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"Hooverville" was a deliberately politicized label, emphasizing that President Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party were to be held responsible for the economic crisis and its miseries.

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by Joey Smith

Seattle's Hooverville, as pictured here by watercolor artist Ronald Ginther, was one of the largest in the nation, and was subject to caricaturization, demonization, and misunderstanding by the media and arts. Popular portrayals of Hooverville as exotic, violent, or depraved obscured the self-organization and successes of Hooverville residents in structuring their community. (Courtesy of the Washington State Historical Society)

From 1932 until 1941, on a vacant, nine-acre waterfront lot of the Seattle Port Commission, a haphazard town of particleboard and tin endured the long winters of Seattle under the name of "Hooverville." The residents themselves had designated the town "Hooverville," a reminder of the economic crisis and failures under President Hoover, while they sat around a campfire admiring their creation.[1] These men, who came flooding in from the drenched streets of Seattle as displaced laborers and frustrated immigrants, established what was to become the landmark of the Great Depression in Washington State-a presence that led to both the condemnation and caricaturization of the shantytown and its inhabitants. The men living within this shantytown were detrimentally labeled as dirty, uncouth, and criminal while simultaneously figured as exotic in the films and artistic communities of Seattle. This created a complicated and fraught discourse that would weaken the men's opportunities for social mobility.

By analyzing the beliefs and prejudices held toward Hooverville by the journalists, students, and film directors who shaped the image of shantytown dwellers in the public mind, I hope to provide a more multifaceted examination of the town. It is clear from an analysis of primary sources that Seattle's media and entertainment institutions succeeded in alienating the Hooverites through methods of demonization and romanticization, all the while overlooking the triumphs Hooverville embodied for the men who had created it.

Criminal Portrayals of Hooverville

Hooverville was by no means a luxurious neighborhood. Amenities were lacking and sanitation was unheard of: the nearest flushing toilet was located on the beach, across a precarious and dangerous plank where many drunken men met injury. Most avoided this treachery and simply used the ground between shacks to relieve themselves.[2] The city did not even bother fixing the problem, denying that bathhouses be built because "From a sanitary point of view, Hooverville is all wrong, and should be entirely eliminated."[3] The unsanitary conditions of the town bled into the perception of residents themselves as uncouth and unsanitary, and many of the neighboring residents were constantly outraged at the perversions and unsightliness of the shantytown. A woman of Beacon Hill was reported saying, "Beacon Hill people must look down on these unsightly shacks. People who live in these shacks get their food from Garbage cans...our children at times come across these men."[4] This quote was to be solemnly rebutted by the Hooverites at a meeting with the community of Beacon Hill, who said that many do not eat out of garbage cans, despite the serious shortage of edible, nutritious foodstuffs.[5] Yet, it was unmistakable that the homeless men were not acceptable as neighbors.

If the men of Hooverville were obtaining their food in an unwholesome manner, claimed Jesse Jackson, the self-appointed "mayor" of Hooverville, it was due to the terrible food being served to homeless people by the W.E.R.A. (Washington Emergency Relief Administration). These federally funded soup kitchens, wrote Jackson, "resembled a pig swell more than human...[Serving] no morning or noon day meal."[6]

Perhaps the men of Hooverville really were tainting their provided food with alcohol and other "concoctions" as Donald Francis Roy, a graduate student researching Hooverville, suggested. Nevertheless, had they been served proper, nutritious food, there would have been no necessity for alteration or additions.[7] The Seattle Times revealed in multiple articles the destitution of the Hooverites' food supply and their methods of foraging. Most notably, an article from 1934 relayed the bizarre and comical story of a doughnut shipment truck which had been stolen and later recovered near Hooverville with the steady "munch munch" of homeless men gorging on the pastries.[8]

Yet the eating and drinking accounts from Hooverville were not always as laughable in the eyes of the public and the poor men as this episode, especially when they concerned alcohol consumption and alcoholism. Jesse Jackson, in his memoirs, admitted to the public that "The boys drink a little more than they ought to down here."[9] Sounding both apologetic and lighthearted, this remark was a response to the constant reproach of drinking by post-Prohibition Seattleites. Although Prohibition had been halted by the ratification of the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933, the stigma attached to black-market alcohol production remained intact and painted home-made alcohol producers as criminals. For instance, in the summer of 1937, 447 quarts of beer and forty gallons of mash-a stage in alcohol fermentation-were seized from the shack of a Hooverville "Negro," while two others were arrested in what the paper called "one of the largest raids since the days of prohibition."[10] Earlier in that same year, a shack was discovered to have sold, on average, 60 gallons of alcohol to Hooverville residents per day, and reported the confiscation of 500 quarts of beer, vats of mash, and 2,000 empty bottles from Hooverville.[11]

