mark catlin who helped preserve the films and make them available to the public. watch tonight beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern and enjoy american history tv every weekend on c-span3. during the great depression almost one-quarter of the united states working population was unemployed. this gave rise to an increasing number of migrant workers commonly referred to as hobos. jeffrey urbin with the franklin d. roosevelt presidential library and museum explains the origins of this term and how hobos have been romanticized in popular culture. the library provided the video for this program. >> hi there. jeff urbin speaking to you from the roosevelt library and museum on behalf of the director and the entire roosevelt staff, i want to welcome you to another one of our talks today. today we'll be talking about hobos and hoovervilles, and as i said i'm jeff urbin. i'm education director here, and it's our pleasure to be

presenting these programs for you. now, hobos and hoovervilles, let talk a little bit about them. these are two things that came out of the great depression, and, you know, a lot of people throw around the term hobo. a lot of people throw around the term hooverville, but what are these things? who were these people and what were these things actually? well, we're going to talk a little bit about that today, so it all goes back to the great depression, of course, and when we learn about the great depression in school, we learned the great depression occurred on october 29th, 1929 when the stock market crashed, and that's not really accurate. you know, certainly that's when most people got the -- you know, it got everybody's attention that the great depression was under way, but it had actually begun for farmers almost ten years earlier with the dust bowl and the overplanting of the crops out there, you know, in the mid-west and the southwest.

the farmers were really hitting on hard times with the drought conditions that were occurring. now why that's important is that 50% of the population were farmers at that time and so if you've got 50% of your population having that kind of an economic problem it's going to have an impact on the rest of your economy, so, yes, we can point to october 29th, 1929 as an indicator of the great depression, but it had been going on for much longer than that. also we would like to talk about the great depression as if it was an economic problem, and it was an economic problem, right? you know, the stock market crashed. people were losing their jobs. people were losing their homes, but it was really, you know, not just an economic situation with 25% unemployment and 1,000 banks closing each day and those sorts of things, it was really a social problem as well. families tended to split up. if you had a 17, 16, 17, 18-year-old boy at home you might ask him to leave the house

because there just simply wasn't enough money to feed him and, you know, baby brother or sister. if you had a grandma or a grandpa who were living on their open, they might move in with you simply because, you know, you could pool resources and it would, you know, work a little bit better so the family dynamics changed a lot. sometimes the dads would go off working as well and it was hard to hold the family unit together. it was a social problem and it was also an emotional problem. you know, people lost their jobs, and when you lose your job, yes, you lose a paycheck. there's definitely an economic impact to that, but you also lose an important part of your identity. you lose an important part of who you are, right? we identify ourselves by our jobs. i'm a bank. i'm a lawyer. i'm a bus driver, a teacher, you know, whatever it is, so if you lose that job, if you lose that occupation you lose a big part of who you are and how you

define yourself, so the great depression was a terrible, terrible time. you know, sometimes people would leave their children at post offices or sign them into orphanages because they couldn't feed them. that's how bad it was. combine of this being an economic problem, a social problem and an emotional problem gives you a better understanding i think of just how much of an impact this great depression had on people, and, in fact, when the depression was over some of those feelings, those emotion, those actions that people took stayed with them, those attitudes stayed with them the rest of their lives. that's how much of an impact it had. so let's talk a little bit about a group of people that originated in this time period or are said to have originated, and that would be hobos. now, hobos, the idea of a hobo goes back probably to after the -- the american civil war.

there were folks, you know, tra traveled around and such and the heyday of the hobo really was the 1930s, and nobody really knows where the name hobo originated. some people say, as i said, it came from the end of the civil war where people were homeward bound. hey, where are you going. home bound? some people say it originated from migrant workers who are going around and they would carry hose and knock on the farmer's day and you need an extra pair of hands. these were hoe boors going door to door are looking for work and the farmer would hire them. other people would say, maybe it was such a growthing, hoe boy, hoe boy and shortened down to hobo from there. nobody really knows. if you can come up with something that sounds legitimate, it will be legitimate as any other origin for the name of hobo.

