Chapter One
The End of Jobs
In 1932, the United States faced the greatest crisis in its history short of
war. The American industrial powerhouse that had emerged at the end of the Great
War in Europe had fallen still. The stillness had progressed from the stock
market, which had lost almost 90 percent of its value since the awful crash of
October 1929, to the nation’s factories, and from the factories to city avenues,
small-town streets, and out across the countryside, where it reached farmers who
were mired in a crisis of their own, caused by debt and drought. Workers from
every walk of life were idle, one-quarter of the workforce-13 million men and
women, though some estimates ranged to 15 million and above. As their resources
dwindled, they descended a spiral from belt-tightening to despair to
destitution. Millions lost their homes, wore their clothes into rags, and had to
forage like animals for food: city dwellers fought for scraps in garbage cans
and dumps, while in the country, the hungry scratched for roots and weeds.
For all of the physical suffering, the greatest loss was to the spirit. People
felt fear, shame, despair; the suicide rate soared, and the nation trembled at
the prospect of a dark, uncertain future. The optimism that Americans had
distilled from the promise of the Constitution and learned to take as their
birthright-their dreams-had disappeared with their access to work.
This did not have to happen. That it did was dictated by a revered American
political philosophy that denied the central government a role in addressing
social problems. In the so-called New Era, which began in 1921 and spanned the
Republican presidencies of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and now Herbert
Hoover, business interests effectively ran the country with some friendly advice
from Washington, primarily in the form of useful information. The right data,
gathered by the government, would allow banks to adjust their loan portfolios
and manufacturers their production schedules, thereby achieving greater
efficiencies than they had attained on their own. Labor was a commodity, like
iron ore or cotton, to be purchased on the open market at the cheapest price. It
was outlandish to think that employers would have any interest in their
employees beyond their productive capacity, and even odder to think that the
federal government would interfere by telling them how to treat their workers.
As for human health and welfare, these were private matters. Society understood
that there would always be a few unfortunates who could not-or chose not to-work
and take care of themselves, and for these stragglers local governments and
private charities were expected to lend a helping hand. It was certainly not
Washington’s job to feed and clothe people or give them employment. The
government had an interest in promoting social goals, since a healthy, well-fed,
stable nation provided a good business climate, but that was all.
“The sole function of government,” Hoover had said in the fall of 1931, two
years after the crash, “is to bring about a condition of affairs favorable to
the beneficial development of private enterprise.” His predecessor, Coolidge,
had put it more succinctly (a practice for which he was famous; his nickname was
“Silent Cal”): “The chief business of the American people is business.”
But the New Era had failed, and Hoover’s efforts to revive it had been
fruitless. Babe Ruth had put the president’s performance into harsh perspective.
Early in 1930, the New York Yankees slugger was holding out for a contract that
would pay him $80,000 a year. When sportswriters reminded him that the president
made $75,000, Ruth responded, “What’s Hoover got to do with it? Besides, I had a
better year than he did.”
And conditions were not improving. Businesses continued to fail at an
unprecedented rate, more than 50,000 since the crash, and the pace of these
failures was accelerating. By 1932, more than 3,600 banks had closed, robbing
millions of depositors of their life’s savings. Every time a bank or business
shut its doors, men and women lost their jobs and their buying power, which
meant more business failures. As a result, industry was operating at a fraction
of capacity, with production lines slowed or shut down entirely. In Birmingham,
Alabama, 25,000 of the steel town’s 108,000 salaried workers had no jobs at all,
and another 75,000 were working reduced hours, for an average pay of $1.50 a
day. Thirty percent of workers were jobless in Detroit, 40 percent in Chicago,
50 percent across the state of Colorado. New York City had 800,000 workers
without jobs. Skilled laborers in the construction industry-carpenters,
plumbers, and electricians-saw their jobs disappear as new construction
vanished. White-collar professions were equally hard hit. Only half the
nation’s engineers had work. With few new homes, or commercial or public
buildings, to design, architects’ practices were decimated; only one in seven
had jobs. Nationally, unemployment had doubled in a year.
After the prosperity of the late 1920s, the widening epidemic of joblessness
sent shock waves through the nation. Before the crash, almost every non-farmer
who could work and wanted a job had one. The unemployment rate in 1929 had been
just 3.2 percent. Flush times had begun to seem permanent, a notion supported by
the nation’s leaders. Hoover, accepting the Republican presidential nomination
in June 1928, said, “Unemployment in the sense of distress is widely
disappearing…. We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over
poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing
from among us.”
When it was jobs, not unemployment, that vanished, people found it impossible to
believe at first. They never thought it could happen to them. Office workers who
got pink slips went home and circled newspaper want ads at the kitchen table,
then went out the next morning with the paper tucked under their arms, full of
expectation, only to return at night disappointed. Factory men gathered day
after day in union halls, in employment offices, and at the gates of the
factories where they used to work. Bulletin boards bristled with “No Help
Wanted” signs. Barkers bellowed “No jobs today, men” over bullhorns at the
factory gates. Each day hope flaked away like layers of old paint. And when the
reality that there were no jobs finally sank in, the job seekers continued to
leave their homes each morning, but now sat on park benches and in the reading
rooms of public libraries. They haunted the counters of cheap coffee shops and
stood in sheltered doorways. Anything was better than returning home and
admitting defeat to a wife whose eager hope shone on her face as she opened the
door-and to children who sensed the desperation in their parents’ whispered
conversations.