This last illegal brewery was found in the middle of Hooverville inside one of the largest shacks, having been constructed by joining two shacks together.[12] Symbolically, as well as economically and physically, the illegal brewing industry and the alcohol it produced were a center of life and community in the shantytown. Graduate student Donald Francis Roy observed the impact alcohol had on Hooverville's existence, noting that "A home worth at least $12.00 at the current adjustment of supply and demand sold for $4.00 because its owner was on a "drunk" and needed funds immediately to carry on festivities."[13]

Seattle's Hooverville in 1937, at the foot of S. Atlantic St. near the Skinner and Eddy shipyards, just south of downtown. Click the image to view photo galleries of Hoovervilles in the Northwest. (Courtesy of University of Washington Library, Special Collections).

Roy's statement perpetuated the image of the drunken Hobo, a worthless being. For the outside world, a generalized depiction like this proved that the men of Hooverville were unable to adapt to the capitalist system and that their value of alcohol and "festivities" were greater than that of their own economic stability. Furthermore, the impairing effects of alcohol then were used as a mechanism against the homeless men's upward mobility and a legitimate rationale to keep them bound in poverty. Yet this overlooks the community that Hooverville residents had built and the "festivities" that they were able to create.

Hooverville residents were condemned for much more than pure alcoholism; their politics were also suspect. On the 13th of December, in 1935, nine people were arrested for investigation on the grounds that they had participated in an organized communist meeting in a Hooverville shack. The police reported seizing "red" literature and records from this group of immigrant men.[14] The raid showcased the xenophobic uneasiness of the public and of the police force toward this multiethnic group of the homeless men, and three of the nine were sent to the United States Bureau of Immigration to have their citizenship investigated. Communism and Marxism were seen as foreign ideologies by public officials and antithetical to American capitalism and liberal democracy. Therefore, it seemed apparent to the public that a shacktown in which only 11% of its residents had made it past 8th grade and only 29% of its white residents were American-born, would find Communist ideology appealing.[15] The threat of Communism was a potent presence in the political discourse of this period; to have it linked to Hooverville only worsened mainstream public perception of Hooverville and served to distance the shacktown from American society in the public imagination.

Lastly, the most significant issue creating uneasiness towards Hooverville was violence and crime. Violence and death were everywhere in the newspapers during the Depression, yet the villains-and also the victims-of the majority of these stories were the homeless, and Hooverville was their hub. Of the numerous cases, nearly all made brief reference to race or nationality, an easy way of distracting the reader from the real issues of social breakdown or individual desperation. The newspaper articles worked from the preconception that ethnicity, not hardship or desperation, caused the brutality and criminal prowess of the shantyown men. For example: in July of 1933 a Finnish Man, Victor Salo, barbarically attacked another man with an axe in Hooverville, nearly killing him.[16] Scandinavians, making up over two-thirds of the foreign-born white population of Hooverville at a given time, even had relatively prosperous neighborhoods throughout Seattle and could fill cinemas for Swedish productions.[17] This Scandinavian attacker did not receive the sensationalized demonization that other racialized groups of homeless men did.

A "huge Negro with a gold tooth" stabbed two other black men on June 24th, 1934 at the climax of a "house" party.[18] The author, while being hesitant on calling the shacks "houses," shamelessly gave a monstrous depiction of the black attacker and of " King George's Palace"-the home of the victim whom the author mocked through a liberal usage of italicization and apostrophes. These exaggerated, almost barbaric descriptions were central to the sensational journalism style that helped to widen the gap between white civilization and the rowdy blacks, who represented only a sliver of the Hooverville community at 29 out of a total 700 men in the spring of 1934.[19] Still, their exploits were heralded throughout the Seattle Times ' coverage of Hooverville, with their race used to demonstrate their distance from white society and explain their propensity for a barbaric, homeless existence.

