During the first years of the Great Depression encampments, dubbed ‘Hoovervilles’ or ‘Hoover Towns’ after President Hoover, were built all over the country as millions lost work and home in crisis. One of the many in southern California, the Los Angeles encampment which sat at E 85th St. and Lou Dillon Ave., is described here.

‘Hoover Town in Los Angeles Scene of Misery’ by Mollie Prager from Western Worker. Vol. 1 No. 12. June 15, 1932.

Poverty for Unemployed. Sickness and Disease Flourishes Among 140 Families in Tent Colony

LOS ANGELES, Cal. At the edge of the industrial section of this city 140 families are living on a large barren tract of land, in crude makeshift tents and shacks. These workers’ families are the ones who have toiled all their lives producing the tremendous wealth of this country. They have built the railroads, mines, factories, palaces, mansions and estates of this country. Now the bosses no longer need their labor and have cast them out of their industries, forcing them to join the ranks of the unemployed.

LOST EVERYTHING

These workers, who for the last year or two, have been frantically looking for work, have lost their homes, furniture, every possession for which they toiled. Now they are living in “Hoover Town.” This “model city” has no water, no toilet facilities, only the crudest kind of latrine patched together from pieces of board and scraps of tin. Bathing is an unknown luxury. No lights. Night finds the people in Hoover Town huddled in their tents and shacks, which are lighted by candles, oil lamps or by auto headlights. Some are completely dark. Water must be carried in pails from a gas station on the outskirts of this piece of land.

How do they live here? What do they eat? One woman said:

“The children here do not know what meat is. They have never tasted it here. The men go out with a truck and make the rounds of the wholesale fruits and vegetable markets, and the stuff that is thrown away as unfit to sell they are sometimes permitted to take. They went to the wholesale groceries hoping to obtain some canned goods, but were flatly refused. Sometimes, a bakery, having a large stock of stale bread on hand, sends it to “Hoover Town” and the bread is doled out–one loaf to a family per day as long as the supply lasts.”

DECAYING FOOD

I said to one sick woman lying on a bed: “The capitalist papers say you have enough to eat here. That no one knows hunger in Hoover Town.”

The sick woman motioned towards a cardboard box. “Look in there. That’s what we get.” In the box was some molding cabbage, rotten lettuce and four apples that were so decayed that when we picked them up they oozed from our fingers. Bugs, ants and flies are everywhere. Tiny babies lying in stuffy, crowded tents are exposed to them as well as the adults.

SLEEPS IN OPEN

One woman was lying on a bed, a bed which was not in a shack, not in a tent, but in the open with merely a tarpaulin stretched over it. She is an expectant mother. For months her husband has been out of work. Evicted from their home, they slept in their car for weeks. At last they came to “Hoover Haven.” Still they had no tent, not a table or a chair. Due to the woman’s condition a bed was finally obtained for them. But they had no shelter for it. They have only a piece of canvas stretched over the bed. They, too, had no stove, but cooked the little food they got on a strip of rusty tin. This man looked at his wife and said: “What I am going to do? I am a war veteran. Was wounded in the world war. But what did I get out of it? My home and everything gone, everything taken away from me. Why don’t they give me a chance to work for my wife and the baby we are going to have soon? That is what I want, work, not charity.”

Another woman, also pregnant, contracted pneumonia and was finally taken to the county hospital. Through the complication of her sickness she had a miscarriage and three days later was sent back to camp in this weakened condition.

HOOVER MEMORIAL

This is the city which one of the Los Angeles papers jokingly describes as the only town which knows no depression. With the stark misery, glaringly obvious everywhere, the paper treated Hoover Town in a smart aleck, wise-cracking way. Of all the monuments, bridges, buildings, roads named after our President Hoover, not one is more truly a tribute to him than this Hoover Town–“model city that knows no depression.”

Western Worker was the publication of the Communist Party in the western United States, focused on the Pacific Coast, from 1933 until 1937. Originally published twice monthly in San Francisco, it grew to a weekly, then a twice-weekly and then merged with the Party’s Daily Worker on the West Coast to form the People’s Daily World which published until 1957. Its issues contain a wealth of information on Communist activity and cultural events in the west of those years.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/westernworker/1932/v1n12-jun-15-1932.pdf