Historian explains why Donald Trump’s COVID-19
response is remarkably similar to Herbert Hoover’s
failed crisis leadership

I HAVE MADE THIS SAME COMPARISON HERE

 April 14, 2020 By Robert Rupp  History News Network - Commentary


On April 9, the New York Times reported more than 6 million new unemployment claims for the previous week, and nearly 17 million over the previous three weeks. As this massive unemployment has followed the coronavirus crisis, a comparison between Presidents Donald Trump and Herbert Hoover becomes more apt than ever. For both presidents failed to project candor or show leadership during an unprecedented national crisis.

President Hoover during his first year in office confronted an economic collapse. Unemployment soared to a record 25% at time when most Americans did not have access to unemployment benefits let alone health care. But as the nation sank into the Great Depression of the 1930s, Hoover radiated confidence. He was fond of saying that prosperity was just around the corner.

Hoover allegedly explained his optimistic proclamations by saying that “A doctor does not tell his patient how sick he is.” His lack of openness prompted a pushback as opponents during his administration labelled the slums built outside major cities as “Hoovervilles,” and encouraged people to call an empty pocket turned inside out as a “Hoover Flag.”

Like Hoover, Trump leans toward overconfidence rather than openness. According to the Washington Post, he had sought to downplay the coronavirus threat 33 times in February and March. At the start of the pandemic Trump appeared to dismiss the threat by highlighting low numbers (only 5 deaths and 15 cases). In the following months he repeatedly ignored Winston Churchill’s observation that “ There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hope soon to be swept away.” On April 3, President Trump did warn Americans that this week “there’s going to be a lot of death.” But then he talked about “the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Another characteristic shared by the two presidents is an avoidance of strong presidential action; each proved reluctant to use the full power of the federal government.

Any discussion of presidential leadership must first recognize that Hoover was not a laissez-faire bystander as the depression worsened. Over the objections of his Secretary of Treasury, Andrew Mellon, who fought any federal action, Hoover pushed for historic initiatives such a Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which provided loans to banks and other major businesses and a Home Loan Bank to help the construction sector. He also undertook “jawboning” to convince certain industries not to reduce wages and promoted a direct loan to state governments for spending on relief for the unemployed.

However, Hoover’s initiatives were constrained by his conservative political philosophy. He had strong ideological resistance to excessive federal intervention—a profound belief that such action would undermine initiative and responsibility. He expressed his strong views in his 1922 book American Individualism, which highlighted the danger of collectivism and a reliance too much on the federal government. In this regard he believed that assistance should be handled on a local, voluntary basis rather than on the federal level.

The American public would have to wait until President Franklin Roosevelt initiation of the New Deal and mobilization efforts during the World War II to witness dramatic model of full government intervention.

Like his overconfident pronouncements, Hoover’s principled resistance to extensive federal intervention did not serve him well as president and may have undermined his political future. Hoover was elected with 444 electoral votes winning all but 8 states in 1928. Four years later he received 59 electoral votes and carried just 6 states. Today no politician mentions him, except to compare their political opponent to him.

If history shows Hoover followed the wrong path for principled reasons, what will it say about Donald Trump, who has several tools that were not available to Hoover? Unlike Hoover, Trump could use such tools as War Production act and Defense Production act that date to World War II and the Korean War era, plus he has the precedent of the New Deal. All of these things happened after Hoover was president, and although available to Trump, he nonetheless is choosing not to use them as part of his action plan.

Armed with these tools Trump’s response has been confusing and impotent. While Hoover refused to initiate such action for ideological reasons, Trump has expressed no ideological justification. Trump apparently does not adhere to set of policies and ideology that would explain his reluctance to show strong presidential leadership.

Instead the man who just last year was making extraordinary claims about the unlimited power of a president has become the champion of federalism as he hands off to the states the decisions about the pandemic. He asserts that the federal government is only a backstop and that it is the responsibility of the state governors to set up the rules. The result is a patchwork of required action across the nation as fifty governors must fight each other for aid the President could implement as one nation.

As the United States faces the oncoming surge in victims, America does not have a uniform policy on stay-at-home-only suggestions and recommendations. States rights appear to trump federal action as we await future dissertations on the failure to allocate effectively ventilators, hospital beds and medical personnel during this pandemic emergency.

This lack of action and unified policy reminds one of the Articles of Confederation- that failed form of government replaced by the Constitution as our leaders realized the importance of strong federal government in times of crisis. As Alexander Hamilton wrote to James Duane on September 3, 1780, the danger was that the people “cannot long respect a Government which is too feeble to protect their interest.”

To flatten the curve of the coronavirus we need to be ahead in our planning and in our action. For delay is an ally of the coronavirus. As hockey star Wayne Gretzky said “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is.” As we await the pandemic’s impact on the nation, Presidents Hoover and Trump have provided negative role models.