now, is the idea of a hobo is somewhat romanticized as well, you know. we think of the hobo very often as, you know, out there on the open road, just making its way around, calling his own shots and stuff and there was some truth to that, but we'll talk about that in just -- in just a minute. how many hobos were there? as i said, the 1930s was kind of the heyday of the hobo and there may have been as many as 20 million hobos going across the country looking for work. it's difficult to know the exact number, of course, because they were transient, so it was hard to tie them down, but before we go any further, let's define what a ebb whoo is, and there's a big difference between a hobo, a tramp and a bum, although many people use these interchangebly, you know, as if they are all the same thing but they are not. a hobo was a migratory laborer, so basically a hobo was someone who was looking for work.

they were going from place to place to place looking for some kind of work. hopefully some kind of long-term work, but if not they would take whatever they could get. sometimes it was a job that would last a couple of weeks. if they were picking fruit at an orchard or, you know, a vineyard. sometimes it was a project that might last only a day or two raking some leaves and chopping some wood. whatever work they could get they would take. the hobos were willing to travel and the hobos were willing to work, and it was important to the hobo to put in a full day's work for whatever compensation they got, and they would negotiate that, of course, with whoever they were, working w.sometimes it was money. sometimes it was maybe a warm safe place to sleep. other times maybe it was a meal or two, you know. it depended upon what the person that was offering the job had to give in exchange for the actual job, so a hobo, someone who was willing to work, wanting to work, looking for work and

moving around doing this. a tramp was somewhat different. a tramp was more of a traveler. a tramp would go from place to place, and they would work if they had to, but they would rather not, right? they would rather just kind of go from place to place looking for, you know, adventure and excitement and such and, you know, probably the most famous one, of course, is, you know, charlie chaplin's, you know, personification of the little tramp, but a tramp was somebody who would work if they had to but wasn't necessarily looking to do that. if they could get a freebie and a handout they would be happy to do that just as well, and then we have the bums, and the bums are real the lower level of this sort of hierarchy and a bum who someone who didn't want to look. the a bum was looking for pure handout. i don't have to give kniffing in return. very often bums had some alcohol

problems. they were known for, i know, getting drunk and creating problems as such and this was a real problem for hobbios because if people were mixing up hobos, tramps and bums all in their mind then when a hobo came looking for work and someone might think they were a tramp they were less likely to employ the hobo and that's, exactly, of course, what they were looking for, the hobos. the popular character of freddy the freeloader, he was a bum, and you can see that sort of reflected in his actions as a character. so why did people become hobos? well, the number one reason became hobos was out of economic necessity. they were searching for work. they were searching for food. they were searching for shelter, and, you know, sometimes they would get this stuff and then be able to, you know, have a little extra and send it home. other times they were just sort of able to maintain their own

existence as they went along, and, of course, the thing about that is that if you're able to maintain your own existence at least you're not being a burden back to your family so economic necessity, number one reason why people became hobos and also a reason why people became hobos for adventure, the freedom of the open road, freedom to call your own shots, come and go as you lyrics be your own boss. you know, that's sort of the romanticized version that we have of hobos over the course of time, and then the third reason that people became hobos was for escape. sometimes they were trying to escape from the law. sometimes they were trying to escape from abuse. sometimes they were trying to escape from a lack of opportunity which, of course, goes back to -- to this idea of economic necessity, so lots of reasons why people left, but primarily they were looking for a better life in terms of

economic ability. now the hobo's life is romantic in culture, but it was anything but romantic in legal life. it was an incredibly hard life to live. you were traveling around constantly or exposed out to the elements. you were hopping on a freight train that might be moving five or ten miles an hour, very dangerous. the opportunity to lose life an limb always with you when you're jumping on this giant piece of machinery or jumping off of this giant piece of machinery and the -- the hobos would ride on these cars, you know, on train cars going from city to city and town to town and that's basically, you know, how most of them traveled. riding freight trains was very, very dangerous. sometimes you rode out in the open on a flat car and, of course, there you were expected to the sun, the rain, the snow, you know, whatever exposure was

