The Great Depression of the 1930s brought thousands of people, and even entire regions of the country, to their knees. The sudden, catastrophic economic downturn that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929 caused widespread homelessness, poor health and early deaths, and the creation of shantytowns in urban areas. A massive, forced migration took laborers away from their homes to transient jobs in which they experienced discrimination and unfair working conditions and pay. The economic desperation also fueled discrimination against people of color and women.
Hoovervilles
The increase in homelessness, due to sudden unemployment and inability to pay rent, concentrated thousands of Americans in squalid, urban settlements throughout the nation. These became known as "Hoovervilles," a term coined by Democratic National Committee publicity chief Charles Michelson to slander the name of Republican President Herbert Hoover, whose policies many people blamed for the stock market crash and ensuing Depression.
Hoovervilles arose in many public areas, including well known locations such as Central Park in New York City, where scores of homeless families camped out at the park’s Great Lawn, as well as New York’s Riverside Park. Some of the men forced to live in these conditions possessed construction skills and were able to build houses out of stone. Most people, however, resorted to building shelters out of cardboard, wood from crates and fences, scraps of metal, or whatever other materials were available to them. These makeshift homes offered scant protection from wind, rain and the cold of winter. There was usually no running water or bathrooms and living conditions were extremely unsanitary, enabling illness to spread easily. Local authorities did not officially recognize these Hoovervilles and occasionally removed occupants for trespassing on private lands, although they were frequently tolerated or ignored out of necessity.
Hooverville in Manhattan, 1935
Makeshift housing of the type found in shanty towns that sprung up during the Depression, named Hoovervilles to place blame on President Herbert Hoover, in an alley in the Manhattan borough of New York City in 1935.
Democrats coined other terms, such as "Hoover blanket" – old newspaper used as blanketing – and "Hoover flag" – an empty pocket turned inside out – that pressed the idea of the president’s blame for the public misery. "Hoover leather" was cardboard used to line a shoe when the sole wore through, while a "Hoover wagon" was an automobile with horses hitched to it because the owner could not afford fuel.
There were various tactics employed to try to end the suffering of those forced to reside in squalid conditions. Soup kitchens, invented by Benjamin Thompson and run by volunteers, gave free food to homeless Americans, who often received their only daily meal from these establishments.
After Franklin Delano Roosevelt soundly defeated Hoover in the November 1932 presidential election, FDR’s “New Deal” economic recovery plan enacted special relief programs for the homeless under the Federal Transient Service (FTS), which operated from 1933-35. In 1934, the Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act and Taylor Grazing Act also became pivotal tools in the effort to prevent farms from failing and to add livestock feeding areas, both of which helped reduce homelessness. After 1940, the economy recovered, unemployment fell, and shanty eradication programs destroyed all of the remaining Hoovervilles.
The Dust Bowl
In 1930, a confluence of bad weather and poor agricultural practices compounded the Depression's effects on farmers in areas in the South and Midwest Great Plains that came to be known as the Dust Bowl. The affected area included 1 million acres centered on the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and adjacent parts of New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas.
Drought and massive wind storms that threw up giant clouds of dust continued throughout the 1930s, leading to the period being called “the Dirty Thirties.” The dust storms caused major ecological and agricultural damage to American prairie lands, particularly in 1934 and 1936. In 1934, an estimated 75% of the United States felt some effect from the storms, including New England, where red snow fell.
The phenomenon was caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops and other techniques to prevent wind erosion. Farmers grew more and more crops, despite the prices of each of the crops beginning to decline. Deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains displaced the natural deep-rooted grasses that normally kept the soil in place and trapped moisture even during periods of drought and high winds.
As the 1930s progressed, the soil continued to dry, turn to dust and blow eastward and southward in large, dark clouds. At times, these clouds blackened the sky, reaching all the way to East Coast cities such as New York and Washington, D.C. Much of the soil ended up deposited in the Atlantic Ocean, carried by prevailing winds, which were themselves strengthened by the dry and bare soil conditions. These immense dust storms – given names such as "black blizzards" and "black rollers" – often reduced visibility to a few feet. During black blizzards, normal activities such as breathing, eating and walking outside became very difficult tasks. Over 350 houses had to be torn down after one storm alone and more than 500,000 Americans were left homeless.