Robert Rupp is a professor of history and political science at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

This article was originally published at History News Network

SEE
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=HOOVERVILLE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=HOOVER+DEPRESSION

The Great Depression, the New Deal, and how disasters change politics

by Kristen De Groot, University of Pennsylvania

Edna Hershman paints a mural in the 1930s as part of a Works Progress Administration Program. Credit: Sol Horn/Archives of American Art

The coronavirus pandemic has the United States facing a social and economic crisis with businesses shutting down, financial markets tumbling, and millions of Americans losing their jobs.

The downturn has some economists wondering if the U.S. will face another depression, and even the president has compared the $2.2 trillion bailout package to the New Deal.

History professor Brent Cebul's current book project, tentatively titled "Illusions of Progress: Business, Poverty, and Liberalism in the American Century," is a history of how liberals from Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to the New Democrats of Bill Clinton's administration tried to create a foundation for progressive governance by stimulating economic growth.

Cebul spoke to Penn Today about lessons contemporary politicians can take from the Great Depression and the New Deal and how disasters like the current pandemic can change politics.

How did FDR react to the Great Depression, as compared to how this administration is managing the current crisis so far?

One of the things that's really important to think about the New Deal as compared to the relief package Congress just passed, is that the package is a bailout, it's not a long-running agenda to implement a variety of different policies over time, which is what the New Deal was. The New Deal was many different policy ideas and agendas that unfolded and cohered over the course of a decade.

The depression started in October of 1929, so there were three solid years of worsening economic conditions before voters turned the keys of the White House over to Roosevelt, making the New Deal possible. Something the pandemic is doing is showing how interconnected the world is, and that was actually something Roosevelt featured prominently in his first inaugural, that the depression laid bare how deeply interconnected Americans were. That was one of Roosevelt's strengths; he was the narrator-in-chief. He was able to fit the crisis into a framework for active and collective government.

How was FDR's reaction different than the approach to the crisis by his predecessor, Herbert Hoover?

To a certain degree, Hoover approached the depression in a similar way to how the Trump administration is approaching this crisis, but Hoover was far more sophisticated. Hoover didn't want the government to have to step in and mandate things. He worked with business leaders and voluntary associations, who would then set prices and determine what was needed in a given market through associational and voluntary decision-making rather than through government directive.


Hoover had used those strategies and tactics to great effect in World War I and rebuilding efforts in Europe afterwards when he created really robust voluntary and associational solutions for ensuring the food supply and fighting hunger. He was an exceedingly competent broker of private actors. But when he was trying to get volunteers to stand in for the government during the depression, it couldn't work because the scale of the crisis was far beyond what private actors could carry out.

Was the New Deal a tough sell to lawmakers and the public?

It's important to situate the New Deal at the end point of a variety of labor movements, where people were looking for a more active government in terms of moderating capitalism and securing workers against powerful corporations. There was a hunger for bold experimentation.

Some 5,000 banks failed between 1929 and 1933, and what that meant was that everyone's savings in those banks went poof. The FDIC, which insures our savings accounts, was a product of the New Deal; it had to be invented, and that was one of the first things FDR did. He shut down the national system of banking and when it reopened the federal government began insuring savings in banks and even became a shareholder in many banks to ensure they had enough capital on hand to resume regular operations.

Another stat that gets at the scale of the crisis: Around 1,200 cities and counties went bankrupt during these years. In industrial cities like Cleveland and Philadelphia, the number working-age adults out of work approached 40 to 50% at times. Charitable approaches to poverty and hunger just were devastated. One of the really poignant stories from the era was in Detroit, where they decided that they could no longer run the zoo, so all the edible animals were killed to provide for the hungry. The scale boggles the mind today.

The baseline American standard of living had just been devastated, and so Roosevelt had a strong mandate coming in 1932, when he got nearly 60% of the vote. All this expressed a real appetite for bold policy change and a tolerance for stumbles.

Would such social programs ever be possible in today's political environment?

I do believe we are at a similar point especially given that we are more than a decade removed from the 2008 financial crisis, and we didn't get bold changes then. We got a bailout and Obamacare, which is significant certainly but not the kind of paradigm shifting policies that the New Deal brought.

The good news is where this crisis comes in, which is late in Trump's presidency. The depression started in 1929, and Hoover had a lot of runway ahead of him. There is a real opportunity to have a change of administration. But even if Trump is voted out, there's the question of whether the Democrats will have the interest, stomach, and fortitude to build a real sustained program, which is far different than a bailout or a single policy. Could they really implement a vision, a paradigm shift in Americans' relationship with government? Certainly Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were campaigning on such ideas and they were resonating.

One major challenge facing any sustained agenda today is how short our news and political cycles are and how quickly people sour on agendas. The question would be how to sustain something like this.

In this regard, one of the real strengths of the New Deal was it harnessed the self-interest of members of Congress. Some of the classic programs, like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, were profoundly local programs. While they were crucially important to delivering wages to out-of-work Americans, they were also a robust form of pork barrel spending. If a member needed a bridge or public library built, the New Deal was happy to subsidize that.