Although the black homeless community often found themselves in the headlines, the Russians were yet another ethnic group that was focused upon in articles, and were perhaps the scariest:[20]"A third strange story of the slaying of Otto Johanson, 46 year old Norwegian Fisherman, in his Duwamish River tide flat shack, was told...as the state laid it's groundwork of its first-degree murder case against Ms. Mary Kelly, Russian-born veteran of the Woman's Battalion of Death."
The Post Office sign for Seattle's Hooverville, just one of the self-governing institutions organized by Hooverville residents in an attempt to strucutre their community and incorporate it into Seattle's civic body. Most of the mail sent to Hooverville was from family members trying to locate disappeared loved one. (Courtesy of the Museum of History and Industry)

This piece, one of the many reported on this highly publicized trial, was effective in its harsh portrayal of Mary Yermarvi (her birth name), a "crazy drunk woman" who bludgeoned and slit the throat of her lover.[21] Her status as "Captain of a Death Battalion," her ugly appearance, and her drunken slaughtering of another homeless immigrant was enough to terrify anyone. She was the ideal poster-figure for the newspapers' campaign against the unwholesome shantytown: she was violent to the point of murderous, she was an alcoholic, she had serious and undisputed ties to the Bolshevik Battalion of Death and, most importantly, she was a shanty-dweller. To the readers, "Russian" Mary embodied the vile, foreign stain of Hooverville, and brought the fears of foreign radicalism, violent barbarity, and unwholesome sexuality together.

Interestingly, Mary did not, and could not live in Hooverville under the laws of the city. In fact, women were scarce in Hooverville, making up only 1% of the near 700-person population recorded by Roy in the spring of 1934.[22] The women who did frequent the shanty were, according to Jackson, "in most cases a bad sort"-prostitutes and "battleaxes."[23] Only the most down-and-out of women were attracted to this bachelor vacuum, where both loneliness and alcohol consumption promised them a small wage or at least a bout of drunkenness. Roy recounted the looseness of these women, as told by a local Hooverite: "All you need to do is wave a bottle around and they'll come on the run."[24] For those Seattleites witnessing this debauchery take place, it would appear that sexual and moral depravity was a symptom of living in shacks and that any women caught there was immoral by default. Contrarily, what brought these women to the shack towns was the opportunity to make money in a community that lacked family institutions and an anti-prostitution morality, not some underlying desire for depravity.

Hooverville as Caricature

While belittling newspaper articles and stories of violence and crime in Hooverville were streaming through the minds of Seattle homeowners and "respectable" citizens, another form of media was fueling the "shantytown" discourse. This form, which had been effective in reinforcing stereotypes and prejudices for hundreds of years, was arts and entertainment. The four examples below, all taken from the Seattle Times in 1933 and 1936, display a certain romantic illustration of the shantytown which helped further the distance between the public and the Hooverites and effectively simplified the homeless "stiff" as a caricature, not a human being struggling to live in a complex and changeable environment.

Artistic production was instrumental in spreading the myths of the shantytown during the Depression. In early July of 1933, a young man and recent graduate of the University of Washington by the name of Kenneth Anderson returned home from his vagabonding artistic travels of Europe as a hometown hero. Upon arriving in Seattle, he began sketching crude images of Hooverville from within the community and was boldly compared to Leonardo da Vinci in a Seattle Times article:

"Leonard da Vinci used to slip down the Apache dens to study the faces of those smeared with crime...So it's [sic] meet young Kenneth Anderson Seattle's own prototype of Leonardo da Vinci...He doesn't sit at home in his cozy studio imagining what Seattle's shanty town looks like and then paint it from his imagination. No, indeed; Mr. Anderson goes right down to Shanty Town, sits on an old dried goods box and sketches life as life in the shanties even unto the patched underwear on the clothes line." [25]

Kenneth Anderson had sketched his way through Europe in the months prior, after having been robbed in Spain and becoming nearly as poor as the men he would soon draw. Yet Anderson had all the attributes of a respectable man: he graduated with a degree in architecture, wore his hair and clothing prim and neat, and was an enthusiast of the arts. Anderson's respectability rendered his artistic undertaking as a worthwhile pursuit, a sort of artistic documentary much like the Apache studies of the esteemed da Vinci.[26] Anderson here, as well as Roy, whose anthropology writings demeaned his neighbors as uncouth and "sex-hungry" sodomists, personified the condescension felt toward the homeless by scholars, and demonstrated the romanticized exoticness of the shanty.[27] "Life as life" here can be understood, in reality, as life amongst the outcasts-the different. The strange, depraved, exoticness of shantytown life became a proper subject for anthropological study and artistic representation.

Later in that same year, in December, the John Marshall School P.T.A. performed " A Shanty Town Carnival" on stage in order to raise money for the welfare of the school district. Starring such roles as "King of the Hobos," "Wandering Willie," and "The Tramp," the play was expected to be a comedic romp which mocked the shack communities to the south.[28] The headline of the newspaper, under which was a photo of a grimy-looking woman leaning over a washbasin, was " Shure, an' it's to be a foine play".[29] This usage of a colloquialism was emphasized shantydwellers' cultural difference from Englishspeakers.

