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The Geography of Ruin: Hoovervilles and the Human Cost of Collapse
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
When the 1929 Wall Street crash destroyed livelihoods, a new kind of city appeared across America — built from scrap, named after a president, and impossible to ignore. Episode 7 maps the human geography of the Great Depression at ground level.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before the Depression, homelessness in America was understood as a personal failure. After it, homelessness became a political fact.
To understand Hoovervilles, you have to hold two pictures in mind at once. The first picture is nineteen twenty-nine.
By nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty-one, something new is appearing on the American landscape. In Central Park in New York City, in the mud flats along the Mississippi River in St.
There's something specific about the visibility of Hoovervilles that made them politically powerful in a way that unemployment statistics couldn't quite achieve on their own. Numbers abstract suffering.
Franklin Roosevelt wins the nineteen thirty-two election by a landslide. Hoover carries only six states.
Here's a number that tells the story more starkly than most. The stock market does not recover to its nineteen twenty-nine peak until nineteen fifty-four.
The Depression's reforms held for decades. Glass-Steagall kept commercial and investment banking separate.
The Hoovervilles are gone. The physical settlements were cleared over time, some during the Depression itself, as circumstances changed and residents moved on or were relocated.
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