One challenge any president will have in the current environment is that the earmark system in Congress, which enabled members to use local pork projects as part of negotiations over broader bill, has been significantly curtailed in recent years. I think that is an overlooked cause of paralysis in Congress. Without these sorts of bargaining chips, members of Congress are forced argue about abstract ideologies and principles rather than material interests.

What lessons can today's politicians take from the Great Depression?

Make no small plans. When you have conservatives readily agreeing to a $2 trillion bailout package, now is not the time for anybody to be negotiating against themselves. There is a window of opportunity here where politicians can make big asks. It's become apparent that service workers deserve to be paid better, that there's something peculiar about tying health insurance to a person's ability to hold down a steady job. We have very live and tragic object lessons right now of just how porous and privatized the American system of social provision is.

It was just proven by the bailout that we can afford these things, and you can look at Vermont and Minnesota which have already said child care providers, firefighters, and nurses, doctors, and others are essential employees and are entitled to state-subsidized child care. We see renewed calls for more universal health care and insurance, for government to not simply offer unemployment insurance but to guarantee that private sector employees aren't laid off in a time of crisis and continue to receive wages from government. Emergencies and emergency measures like these invite Americans to ask why wasn't that the case before? Can it be in the future?


Explore further We are entering a recession: What did we learn from the last one?

Provided by University of Pennsylvania

Deja Vu

Stephen Harper, Jim Flaherty and Mark Carney assured us that the economic fundamentals in Canada are sound, despite the current meltdown of international finance capitalism. Wearing Bush/McCain like rose coloured blinders they refuse to admit that Canada faces a pending recession and the government will likely incur a deficit. Something Harper and Flaherty denied during the election campaign. Instead they say steady as she goes.

Of all the leaders, Harper was most determined to stay the course.
"What leaders have to do is have a plan and not panic," he said. Revising the plan
based on new data was considered to be a sign of panic, not prudence.Harper, in
the dying days of the campaign, proclaimed that he would not run a deficit,
raise taxes or cut spending. That may be a difficult circle to square, and those
words may come back to haunt him.

Wait I have heard this before...why in 1929 when then PM William Lyon Mackenzie King said he would stay the course.....

October 24, 1929 went down in history as "Black Thursday". On that day, stock prices plummeted on the New York Stock Exchange, creating a domino effect on world stock markets. It signaled the beginning of the Great Depression.

Canada was one of the hardest hit by the economic crisis. The country relied heavily on its exports. Pulp and paper, wood and wheat represented two-thirds of Canadian exports and accounted for much of the country's prosperity.

Governments in Canada were slow to respond to the desperate economic and social conditions. Until the Great Depression, government intervened as little as possible, letting the free market take care of the economy. Social welfare was left to churches and charities.

When the Depression began William Lyon Mackenzie King was Prime Minister in 1930. He believed that the crisis would pass, refused to provide federal aid to the provinces, and only introduced moderate relief efforts.


Although unemployment was a national problem, federal administrations led by the Conservative R.B. BENNETT (1930-35) and the Liberal W.L. Mackenzie KING (from 1935 onwards) refused, for the most part, to provide work for the jobless and insisted that their care was primarily a local and provincial responsibility. The result was fiscal collapse for the 4 western provinces and hundreds of municipalities and haphazard, degrading standards of care for the jobless.


The Depression altered established perceptions of the economy and the role of the state. The faith shared by both the Bennett and King governments and most economists that a balanced budget, a sound dollar and changes in the tariff would allow the private marketplace to bring about recovery was misplaced.



Library and Archives Canada / C-000623
Bennett Buggy in the Great Depression in Canada


October 1929 – Stock Market Crash: Markets Suffer the Worst Losses in Canadian History
In the late 1920s, Canada’s economy and stock exchanges were booming. From 1921 to the autumn of 1929, the level of stock prices increased more than three times. But these heady days came to a swift end with the stock market crash on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, in New York, Toronto, Montréal and other financial centres in the world. Shareholders panicked and sold their stock for whatever they could get.
Overnight, individuals and companies were ruined. It was estimated that Canadian stocks lost a total value of $5 billion on paper in 1929. By mid-1930, the value of stocks for the 50 leading Canadian companies had fallen by over 50% from their peaks in 1929.
The stock market collapse affected all investors—individuals who had been persuaded to buy shares as well as speculators looking to make a fast dollar. Despite the market crash, 1929 was a good year for banks, mines, manufacturing and construction in Canada. All reported record profits at year-end.
Although the crash was sudden and deep, there were signs that it was coming. Earlier in 1929, stock prices had been volatile. Economic slowdowns in May and June hinted that the booming economy was heading for a recession. Export earnings were declining and the price of wheat plummeted.
Economists and historians are still debating what caused the crash. At the time of the crash, Canada had no monetary policy or central bank, so there was little government intervention in the market. (See 1934—Bank of Canada.) Canadian firms had healthy profits and did not expect the boom to end. Corporate profit expectations were inflated. Canadian corporations took advantage of the bull market to issue new stock, which overheated the supply. Banks gave out easy and cheap credit, and let people buy stocks on margin: buyers paid only a fraction of the share price and borrowed the rest. Speculation was rampant: bidding drove up the value of stocks as much as 40 times the companies’ annual earnings. Investors seemed to pay less attention to corporate earnings than to how much their shares would appreciate in value.
The economy could not sustain its rapid growth and the bubble burst. Investors lost confidence in the market. In the United States, the government was blamed for not controlling the speculative frenzy. Because Canada’s economy was so closely tied to that of the United States, the New York crash brought down Canadian markets, too.
It is widely felt that the stock market collapse started a chain of events that plunged Canada and the Western world into the decade-long Great Depression, which ended only with the outbreak of the Second World War.

