The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America (3 page)

Even Will Rogers’s witticisms could not compete with some news stories. Toward the end of 1931 the journalist Edward Angly compiled a short book of roseate predictions by Republican officials and business leaders, interlarded with statistics of plunging markets and closing factories. It bore the mocking title
Oh Yeah?
and included the following entry attributed to Simeon D. Fess, chairman of the Republican National Committee:

Persons high in Republican circles are beginning to believe that there is some concerted effort on foot to utilize the stock market as a method of discrediting the administration. Every time an Administration official gives out an optimistic statement about business conditions, the market immediately drops.
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In response, Hoover redoubled his cheerleading efforts. In March 1931 he appointed a new press secretary, Theodore Joslin, who tried to amplify the president’s message. “Ninety per cent of our difficulty in depressions is caused by fear,” Hoover insisted to Joslin. “What I want to do is to mitigate the effect of the recent crash and get back on to the road to recovery as quickly as possible. We must cushion this crash and we must restore confidence. And there should be confidence, for our country is fundamentally sound.”
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For the last three years of his administration, Hoover, Vice President Charles Curtis, and cabinet secretaries maintained their chorus of confidence in the nation’s economic health, even as the economy slumped and shrank. The mainspring of recovery, Hoover insisted, could not be the federal government. As he said in his December 1931 State of the Union Address, it lay with local governments (by now impossibly ill-equipped) and the isolated individual. In a radio speech four months later, New York governor Franklin Roosevelt directly challenged such a view when he called for governmental aid to “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”
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Meanwhile, in private, Hoover protested that he was unfairly blamed for the Depression when, as secretary of commerce and president, he believed he had done more than anyone else to avert the disaster. Profanely excoriating politicians of both parties and leaders of foreign governments, whom he regarded as the real culprits, he demanded, “Is it my fault that cheap politicians [and] selfish men over the whole world have refused to see the folly of their policies until it was too late?”
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No doubt in 1930, perhaps in 1931, possibly even into 1932, Hoover felt he had successfully dealt with far worse crises before in his career, restored hope, mobilized voluntary and governmental efforts, and, indeed, emerged a hero in the process. Yet as the economy’s inexorable plunge continued, the limitations of Hoover’s political vision and faith in voluntarism were severely exposed. By 1932 he grudgingly found himself forced to accede to innovations that he would earlier have regarded as dangerously radical, most notably the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which provided aid to state and local governments and loans to banks, railroads, and other businesses. Although he had never been a strict exponent of laissez-faire capitalism, as he shifted his positions, he accompanied his moves with petulant stubbornness, exaggerating differences rather than aiming for common ground with others.

The deepening crisis starkly exposed the limitations of Hoover’s personality. Born into a dour Quaker household in West Branch, Iowa, he lost his father, a tall, bearded, enterprising blacksmith who had risen to be a farm implements dealer, at the age of six. His mother lived for three more years, but from the time of his father’s death through the rest of his childhood, he was shunted off to a series of uncles and other relatives, spending the last six working for his cold, calculating, and demanding uncle in Oregon. A profound sense of loneliness gripped him, and the chill of it lasted throughout his life.