going on, the wind, and also you were on a flat car so as things shifted and changed, you know, if you weren't careful you could be thrown off of that. you were also very vulnerable and visible to what were called bulls, and the bulls were the railroad police. these folks tend be to be -- they took their jobs very, very seriously. they tended to be very brutal about the way they enforced their job. the job was to protect railroad property, and if you were a hobo traveling on that train you were trespassing, so they felt very within their rights to, you know, beat you up, hit you. sometimes shoot you on site or throw you off the moving train. not supposed on that. sorry, pal. the fact that i'm throwing you off is your fault for being here. not my fault for throwing you off so flat cars exposed to a lot of different things. you also might try to travel in

a boxcar. a boxcar was great because it provided you protection from the elements, you know. you were able to be inside and you could sleep without having to worry about falling off. you were less visible to the bulls. however, you got locked in that boxcar that chances of starvation or suffocation were very good. you if you were in a car that might not be moved for three or four days, you might be in the box without a whole lost circulation of air and such in the hot sun. sometimes you would ride on top of the boxcars which had it own set of dangers. you're exposed to the bulls, there's the danger of underpasses and the danger of falling off but riding the rails meant riding on a car in one way or another and hobos knew you never rode on a car with pipes because pipes tended to roll and shift as the train was moving

along, and there was a very easy opportunity for you to get crushed. you also didn't tend to ride between the cars 2002 the couplings would go back and forth. there was always give to those and that was a dangerous place to ride as well so you tried to get on one of these things, and you sort of took your chances whether you were on a flat car, a boxcar, a top of the car, however it was. you also heard the express riding the rods, and riding the rods was even more dangerous, and the rods were large steel basically rods that were underneath the train in a cross-section to give torque to the -- to the car, and they were underneath between the sets of wheels. the there were these rods and they were easy to get on to when the train was stopped, so if the train was in a yard you could easily get on the rods, but now you are -- so there was sort of like a locked boxcar, you can get on the romptds the rods were

incredibly dangerous because you're basically traveling on to a train hanging on to some steel rods, you know, just inches from the -- from, you know, the grave going past if the train was moving along. if you fell asleep and let go you'd be killed, no doubt about it. riding the rods was very, very dangerous. are the bulls, as i said, they were out to get you, right. they had very little sympathy. they had jobs. their job was to protect the railroad property, so they had very little sympathy for the hobos that were moving through and would toss them from the train. there were also some unsavory hobos. there were people out there riding the rails who were looking to get over on people, who were looking to take advantage of people. that's not the predominant number of hobbios. most hobos were people looking for work, trying to work their way through, and we'll talk about the hobo code in a minute. a code that hobbios lived birks but you're always run into

somebody who is always looking to take advantage of you, to rob you or abuse you. you had to to be careful with who you came into contact with while you were out there riding the rails, and there were also unsavory people. there were people who looked down upon you, you're just a hobo and they didn't value you necessarily as a person or maybe they mistook you for a burge you know, and so they felt, you know, somehow justified in the ability to sort of, you know, abuse you or treat you as less than who you are, so a lot of times people will say to me, okay, jeff. let's say i wanted to be a hobo. what would i need? well, you would need to have some kind of nick necessity. we talked about that. you would need access to a train, right, to move from place to place and you would also have a certain amount of equipment that you would bring with you as well. just before i talk about that

lets talk about how found those traipse, and the trains usually, there would be a train yard and just about a mile or so outside of the train yard that's where the hobos would congregate. they wouldn't go into the yards because, of course, the bulls were there, but when the train was leaving the yard or a train was entering the yard, the train would be slow enough that you could relativity safely jump off or relatively safely on on, so outside of these train yards there would be these places that they called hobo jungles. they would be little like basically villages or camps that the hobos would congregate in, and they would wait for the trains to come in and out, so what kind of equipment do you need? well, basically it would come down to two things. number one would be if you were lucky enough to have a bed roll, and a bed roll would simply be a blanket. maybe you were lucky enough to have something as a pillow though you would probably just use an extra set of clothes wrapped up, you know, as a

