American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA : When FDR Put the Nation to Work Read Online Free PDF Page B

condition of hysteria. If someone could get off a good joke every ten days, I think our troubles would be over.”
    In fact there were jokes aplenty about the hard times, but Hoover was frequently the butt of them. One had him asking his treasury secretary, banker Andrew Mellon, “Can you lend me a nickel? I want to call a friend,” and Mellon responding, “Here’s a dime. Call both of them.”
    On another occasion, Hoover said the country needed a good poem. But when he told crooner Rudy Vallee that he would give him a medal if he could sing a song “that would make people forget their troubles and the depression,” Vallee responded by recording a song from a musical, Americana, that opened on Broadway in the fall of 1932. The musical’s theme, largely reprised in Hollywood’s Gold Diggers of 1933 a year later, evoked the hard times, nowhere more poignantly than in Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”
     
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead.
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?
     
    The writers said they got the idea for the song as they walked past the breadlines in Times Square. This anthem of the penniless forgotten man is the song Vallee chose to record. Bing Crosby released his own version of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” at almost the same time, and both went to number one on the charts. But rather than distracting people from the depression, its sweeping popularity reminded Americans that millions of their fellow citizens were out of work, and that for many the indignity of begging for handouts was their only recourse.

5. HOOVERVILLES AND HUNGER
    T he ripples of joblessness kept widening, engulfing the laboring and middle classes alike. In New Concord, Ohio, eleven-year-old John Glenn, who would later become the first American to orbit the earth in the Cold War space race, overheard his parents in whispered conversation one day in 1932; his father, a plumber whose new business had dried up in the general construction falloff and whose repair clients couldn’t afford to pay their bills, told his mother he was afraid they would lose their house. “The conversation struck terror in my heart,” Glenn wrote. He experienced fears shared by many depression children: Where would they move? Did they have relatives or friends who would take them in? Would the family break up, with John and his sister parceled out to relatives or, worse, to foster homes?
    The Glenns managed to hold on to their house, but many didn’t. As family budgets went from black to red and rents and mortgages fell into arrears, foreclosure and eviction followed. Homeowners, renters, and farmers and their families were turned out with the clothes on their backs, and bank auctioneers sold property, furniture, machinery, and implements for pennies on the dollar. Philadelphia saw 1,300 evictions a month in 1931. New York had some 200,000 for the year. The secret humiliation of the jobless became a public shame when their household goods were stacked on city sidewalks, on small-town lawns, and in farm lots.
    Comedians treated evictions with the same defiant humor that tinged most depression jokes. “Who was that lady I saw you with last night at the sidewalk café?” asked the straight man. “That was no lady, that was my wife,” came the expected retort, and then the new punch line: “And that was no sidewalk café, that was my furniture.”
    In cities, tenant organizers devised rent strikes to try to ward off evictions. In the country, farmers petitioned for moratoriums on mortgage foreclosures, and when that failed, they tried direct confrontations. Buyers attending a foreclosure auction might think twice about bidding for farm land or equipment when surrounded by a band of twenty or more glowering farmers, who appeared even more threatening because their long beards made them look like avenging Old Testament prophets. When they could, farmers took