The Drought And The Dole (February 1972 | Volume: 23, Issue: 2)

The Drought And The Dole

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Authors: Robert Cowley

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February 1972 | Volume 23, Issue 2

Few places are more unpleasant ban Washington in the summer, and the summer of 1930 was worse than most. The pressures of the business downturn had kept Herbert Hoover a prisoner in the White House through a hot June and a hotter July —the stock-market crash was less than a year old—and in those days before air conditioning, editorial writers were beginning to express concern for the President’s health. Whenever he could break away for a weekend, Hoover would lead a caravan of Cabinet members and other influential guests to his Rapidan River fishing camp three hours away in the Virginia mountains; even there the heat was inescapable that summer. He had announced plans for an August vacation in the Rockies, where he proposed to make a leisurely tour of the national parks, and his most ardent critics could not deny that he certainly had earned the rest.

“The President, it is understood, has more than an interest in nature and a love of the outdoors in visiting the Western region,” the New York Times commented. “Some of his friends assert that he desires to test the strength of his own position after fourteen months in office.…” The events of recent months had certainly tarnished his position, but as yet there was little indication that the damage was much more than the surface wind-erosion of politics. Hoover was an authentic American hero, the managerial genius who had organized relief for starving Belgium and Russia, who had taken command of the broken levees and the submerged fields of the Mississippi River delta during the great flood of 1927. Most people believed him now when he said that the slump had touched bottom—and public trust, like confidence in Insull utilities or the Bank of the United States, could prove the margin of recovery.

The mood of the boom persisted as that steamy summer began. Unemployment, the administration reassured the country, wasn’t as bad as the bread lines made it seem. Stocks were drifting downward after an impressive recovery in the spring, but Wall Street blamed that on the doldrums of the season. Not even in the best years of the Jazz Age had so many Americans travelled in Europe, and those who didn’t get over still had enough money to spend a half million dollars a day emulating Bobby Jones’s grand slam on miniature-golf-course putting greens. They fretted about the heat as much as the Depression. If clouds remained on the Presidential horizon, few, unfortunately, were rain clouds.

 
 
 
 

It was hot—hotter than anyone could remember. The country had never known a month as hot as July, the weather bureau said. In Arkansas during one forty-three-day stretch, the mercury reached i oo degrees or more on all but one day. A grocer in Petersburg, Indiana, opened up his store one morning to find a newly hatched chick hopping on top of