The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

The Economy Hits Bottom 679

relief funds were available, hundreds of families
existed on stale bread, thin soup, and garbage. In the
nation as a whole, only about one-quarter of the
unemployed were receiving any public aid. In
Birmingham, Alabama, landlords in poor districts
gave up trying to collect rents, preferring, one
Alabama congressman told a Senate committee, “to
have somebody living there free of charge rather than
to have the house... burned up for fuel [by scav-
engers].” Many people were evicted, and they often
gathered in ramshackle communities constructed of
packing boxes, rusty sheet metal, and similar refuse
on swamps, garbage dumps, and other wasteland.
People began to call these places“Hoovervilles.”
Thousands of tramps roamed the countryside
begging and scavenging for food. At the same time,
food prices fell so low that farmers burned corn for
fuel. Iowa and Nebraska farmers organized “farm hol-
iday” movements, refusing to ship their crops to mar-
ket in protest against the thirty-one-cent-a-bushel
corn and thirty-eight-cent wheat. They blocked roads
and rail lines, dumped milk, overturned trucks, and
established picket lines to enforce their boycott. The
world seemed to have been turned upside down.
Professor Felix Frankfurter of the Harvard Law
School remarked only half humorously that hence-
forth the terms BC and AD would mean “Before
Crash” and “After Depression.”

The national mood ranged from apathy to resent-

ment. In 1931 federal immigration agents and local

groups in the Southwest began rounding up Mexican-

Americans and deporting them. Some of those

returned to Mexico had entered the United States ille-

gally; others had come in properly. Unemployed

Mexicans were ejected because they might become

public charges, those with jobs because they were pre-

sumably taking bread from the mouths of citizens.

“Capitalism is dying,” the socialist theologian Reinhold

Niebuhr remarked in 1932, “and... it ought to die.”

In June and July 1932, 20,000 Great War veterans

marched on Washington to demand immediate pay-

ment of their“adjusted compensation”bonuses. When

Congress rejected their appeal, some 2,000 refused to

leave, settling in a jerrybuilt camp of shacks and tents at

Anacostia Flats, a swamp bordering the Potomac.

President Hoover, alarmed, charged incorrectly that

theBonus Armywas largely composed of criminals

and radicals and sent troops into the Flats to disperse it

with bayonets, tear gas, and tanks. The task was accom-

plished amid much confusion; fortunately no one was

killed. The protest had been aimless and not entirely

justified, yet the spectacle of the U.S. government chas-

ing unarmed veterans with tanks appalled the nation.

The unprecedented severity of the Depression led

some persons to favor radical economic and political

changes. The disparity between the lots of the rich and

Evicted from their homes, many unemployed people gravitated to vacant industrial property, where they

erected hovels from scraps of lumber, tarpaper, and cardboard. This shantytown is outside of Seattle.