pillow. you would have are a bed roll and tie that with a peeves rope at the top and at the bottom and loop it through and were you able to put in a over your back and, you know, pass along through that way. you could use that as a blanket. you could use it, you know, in the ed could. you could use it as a cozy place to sleep in the boxcar or flat car so a bed roll was really pretty important. the other thing that was real important was the iconic bundle stick, and this is sort of the symbol of what had a hobo would have, and there's quite a bit of, you know, utility to this. number one is because you would have a small bundle and, again, you're mostly traveling with a bed roll and a bundle of stuff because you're hopping an and off trains, right, so you can't travel with luggage or a whole bunch of stuff, you've got to travel light. the lighter it was the easier you could hop off and on the

trains. you would have a stick like this, and what this allowed to you do even with very little pressure you could have balance to this, right, depending on the length of the stick so if you're walking long distances, you know, in between trains or you're off the train and now you're walking into the village that was an opportunity and a good way for you to carry the bundles without it tiring yourself down too. you could also use it as walking stick, you know, walking long distansz. you could use this to sort of, you know, use this as a walking strich to work your way through and along and you could also use it as a weapon, potential weapon. if you came across an unsavory person or such and you could also use it as an opportunity to pull on to a train or have someone pull on or have somebody pull you as a device to help of you get on. the bundle stick had an opportunity and sometimes at the end of the bundle stick you would have a key tied on with a

piece of twine or leather and the key was you had a home, not able to make a living in your hometown, so a lot of hobbios would have a key to their front door and would carry this with them as a symbol and reminder that some day i'm going back home. some day i'm going to get back to, you know, where i came from. this is just a temporary thing. i'm not a hobo for good. i'm a hobo for the time being, so the key, really important to remind them of that. let's take a look at what you might find in a hobo's bundle stick here in the still bundle. so they would tie up this in a kerchief or handkerchief or a piece of cloth or an extra piece of clothing and in here you're going to find some items. let's take a look at what you're going to find. well, you might find something that looks like this. this was a way for them to get water. it's just nothing more than a can with a string tied to it,

pierced with a hole somehow and you would use this to get water, so if you were going to go, you know, to a pond or a stream or a lake you tried not to get wet. once you got wet, especially in the fall or early spring you would stay wet. the only way to dry out was just through natural drying out which in the meantime is going to live pretty cold, so to keep your feet from getting wet, to keep your sleeves from getting wet. would you drop this into the stream, pull it up with weight in it and then you had access to some water so you always had something like this with you because you didn't want to dehydrate along the way. you also might have some matches, okay, because you're going to light a fire when you get to the hobo village, to the jungle to keep warm, to have some of light, maybe to cook some food and so a way to start

a fire was always a good thing to have. you also might have, carry with you a deck of cards, and the cards would be used for recreational purposes, right? you wouldn't gamble with these because the last thing you wanted -- first of all, you don't have much to gamble with and the last thing you want to do is get on the wrong side of somebody when you're out there, you know, kind of on your own and in the wild so you would use these card to placard with other hobos or maybe solitaire with yourself to pass the long lonely hours of waiting for work to come by. you also might have a piece of fruit so if you were working for someone and they paid you withed to, you would very rarely eat all the food at once right there because you never knew where your next meal would be coming from so if someone paid you with fruit, someone paid you with food, you would eat a little and save a little for along the way. now this would come in very handy back at the hobo jungle because the hobo jungle each