Hooverville was not always portrayed in the arts as a depraved or exoticized locale. Just as often, Hoovervilles and shantytown residents were rendered as simple-minded and humorous characters, or used as setting for universal narratives about social inequality and human struggle. Yet these representations, while not demonizing residents, pictured them as flat caricatures or blank templates, denying the diversity of homeless men's experiences and the social complexities of Hooverville life and Depression-era poverty.

A 1934 map of Hooverville's shanties created by University of Washington graduate student Donald Roy, who used the shantytown as a subject of study for his dissertation. Though Roy was sympathetic to Hooverville's plight, his study also helped solidify perceptions of Hooverville residents as sometimes violent and depraved. Click the image to read excerpts from Roy's study.

" Söderkåker," or 'Shanty Town' in Swedish, was a film starring "The favorite team of Swedish motion picture comedy stars," Edward Person and Gideon Wahlberg.[30] The film played twice nightly and examined the limits of social barriers, following the story of an impoverished shanty dweller attempting to marry a wealthy merchant's daughter.[31] Despite the marketing of the film toward Swedes, what was even more extraordinary was the description of the film, which demonstrates the day-to-day imagery used to evoke a shanty-dweller in the public mind: "In this thoroughly entertaining film, a delightful blend of gay, light-footed comedy and convincing drama, appears again the rotund, witted carpenter, a henpecked fellow, who nevertheless manages to rise above his adversities and enjoy moments of unalloyed happiness."[32]

While this differed from a depraved and exotic portrayal of shantytown dwellers, the film's description relied on a caricature of homeless people as simple-minded and humorous. The triumph of the main character here can be seen as a mechanism to separate the main character from the rest of his faceless, poor neighbors, who will never manage to rise above their vast adversities. Motion pictures like this would address small, scattered communities of Scandinavians in parts of America, while the big screens in downtowns all across the nation were showing very similar films in English.

A movie based on the growing shanties of New York City, " Man's Castle" was an international hit, frequenting the entertainment pages of the Seattle Times in May of 1938.[33] Starring Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young, this film portrayed love amidst the poverty and crime of shack towns and was an iconic film of the Depression era. The film used celebrity actors to play sympathetic roles, while the film itself relied on universal themes of inequality, poverty, and human resilience. One modern review of movie claimed it to have "an almost fairy-tale aura around elements of poverty, crime, and horrendous social inequity."[34] The fairy-tale told here is one which provokes a sense of wonder while simultaneously signifying the unrealistic nature of the story - once again distancing and romanticizing the shanty town and allowing the Seattle audience to replicate these feelings towards Hooverville. This, when coupled with the criminalized imagery of the newspapers, wholly estranged the local Hooverites.

The entertainment industry in Seattle sought to define the differences between regular people and homeless people of the shanties. Their success hid much of the initiative and progress of the Hooverites to overcome their poverty and re-instate themselves as members of society. Recognition of Hooverites' accomplishments was drowned out by the constant bombardment of the newspapers, the theatres, and the cinemas.

The Triumphs of Hooverville

Despite the alienating discourse newspapers and films relied on in their descriptions of Hooverville, positive institutions did find roots amidst the shacks. An intricate political body and the promise of higher education for the residents were a reality of shantytown life never seen in Seattle's mainstream news, theatres, or cinemas.

Seattle Hooverville resident Edwin Hall, repairing the roof of his shack with tarpaper, 1939. Though Hooverville residents were both migratory and poor, they organized a "city council" to oversee the shantytown as men followed work and moved in and out of the dwellings. Click the image to explore a photo gallery of Northwest Hoovervilles. (Photo courtesy Museum of History and Industry)

For Hooverville to have become a unified neighborhood with a centralized administration would have been a near impossible feat, not because of the intellect or capabilities of the men living there, but because of the purpose and the make-up of the community. It was in constant flux. A newspaper article stated in 1938 that "W.P.A. researchers found that the turnover of residents in the section is so great that few, if any date back to the former President Hoover's administration."[35]

Hooverville was primarily a place for displaced workers to sleep and stay in the wintertime, when jobs were scarce and warmth scarcer, and men constantly cycled in and out of the community.[36] The men who resided in Hooverville seasonally were often subject to the discrimination and segregation of the times. Roy wrote: "It is not a discreet community at all, but an integral part of a highly differentiated urban design. Within a city, and of the city, it functions as a segregated residential area of distinct physical structure, population composition, and social behavior." [37]

Because of this fluctuation in population combined with the segregating factors of the heterogeneous community, discussing and criticizing Hooverville as one united entity is problematic. Furthermore, because of the instability and transient function of Hooverville, the mere fact that its members were able to create social and political institutions that could function with a constant population cycle was a profound achievement.