As a mining engineer, manager, and financier, he quickly became a rich man, but success never thawed the laconic, brusque bearing of Hoover’s youth or truly infused him with optimism. “If you want to get the gloomiest view of any subject on earth, ask Bert about it,” his wife once said.” The famous newspaper editor and Progressive Republican William Allen White described him as “constitutionally gloomy, a congenital pessimist who always saw the doleful side of any situation.” Gutzon Borglum, the creator of Mount Rushmore, quipped, “If you put a rose in Hoover’s hand it would wilt.”
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From the beginning of his presidency, Hoover worked relentlessly, rising early in the morning and continuing to work into the night in bed, often waking up after two hours and working some more, sleeping only five or six hours. As the Depression engulfed him, he quickened his pace and slept as little as three hours a night. Members of his staff marveled at his stamina even as they feared he would collapse under the constant strain. The chief usher of the White House remembered, “He [Hoover] would go about, never speaking to any of the help. Never a good-morning or even a nod of the head. Never a Merry Christmas or a Happy New Year. All days were alike to him. Sunday was no exception, for he worked just as hard on that day if not harder than on any of the others. There was always a frown on his face and a look of worry.”
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In official meetings, said an associate, Hoover had a “persistent habit of not looking at one squarely when in conversation, and of doodling steadily the while. It gave one the impression that he was not much interested in what was being said and did not want anyone to know what he was thinking.” As the economic crisis grew deeper, Hoover’s mood also sank. After one particularly gloomy meeting, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson confided to his diary, “The President was tired and . . . went through all the blackest surmises. . . . It was like sitting in a bath of ink to sit in his room.”
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Hoover’s doughy face was creased with a brow knitted in worry and a frown. He was distrustful and ill at ease with reporters, and the White House press corps fully reciprocated the feeling. As the Depression plunged further, his temper sometimes flared, so that one reporter dubbed him “our most peevish president.” Hoover’s press secretary, Theodore Joslin, wrote in his diary, “There is almost as much love lost between the president and the press as between God Almighty and the devil himself.”
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Hoover disdained what he thought of as political theatrics, saying, “This is not a showman’s job. I will not step out of character.” True to his word, he was obstinately undramatic. In his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination in August 1932, he all but extinguished applause, a British reporter noted, with his personality’s “dispiriting influence . . . , his unprepossessing exterior, his sour, puckered face of a bilious baby, his dreary, nasal monotone reading interminably, and for the most part inaudibly, from a typescript without a single inflection of a voice or gesture to relieve the tedium.”
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On the radio, he was even worse. “In his own mind, he had been elected to look after the nation’s affairs, not to jabber into a microphone.” His delivery made scant concession even to live audiences, and “the millions who listened over the radio were just eavesdroppers.” Once, when asked by a woman if he did not get a thrill delivering an address over the radio, he replied, “The same thrill that I get when I rehearse an address to a door knob.”
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The deepening economic crisis gradually transmogrified Hoover’s reputation from expertise to ineptitude, from competence to incomprehension, from humanitarian savior to heartless bystander. For the rest of his long life Hoover protested that such characterizations were simplistic and unjust, but they stuck indelibly in public memory. His stiff bearing, immobile features, and shy, undemonstrative personality, refreshing in the context of 1920s ballyhoo and bluster, soon appeared to be a sign of cold indifference. A man of strong charitable impulses and personal tenderness, Hoover could not bear to look at the down-and-out people standing in breadlines or selling apples (including an estimated six thousand such vendors in New York City), let alone to greet and comfort them. Even in hindsight, he insistently regarded such desperate figures as emblems of opportunity. “Many persons left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples,” he blandly wrote in his
Memoirs
.
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His appeals for good cheer came to seem feckless, even desperate, coming as they did from a man whose credibility was widely suspect and who was the embodiment of gloom. In February 1931 he told a reporter that “if the newspapers would quit talking about unemployment,” the Depression would speedily lift. His remedy was simple: “What the country needs is a good, big laugh. . . . There seems to be a condition of hysteria. If some one could get off a good joke every ten days, I think our troubles would be over.” He made similar appeals for a “resoundingly good new joke” to others, ranging from the old vaudevillians Joe Weber and Lew Fields to Will Rogers. He variously added that the country needed a “great poem” and a “good song.”
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To the rapidly swelling army of the unemployed, such prescriptions seemed as helpful as tossing a drowning man a whoopee cushion instead of a lifesaver.

For such feeble efforts, his own name became a sarcasm, mocking his 1928 campaign slogan “Vote for Prosperity” and his bromidic statements on the fundamental soundness of the American economy. Shantytowns were called Hoovervilles, freight cars providing shelter Hoover Pullmans, a newspaper warming the homeless a Hoover blanket, an out-turned trouser pocket a Hoover flag.