night would each what was called a mulligan stew, and so the hobos would live in this jungle, this village and during the day they would go out and find work hopefully and then they would come back and they would create this mulligan stew, and the part of the hobo code there was that you could have access to the stew if you contributed to the stew and you generally got one, maybe two days of leeway so if you went out and couldn't find any work and you came back and didn't have anything to contribute to the stew, they would still lit eat that day and then maybe the next day and if you went more than two days without bringing it in, chances are you're going to be considered a bum, so whatever it was you would bring it back and maybe you wouldn't put the pear in the stew but slice this up with your fellow hobos as a dessert item but if you had tomatoes or anything like that as payment all of that went into the hobo stew. you might also carry little candle, again, just for some

liking if you're in a boxcar. you have to be very careful with this because you don't want to set car on fire so you would use this, you know, sort of as a sign of last resort. you also might carry a bible with you, and the bible was carried by hobos in part, you know, for what the bible intended to do, you know, which was to give you aspiration and, know, positive thoughts and things and you might tuesday for inspiration. you also might use it as a bit of a political prop so if you go looking for work and someone sees, you know, a bible reared and you're a man of the word, then they are probably going to be more likely, you know, to feel good about hiring you, you know, to do a little job or to help around the place as case maybe. you also might carry peeves coal. you might think why would i carry coal? sorry, we got a little blackout there. i might have had to light that candle. the coal would be carried with

you because the idea was that, a, coal was very readily accessibling right. the trains were running on coal, and with this coal you could make markings, and that is where another part of the hobo code came in so you used this to scratch etchings and things on the sidewalk on the side of the barn and we'll talk about that more in just a minute or two. you also would carry a pocket knife, and this tool was indispensable because it allowed you, you know, a knife blade that you could open cans with. it allowed you a little bit of protection. could you cut up the pear and share it with the other hobos. you could whittle time away, you know, by actually literally whitling. could you use this knife blade to make markings in fence posts and other things with the hobo code that we'll talk about in a second or two so if anybody messes but you could at least have a little blade to fend them off with and such and then the

other thing hobos would very often carry would be a can of beans. beans were the sort of go-to meal for hobbio, and that was because they were small. they could fit in the bundle, and, you know, could you open the can with your knife and you would open, it bend over the lid and have a little handle and put that over the fire and, you know, you got yourself a meal, and the can of beans always according to hobo tra dishes always had no more than 239 beans per can, and the reason you only had 239 was because if you went to one more you'd be too -- maybe you would have this as as little bit of pick me up there and you could also tuesday as, you know, sort of a pain killer kind of thing, you know, if you had to take a splirnt out

or something like that. this was not at huge thing for hobos. they were generally not drunks. they were willing to work and you didn't want to show up to a potential job smelling like liquor so you would probably use this, you know, back in the jungle just as a little night cap for yourself so you have to have some fun through the is force of the day. you put all this stuff together and you've got yourself a bundle stick and can you go from place to place and town to town and you have a lot of the things that you're going to need in order to survive, so you need economic necessity. you need a train and some of this hobo equipment. now a minute ago i mentioned the hobo code. there were two types of hobo codes. one was an ethical code, and, again, this speaks to the fact that the hobos, you know, were people looking for work, and so the hobo ethical code consistd of always doing a full day's work for a full day's pay,

whatever that might be, so if you say you're going to sweep out the barn, you sweep out the barn like nobody's business and you do the absolute best job that you can. you do this for two reasons. number one, because that's going to put you in good stead with whoever asked to you sweep out that barn and you might get a little extra handout and the other thing is that these hobos understood that there were many of them out there, right? they had these villages, these jungles, and as they traveled across the country, there were literally 2 million of these folks so they understood that they needed to do a good job wherever they were around after they left another hobo would come through and you cheated someone. if you took advantage of someone, the next hobo that came along would have a much harder time so you always did the best job you could for what it was that you were getting your handout for. when is there there was no

employment available, then you would sort of hang low. just hang around in town, know, looking like a bum or making, you know, a nuisance of yourself. when you were in the jungle, in the jungle community, you always pitched in, right? you are wanted to pull your own weight. you wanted to be a valuable member of that -- of that society. when are you were on the train as much as possible you acted like a member of the crew. now the bulls were there to try to get you off but -- get you off the train and get you out of the way and, you know, off the property of the -- of the train company, but the crews were often traveling, you know, with less than full crews so if you could get on the train and make yourself helpful and useful the crew members of the train would appreciate that extra helping hand and they might, you know, step in for you when the bulls are trying to get you off the train or, you know, abuse you along the way.