The hardships that followed came on slowly. Those who hadn’t lost their savings
when a bank failed spent them down to nothing. Then they borrowed. They put off
paying rent, bought on credit at the grocery store, skipped the installment
payments on their furniture. When their credit was gone, they leaned on
relatives and friends. When their clothes wore out, they darned and patched
until the fabric couldn’t hold new thread. When the soles of their shoes wore
through, they stuffed them with cotton, cardboard, or old newspapers. When they
couldn’t pay for electricity or coal and suppliers cut them off, they huddled
together in the dark and chased coal trucks down the street to pick up the odd
lumps that fell onto the pavement. When they found the eviction notice nailed to
their front door, they tore it down and hoped the sheriff would forget them.
Food was the last necessity to go. Parents skipped meals so their children could
eat. Siblings ate on alternate days. Teachers watched skinny, ill-clothed,
malnourished children nodding at their desks until the day came when they
dropped out of school and vanished. Foster homes and orphanages swelled with
youngsters whose parents could not afford to feed them, 20,000 in New York
alone. At night people lurked behind restaurants and grocery stores waiting for
the refuse cans to be set out, and fought others for the chance to claw through
the garbage. They followed sanitation trucks to city dumps. They stared at the
food displayed in grocery store and bakery windows and wished they had the nerve
to hurl the brick that might let them satisfy their children’s hunger for a
night.
By 1932, the situation of city dwellers had finally fallen to a par with the
nation’s farmers, who for the past ten years had not been able to sell their
crops and livestock for what these cost to grow. The farm troubles had started
in the aftermath of the world war. Food from America had sustained Europe when
its own farms were idled by the war, but once those farms regained their
productivity America’s export markets disappeared, and suddenly its farmers were
producing more food than the domestic market could absorb. Protective tariffs,
which sheltered American manufacturers from inexpensive imports, had never been
erected on behalf of farmers. While the nation’s overall economy recovered from
the brief postwar depression of 1920-21, when manufacturing output fell 25
percent, the farmers never regained their buying power. Subsequent years of
drought had made matters even worse. Eleven million farm families continued to
live in unremitting poverty, and the banks’ hold on their mortgaged land grew
ever tighter.
And no matter where they lived, those who had a roof at all were lucky, because
the sheriff could not forget those struggling in arrears, even if he wanted to.
When the eviction notice was hammered to the door a second and a third time, the
dispossessed were likely to steal away in the middle of the night to find space
where they could, sometimes in apartments where landlords who were also
desperate were offering terms of free rent to fill their empty space, sometimes
doubling up with the same relatives and friends they had already pressed for
loans, sometimes even in their cars. But for many who lost their homes through
eviction or foreclosure, including farmers who had been turned out or simply
walked away from barren and unproductive land, there was no place to go.
Following rumors or blind hope that jobs waited at the next crossroad or rail
junction, thousands upon thousands became nomads. Old farm trucks driven by grim
men plied the roads, overloaded with mattresses and furniture, pots and pans,
suitcases and chests, wives and children and sometimes parents crowded together
in the cab or huddled under canvas in the back. Others rode in-or under-empty
freight cars or hitchhiked, wandering between hobo jungles where they might find
a crude meal and temporary shelter. Most though not all of them were men. Women
and even children were also on the roads and rails, their days spent in a
twilight world of fear and want. The homeless numbered as many as 2 million.
They collected in city doorways, in railway freight yards, under bridges. They
lived in squalid migrant camps and shantytowns cobbled together from abandoned
cars, discarded tarpaper, sheets of tin, scraps of wood.
Yet even the most impoverished families were slow to turn to charity. Americans’
deep-rooted belief in work came with a catch: failing to find it, it was not in
their blood to ask for help. Campaigning in 1928, Hoover had extolled “the
American system of rugged individualism,” a system, he said, that “has come
nearer to the abolition of poverty, to the abolition of fear of want, than
humanity has ever reached before.” But even when the system failed in 1929,
bringing them face-to-face with poverty and want-and fear itself-Americans clung
to its assumptions. If they couldn’t make their own way in the world, the fault
must be with them.
“Oh, don’t bother,” a laid-off Texas teacher who had been forced to seek
assistance told a social worker who was trying to cheer her up. “If, with all
the advantages I’ve had, I can’t make a living, I’m just no good, I guess.”
The growing evidence of suffering brought no change in the philosophy that ruled
government and business. The United States clung to a tradition of poor laws
that harked back 350 years to Elizabethan England. The burden of caring for the
poor fell on local governments and private charities. In recent years a few
state governments, led by New York, had set up formal systems to administer what
was called “relief,” as in relief of want by way of cash payments, vouchers for
necessities such as food and rent, and-where work could be created-paying jobs.
But Washington remained aloof. Business and banking interests insisted on
maintaining this alignment of responsibilities, which had been in place under
the Republican administrations that with few exceptions had been in power since
the Civil War. When the United States Chamber of Commerce polled its members in
December 1931, they responded 2,534 to 197 that “needed relief should be
provided through private contributions and by state and local governments.”
But these governments were now as broke as the people who needed their help, and
as the depression deepened they were unequal to the task. City tax collections
had shrunk with the contraction of the economy. Many local governments were on
the verge of bankruptcy. Charitable donations had also shriveled, and with them
the ability to provide relief to families in need.
Those charged with the burden of the poor sought solutions with growing
desperation. Winslow Township, New Jersey, an area of small farm communities
with about 5,000 people, mirrored the country as a whole. One worker in five was
out of work. On January 2, 1932, the eight members of the Winslow Township
Committee convened in Blue Anchor, a crossroads halfway between Philadelphia and
then-sleepy Atlantic City. The committee voted to dismiss the five-member police
force it no longer could afford to pay. Then, led by its aptly named chairman,
Herman Priestley, the committee called for a week of prayer to ask God’s help in
solving the township’s unemployment crisis.
Prayer was all many jobless Americans had left in 1932.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from American-Made
by Nick Taylor
Copyright © 2008 by Nick Taylor.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Bantam
Copyright © 2008
Nick Taylor
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-553-80235-1
