The Worst Hard Time: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

Towns were beginning to go broke. Texhoma, just up the road from Dalhart, had cut off its streetlights. People’s desperation drew them closer to Alfalfa Bill Murray. He promised that, if he were president, no one would go without bread, butter, bacon, or beans. He criticized Oklahoma A&M for asking for public money to build a swimming pool, saying that they could simply go to the creek to swim. Conversely, he believed that every white citizen should get a piece of land.

President Hoover was becoming increasingly unpopular. Most Americans paid no income tax in 1932, but Hoover wanted everyone to pay taxes to pay for the federal deficit. When he was shown pictures of fruit vendors on city streets, he said it was simply due to that being more profitable than working a regular job. Meanwhile, the Republicans had lost seventeen seats during the 1930 midterm election. They had also lost control of the House. Congress voted to raise taxes on the wealthy, while others pushed for an estate tax, taking half the worth of anything over ten million dollars. There appeared to be an attack on the rich.

Hoover was an engineer and an entrepreneur. He was worth four million dollars at the start of World War I. His past statements, including his inaugural prediction that the United States was close to eliminating poverty forever, and that one’s character was defined by how much money they had, came back to haunt him.

The national unemployment rate was 25 percent. John Maynard Keynes said that only the Dark Ages were worse. In regard to the election, Alfalfa Murray was certain that anyone “who could stand up straight and string four sentences together” could become president. One wing of the Democratic Party favored Al Smith, but Murray was sure that Smith’s Catholicism would work against him. Then there were “the Reds,” or Socialists. From New York came a governor from the moneyed class, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Initially, people believed that Roosevelt lacked substance. He seemed to be running on his great name. Then, he took up the cause of the “forgotten man”—the destitute farmer on the plains, the apple cart vendor in major cities, and the factory hand without work. He gave people hope and justified their outrage. His health problems, including double pneumonia, which had nearly killed him, and polio, which paralyzed him, helped him understand emotional panic.

Hoover believed that the way to end the Depression was to help factory owners and business owners “get up and running again.” Yet, Roosevelt said it made no sense to spur production if no one could afford to buy products. In No Man’s Land, a farmer could only get six cents for a dozen eggs and four cents a pound for a hog or a chicken.

At the Democratic convention in Chicago, Alfalfa Murray tried to stop Roosevelt, but the New York governor won the nomination on the third ballot. Murray was crushed. In the November election, Roosevelt won Oklahoma and every other state except for six. Hoover said that the Democrats under Roosevelt had become a “mob,” while Murray said that Roosevelt was actually a Jew who had kept his heritage a secret.

Roosevelt was sworn in as president in March 1933. Shortly thereafter, he went on a hundred-day dash. He called for a bank holiday—four days to stabilize the system. Then, he called Congress into session and signed the Emergency Banking Bill. By the end of Roosevelt’s first week in office, deposits exceeded withdrawals. He added new provisions to the law, insuring individual accounts up to ten thousand dollars. Now, the government would back people’s accounts.

The next task was to save farms. To avoid surplus crops, the government would become the market for farmers. It would ask cattlemen and wheat growers to reduce supply in return for cash. The newly created Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) would work “to stitch the land back together” by building dams and bridges, restoring forests, and creating trails in mountains. Also, the Volstead Act was permitted to allow for the sale of beer—the first step toward ending Prohibition.

Hugh Bennett continued to rage about the destruction of the land. He was particularly outraged about land exploitation in Oklahoma. He could speak on the matter without sounding like an elitist because he, too, was a farmer and knew the soil. Still, most scientists did not take Bennett seriously. To them, the study of nature was associated with the appreciation of scenic wonders, such as grand mountains, rivers, and megaflora. People did not care about soil, and did not understand that humans could impact the environment at this level.

Roosevelt summoned Bennett to the White House, and asked him what could be done to undo what humans had caused. Bennett made no promises, but he suggested stabilizing the soil. He then became the director of a new agency within the Interior Department, one that was dedicated to the task. Bennett had no money or staff, but he knew his subject. Some estimates found that more than eighty million acres in the Southern Plains were stripped of topsoil, and more was disappearing each day. Millions of years of runoff from the Rocky Mountains had deposited “a rich loam over the plains, held in place by grass.” To replace it, people had to remember how to farm without a plow. Still, it was unclear if the land could be restored.