Hoovervilles

7 Key excerpts on "Hoovervilles"

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  The Great Depression in America

  A Cultural Encyclopedia [2 volumes]

  • William H. Young, Nancy K. Young(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Hoover saw drought relief emanating from state and local municipalities, but people clamored for the president to offer direct federal aid. Seemingly powerless in the face of calamitous events, Hoover soon found his surname the butt of many jokes. A Hooverville consisted of a collection of tents, cardboard boxes, tarpaper shacks, and the like that served as housing for the homeless. Usually located close to railroad tracks, Hoovervilles multiplied during the early 1930s. ‘‘Hoover blankets,’’ accumulated newspapers under which the jobless and homeless often slept, provided a different kind of shelter. Scarcity of food forced some to eat small game, all of which got called ‘‘Hoover hogs.’’ Rundown shoes, usually with visible holes in the HOOVER, HERBERT 240 soles, became ‘‘Hoover shoes,’’ and ‘‘Hoover leather’’ meant the cardboard inserted to resole them. ‘‘Hoover flags’’ referred to empty pockets; when destitute people turned their pockets inside out to indicate that they were broke, the exposed white linings somewhat resembled flags. ‘‘Hoovercart’’ and ‘‘Hooverwagon’’ rodeos began in 1933 and swept the country. The events involved hitching mules to the sawn-off back halves of decrepit Model T Fords and racing them through obstacles, the bumpy course a symbol of the equally bumpy economy. Not all Americans opposed Hoover and his programs, however, and those who had faith in the beleaguered president gained the name Hoovercrats. In 1931, Grant Wood (1891–1942), a popular Regionalist painter from Iowa, depicted Hoover’s early rural home in a canvas titled ‘‘The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover.’’ Hoover held the honor of being Iowa’s first citizen to reside in the White House and clearly stood as its most famous resident, although, given the times, not necessarily its favorite son. In the spring of 1931, Europe sank further into an ongoing economic crisis, an event that negatively affected the American banking system.

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  Shantytown, USA

  Forgotten Landscapes of the Working Poor

  • Lisa Goff(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  The depression and droughts of the 1930s swelled the ranks of the homeless poor across the country. Many slogged from town to city or field to orchard looking for work and a place to live. Families, youths, and single women crowded into inner cities, renting rooms in lodging houses and tenements or, if penniless, bedding down in the shelters and missions run by cities or charitable organizations. Transient men, romanticized in the 1930s as hoboes, often lived in “jungles” at the edges of cities or near railroads or ports, or in flophouses on the edge of downtowns. Out West, families traveled from cheap auto camp to cheaper auto camp, in an exodus memorialized in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, speeded on their way by donations of gas and oil from overwhelmed relief agencies whose solution to transients was to keep them moving past the city line. But an estimated 100,000 under- or unemployed people spent the 1930s not in hobo jungles, center-city lodging houses or auto camps, but in the dozens of American shantytowns known as Hoovervilles. 8 Although shanties in the twentieth century, like those in the nineteenth, were generally constructed mostly of wood, they sometimes reflected the availability of geographically specific natural resources. Migrants built log shanties along the Iron River in Michigan. A writer for the Federal Writers’ Project saw “palmetto-thatched huts with floors of rough boards or hard Troops under the command of General Douglas Macarthur set fire to the shantytown built by the Bonus Army on the Anacostia flats in Washington, DC, in 1932. 228 s h a n t y t o w n , u s a packed dirt” in the Florida Everglades in 1938. After the 1920s, car and truck parts appear regularly in shanties, sometimes forming the basis of the struc-ture. As the Farm Security Administration photographs of the 1930s and 1940s demonstrate, some shanty builders showed great creativity in the matter of siding, roofing, front doors, and general decoration.

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  Homelessness in the 21st Century

  Living the Impossible American Dream

  • Stephanie Southworth, Sara Brallier(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Legends of America. www.legendsofamerica.com/20th-Hoovervilles/ .
• Heathcott, J. (2012). The strange career of public housing: Policy, planning, and the American metropolis in the twentieth century. Journal of the American Planning Association, 78(4), 360–375. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2012.740296 .
• Ibid.
• Rossi, P. H. (1990). The old homeless and the new homelessness in historical perspective. The American Psychologist, 45(8), 954–959. https://doi.org/10.1037//0003-066x.45.8.954 .
• The high-rise public housing projects concentrated poverty in areas without resources, often in areas of cities that were near jobs. This concentration, along with the new suburbs, created an unprecedented level of racial and economic segregation in American cities.
• These benefits mostly went to White veterans. The impact of these benefits will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2 .
• Rossi, P. H. (1990). The old homeless and the new homelessness in historical perspective. The American Psychologist, 45(8), 954–959.
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Chapter 2 Neoliberal Ideology and Homelessness

DOI: 10.4324/9781003325581-3

“I go here, I go there. No one understands that I can pay for housing. I just can’t pay that much. I need to be able to put gas in my car and eat.” Jared, a 40-year-old White male

Introduction

Social problems, such as homelessness, do not occur in isolation and can be mitigated with good policy decisions. The magnitude of homelessness we see today was not inevitable. As we discussed in Chapter 1 , in the late 1970s, homelessness had almost disappeared from the social landscape in the United States. In his 1976 book about the history of housing, Anthony Jackson wrote, “The housing industry trades on the knowledge that no Western country can politically afford to have its citizens sleep in the streets.”1