Hooverville

Hooverville near Portland, Oregon

A Hooverville was the popular name for shanty towns built by homeless people during the Great Depression. They were named after the President of the United States at the time, Herbert Hoover, because he allegedly let the nation slide into depression. The term was coined by Charles Michelson, publicity chief of the Democratic National Committee. The name Hooverville has also been used to describe the tent cities commonly found in modern-day America.

Homelessness was present before the Great Depression, and hobos and tramps were common sights in the 1920s, but the economic downturn increased their numbers and concentrated them in urban settlements close to soup kitchens ran by charities. These settlements were often formed on empty land and generally consisted of tents and small shacks. Authorities did not officially recognize these Hoovervilles and occasionally removed the occupants for trespassing on private lands, but they were frequently tolerated or ignored out of necessity. The New Deal enacted special relief programs aimed at the homeless under the Federal Transient Service (FTS), which operated from 1933-35.

Some of the men who were forced to live in these conditions possessed construction skills and were able to build their houses out of stone. Most people, however, resorted to building their residences out of wood from crates, cardboard, scraps of metal, or whatever materials were available to them. They usually had a small stove, bedding and a couple of simple cooking implements.

Most of these unemployed residents of the Hoovervilles used public charities or begged for food from those who had housing during this era. Democrats coined other terms, such as "Hoover blanket" (old newspaper used as blanketing) and "Hoover flag" (an empty pocket turned inside out). "Hoover leather" was cardboard used to line a shoe with the sole worn through. A "Hoover wagon" was an automobile with horses hitched to it because the owner could not afford fuel; in Canada, these were known as Bennett buggies, after the Prime Minister at the time.

In popular culture

• In Sullivan's Travels, a 1941 comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges, John L. Sullivan, a wanderlust movie director, played by Joel McCrea, visits a Hooverville and accidentally becomes a genuine tramp.
• The musical Annie, has a song called "We'd Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover," which takes place in a Hooverville beneath the 59th Street Bridge. In the song, the chorus sings of the hardships they now suffer because of the Great Depression and their contempt for the former president.
• In 1987, the Liverpool group The Christians had a British hit with the song "Hooverville (And They Promised Us The World)".
• During a temporary housing crisis, the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper referred to a fictional solution to the resulting housing crisis at Stanford University as "Hooverville" due to its proximity to Stanford's Hoover Tower.
• In the 2005 version of King Kong, directed by Peter Jackson, the Hooverville in New York's Central Park is depicted at the beginning of the film.
• The 2005 movie Cinderella Man also referenced the Central Park encampment.
• Two episodes ("Daleks in Manhattan" and "Evolution of the Daleks") of the 2007 British science fiction television series Doctor Who depicted the Central Park Hooverville.
• The novel Bud, Not Buddy is set in the Great Depression, and an early scene involves a Hooverville being dismantled by the police. Bud calls it "Hooperville."
• In John Steinbeck's famous novel The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family settles into a Hooverville in California.

External links

• Photos of a new father figure in Hooverville in Portland, Oregon, near the Ross Island Bridge, from a Library of Congress website
• Photos and details of a Hooverville in Seattle, Washington, from a King County, Washington website
• Photographs of California Hoovervilles (Sacramento, Kern County), via Calisphere, California Digital Library
• "Missouri Hooverville photographs". University of Missouri–St. Louis.
• Yael Schacher, "Homelessness"
• Obamaville: Springs Tent Community Has Sign Tying President To Homelessness (VIDEO)

See Also

National Mortgage Crisis of the 1930s