Subject: US: 1920-1945 (1920-1945), Economic and Business History No One Has Starved

Fortune Magazine

DOI: 10.1093/acref/9780199794188.013.0129

Abstract and Keywords

By 1932, unemployment in the United States reached unprecedented levels. Representatives of the Hoover administration were forced to admit to a congressional committee that no onenot even the federal government had a clear idea of how many people were unemployed. Nevertheless, President Hoover, seeking reelection, insisted that the underlying conditions of the American economy were sound and that no one has starved. In September 1932, the editors of Fortune magazinea leading proponent of pro-business policiestook President Hoover to task for the apparent inadequacy of his administrations response to the depression crisis. This article compiled unemployment statistics from cities across the nation to paint a damning picture of the economic and social conditions in the United States on the brink of the presidential election.Source: No One Has Starved, Fortune (September 1932), 1923. Document: There can be no serious question of the failure of those [anti-depression] methods. For the methods were never seriously capable of success. They were diffuse, unrelated, and unplanned. The theory was that private charitable organizations and semi-public welfare groups, established to care for the old and the sick and the indigent, were capable of caring for the casuals of a world wide economic disaster. And the theory in application meant that social agencies manned for the service of a few hundred families, and city shelters set up to house and feed a handful of homeless men, were compelled by the brutal necessities of hunger to care for hundreds of thousands of families and whole armies of the d splaced and the jobless. And to depend for their resources upon the contributions of communities no longer able to contribute and upon the irresolution and vacillation of state Legislatures and municipal assemblies long since in the red on their annual bud gets. The result was the picture now presented in city after city and state after stateheterogeneous groups of official and semi-official and unofficial relief agencies struggling under the earnest and untrained leader ship of the
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local men of affairs against an inertia of misery and suffering and want they are powerless to overcome. But the psychological consequence was even worse. Since the problem was never honestly attacked as a national problem, and since the facts were never frankly faced as facts, people came to believe that American unemployment was relatively unimportant. They saw little idleness and they therefore believed there was little idleness. It is possible to drive for blocks in the usual shopping and residential districts of New York and Chicago without seeing a breadline or a food station or a hungry mob or indeed anything else much more exciting than a few casuals asleep on a park bench. And for that reason, and because their newspapers played down the subject as an additional depressant in depressing times, and because they were bored with relief measures anyway, the great American public simply ignored the whole thing. They would still ignore it today were it not that the committee hearings and the Congressional debate and the Presidential veto of relief bills this last June attracted their attention. And that the final passage of the Emergency Relief and Construction Act of 1932 has committed their government and themselves to a policy of affirmative action which compels both it and them to know definitely and precisely what the existing situation is. IT SHOULD be remarked at this point that nothing the federal government has yet done or is likely to do in the near future constitutes a policy of constructive action. Unemployment basically is not a social disease but an industrial phenomenon. The natural and inevitable consequence of a machine civilization is a lessened demand for human labor. (An almost total elimination of human labor in plowing. For example, is now foreseeable.) And the natural and inevitable consequence of a lessened demand for human labor is an increase of idleness. Indeed the prophets of the machine age have always promised an increase of idleness. Under the name of leisure, as one of the goals of industry. A constructive solution of unemployment therefore means an industrial solutiona restatement of industrialism which will treat technological displacement not as an illness to be cured but as a goal to be achievedand achieved with the widest dispensation of benefits and the least incidental misery. But the present relief problem as focused by the federal Act is not a problem of ultimate solutions but of immediate palliatives. One does not talk architecture while the house is on fire and the tenants are still inside. The
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question at this moment is the pure question of fact. Having decided at last to face reality and do something about it, what is reality? How many men are unemployed in the U. S.? How many are in want? What are the facts? Twenty-five millions The following minimal statements may be accepted as truewith the certainty that they underestimate the real situation: (1) Unemployment has steadily increased in the U.S. since the beginning of the depression and the rate of increase during the first part of 1932 was more rapid than in any other depression year. (2) The number of persons totally unemployed is now at least 10,000,000. (3) The number of persons totally unemployed next winter will, at the present rate of increase, be 11,000,000. (4) Eleven millions unemployed means better than one man out of every four employable workers. (5) This percentage is higher than the percentage of unemployed British workers registered under the compulsory insurance laws (17.1 per cent in May, 1932, as against 17.3 per cent in April and 18.4 per cent in January) and higher than the French, the Italian, and the Canadian percentages, but lower than the German (43.9 per cent of trade unionists in April, 1932) and the Norwegian. (6) Eleven millions unemployed means 27.500.000 whose regular source of livelihood has been cut off. (7) Twenty-seven and a half millions without regular income includes the families of totally unemployed workers alone. Taking account of the numbers of workers on part time, the total of those without adequate income becomes 34,000,000 or better than a quarter of the entire population of the country. (8) Thirty-four million persons without adequate income does not mean 34,000,000 in present want. Many families have savings. But savings are eventually dissipated and the number in actual want tends to approximate the number without adequate income. How nearly it approximates it now or will next winter no man can say. But it is conservative to estimate that the problem of next winters relief is a problem of caring for approximately 25,000,000 souls. BUT it is impossible to think or to act in units of 25,000,000 human beings. Like the casualty lists of the British War Office during the Battle of the Somme, they mean nothing. They are at once too large and too small. A
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handful of men and women and children digging for their rotten food in the St. Louis dumps are more numerous, humanly speaking, than all the millions that ever found themselves in an actuarys column. The 25,000,000 only become human in their cities and their mill towns and their mining villages. And their situation only becomes comprehensible in terms of the relief they have already received. That is to say that the general situation can only be judged by the situation in the particular localities. But certain generalizations are possible. Of which the chief is the broad conclusion that few if any of the industrial areas have been able to maintain a minimum decency level of life for their unemployed. Budgetary standards as set up by welfare organizations, public and private, after years of experiment have been discarded. Food only. in most cases, is provided and little enough of that. Rents are seldom paid. Shoes and clothing are given in rate instances only. Money for doctors and dentists is not to be had. And free clinics are filled to overflowing. Weekly allowances per family have fallen as low as $2.39 in New York with $3 and $4 the rule in most cities and $5 a high figure. And even on these terms funds budgeted for a twelve-month period have been exhausted in three or four. While city after city has been compelled to abandon a part of its dependent population. We are merely trying to prevent hunger and exposure, reported a St. Paul welfare head last May. And the same sentence would be echoed by workers in other cities with such additions as were reported at the same time from Pittsburgh where a cut of 50 per cent was regarded as inevitable, from Dallas where Mexicans and Negroes were not given relief, from Alabama where discontinuance of relief in mining and agricultural sections was foreseen, from New Orleans where no new applicants were being received and 2,500 Lunches in need of relief were receiving none, from Omaha where two-thirds of the cases receiving relief were to be discontinued, from Colorado where the counties had suspended relief for lack of funds . . . from Scranton . . . from Cleveland . . . from Syracuse . . .