The first of these institutions was a town government. Although in no way as proficient as the municipal government in the commercial district to its north, Hooverville had both a "mayor," a postmaster, and later its own city council.[38] The first mayor, Jesse Jackson, began as a "contact man" for the city government and, because of the staggering amount of problems he had to deal with under this title, eventually became known as the "mayor."[39]His memoirs, The Story of Hooverville, portrayed a very diverse and self-sustaining community struggling triumphantly against the circumstances of their poverty. Of course, being the "Honorable Mayor of Hooverville" as many addressed him, writing a positive, progressive history of the community was necessary for its preservation, and Jackson's memoirs express the goals of administration as well as a somewhat biased portrayal of the town's beautiful functioning. However, Jackson's memoirs are no more biased than the newspaper articles, films, or scholarly records of Hooverville, and perhaps portray the town in such a positive light in order to counteract the negative image of Hooverville that had been constructed in the public imagination.

While he was not elected by any official system, the ushering in of a Hooverville town council was a step that symbolized the consolidation of the Hooverites in order to challenge the many prejudices held against them. This advancement in democracy was made on October 23, 1938, three years before Hooverville was to be torn down. Five members were elected by shantytown residents to hold weekly meetings concerning the issues and development of the shanty. Their first call to action was a mere week after the election, when they arrested a bothersome resident on a complaint of insanity.[40] By doing this, the council, as representatives of the whole shanty, attempted to public image of Hooverville in 1938 by showing the public that Hooverville had, in fact, succeeded in nominating a respectable governing body that would patrol the streets.

The president of this new council, a sixty-two year old homeless man named George Parish, appeared in a debate over the Beacon Hill shack town, which was being attacked by the women of the South District Clubs Inc. and the Beacon Hill Community Club on November 22, 1938.[41] Parish's words were marked with sincerity and pleading, but also with an honest appraisal of Hooverville's circumstances:

"I live in a shack. I try to keep my shack as clean as possible. I don't love living in a place like that. But what can I do when I can't get any other place? They tell me I am too old when I ask for work. I don't want to put a pack on my back and hit the highway. I don't want to live in a boxcar. I'd leave my shack if I could get another place." [42]

Hooverville residents also sought protest through official city channels. Twenty-five Hooverites signed an appeal letter for the Seattle City Council, stating grievances of age discrimination, housing shortages, and general unfairness held toward the men of Hooverville.[43] One week later and encouraged by Parish, an army of 300 Hooverites spoke at a City Council meeting in stark opposition to the Beacon Hill removal proposition, alongside Seattle residents who approved of the shacktown.[44] Greeting the public face-to-face in an open debate, the members of Hooverville proved that they did indeed care for the governance and the appropriate recognition of their neighborhood. Yet even the mass demonstrations of the men could not wholly counteract their glaringly negative image nor secure them rights to their shacks, which were to be torn down three years later on the eve of American involvement in WWII. Still, the protest shows that Hooverites were capable and savvy players in local politics and did possess a caring, loyal government that sought redress and recognition from the broader Seattle community.

What Hooverites severely lacked was education. According to Roy's collected census of 1934, only eleven percent of the men of Hooverville had reached high school, a number that was reconfirmed later that summer in an article which also mentioned eighty-three college graduates, something that Roy's census lacked.[45] Understandably, this was a rallying point for the opponents of the Hooverville, who viewed education as fundamental to modern, civilized, white American society. The article, however, was focused upon a very unusual development in the history of shacktowns everywhere: A proposed Hooverville College in Seattle. In the summer of 1934 this proposed college had found 2,000 men willing to participate in courses on "Social science, social psychology, government, legislation labor movements, economics and economic history, community history, current industrial problems, international affairs, history, and English."[46]

The focus of the college was to provide education and to negate the harmful image of Hooverville and the homeless population in general as uneducated that had become commonplace in journalism and entertainment. The aforementioned courses were designed to fit with the new social concerns of the Great Depression, giving the homeless men insight into the newfound labor movements, immigration policies, and economic woes of the 1930s. The founding members of the school had planned courses, found teachers, and had even won federal grants for the completion of the college, which was to be located adjacent to the grounds of Hooverville. Unexplainably, the plans for the college abruptly fell through with little media mention. One explanation of the failure of the College of Hooverville could have been the fatal automobile accident, which took the life of its vice president, John J. Feroe, in August of that summer.[47]