you always helped fellow hobos because fellow hobos were people just like you, people just like you that were in immediate and looking for, you know, a way to make had a living and looking for a way to get home. you also always tried to keep yourself as clean as possible and the hobos refer to this as boiling up, so every chance you got you would boil yourself up which basically meant heat up some water and clean yourself up so you looked presentable so you didn't look like a bum, that you looked like someone that might actually be employable, and the basic idea of the hobo code was to be kind, right? you know, you're out there. you're looking for work, and, you know, it's a value for value. it's a win-win. you do the work, the people get the, you know -- the people get the work done for them and you get some kind of a handout. my grandmother said that during the great depression her mother ran a boarding house just outside of maybrook, new york,

which was a big rail husband and hobos were constantly coming to the back door look for some work to do, so my great grandmother might give them an opportunity to cut some wood in exchange for a sandwich or, you know, beat the rugs, you know, in exchange for sleeping in the carport or the barn that particular night so, again, looking for work, looking for something in exchange. that was the hobo code of ethics, but there was also another type of hobo code, and that's where the knife and the coal come in handy because what the hobos would do is they developed their own special way of communicating with each other, and they would leave messages for each other as they traveled through sounds, so the next hobo that came through looked for the is messages, the symbols and they would know, you know, something about the town. you're traveling on these trains. you're going to places you don't know anyone.

you don't know anything that's going on in the town and you're coming in completely blank so if you can get some advice from a hobo who had been there before that was very, very useful to you, so they created this entire code and it was basically made up of symbols, so this symbol looking like a banana with a plus sign on the end this meant dishonest man so if this was scratched etched in coal outside of the sidewalk or scratched in the fence post with a knife then you were likely to be given a job working with this person but you might not get the payoff, okay. it was a dishonest person. sure go over there and rake up them leaves and that will be great and i'll pay you, give you a sandwich on your way, but get the leaves done first. if you saw this kind of symbol you would want to make sure you had the sandwich first because you did the leaves because the chances are the dishonest man wasn't going to pay you. symbol like this meant man with a gun. if you saw this you were on your

extra guard, extra careful and this meant good water so if you saw this carved on a tree next to a stream you knew that that was good water. you could use your cup to get some water from there. this meant the -- they will let you sleep in the barn so if you saw this by a farm or, you know, the work shed they would let you sleep in the barn if you saw this symbol there as well. this was a symbol for good for a handout, so i have a feeling that this symbol was probably carved somewhere near my great grandma's boarding home because she was always looking for folks to help her out with some work and -- and they were always coming from the jungle to do that, so good for a handout here. i'm going to share one that might be relatively more

familiar to you -- where is it? oh, here they are. this is one that you may have seen. this is actually kind of popular among popular culture now, and this is kind hearted laid, so this might have been another symbol that was near my grandma's boarding house and you'll see these in a magazine you'll accepted away for as, you know, a kitchen decoration or so so if you think your mom or grandma is a nice fine lady you would buy this symbol. it's kind of a cat with two feet in the back and a tail and bick here's, kind hearted lady and this meant that the person was wealth, so if you were going to do some work for this guy, chance are you're going to be paid in money, not food or a place to stay or a place to sleep, so this was an important thing to lock out for as well. so that's the hobo code and there were hundreds of symbols.