What Do You Do?

You are a carpenter. Your last cent is gone. They have cut off the gas. The kid is white and stupid looking. You have always earned your own way before but you cant get a job now for love or money. What do you do? In some, but by no means all, cities you can get a meal at the Salvation Army or the Municipal Lodging House merely by waiting a few hours in a breadline. But thats no use now. So you go to the cop. He pulls out his directory and
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sends you to one of the listed charitable societies. The society takes your name and gives you emergency aid if you need it. It then asks you a list of questions about your age, your nationality, your religion, and your need. Your answers to these questions will determine to which of the charities specializing in Jews, Catholics, Protestants. abandoned babies, homeless boys, sickly children, pregnant women, disabled veterans, and the like you should be sent. You draw the Episcopal Family Relief Society. The Relief Society clears your name through the central agency to see that you are not receiving help elsewhere and sends around within the next few days to visit your family, prepare a budget, detail a nurse (if there is one), and eventually to allot you $2 to $8 a week, depending on the locality and the funds available. If its funds are exhausted it asks you to wait. Meanwhile you register for work. You wait anyway. ***

Outpost of A Hundred Cities:

American suburbia has added to its Lake Forests and Englewoods and Shaker Heights and Brooklines and Bryn Mawrs a new and bitter designation and a new and ugly scene. The scene is that poignantly presented here by Reginald Marsh: the filthy and evil-smelling shacks which have grown . . . *** Review 1) According to the editors of Fortune, what were the economic conditions in the United States in 1932? How many people were unemployed? How many people were in need? How were state and local governments responding to the depression crisis? 2) Why was unemployment so high? What was prolonging the depression? 3) How did the Hoover administration respond to persistent high unemployment? Was their response adequate? What did Fortune magazine think should be done?

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