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 President
Herbert Hoover along with most American leaders, assumed that the depression would be of
short duration. Hoover refused to do anything until unemployment rates were inordinately
high. By the early 1930s the nation was in very serious straits.
Unemployment in some cities was over 40 percent
and bankruptcy was a common occurrence. Thousands of unemployed males, called hobos or simply
"Bo's", roamed the country in a fruitless search for work. Farmers from all over
the heartland were losing their land. Farm prices were so low that farmers were selling
their produce for less than it cost them to transport the goods to market.
Meanwhile, New York's Governor Franklin D.
Roosevelt (FDR) was not afraid to act. FDR had a number of very gifted social workers on
his staff, largely refugees from the settlement movement. Some, such as Frances Perkins
,his state secretary of labor, he had inherited from previous governor Al Smith. Others,
such as Harry Hopkins, he had recruited from private charities. Governor Roosevelt, with
the help and encouragement of his social workers, crafted both unemployment and public
works programs that were quickly imitated in other states. |
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he seeds of the depression were sown in World War I. Following the war, artificially high prices for farm products encouraged many farmers to expand. When Western Europe recovered from the war in the mid-twenties, farm prices plummeted. Many farmers plunged into debt.