each area of the country had their own dialect as to what the codes might mean. generally speaking hobbios were looking for work. found them a lot down in the south part of the country and the western part of the country because the weather was better there, so, you know, you were going to find yourself without a place to live, you'll be in the warmer climate. who were some notable hobbio. well, i got a little lives folks who starred off as hobos. jack dempsey was a hobo. woody guthrie spent some time as a hobo and jack kerouac, no surprise there, spent a little bit of time as a hobbio. the one that surprised me the most was none other than art link letter spent some time as a hobo during the great depression, so that show that he had, "kids say the darnedest things" may very well have been hobbio say the darnedest things. those were some folks, again, looking for work, getting back on their feet and then off they

go and there you are. so that's a little bit about the hobo culture. you know, fascinating time in american history, fascinating group of people, and -- and there's still some of them out there if you ever get an opportunity to talk with someone who was a hobo, you'll learn a lot of interesting things about how to survive on the road, how to think on your feet and be very, very resourceful. the second part of our stalk about hoovervilles, and a hooverville was basically a shantytown, and hoover, of course, was the president when the great depression sort of struck, and he happened to be the wrong guy in the wrong time in the wrong place. as all these things joined together to create the great depression, hoover was caught offguard. he did some things that he did, trieded to have some programs to

alleviate the suffering during the great depression, most of these things were too little too late so hoover really historically has gotten the blame for the great depression. the term hooverville was actually coined by charles mitchelson who was the publicity chief for the democratic national committee in chicago, and it first appeared in the "new york times" in 1930 to describe a little town of shacks that had developed just outside of chicago, and there's always been homelessness, of course, know. there still is today, but these -- these hooverville ares were, again, the result of the great depression and very i don't want to say popular but certainly prominent during that time. as people lost their homes they couldn't afford to pay their mortgages because they had lost their jobs and so in cities all across the country these little shanty towns would -- would

spring up. i want to share a couple of pictures of you. oh, here by the way, is -- let me go back to this. here's a picture of a hobo family. here's a mom and a dad and two kids and mom looks a little embarrasses. there doesn't want her face shown but here's a family riding the rails, and you can see over here this is the bed rollie was talking about with the rope over the shoulder it would go, so sometimes entire families would go searching for work as hobos, but in terms of hoovervilles, they would look something like this, right? not especially happy looking places, places with shacks, you know, shelters built out of cardboard or tin or, you know, scrap plywood, tarps, canvas, anything you could find that would get you at least had a little out of elements, you know. you would find in these hoovervilles, and, of course, you know, sometimes people looked down on people who lived in hoovervilles. it wasn't their fault.

they lost their homes. what were they going to do? they had to do something and to show the dignity of the nokes that were in these towns, these hoovervilles, i want to show you this. this is a shack, you know, that's part of a hooverville, and you've got four or five people here, and this is christmastime in new york 1938, so this is a hooverville that was in new york, and it's christmastime, and look what they actually have outside their shack, you know, so they didn't pass by the holiday season. they had a christmas tree there as well, so these were people who still had feelings, still had emotions, still had a tie to, you know, some sense of normalcy. they just had no place to live. now there was a hooverville in central park that conciviled of dozens of shacks, and that race right there in central park, and there was also a place over by

the east river called hard luxville, which was a hooverville and that consisted at one point over 80 shacks so 80 folks had come to live there. the there was a hooverville outside of seattle that lasted for ten years, from 1931 to 1941 and had maybe as many as 1,200 residents at the peak of its occupancy. now in may of 1933 in response i should say to these -- these multiple hoovervilles, the new deal created a program, the federal transient service, and what they did was they came in and they started to provide sherlts for people, provide food and clothing, some very simple medical care, some training and education so that they could, you know, get out of these shacks and into at least some kind of standardized housing and began to work their way, you know, back into, you know, proper working society as the

jobs were become more available. hovervilles are their own governance. there was often a mayor of hooverville who was elected by -- by the residents. they had their own little hooverville councils so if they were going to, you know, pass laws or pass rules for living in the hooverville, you know, these councils would go ahead and do that. they were located primarily the warmer weather areas, the south and the west. as a matter of fact, kfl had such a problem with hoovervilles that los angeles had a thing that later became known that is the bum blockade. the idea was that the l.a. police, "james two-gun" davis with the support of the chamber of commerce and public firms and the railroad officials and some state agencies set up roadblocks

