In previous chapters, we read about the nation and federal government's general philosophy that prevented any nationalized efforts to address hunger, poverty, and general human suffering. In our recent readings, we see how the Great Depression along with the environmental impacts of drought and dust storms were creating such dire circumstances that forced leaders to reevaluate these philosophies. How were circumstances creating such dire need? What stuck out to you in these chapters that really underlined how bad things were in the country? 

    Worst Hard Times - chapters 9-10 & A Square Meal - chapters 5-6

      Social Studies/History    Virtual Book Club    Dust Bowl    Great Depression  

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    I'm always baffled by how Hoover has this idea that the government shouldn't be the source of aid for the people; reading Chapter 5 in A Square Meal showed me just the lengths that he would go to ensure that the government didn't provide food aid to the citizens of the United States. Moving off of that tangent into Chapters 5 and 6 of the Worst Hard Times, it intrigued me that a lot of the circumstances that led to what we call the dust bowl were responses to the needs of the farmers needing more money to survive. World War I was really a boon to the farmers in the United States and when that conflict ended their production didn't. With the depreciation of prices farmers had to plant more and more and this led to the soil erosion. I found it funny how the author cites sources that stated that they didn't think that the Great Depression would affect individuals in the midwest and argued that it would be a costal phenomena. With the benefit of hindsight we know that that was not true and we see individuals working for no wages in the hopes that they would get paid in the future (I'm blanking on the name of the teacher right now) but also that individuals who had benefited from the high farm prices during the war and the years after were dragged down into dire straits like many other individuals. People were selling off prized family goods to be able to afford basic necessities and in the midst of all this turmoil the land itself began to turn against them. 

    I also found Hoover's response (or should I say lack of a response) baffling as well. He put on airs that everything was going well and refused to look at the actual human suffering by hiding behind "data". 

    The government’s push to but settlers into America’s grasslands started the problems in this region.the cowboys that had already learned the lessons of the area knew not to break up the grassy land but their warnings fell on deaf ears.  The new comers were excited with their first crops in this new area but their hopes were dashed when the market fell.  Their reaction was to break up even more grass land and plant more wheat.  As a person who grew up in the family business of buying and selling grain and then married into a farming family I know how much modern farmers depend on the knowledge government sponsored research provide.  Reading these books has shined a light on just how much these people were in the dark about best practices.  Not only did breaking up even more grassland cause more dust it also lead to more insects and more rabbits for example.  The woes only grew no matter how hard they worked.

    add to this the lack of compassion the people in power had for the common man.  They believed helping would only lead to a lazy work force.  Even when the these leaders agreed to help their help was not enough to feed starving men, women, and children.  These men went from working to starving basically overnight.  Many had left the farm to find work and a better life in the city.  This turned out to not be the case.  

    One of the things that struck me was the changes in meal preparation that resulted in theses hard times.  Sliced bread and casseroles as two examples. I had never even thought about that before reading A Square Meal.  Also the information about nutrition that I have grown up with was not known by these people.  They had no knowledge of vitamins and calories for example.  That lack of knowledge made these times even harder. 

    I had never thought about the history of casseroles until I read A Square Meal so I found it very intriguing! I wonder what they would think about some of the ...interesting... casserole recipes that get shared today.

    Prior to reading A Square Meal, I knew Hoover coordinated food relief in Belgium during WWI and that he espoused a philosophy of "rugged individualism" during the Depression. However, reading A Square Meal made reconciling these two facts even more difficult to understand- Hoover was so frustrating! Ziegelman and Coe explain that "the sight of human suffering had always rattled" Hoover during WWI, yet he also "steered clear of the breadlines" during the American Depression (148). The extra maddening part was that Hoover kept seeking out bad data to back up his volunteerism philosophy, such as the Surgeon General assuring him that Americans were the healthiest they had ever been in 1931 (149). Meanwhile, nearly 100 people were diagnosed with starvation in New York City (151), which really underscored the severity of the situation for me. To think that Hoover had actual experience coordinating relief efforts for civilians in Europe during WWI, then completely overlooked a strikingly similar need in his own country, was incredibly frustrating. I definitely felt that Hoover's response- and the general government philosophy that negatively judged social services and aid- was a large factoring in magnifying the suffering of everyday Americans. It made me wonder how/why the government viewed aid during war differently than aid during economic crisis. 

