hoover died?” or reported that Hoover asked Secretary of the Treasury Mellon for a nickel to telephone a friend and was told, “Here’s a dime, phone both of them.”
There was a fine irony in Hoover’s plight, for by the standards of the Twenties he had been considered a liberal politician. President Coolidge had scorned his brisk Secretary of Commerce as “the miracle worker” and “the wonder boy.” Republican conservatives had not been grateful to Hoover for regulating radio and making airwaves public property. His great dream, on the day of his inauguration, had been to become a mighty social engineer, manipulating industrial forces for the common good. That was not quite what the Grand Old Party stood for; when the first few paragraphs of his inaugural address reached the Chicago Tribune, Colonel McCormick had wired his Washington bureau, “This man Hoover won’t do.” Hoover had been sharply critical of Coolidge-Mellon easy money. He had predicted an economic downturn because of it, and one of his first acts as President had been to persuade the Federal Reserve Board to tighten credit in the hope that the blow might be softened.
When time came to sail near the wind, however, it developed that he wasn’t so heretical after all. By manipulation he had meant that the government should act as a supervisor and coordinator. Its function was to bring about “a condition of affairs favorable to the beneficial development of private enterprise,” he explained, and he added that the only “moral” way out of the Depression was self-help: the people should find inspiration in the devotion of “great manufacturers, our railways, utilities, business houses and public officials.” Since by 1932 the people in large numbers had become convinced that the great manufacturers and their colleagues were a bunch of crooks, a credibility gap appeared and widened.
The President professed to ignore it. He was an apostle of what John Kenneth Galbraith later called the conventional wisdom. He believed the gold standard to be sacred—even though eighteen nations, led by Great Britain, had abandoned it. He was convinced that a balanced budget was “indispensable,” an “absolute necessity,” “the most essential factor to economic recovery,” “the first necessity of the nation,” and “the foundation of all public and private financial stability”—all this despite the fact that in 1932 he was running the federal budget four billion dollars into the red. When he became convinced at last that the government must do something, he created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to prop up sagging banks, and agreed to spend twenty-five million dollars on feed for farm animals on the condition that a bill authorizing $120,000 for hungry people be tabled.
This sounds absurd today, but in those days sound men accepted it as the revealed word. “Federal feeding would set a dangerous precedent,” argued the Schenectady Star; it would be too dangerously like the dole, which paralyzed British labor. “If this country ever votes a dole,” said Silas Strawn, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, “we’ve hit the toboggan as a nation.” Everyone knew how England’s moral fiber had been sapped; the American Magazine reported that pubs were crowded with topers on the dole. Henry Ford declared that unemployment insurance would only guarantee increased unemployment, and his logic was accepted as flawless. The enlightened editors of Fortune explained that business should reject the very concept of social responsibility, on the ground that the introduction of any noneconomic factor would destroy the benign workings of a free market. Even Walter Lippmann, while taking the position that action was necessary, insisted that money be raised by state legislatures, not Congress.
It was a business country, Calvin Coolidge had said, and it wanted a business government. Coolidge went further. “The man who builds a factory,” he wrote, “builds a temple,” and “the man who works there worships there.” During the Republican Twenties business had become much more than the accumulation of cash; it had come to be the guiding light in schools, press, even in churches. True believers continued reading Bruce Barton’s best seller about Jesus Christ, The Man Nobody Knows, in which Barton claimed, among other things, that if Jesus were alive he would be an account executive in an advertising agency—a startling thought for those who had been taught that the Saviour had been a member of the building trades.
The harder times became, the greater Hoover’s faith in business became. He reduced individual and corporate income taxes, thereby narrowing the government’s tax base at a time when it desperately needed every source of revenue. To preside over the Reconstruction Finance Corporation he appointed Chicago banker Charles G. Dawes, who then loaned ninety million dollars to his own bank. As the impasse continued, the President turned to Mellon for counsel, and that social Darwinist replied, “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” It almost seemed, as Galbraith later wrote, that everyone called upon for advice “was impelled by the conventional wisdom to offer proposals designed to make things worse.”
Years later Richard Nixon came to believe that “Hoover had the misfortune to hold office at the wrong time.” Certainly Hoover was trying desperately to find solutions. He worked eighteen hours a day, proclaimed a statesmanlike moratorium on war debts, and even cut his own salary. And he was hopeful. In the end, he felt, what he called “rugged individualism” would win.
Over and over the President explained that help for the poor must come from private charities and local or state governments. To be sure, no state had had a department of public welfare until Franklin Roosevelt opened New York’s, but others would have to follow the governor’s example. Meanwhile, the President said firmly, there would be no irresponsible experiments performed simply to “do something.” The United States, he wrote a public works advocate on May 20, 1932, couldn’t “squander itself into prosperity.” When the Democratic Congress passed a two-billion-dollar relief bill, he vetoed it and issued a scathing message calling the measure “an unexampled raid on the public treasury.” He added, “Our nation was not fou
nded on the pork barrel, and it has not become great by political log-rolling!”
At about this time men in power began to discover “outside agitators.” It was always strangers, never “the deserving poor,” who whipped mobs into a frenzy of irrational behavior. Hoover’s contempt for mobs had been set down ten years earlier. In a little book entitled American Individualism he had written, “Above all, beware the crowd! The crowd only feels; it has no mind of its own which can plan. The crowd is credulous, it destroys, it consumes, it hates, and it dreams—but it never builds.” Conceivably, he concluded, this “destructive criticism” could lead to revolution. Destructive critics were blamed for the hunger march on Ford’s Dearborn plant, for the bonus riot, and especially for the unrest in Harlan County, Kentucky. Rugged individualists in both parties regarded the college students who had gone into Kentucky as fair game. They were beaten, jailed, and denounced by the county attorney as a “godless, self-appointed, nondescript, iconoclastic minority of grandiloquent egotists.”
Riffling through Hoover’s papers, one sometimes has the strange feeling that the President looked upon the Depression as a public relations problem—that he believed the nightmare would go away if only the image of American business could be polished up and set in the right light. Faith was an end in itself; “lack of business confidence” was a cardinal sin. Hoover’s first reaction to the slump which followed the Crash had been to treat it as a psychological phenomenon. He himself had chosen the word “Depression” because it sounded less frightening than “panic” or “crisis.” In December 1929 he declared that “conditions are fundamentally sound.” Three months later he said the worst would be over in sixty days; at the end of May he predicted that the economy would be back to normal in the autumn; in June the market broke sharply, yet he told a delegation which called to plead for a public works project, “Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late. The Depression is over.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 4