hat 16 major points of entry into southern california for people who had no visible means of support, so if you were coming and looking for work and had you no visible means of support and you didn't have a cousin or an uncle or somebody there that could vouch for you that they were going to give you a job you were turned away and, of course this, led to a great number of hoovervilles being built, you know, just outside of these stopping points. eventually there began to be some public sympathy for these folks. they were just location looking for work. as that is began to happen, the security decision was overturned and hoovervilles folks were entered into transient services for help. hoovervilles also spawned their

own type of languages and their own words for things, so if you were sleeping under a hoover blanket, a hoover blanket was nothing more than a newspaper, right, and would you use this to keep warm. the these were readily available. could you find them pretty much anyplace, and that would give you at least a little bit of warmth. not as cozy as a nice blanket would be, but it was better than sleeping how the in the elements, so hoover blankets. you might repair your -- your -- your house with some hoover siding which was nothing more than cardboard which would keep the wind out and repel the rain. if you had a hole in your shoe you would repair it with hoover leather, nothing more than cardboard. this would at least give you some protection between your foot and the actual ground. if you saw a -- a horse and cart

being pulled along, that was called a hoover wagon because people couldn't afford cars anymore. they couldn't afford the gas so, you know, you might hunk an old horse, an ox, something like that to a cart and be able to move along there in your hoover wag orange an at the end of the day whereas the hobos would go back to the jungle for their mulligan stew, they would go back for some hoover stew. which was nothing more than watered down soup. ham, present of water and maybe some cabbage and anything else that you would get your hands on and that would become your dinner, you know, for that night, hoover stew, so what we tried to do today is to give you a little bit of a taste of what some people were going through during the great depression in these sort of little

microcommunities whether it had a hooverville, a hoover village or as -- as hobos. hobos have become sort of romantic over time. their idea of riding the railroads and being your own boss, a real, real life. these were just situations that the people of the country found themselves in during the great depression. vass realty's job was to create a job for people and, q, it gave them a severance purpose, a purpose that people had a place to come and something to do. the great depression lalted for a long time. the hobo culture continued on into the 1940s and '50s and then

in the 1960s it was replaced by the sort of hitch-hiker culture. some was based on less economic activity and getting away from your parents and just get out there on the open road. you know, those folks who found themselves hitchhiking hiking to different places can trace their roots back to the hate 1930s. in you would like to know more about the approximate they had and the measures they had gone about to reduce the suffering, please visit us at the website hand when we hope again, hopefully won't be too much longer, come visit us here at the library. there's a great number of things to learn from and to see and experience, either wittially

trade or coming barred to online. thanks, take care. >> you're watching american history tv every weekend on c-span3 explore our nation's past. american history tv on c-span3 created by america's cable television companies, and today they were prout to you by these television companies who provide american history tv to viewers as a public service. weeknights this month we're featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. congress passed the occupational, safety and health act in 1970, and president nixon signed the bill into law. tonight on "reel america" we mark the 50th anniversary with three osha films released in 1980 by the carter administration which were later-related by the reagan administration in 1981. with begin with occupational,

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use of the press. it's a freedom to print and publish thing. it's not what we refer to today as freedom of the press. >> "lectures in history" on c-span3 every saturday at 8:00 p.m. history. "lectures in history" is also available as a podcast. find it where listen to podcasts. >> up next on american history tv, directors of the herbert hoover and franklin roosevelt presidential libraries talk about the the 1932 presidential campaign and the tense transition that followed. the roosevelt presidential library provided this video. >> welcome to the home of the race developments. i'm paul sparrow, director of the roosevelt presidential library and museum and i'm joined by director of the herbert hoover library and museum. >> were here today to talk about one of the most remarkable