1929 - 1939 —The Great Depression.
The Roaring Twenties saw boom times in Canada. Unemployment was low; earnings for individuals and companies were high. But prosperity came to a halt with the stock market collapse in New York, Toronto, Montréal and around the world in October 1929. The crash set off a chain of events that plunged Canada and the world into a decade-long depression. It was the beginning of the Dirty Thirties.
The Great Depression caused Canadian workers and companies great hardship. Prices deflated rapidly and deeply. Business activity fell sharply. There was massive unemployment—27% at the height of the Depression in 1933. Many businesses were wiped out: in Canada, corporate profits of $396 million in 1929 became corporate losses of $98 million in 1933. Between 1929 and that year, the gross national product dropped 43%. Families saw most or all of their assets disappear. Governments around the world, including Canada’s, put up high tariffs to protect their domestic manufacturers and businesses, but that only created weaker demand and made the Depression worse. Canadian exports shrank by 50% from 1929 to 1933.

THE CAUSE OF THE DEPRESSION
Many Canadians of the thirties felt that the depression wasn't brought about by the Wall Street Stock Market Crash, but by the enormous 1928 wheat crop crash. Due to this, many people were out of work and money and food began to run low. It was said by the Federal Department of Labor that a family needed between $1200 and $1500 a year to maintain the "minimum standard of decency." At that time, 60% of men and 82% of women made less than $1000 a year. The gross national product fell from $6.1 billion in 1929 to $3.5 billion in 1933 and the value of industrial production halved.
Unfortunately for the well being of Canada's economy prices continued to plummet and they even fell faster then wages until 1933, at that time, there was another wage cut, this time of 15%. For all the unemployed there was a relief program for families and all unemployed single men were sent packing by relief officers by boxcar to British Columbia. There were also work camps established for single men by Bennett's Government.
The Great Depression, also known as The Dirty Thirties, wasn't like an ordinary depression where savings vanished and city families went to the farm until it blew over. This depression effected everyone in some way and there was basically no way to escape it. J.S. Woodsworth told Parliament "If they went out today, they would meet another army of unemployed coming back from the country to the city." As the depression carried on 1 in 5 Canadians became dependent on government relief. 30% of the Labour Force was unemployed, where as the unemployment rate had previously never dropped below 12%.

It was estimated back in the thirties that 33% of Canada's Gross National Income came from exports; so the country was also greatly affected by the collapse of world trade. The four western prairie provinces were almost completely dependent on the export of wheat. The little money that they brought in for their wheat did not cover production costs, let alone farm taxes, depreciation and interest on the debts that farmers were building up. The net farm income fell from $417 million in 1929 to $109 million in 1933.


Canada suffered a major depression from 1929 to 1939. In terms of output it was
similar to the Great Depression in the United States. However, total factor productivity
(TFP) in Canada did not recover relative to trend, while in the United States TFP had
recovered by 1937. We find that the neoclassical growth model, with TFP treated as
exogenous, can account for over half of the decline in output relative to trend in Canada.
In contrast, we find that conventional explanations for the Great Depression - monetary
shocks, terms of trade shocks and labor market and competition policies – do not work
for Canada.

Our conclusion is that the reason that Canadian output per adult was still 30 percent below
trend in 1938 was that productivity failed to return to trend.

Relative to trend, consumption fell more in Canada, and remained below that of
the United States throughout the 1930s. Investment in Canada fell to 15 percent of its
trend value by 1933, and recovered very slowly in both countries (remaining roughly 50
percent below trend in 1939). Government purchases in the two countries followed a
similar pattern during the downturn, before diverging in the late 1930s when U.S.
government spending remained above trend, while in Canada it fluctuated about trend.

U.S. government output increased more relative to trend
than Canadian government output. A large part of the difference in government
expenditure can be attributed to different government policies towards providing
unemployment relief. In the United States, the government relied much more heavily
upon make-work projects (government relief projects) than in Canada. The fraction of the
workforce employed by the government doubled in the United States, while increasing by
less than 50 percent in Canada. The increase in U.S. government employment was mainly
due to public works, as nearly 7 percent of U.S. employment in the late 1930s was in
relief projects. Relief workers were never more than 1.5 percent of the total number of
employed people in Canada.