Dust Bowl buried machinery, 1936
Farm equipment in South Dakota is left half exposed by one of the many wind storms that swept across the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl period of the Great Depression in the 1930s.
The sustained drought and storms damaged the land so badly that overall farm revenue fell by 50 percent in the Dust Bowl region. Some residents of the Plains, especially in Kansas and Oklahoma, became ill and died of dust pneumonia or malnutrition. While there is no official death toll due to insufficient record keeping, it is believed that up to 7,000 deaths occurred as a result of the Dust Bowl. Already suffering from depressed prices and declining incomes, many farmers were forced to abandon their operations and move to the cities or to agricultural areas in other states in order to survive.
Migrant Labor
The Dust Bowl exodus was the largest migration in American history within a short period of time. By 1940, 2.5 million people had moved out of the Plains states, including 200,000 who moved to California. With their land barren and homes seized in foreclosure, many families were forced to leave farms in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Americans primarily migrated west looking for work, although most found economic conditions little better than the ones they had left, given the pervasiveness of the Great Depression throughout the country.
"Migrant labor" is a term applied to those who travel from place to place harvesting crops that must be picked as soon as they ripen, a practice that became a harsh necessity for indigent farm workers. There were two kinds of migrant workers: seasonal urban dwellers and permanent migrants who followed crops from one place to another in order to make a living. In either category, the hard work produced little reward. Because of their exclusion from federal and state legislation that protected workers against exploitation and unfair labor practices, migrant workers earned lower wages than other farm laborers. The jobs were hazardous, while housing and health conditions were extremely poor.
Migrant Mother
In this famous Dorothea Lange photograph, a destitute mother and two of seven her children take a break from picking peas in California. The 1936 image became synonymous with the plight of migrant farm workers during the Depression.
More of the migrants were from Oklahoma than any other state, earning them the nickname "Okies." The names "Arkies" and "Texies" were also used, but less common. Ben Reddick, a freelance journalist and later publisher of the Paso Robles Daily Press in California, is credited with first using the term Oakie in the mid-1930s to identify migrant farm workers. Reddick noticed the "OK" abbreviation on many of the migrants' license plates and referred to them in his article as "Oakies." Californians began calling all migrants by the name, even though many newcomers were not Oklahomans. West Coast residents and some politically motivated writers used "Okie" to disparage these poor, white workers and their families, but also included those of Native-American ancestry such as Cherokees, who were the largest tribal group.
Film star Will Rogers, who had Oklahoma roots, jokingly remarked that Okies moving to California increased the average intelligence of both states. Author John Steinbeck later wrote his novels, Of Mice and Men and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath, about migrant laborers and their struggles. The music and writings of Woody Guthrie were also inspired by migrant workers and the Dust Bowl.
Migrant Dust Bowl Family, 1937
This 1937 photo by Dorothea Lange titled, Broke, baby sick, and car trouble!, shows a family of migrant workers from Missouri stuck on the side of the road near Tracy, California.
Discrimination
The Depression was an extremely difficult time for white Americans in the lower classes. Yet it was even worse for other races, especially African-Americans, as the hard economic conditions once again forced virulent racism and discrimination into the open in American society. In the South in 1930, an organization called the "Black Shirts" recruited approximately 40,000 people to its racist agenda, primarily that no African-American would be given a job before a white person. Unemployment among black workers grew to almost 50% by 1932.
In the Southwest, the claim that Hispanic workers were "stealing jobs" from whites became prevalent. The United States Department of Labor deported 82,000 Mexicans between 1929-1935, while almost half a million people returned to Mexico either voluntarily or after being tricked or threatened into believing they had no other choice. Many of these people had immigrated legally, but lacked the proper documentation to prove their status. Government officials also ignored the legislation automatically designating children born in the country as legal United States citizens.
Discrimination against women was also widespread, with many believing sexist claims that women were stealing available jobs from men. In a survey conducted in 1930 and 1931, 77% of schools refused to hire married women as teachers, while 63% of schools fired females already working as teachers but who then chose to marry.