Hooverville itself met a much more publicized fall from grace seven years later. In 1941 "the Tarpaper Carthage was put to the torch by an overalled conqueror on a Caterpillar tractor."[48] This final image of Hooverville burning was the last of the romantic portrayals contemporary of the homeless community, with Hooverville depicted as Carthage, the great Phoenician enemy of the Romans, and as a past relic of the Great Depression. A Negro man stood playing a Nickelodeon to an empty shanty town while the men of Hooverville, well adapted to the fluctuations of their homes and of the economy around them, had left to chase the blossoming job market. Hooverville was needed no longer, and its destruction was used to symbolize the end of the Great Depression and new wartime economic growth.

In conclusion, it can be said that the Hooverites of Seattle were a highly discriminated and misunderstood minority in the Depression years. The journalists, with their moneymaking tactic of sensationalism, provided the public with a grim image of their shacktown neighbors, affiliating them with dirtiness, foreignness, sexual depravity, and crime. Meanwhile, the American entertainment industry and scholarly and artistic representations distanced the men of the shacks through romanticized, exoticized caricature. In the end, the discourse created by these two institutions showcased Hooverville's alienation from the rest of Seattle, despite its own advancements in politics, community identity, and education.

Copyright (c) 2010, Joey Smith
HSTAA 105 Winter 2010

[1] Jesse Jackson, Story of Hooverville, pg 2. As taken from a term paper prepared for the course in Human Ecology (Sociology 55...155) by Anette de Vol Trumbull under the direction of Calvin F. Schmid, University...Washington, 1938. A document similar to the following was prepared by Mr. Jackson for...Seattle Public Library.
[2] Donald Francis Roy, Hooverville: A Study of a Community of Homeless Men in Seattle (Unpublished Master's Thesis, University of Washington, 1935) pg. 34.
[3] Frank M. Carroll to City Council, May 23, 1935. CF 147091. Comptroller Files, 1802-01, Seattle Municipal Archives.
[4] "Council Hears Both Sides of Shack Disputes" Seattle Times, 22 November 1938, pg. 2. It should be noted that no article appearing in the Seattle Times during the Depression listed an author.
[5] Seattle Times, 22 November 1938.
[6] Jesse Jackson, pg. 1.
[7] Donald Francis Roy, pg. 35.
[8]"Doughnut Truck Dissapears: Shacktown Dwellers Feast," Seattle Times, 17 February 1934, pg 12.
[9] Jesse Jackson, pg. 7.
[10] "Beer Seized in Hooverville Raid," Seattle Times, 12 August 1937, pg 23.
[11] "Brewery Found in Shacktown," Seattle Times, 4 April 1937, pg. 1.
[12] Seattle Times, 4 April 1937.
[13] Donald Francis Roy, pg. 28.
[14] "Officers Seize Red Literature," Seattle Times, 14 December 1935, pg. 2.
[15] Donald Francis Roy, pg. 43. It should be noted that these statistics were gathered in the spring of 1934 and that the population fluctuated so drastically from season-to-season that the numbers may have been different 1½ years later.
[16] "Suspect and Victim in Axe Case Jailed," Seattle Times, 27 July 1933, pg. 10.
[17] Donald Francis Roy, pg. 44.
[18] "Pair Stabbed at "Houseparty" in Shacktown," Seattle Times, 22 June 1934, pg. 3.
[19] Donald Francis Roy, pg. 46.
[20] "Three Stories Told in Murder Trial," Seattle Times, 26 February 1935, pg 2.
[21] Seattle Times, 1935, 26 Feb. 1935.
[22] Donald Francis Roy, pg. 39.
[23] Jesse Jackson, pg. 6.
[24] Donald Francis Roy, Pg. 87.
[25] "Kenneth Anderson Paints his Subjects from Real Scenes," Seattle Times, 2 July 1933, pg. 12.
[26] Seattle Times, 2 July 1933.
[27] Donald Francis Roy, pg.11.
[28] "Shanty Town Will Entertain School Patrons," Seattle Times, 3 December 1933, pg. 16.
[29] Seattle Times, 3 December 1933.
[30] "Swedish Film Coming Soon to the Roxy," Seattle Times, 30 December 1936, pg 13.
[31] Hal Erickson, "Soderkaker," All Movies, retrieved February 27th 2010, http://www.allmovie.com/work/soderkakar-235750.
[32] Seattle Times, 30 December 1936.
[33] "Man's Castle New Offering at the Roxy," Seattle Times, 5 Decmber 1933, pg 16.
[34] Daryl Chin, "One of the Essential Depression Dramas," the Internet Movie Database, retrieved February 9th 2010, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024302/.
[35] "Man's Castle Opens Today at the Liberty," Seattle Times, 20 May 1938, pg. 12.
[36] Jesse Jackson, pg 3.
[37] Donald Francis Roy, pg. 20.
[38] "Hooverville Council Cites Noisy Dweller," Seattle Times, 29 October 1928, pg. 2.
[39] Jesse Jackson, pg. 5.
[40] Seattle Times, 29 October 1938,
[41] Seattle Times, 22 November 1938.
[42] Seattle Times, 22 November 1938.
[43] Vance M. Ardeune to City Council, October 10, 1938. CF 160628. Comptroller Files,
1802-01, Seattle Municipal Archives.
[44] "Boos Punctuate Shack Hearing," Seattle Times, 29 November 1938.
[45] Donald Francis Roy, pg 59. And "Hooverville College Head Fears Political Control," Seattle Times, 15 July 1934. Pg. 30.
[46] Seattle Times, 15 July 1934. Pg. 30.
[47] Seattle Times, 17 August 1934.
[48] "Ragtime Requiem Rings Out as Tractors Level Shacks," Seattle Times, 10 April 1941, pg 8.