Canada was the first country to leave the gold standard, suspending gold
shipments in January 1929 (Bordo and Redish (1990)). Despite the suspension of
convertibility, the Canadian government took steps to prevent depreciation of the dollar,
motivated in part by a wish to maintain access to American capital markets to refinance
Dominion debt (Shearer and Clark (1984)). As a result, the government maintained the
advance rate at its 1928 level throughout 1930, despite the fall in world rates. This policy
was ultimately abandoned in 1931. Despite this, the Canadian dollar did depreciate
relative to the U.S. dollar by approximately 15 percent between 1929 and 1931, before
recovering to its 1929 level in 1935.

The “debt-deflation” view of the Great Depression asserts that deflation and high
private debt levels contributed to the Great Depression by reducing borrower wealth and
constraining lending. Haubrich (1990) argues that the debt crisis was much less severe in
Canada than in the United States. He argues that there is little evidence to suggest that the
debt crisis caused the Great Depression in Canada.

A common view is that banking crisis played a significant role in transforming the
1929 downturn into the Great Depression. For example, Bernanke (1983) states that “the
financial crisis of 1930-33 affected the macroeconomy by reducing the quantity of
financial services, primarily credit intermediation” (p. 262). As has been pointed out by
numerous authors, however, Canada did not experience any bank failures.

Can the usual explanations of the Great Depression account for the Great
Depression in Canada? Our answer to this question is no. As we show, money shocks,
policy shocks and terms of trade shocks cannot account for the 10-year depression.
Explanations based on these shocks fail because their effects are quantitatively too small
to explain the Great Depression.

Our findings in this paper tell us where to go next. Future research into the Great
Depression in Canada should focus on models in which changes in the level of trade
affect the level of productivity. Such models are consistent with the fact that Canada’s
TFP and trade both declined from 1929 to 33. Beginning in 1934, trade began to slowly
recover, and so did TFP. This also matches the fact that the only large shock that hit
Canada but not the United States was trade, while the main difference in macro
performance is the behavior of productivity.

Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E30, N12, N42.
Key Words: Great Depression, Canada, productivity, terms of trade, deflation

Community Voices
GWINNETT COUNTY: Depression days brought to mind
By Rick Badie
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Elwood Hart lived in Canada during the Great Depression. He considers himself lucky. A Salvation Army was next to the family’s home in Hamilton, Ontario.
“Maybe it was a bowl of soup or a bologna sandwich, but I got something to eat,” said Hart, now a Lawrenceville resident. “If it weren’t for that, I don’t think we could have ever made it. We weren’t living in the United States, but the situation was the same all over.”
Comparisons and contrasts are being drawn between the current economic crisis and the Great Depression. Conventional wisdom says this is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Generally, experts say the odds of a full-blown depression are nonexistent. Let’s hope they are right.
Not many of us were around between 1929 and 1939, so we can’t compare the impact of that period’s economic crisis to today’s turmoil. Hart is now in his mid-80s, so his take on what he saw then and what he sees now carries weight.
We met years ago at the Gwinnett County Veterans War Museum, where his military career is on display. He served with the Canadian Army in Normandy during World War II. With the U.S. Army, he saw two tours of duty in Korea and Vietnam. He received an honorable discharge in 1967.
As for the Great Depression, “I remember it well,” Hart said. “People don’t realize what it was like back then.”
He remembers people lining up at food banks to get a hunk of cheese and powdered milk. He remembers stuffing newspapers in his shoes because they were way too big. And he remembers a white pet rabbit that just disappeared one day.
“I got up one morning and asked my dad where my rabbit was,” Hart told me. “He said, ‘It’s down your stomach. You had it for dinner.’ You ate anything you could get back then. There was no waste of clothes or food. Today, when I throw out trash, wild animals won’t find any food. I don’t throw it away.”
But how does that compare to today’s economic woes, particularly among everyday people barely making it?
Every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning, Hart drives to a local Publix to load his car with day-old breads, cakes and pastries. When he pulls up to the Salvation Army, where the goods are doled out, people are waiting.
“It’s gotten so bad right now that there are twice as many every day as there were a couple of months ago,” he said. “In fact, it’s so bad that, a lot of time, me or some of the women in the church have to stand there. We have a sign that says everyone is to get two loaves of bread and a pastry. If you don’t watch them, they will fill up on all they can get. That’s why I say things are getting bad, similar to the 1930s, I tell you.”
As a brass collector, Hart routinely visits Goodwill stores in search of treasures. He said he’s seen a noticeable uptick in the number of people buying clothes. And at his church, clothes donations have fallen off considerably.
“It’s not that bad yet now,” Hart said.
“But it’s getting there.”

