FDR - Jean Edward Smith [182]
The situation in the countryside was equally bad. Gross farm income had declined from $12 billion in 1929 to $5 billion in 1932. At the same time, agricultural surpluses—crops and livestock that farmers could not sell—rotted on farms or were plowed under. Wheat for December delivery dropped to twenty-three cents a bushel, the lowest since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I three hundred years earlier. In Iowa, a bushel of corn was worth less than a package of chewing gum. In the South, thousands of acres of fine, long-staple cotton stood in the field unpicked, the cost of ginning exceeding any possible return.53
Children went hungry in every corner of the land. In the coal-mining areas of West Virginia and Kentucky, more than 90 percent of the inhabitants were suffering from malnutrition. In the nation’s major cities, only one out of four unemployed workers was receiving any relief whatever. In Philadelphia, those fortunate enough to be on the relief rolls received $4.23 per week for a family of four. Many state and local governments, including the city of Chicago, ran out of money to pay their teachers. In Alabama, 81 percent of the children in rural areas went schoolless. Georgia closed more than a thousand schools with a combined enrollment of more than 170,000.54 Homeowners were being foreclosed at a rate of well over one thousand a day. Farmers lost their land because they could not pay taxes or meet mortgage payments. On a single day in April 1932, one fourth of the entire state of Mississippi went under the hammer of auctioneers at foreclosure sales.55
Violence simmered beneath the surface. In Iowa, farmers declared a farm holiday, blocked highways with logs and telephone poles, smashed headlights, and punctured tires with their pitchforks. When authorities in Council Bluffs arrested fifty-five demonstrators, more than a thousand angry farmers threatened to storm the jail unless they were released. Wisconsin dairy farmers dumped milk on the roadsides and fought pitched battles with deputy sheriffs. In Nebraska, farm holiday leaders warned that unless the legislature took beneficial action, “200,000 of us are coming to Lincoln and we’ll tear that new State Capitol Building to pieces.” In Idaho and Minnesota, the governors declared moratoriums on mortgage foreclosures until state legislatures could enact debt relief measures. In North Dakota, Governor William Langer mobilized the National Guard to halt farm foreclosures.56
Hoover’s doctrinaire attachment to the free market precluded government intervention. Even more serious in terms of long-term recovery, the president did his utmost to inveigle FDR into endorsing the administration’s policy. “I am convinced,” Hoover wrote Roosevelt, “that an early statement by you will help restore confidence.” What Hoover had in mind was that FDR pledge to retain the gold standard, adopt a balanced budget, and impose additional taxes rather than raise money through government borrowing.57 Roosevelt should also disavow any effort to insure home mortgages, rule out loans to states and municipalities for public works, disclaim proposals for government development of hydroelectric power in the Tennessee Valley, and desist in his opposition to a national sales tax. “I realize that if these declarations be made by the President-elect,” Hoover wrote Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania a few days later, “he will have ratified