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Seattle's Hooverville, as pictured here by watercolor artist Ronald Ginther, was one of the largest in the nation, and was subject to caricaturization, demonization, and misunderstanding by the media and arts. Popular portrayals of Hooverville as exotic, violent, or depraved obscured the self-organization and successes of Hooverville residents in structuring their community.

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As the Depression worsened and millions of urban and rural families lost their jobs and depleted their savings, they also lost their homes. Desperate for shelter, homeless citizens built shanty towns in and around cities across the nation. These camps came to be called Hoovervilles, after the president.

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The Great Depression Sets In

The Great Depression was the most severe and enduring economic collapse of the 20th century, and included abrupt declines in the supply and demand of goods and services along with a meteoric rise in unemployment. 1933 is generally regarded as the worst year of the Depression: One-quarter of America's workers-more than 15 million people-were out of work.

Did you know? As America's housing and economic crisis worsened through 2009, homelessness was on the rise. Encampments and shantytowns often referred to as tent cities-with similarities to Hoovervilles-began appearing in parts of California, Arizona, Tennessee, Florida, Washington and other states.

Multiple factors led to the Great Depression, including the U.S. stock market crash in October 1929 and the widespread failure of the American banking system, both of which helped destroy confidence in the nation's economy.

Additionally, although the 1920s, also known as the Roaring Twenties, had been a decade of prosperity, income levels varied widely and numerous Americans lived beyond their means. Credit was extended to many so that they could enjoy the new inventions of the day, such as washing machines, refrigerators and automobiles.

As the optimism of the 1920s gave way to fear and desperation, Americans looked to the federal government for relief. However, the country's 31st president, Republican Herbert Hoover, who took office in March 1929, believed that self-reliance and self-help, not government intervention, were the best means to meet citizens' needs.

In his estimation, prosperity would return if people would simply help one another. And although private philanthropy increased during the early 1930s, the amounts given were not enough to make a significant impact. Many Americans in need believed the resolution to their problems lay in government assistance, but Hoover resisted such a response throughout his presidency.

Hoovervilles Appear Nationwide

As the Depression worsened and millions of families lost their jobs and depleted their savings, they also lost their homes. Desperate for shelter, homeless citizens built shantytowns in and around cities across the nation. These camps came to be called Hoovervilles, after the president. Democratic National Committee publicity director and longtime newspaper reporter Charles Michelson is credited with coining the term, which first appeared in print in 1930.

Hooverville shanties were constructed of cardboard, tar paper, glass, lumber, tin and whatever other materials people could salvage. Unemployed masons used cast-off stone and bricks and in some cases built structures that stood 20 feet high.

Most shanties, however, were distinctly less ambitious: Cardboard-box homes did not last long, and most dwellings were in a constant state of being rebuilt. Some homes were not buildings at all, but deep holes dug in the ground with makeshift roofs laid over them to keep out inclement weather. Some of the homeless found shelter inside empty conduits and water mains.

Life in a Hooverville

No two Hoovervilles were quite alike, and the camps varied in population and size. Some were as small as a few hundred people while others, in bigger metropolitan areas such as Washington, D.C. and New York City, boasted thousands of inhabitants. St. Louis, Missouri, and Seattle, Washington, were home to two of the country's largest and longest-standing Hoovervilles.