SEE:

No Austrians In Foxholes
CRASH
Black Gold
The Return Of Hawley—Smoot
Canadian Banks and The Great Depression
Bank Run
U.S. Economy Entering Twilight Zone


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Hoover Dam, a symbol of the modern West, faces an epic water shortage

BOULDER CITY, Nev. – Hoover Dam towers more than 700 feet above Black Canyon on the Arizona-Nevada state line, holding back the waters of the Colorado River. On top of the dam, where visitors peer down the graceful white arc of its face, one of its art deco-style towers is adorned with a work of art that memorializes the purposes of the dam.© Mark Henle/The Republic A high-water mark or "bathtub ring" is visible on the shoreline of Lake Mead at Hoover Dam.

In five relief sculptures by Oskar Hansen, muscular men grip a boat’s wheel, harvest an armful of wheat, stand beside cascading water and lift a heavy weight overhead. Words encapsulate why the dam was built, as laid out in a 1928 law: FLOOD CONTROL, NAVIGATION, IRRIGATION, WATER STORAGE and POWER.


Eighty-six years after its completion in 1935, the infrastructure at Hoover Dam continues doing what it was designed to do: holding water and sending it coursing through intake tunnels, spinning turbines and generating electricity. The rules for managing the river and dividing up its water – which were laid down nearly a century ago in the 1922 Colorado River Compact and repeatedly tweaked – face the greatest strains since the dam was built.

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The effects of years of severe drought and temperatures pushed higher by climate change are striking along Lake Mead’s retreating shorelines near Las Vegas, where the growing “bathtub ring” of whitish minerals coats the rocky desert slopes.

Since 2000, the water level in Lake Mead, which is the reservoir formed by Hoover Dam and holds the title of the largest reservoir in the country, has dropped about 140 feet. It is just 37% full, headed for a first-ever official shortage and sinking toward its lowest levels since it was filled.

One of the West's driest 22-year periods in centuries is colliding with the river's chronic overuse. As the reservoir falls toward record lows, its decline threatens the water supplies of cities and farmlands and reveals how the system of managing water in the desert Southwest faces growing risks.

Tech: Twitter will promote credible information with new climate change topic after criticism over misinformation
Water levels expected to fall below federal threshold this summer

Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation leads a team of engineers and hydrologists who plan water releases from Hoover Dam, as well as Davis and Parker dams downstream, sending flows that travel through pipelines and canals to Phoenix, Los Angeles and farmlands in the USA and Mexico that produce crops such as hay, cotton, grapes and lettuce.

Bernardo’s team sets power generation goals and produces a monthly report with the latest projections of how reservoir levels will probably change over the next 24 months.

Lately, each month’s report has brought worsening numbers.

Predicted water-level declines have grown as estimates of inflows into Lake Powell, the upstream reservoir, have shrunk because of extremely parched conditions across the upper watershed in the Rocky Mountains, where much of the river’s flow originates as melting snow.

“Unfortunately, due to how dry things have been,” Bernardo says, “what we're seeing is Lake Powell's elevations are dropping.”

That will mean less water flowing into Lake Mead for the rest of the year. The past 12 months have been among the driest on record across the Colorado River Basin. Inflows into Lake Powell from April through July are estimated to be just 26% of the long-term average, and that’s leading to rapid declines in Powell and Mead, the two largest pieces of the river's water-storage system.

The warm, dry conditions over the past two years have baked the watershed’s soils to such an extent, Bernardo says, that “when the snowmelt starts to run off, it just gets sucked up into the ground like a sponge.”

The demands for water downstream from Hoover Dam continue. The Southwest’s farmlands' peak irrigation season lasts through June, Bernardo says, so Lake Mead’s surface drops about 1 foot each week.

'Something we directly cause': Study blames climate change for 37% of global heat deaths© Mark Henle/The Republic "Due to how dry things have been, what we're seeing is Lake Powell's elevations are dropping,” says Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation at Hoover Dam.

The reservoir has declined more than 16 feet over the past year and is forecast to fall about 9 feet more by the end of this year.

The latest projections show that by the end of 2021, Lake Mead will decline below an elevation of 1,066 feet, far below the threshold – 1,075 feet – for the federal government to declare a shortage. That’s likely to happen in August, triggering the largest water cuts to date next year for Arizona, Nevada and Mexico.

Even larger cutbacks could come in 2023 if the reservoir declines as projected over the next year into a more severe “Tier 2” shortage.

Lake Mead's downward spiral is driven largely by the dire situation upstream at Lake Powell, which has declined to 34% of full capacity.

“We need three to four consecutive years of above-average inflow, snowpack runoff and inflow into Lake Powell to refill these reservoirs,” Bernardo says. “So that's what we're hoping for.”

The Colorado River naturally cycles through wet and dry periods, but over the past 22 years, the watershed has had 17 dry years, Bernardo says, and only five years with above-average or wet conditions.

Hotter temperatures have evaporated more moisture off the landscape, leaving less flowing in the river and its tributaries. Scientists describe it as a “megadrought” and one that, unlike the long droughts of the past, is amplified by carbon pollution and the heating of the planet.

One of the unknowns facing the officials who manage Colorado River water is how severely the reservoirs could be affected by climate-driven “aridification” in the years to come. Some scientists have estimated the river could lose roughly one-fourth of its flow by 2050 as temperatures rise, and that for each additional 1 degree Centigrade (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, the average flow is likely to drop by about 9%.

