Homeowners lost their property when they could not pay mortgages or pay taxes. Renters fell behind and faced eviction. Many squeezed in with relatives, but hundreds of thousands were not so fortunate. Some defied eviction, staying where they were, others found refuge in one of the increasing numbers of vacant buildings, more found shelter under bridges, in culverts, empty water mains, or on vacant public lands, where they built crude shacks.
When the Dust Bowl began in it made matters even worse. As these many people used whatever means they had at their disposal for survival, they blamed Hoover for the downfall of economic stability and lack of government help. The shelters themselves varied widely, from stone houses and fairly solid structures built by those with construction skills, but, far more that were thrown together with wooden crates, cardboard, tar paper, scraps of cloth and metal, and various other discarded materials.
Within their shelters, most people had a small stove, a few cooking implements, some bedding, and little else. However, that was not always the case, especially if the occupants were trespassing on private lands and some cities would not allow them at all. Shelters were established by the program that provided food, clothing, medical care, and training and education programs.
The relief also provided for rooms in boarding houses and rent payments. A few camps were established in rural areas but, in the cities, the Federal Government saw the problem as a local one.
The program helped many, it was unable to thousands of others and just two years later, in , it was phased out. Though some were eligible for the Resettlement Administration camps established for migratory workers, it was still not enough.
When the stock market crashed in , it occurred just as a rectangular reservoir north of Belvedere Castle was being taken out of service. By , a few homeless people set up an informal camp at the drained reservoir but were soon evicted. But, having nowhere to go, they would come back and as public sentiment became more sympathetic, they were allowed to stay. Others built a dwelling from stone blocks of the reservoir, including one shanty that was 20 feet tall.
Though the settlement could not have been popular with the tenants of the new Fifth Avenue and Central Park West apartments, they mounted no protest. The Central Park disappeared sometime before April when work on the reservoir landfill resumed. In Seattle, Washington stood one of the largest, longest-lasting, and best documented Hoovervilles in the country, standing for ten years, between to Though there were several located about the city, this Hooverville was located on the tidal flats adjacent to the Port of Seattle.
The camp began when an unemployed lumberjack Spread over nine acres, it housed a population of up to 1, In June, many of them marched to the Capitol to request early payment of the government bonuses they had been promised—money that would have alleviated the financial problems of many families.
The government refused to pay, citing Depression-era budgetary restrictions. When most of the veterans refused to leave their shacks, Hoover sent in U.
Hoover later claimed that MacArthur had used excessive force, but his words meant little to most of those affected. Hoover also received criticism for signing, in June , the controversial Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which imposed a high tariff on foreign goods in an effort to prevent them from competing with U.
However, some countries retaliated by raising their tariffs, and international trade was hampered. Between and , the value of world trade declined by more than half.
By , Hoover was so unpopular that he had no realistic hope of being re-elected, and Governor Franklin D. By the early s, many Hoovervilles had been torn down. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The s in the United States began with an historic low: more than 15 million Americans—fully one-quarter of all wage-earning workers—were unemployed.
President Herbert Hoover did not do much to alleviate the crisis: Patience and self-reliance, he argued, were all Americans The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from to It began after the stock market crash of October , which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors.
Over the next several The Civilian Conservation Corps CCC was a work relief program that gave millions of young men employment on environmental projects during the Great Depression. In the early 20th century, the U. Bureau of Reclamation devised plans for a massive dam on the Arizona-Nevada border to tame the Colorado River and provide water and hydroelectric power for the developing Southwest.
Construction within the strict timeframe proved an immense Roosevelt that aimed to restore prosperity to Americans. When Roosevelt took office in , he acted swiftly to stabilize the economy and provide jobs and relief Franklin D.
With the country mired in the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt immediately acted to restore public confidence, proclaiming a bank holiday and During the Great Depression, with much of the United States mired in grinding poverty and unemployment, some Americans found increased opportunities in criminal activities like bootlegging, robbing banks, loan-sharking—even murder.
Organized Crime in the Prohibition Era The The stock market crash of October left the American public highly nervous and extremely susceptible to rumors of impending financial disaster.
The structures, mostly temporary and in a state of disrepair, were not welcomed by the law. In December , New York City police arrested several men who they discovered living in a tunnel below the drained reservoir. The men had made it liveable, with curtains, chairs, tables, and a red lantern. According to the New York Daily News, it was dubbed the "Little Casino," in reference to an upper-class restaurant, where then-Mayor Jimmy Walker spent a lot of his time.
In the late s, police evicted an informal camp in Central Park. The camp was an early sign of what was to come. At that point, it was not clear how bad the Great Depression would be, and public opinion about homelessness was mostly negative. According to Politico, Hoover's name "had become a synonym for indifference," and the public started to grow more sympathetic towards people living in Hoovervilles.
That didn't make squatting legal, though. In July , 22 men were arrested for sleeping in Central Park. By December, signs of a small town had appeared. A reporter from The New York Times wrote about nine men living in six shacks, who were arrested for vagrancy, but had their charges dropped.
That was as large as it got. Every shack had beds and chairs, some had carpets, and one brick house with a tile roof was known as "Rockside Inn. The contrast between the small shacks — at least one was an actual hole in the ground — beneath some of New York's most impressive apartment buildings caught people's imagination. For a brief period, Hoover Valley became a tourist destination.
A former tight-rope walker named Ralph Redfield held performances. Central Park also provided sustenance. In June , a patrolman asked a man shaking a tree what he was doing. The man responded: "We do this every day. We eat the berries. You know in the Bible people life off fig trees, so we live off these mulberry trees here in the park. Mitchell Jablons wrote about what people living in another one of New York's Hoovervilles were like.
Jablons described them as "men gathered around open fires in empty oil drums much as we see today among the homeless. In September , even though Central Park's Hooverville residents maintained their appearances, a New York City health official said that unless the city fitted running water and sewerage, they had to go. That month, 29 men were arrested for living in the Hooverville. In , the Hooverville was destroyed so that park workers could lay the new Great Lawn.
Those who still lived there left peacefully.
0コメント