Whenever possible, Hoovervilles were built near rivers for the convenience of a water source. For example, in New York City, encampments sprang up along the Hudson and East rivers. Some Hoovervilles were dotted with vegetable gardens, and some individual shacks contained furniture a family had managed to carry away upon eviction from their former home.

However, Hoovervilles were typically grim and unsanitary. They posed health risks to their inhabitants as well as to those living nearby, but there was little that local governments or health agencies could do. Hooverville residents had nowhere else to go, and public sympathy, for the most part, was with them.

Even when Hoovervilles were raided by order of parks departments or other authorities, the men who carried out the raids often expressed regret and guilt for their actions. More often than not, Hoovervilles were tolerated.

Most Hoovervilles operated in an informal, unorganized way, but the bigger ones would sometimes put forward spokespersons to serve as a liaison between the camp and the larger community. St. Louis' Hooverville, built in 1930, had its own unofficial mayor, churches and social institutions. This Hooverville thrived because it was funded by private donations. It maintained itself as a free-standing community until 1936, when it was razed.

Although a common factor among Hooverville residents was unemployment, inhabitants took any work that became available, often laboring at such backbreaking, sporadic jobs as fruit picking or packing. Writer John Steinbeck featured a family who lived in a California Hooverville and sought farm work in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel " The Grapes of Wrath," published in 1939.

Hoover Mocked

In addition to the term "Hooverville," President Hoover's name was used derisively in other ways during the Great Depression. For example, newspapers used to shield the homeless from the cold were called "Hoover blankets," while empty pants pockets pulled inside out-demonstrating no coins in one's pockets-were "Hoover flags."

When soles wore out of shoes, the cardboard used to replace them was dubbed "Hoover leather," and cars pulled by horses because gas was an unaffordable luxury were called "Hoover wagons."

Bonus Army

Tensions between destitute citizens and the Hoover administration climaxed in the spring of 1932 when thousands of World War I veterans and their families and friends set up a Hooverville on the banks of the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C.

In June, many of the so-called Bonus Army marched to the Capitol to request early payment of the government bonuses they had been promised for their military service-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.S. Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur to evict the Bonus Army.

MacArthur's troops set fire to the Hooverville and drove the group from the city with bayonets and tear gas. Hoover later claimed that MacArthur had used excessive force, but his words meant little to most of those affected.

Hoover Out, Roosevelt In

Hoover also received criticism for signing, in June 1930, the controversial Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which imposed a high tariff on foreign goods in an effort to prevent them from competing with U.S.-made products on the domestic market. However, some countries retaliated by raising their tariffs, and international trade was hampered. Between 1929 and 1932, the value of world trade declined by more than half.

By 1932, Hoover was so unpopular that he had no realistic hope of being re-elected, and Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York won that year's presidential election in November by a landslide.

Roosevelt's recovery program, known as the New Deal, eventually reduced unemployment, regulated banking and helped turn the ailing economy around with public works projects and other economic programs. By the early 1940s, with the economy rebounding during World War II, many Hoovervilles had fewer residents and most were torn down.

Sources

Hoovervilles and Homelessness. University of Washington: The Great Depression in Washington State.
Hoovervilles in Seattle. City of Seattle.
Americans React to the Great Depression. Library of Congress.

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Hoovervilles: Definition & Great Depression - HISTORY

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Hoovervilles, named after unpopular President Herbert Hoover, were encampments of crude dwellings for poor and homeless people during the Great Depression.

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This is a photo of a Hooverville in Seattle. We can see the poverty and the lack of access to basic resources that people had. The houses are little more than wooden shacks

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This cartoon shows how the people most affected were ignored by the president and the country. They were left for dead as the rest of the county forgot them and worked to help industries recover before they helped the poor

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This image shows parts of the fallout from the great depression including Hoovervilles. It allows us to see the devastation on a greater level

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The poem speaks about the hardships these people faced and how they often had to lose many things that were commonplace before the crash. Sme had to leave their families to find work and we feel the pain they felt in this poem

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Change. Poem by Justin Presson. Change: Home is this gutter Out of the windy cold Hidden under rags An afghan of trials and tribulations And memories

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This painting shows how the lower class was ignored even though they were the ones struggling the most. We see them huddled beneath a highway with no help coming. This represents the many people overlooked by the government.

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A painting of Hooverville | Painting, Art, Annie

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Mar 20, 2014 - This Pin was discovered by Vera Rukacheva. Discover (and save!) your own Pins on Pinterest

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This short film shows what life was like during the great depression in Hoovervilles. We see huge amounts of poverty and hopelessness