“With the warmer temperatures,” Bernardo says, “not only do we see things melt off quicker but you have that rising snow line, which creates less inflow.”© Mark Henle/The Republic The Lake Mead reservoir has declined since 2000.

The declines in the reservoirs have accelerated over the past two years.

In 2019, representatives of Arizona, Nevada and California agreed under a deal called the Drought Contingency Plan to share in water reductions through 2026 to reduce the risks of Lake Mead falling to critically low levels. The agreement calls for progressively larger cutbacks if Lake Mead drops below lower trigger points in the coming years.

If the reservoir drops below 1,045 feet, California would start to take cuts. Mexico contributes by leaving some water in Lake Mead.

“These mechanisms have been put into place to protect these reservoir elevations,” Bernardo says.

Though the latest agreement is intended as a stopgap measure, officials from the seven states that depend on the river are preparing to negotiate rules for managing shortages after 2026, and those talks promise to be tougher.

Bernardo says the bureau's responsibilities in managing the dams and water deliveries remain the same, and they include incorporating the latest science and models and providing up-to-date information to representatives of the states, water districts, tribes and other entities along the river “to communicate what's going on and what we're seeing, so everyone can act proactively.”

“When you have a river system like this, a complex reservoir and river system especially, that is experiencing the hydrology that we've been seeing, and such a quick decline in the Upper Basin over these last two years, transparency and communication is key,” Bernardo says.

Harris tackles migration in high-profile visit to Guatemala and Mexico: Here’s what’s on the agenda© Mark Henle/The Republic Patti Aaron with the Bureau of Reclamation explains how Hoover Dam works.
Iconic dam holds less and less

Bernardo, 35, has worked for the Bureau of Reclamation for nearly a decade, including the past two years as river operations manager. A mechanical engineer who grew up in New Jersey, he usually works with his staff at the agency’s office in Boulder City, Nevada, but he regularly drives out to visit the dam, sometimes to lead special tours.

Whenever he rounds the curve in the canyon and sees the dam, Bernardo says, he feels awestruck, and “the hair still sticks up on my arms.”

“It never gets old,” he says. “I’m wowed by the engineering marvel.”

Part of that comes from knowing the history of all that went into the dam’s design and construction during the Great Depression, from the hand-drawn blueprints to the blasting with dynamite, the railroad that carried supplies and the massive amounts of concrete poured in, creating a dam that is 660 feet thick at its base – nearly as thick between the reservoir and the downstream side as it is tall. (According to the Bureau of Reclamation, Hoover Dam contains enough concrete to build a sidewalk 4 feet wide around the entire Earth at the equator.)

Bernardo says the dam's historical significance is inescapable: how it controlled the Colorado’s floods, opened arid lands for farming and fed the rise of cities across the Southwest. As he describes it, the dam “helped nourish our nation” and helped the West thrive.

“We like to show it off,” he says.

Hoover Dam's normal capacity is 2,074 megawatts, Bernardo says, generating enough power per year to supply approximately 450,000 average households. At today’s lake level, the dam’s capacity has decreased about 25% to 1,567 megawatts, generating enough power for roughly 350,000 homes.

With every foot the lake declines, about 6 megawatts of power-generating capacity is lost.

The lowest level at which Hoover could produce power is about 950 feet, with an expected capacity of 650 megawatts. If the lake fell below that point – a scenario the rules are geared toward avoiding – the dam would no longer be able to generate power.© Mark Henle/The Republic As water levels drop, Hoover Dam is less able to generate power.

As the reservoir declines, releasing the same amount of water yields a bigger drop in lake level.

“That's one of the concerning pieces,” Bernardo says. “The reservoir is shaped, we call it a teacup, but more like a martini glass. And the lower the elevation goes, the faster the rate of decline.”

That dynamic affects how much the planned water cuts could help Mead’s level. Under a first-tier shortage next year, for example, Arizona, Nevada and Mexico are preparing for cuts totaling 613,000 acre-feet, which Bernardo says is equivalent to 7-8 feet of elevation in Lake Mead.

If the reservoir dropped below 1,025 feet, the total cuts among the three states and Mexico would add up to more than 1.3 million acre-feet. That amount, Bernardo says, would equal nearly 20 feet conserved in Lake Mead at those low levels.

When representatives of California, Arizona and Nevada negotiated the deal, they decided on 1,025 feet as a threshold to avoid, one they thought the lake would be unlikely to reach. The agreement includes a backup provision. If the two-year projections show Mead is likely to decline below 1,030 feet, the agreement says, the states and the interior secretary “shall consult and determine what additional measures will be taken.”

The government’s latest five-year projections, using an approach that considers the river’s lower flows over the past three decades, estimates a 25% chance of Lake Mead declining below 1,025 feet in 2025.

Much could change if there's a snowy winter in the mountains.