To many, the man who had brought food to millions of starving people earlier in his career now seemed deaf to the cries of want and misery throughout his own country. “No one is actually starving,” he famously told a reporter in 1931, adding, “The hoboes, for example, are better fed than they have ever been. One hobo in New York got ten meals in one day.” Rebuking such claims, the St. Louis blues musician Charley Jordan sang in his 1931 “Starvation Blues” of how he nearly had a square meal on a recent day—before a garbage worker came and hauled the trash can away.
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Around the country Americans were indeed dying from starvation and malnutrition, and, in contrast to Hoover’s well-fed hobo, people ransacked garbage pails, fought over scraps in dumps, and begged on roads for food. Children frequently went hungry, at times eating only every other day, and they fell victim to deficiency diseases such as rickets and pellagra. In the Appalachian soft coal districts, miners and their families were often reduced to eating “bulldog gravy,” a mixture of flour, water, and lard. In Philadelphia, during eleven days in April 1932, when no relief funds of any kind were available, one study documented how ninety-one families coped:

One woman borrowed fifty cents, bought stale bread at three and one-half cents a loaf, and the family lived on it for eleven days. Another put the last food order into soup stock and vegetables and made a soup. When a member of the family was hungry, he ate as little as he could. Another picked up spoiled vegetables along the docks and except for three foodless days, the family ate them. Another made a stew with her last food order, which she cooked over and over daily to keep it from spoiling. Another family lived on dandelions. Another on potatoes. Another had no food for two and one-half days. And one in ten of the women were pregnant and one in three of the children of nursing age.
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Because of his perceived insularity and aloofness, Hoover was ridiculed and despised as no other president had been since the days of the Civil War. Consumed by his responsibilities, he plunged into his reelection campaign only in October 1932, as he fought to preserve his policies from what he regarded as a woefully unprepared and ill-equipped opponent. Hoover privately thought Roosevelt was disqualified for the presidency on physical grounds alone, and the summer before the election his aides confidently predicted that the country would never elect a cripple. In the campaign, however, it was Roosevelt who seemed strong, vigorous, and magnetically confident, and Hoover who appeared weak, drained, even broken. As early as January 1932, when Hoover had been in office less than three years,
Time
magazine wrote that he had aged twenty: “His hair is greyer. His shoulders seem to droop in discouragement. The lines about his eyes have cut in deeper and those about his mouth have hardened.”
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In newsreels and newspaper photographs during the 1932 campaign, Hoover “invariably . . . appeared solemn and sad, an unhappy man, a man without hope. Instead of radiating confidence and good cheer in the presence of the economic crisis, his portraits made one want to sell short, get the money in gold, and bury it.” As the campaign drew to a close, Hoover’s deeply lidded red eyes and ashen expression gave him the appearance of a “walking corpse.”
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By Election Day, the vaunted prosperity of 1929 seemed like another era. Real output had fallen close to 30 percent, and unemployment had reached at least 24 percent, or roughly one in four workers, not counting those working reduced hours. Despite this calamitous situation, Hoover professed hope: “The tide has turned and . . . the gigantic forces of depression are today in retreat.” What the people should fear most, he emphasized, was a Roosevelt administration; in FDR’s proposals for a New Deal he sniffed “the fumes of the witches’ cauldron which boiled in Russia.”
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Some crowds cheered, but many regarded Hoover sullenly or worse. On his final swing west in the closing weeks of the campaign, an angry mob menaced his train in Detroit, one of the cities hardest hit by the Depression, with an unemployment rate approaching 45 percent. Near Beloit, Wisconsin, his train ground to a standstill as a man was found pulling up spikes. At Elko, Nevada, the presidential railroad car was pelted with rotten eggs. Stink bombs greeted his entourage in San Francisco. As he prepared to cast his ballot near his home in Palo Alto, California, a telegram jeered, “Vote for Roosevelt and make it unanimous.”
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