    On the subject of Hoover, Eagan gives even less reason to have hope in Hoover at the beginning of chapter 9. I also knew that Hoover was wealthy, but his statement that "if a man has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, he is not worth much" was the nail in the coffin for my impression of Hoover as president.

    (Sidenote: in a previous MTSU TPS book club, we read How to Hide an Empire, and I was really impressed with Hoover as an engineer. Immerwahr explained Hoover's quest to standardize materials like screw threads, which I found so interesting and cool and clearly had such a positive impact on industry and technology! Learning this painted Hoover in a new, positive light for me... until now. For better or worse, Eagan and Ziegelman & Coe have brought me back to being a massive Hoover critic! At least in terms of his presidency!)

    Hoover is a very frustrating historical figure! Like you mentioned at points prior to his presidency, he did some truly amazing and beneficial things that had long-lasting positive impacts. Then he becomes president and just makes a whole series of bad decisions. I wonder how much of those bad decisions were driven by being in the bubble that is the White House and surrounding himself by people who would tell him what he wanted to hear instead of what he needed to hear to make better decisions. 

    I also enjoyed reading about Hoover's strengths as an engineer in the Immerwahr book, so I'm always looking for ways to apologize for him and his failures as president during the Great Depression. It's not easy, of course. But I must say that we still have this idea today in political and social circles that government needs to do less and individual people need to do more, so I don't really see how that attitude has changed much over the years. We still struggle with the idea of who "deserves" government assistance.

    Sometimes it is best for people to believe data over simply stories of despair. Numbers/data are objective and cannot be disputed. It is very hard to ignore 25%+ unemployment rates throughout the US. Some of those numbers were higher based on their location/ethnicities/circumstances. On top of that, you have natural disasters that no one planned for or expected. When Dorothea Lange published her "Migrant Mother" photo to the world, politicians could no longer remain idle. Pictures are worth 1000% words. Just like Jacob Riis, pictures changed people's perspectives on the current situation. 

    When I was reading throughout the books about the bread lines only being open around midnight, I wondered why are they not opened all day every day. Well, people have a certain level of pride when it comes to asking for help. Also the number of stories that I have read of parents giving up their children because they cannot feed them is unbelievable. As parents, they believed that the best chance of their children getting fed was to be dropped off at church buildings or simply abandoned.

    I still believe that the First Red Scare was a major reason why conservative Democrats and Republicans during the Great Depression did not want people to resort to government aid to assuage their unemployment and malnourishment. While there was some hope for World War I veterans to acquire some assistance, the money would not come until 1945. That money won't mean much if the veterans and their families don't survive the Dust Bowl and growing unemployment rates.

    It was also interesting to read that environmental sciences were not taken seriously despite the Dust Bowl wreaking havoc throughout the Great Plains. They thought that conservationism was reserved for grandiose landscapes and not for agriculture. As for weather predictions, people thought that they were useless despite the numerous venues of information gathered by weather balloons and past records (granted, the technology was pretty dated and could use some upgrades). It seems to me that there were numerous ideas of how to combat the issues of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, but many people did not want to compromise their political beliefs to receive aid. 

    One more point I found interesting was the "scientific" reasoning for food rations. Apparently, some careers were deemed worthier for more caloric comestibles. And then women and children's rations were a fraction of the male family head. This is (yet) another Enlightenment/empirical solution gone wrong.

    One of the biggest challenges that was occurring was the depth of the issues; while these problems - drought, unemployment, economic downturns, etc. - had all occurred before, this time it was such a prolonged experience in addition to the fact that all of these circumstances were occurring simultaneously.  On pg. 125 of The Worst Hard Time, a quote from Hugh Hammond Bennett stuck out to me “...we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race…” and that “What was happening, he said, was “sinister,” a symptom of “our stupendous ignorance.’” It truly makes me so curious as to how this time period of suffering could have been different if Americans had not plowed up so many millions of acres of land. Although the drought would have occurred either way, at least the dust storms might have been avoided or at least wouldn’t have occurred at the same massive scale. In addition to fighting through these terrifying storms, there was no work to be found. Although Hoover didn’t have any solutions for them, people had a little hope when Roosevelt came into office. Even still, hope quickly wore out and, according to The Worst Hard Time, pg. 141 “A distress telegram was sent to Congress from the sodbusters…something these nesters never thought they would do – beg.” This stuck out to me because, if you know farmers or people in agriculture, you know they pride themselves on their independence and hardiness. For a group of 1,500 people to send a telegram to the U.S. government asking for help, specifically in the form of work, it shows just how desperate times truly were. In order to receive any sort of assistance, people had to jump through such “demeaning” hoops to receive the bare minimum to sustain life in most cases. Reading the descriptions of how applicants were treated in the first two pages of Chapter Five in A Square Meal was so shocking to me. I was aware that welfare has drastically changed over the years, but I wasn’t aware of the treatment that people went through in order to receive it. Even after receiving assistance, in many cases it was still difficult to make due and required much effort on women’s parts to stretch budgets and food as far as possible (thinking about drinking/eating that much dairy made my stomach ache!). It is interesting to me that this was taking place during the administration of Hoover since he had served in a position that, in theory, should have benefitted his decision-making during this tragedy; instead, he dug his heels in claiming “Nobody is actually starving” while he had gourmet meals served to him by butlers. Although I knew all of this was occurring during this time period, reading first-hand accounts and diving more deeply into the era has been extremely eye-opening for me.

    In reading these chapters, it was really easy for me to get frustrated with president Hoover, but after taking a step back, I realize that he had well over half of congress agreeing with him about how the Great Depression should be handled. I guess I underestimated how strong the laissez faire sentiment was in our government at that time, but in reading these chapters, I really got the impression that Hoover and others in his government were more concerned with Americans becoming government dependent than they were Americans starving. In these difficult circumstances, leaders like FDR realized that something different must be done, and this created the political opportunity he needed to get elected.

    One other thing that really stuck out to me was the treatment of the Bonus Army. People who fought for our country, spending years away from home, treated like common criminals. With this currently being an election year, and each candidate weighing how things "look" to the general public and how that could affect the vote, it amazes me that Hoover didn't take that into account when dealing with these veterans. 

    The change in numbers over just 6 months was amazing. "In September 1929, just over 1.5 million people were out of work; by February of the following year, the number had tripled." And then the response from the White House - "The economy was not fatally ill, President Hoover said: Americans had simply lost their confidence." (Worst p. 95)  But two years later, there was a shift among at least some of those in Washington. ""Unless something is done for the American farmer we will have revolution in the countryside in less than twelve months," Edward O'Neal of the American Farm Bureau told Congress at the beginning of 1932." "The greatest emergency that ever faced this country in time of peace is confronting it now," said Congressman Wilburn Cartwright of Oklahoma. (Worst, p.104) 

    Perhaps part of the problem is an early version of living in a "filter bubble." We have it now, with AI sending news to us based on what we have already read and narrowing what we are exposed to. Back then it was listening to the "experts" that agreed with you and made you feel good about your decisions, and making sure you didn't go anywhere near the breadlines, of course.

    There seemed to be a disconnect between what the government was projecting and what actually happened during this time period.  As more citizens begin to suffer and the issues (inflation, famine, etc.)  increased, the government became forced to take action.  Data can unfortunately be manipulated to create bias based on who is sharing it (what data/how much data).  I do think that deep down the government and many of the people did not want to admit that the U.S. could find itself in need or desperation.  It goes against the belief held by many at that time that this is ‘the greatest nation on earth’. 

    What really stuck out to me was Hoover's response to the food crisis in America during the Depression. I realize that sometimes politicians are criticized for being "tone deaf" to the needs of the people. However, President Hoover has previously been the head of the Food Administration and was responsible for feeding large populations of Europeans during World War I. When facing the same needs from his own people, he resisted and even blocked refusing to send aid to starving Americans. The book portrays him as cold and uncompassionate by doing this. He seemed to have trouble reconciling the lessons he should have learned during World War I and letting those inform his decisions while he was president. 

    Now that we are generations removed from the government aid programs that were started during Roosevelt's New Deal program, I'm not sure that Hoover should have been listened to a bit closer. There may have been some validity to his fears of creating a 'welfare state', or people losing their incentive to work; and that once programs like this are implemented, they are very hard, nearly impossible, to stop. Perhaps if Hoover had been a bit more moderate in his positions on government aid, the programs set up during the Depression might have had more safeguards and restrictions to prevent abuse of perpetual dependence on these programs, like we see today.

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