“We hope and we feel very strongly that the measures that have been put into place should slow down the decline,” Bernardo says. “Now, if it's enough to make it recover, your guess is as good as mine, because the hydrology has been so bad.”

If the river basin gets a wet year with average flows, Bernardo says, the cutbacks in the plan “will buy us time to get to the next year, in hopes to get a better water year.”

“And I think that's what the system is designed to do,” he says.
An ‘Era of Limits’

The outlook for the Colorado River has grown increasingly dire over the past several years. In one study, scientists found that about half the trend of decreasing runoff in the Upper Colorado River Basin since 2000 was due to unprecedented warming.

Other researchers warned in a report this year that an “incremental approach to adaptation” is unlikely to be enough. They pointed out that flows from 2000 through 2018 were about 18% less than the 20th century average and said the downward trend will probably continue as temperatures rise with climate change.

Worries about overusing the Colorado river predate the current dry spell. Some early warnings came before the legal framework that divided the Colorado among the seven states and Mexico.

John Wesley Powell voiced concerns in 1893, 24 years after his expedition down the river in the Grand Canyon, when he told attendees at the International Irrigation Congress in Los Angeles, “I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these lands.”

Under the 1922 Colorado River Compact and subsequent agreements, the river has long been severely overallocated. As University of Arizona law professor Robert Glennon put it, “there are more water rights than there is water.”

So much has been diverted that most of the river’s delta in Mexico was transformed decades ago into stretches of dry riverbed that wind through farmlands and desert in the Mexicali Valley. Only a smattering of natural wetlands remain.


A journey into the heart of a river forever changed by human hands



In his 1986 book “Cadillac Desert,” Marc Reisner wrote that Hoover Dam “rose up at the depths of the Depression and carried America’s spirits with it. Its electricity helped produce the ships and planes that won the Second World War, and its water helped grow the food.”

Reisner wrote that from these hopeful beginnings, “the tale of human intervention in the Colorado River degenerates into a chronicle of hubris and obtuseness” and that people in the river basin – at that time 20 million – “will probably find themselves facing chronic shortages, if not some kind of catastrophe.”

“One could say that the age of great expectations was inaugurated at Hoover Dam,” Reisner wrote. “And one could say that, amid the salt-encrusted sands of the river’s dried-up delta, we began to founder on the Era of Limits.”

Authors Eric Kuhn and John Fleck wrote in their 2019 book “Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River” that “even absent climate change, we would be in trouble” and that the current problems surrounding the river “are the inevitable result of critical decisions made by water managers and politicians who ignored the science” as early as the 1920s.

Scientific analyses in the 1920s found the Colorado River would be in deficit if dams and canals were built to meet the anticipated demand, Kuhn and Fleck wrote. The scientists’ warnings were ignored, and that “set in motion decades of decisions that would end in the overuse seen today.”


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They suggested that addressing the river’s deficit will require recognizing that the “over-allocation became embedded in basin rules in very specific ways that remain unresolved” and should be fixed.

Negotiating the post-2026 rules will be challenging for everyone involved, Kuhn and Fleck wrote, and some of the fundamental issues facing negotiators are similar to those a century ago, including questions of how much water the river will provide in the years ahead and how the system should be governed amid uncertainty.

The Colorado River Basin needs “a stable and effective governance of the use of the river’s waters under conditions where current demands already exceed the exiting supplies,” Kuhn and Fleck wrote. “Like one hundred years ago, the river’s future is not all dark. Innovation, cooperation, and an expanded reliance on science are now the foundation for basin-wide solutions.”

One effort to restore some of the wetlands and ecosystems in Mexico began last month, as water began flowing into the delta under an agreement between the U.S. and Mexican governments. The water releases in the delta, which will total 35,000 acre-feet from May to October, are intended to nourish vegetation and wildlife at habitat restoration sites where conservation groups planted cottonwoods and willows.

The influx of water is supposed to mimic a small portion of the floods that once swept across the delta toward the Sea of Cortez. This year’s releases amount to a smaller version of a planned flood that coursed through the delta in 2014. In that “pulse flow,” 105,000 acre-feet of water brought back a flowing river in areas that had been dry since floods in the late 1990s.

The releases in the delta this year, using water previously stored in Lake Mead, amount to just 5 inches of water in the reservoir. Much more of the water that passes through Hoover Dam is pumped to Phoenix, Tucson and Los Angeles and flows through canals to irrigate farmlands along the river from Parker to Yuma, and across the Coachella, Imperial and Mexicali valleys. © Mark Henle/The Republic Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border, is one of the great feats of engineering.
Low water levels bring risks

If the water declined about 125 feet from where it stands, below the elevation of 950 feet, Bernardo says, Hoover Dam would lose the ability to generate power.

“That's what we call minimum power pool,” Bernardo says.

If Mead falls further, the dam could still release water down to a level of 895 feet.

“At 895 and below, Hoover Dam is unable to pass water by any conventional means. So you would essentially have to pump it out of Lake Mead. That's what we call dead pool,” Bernardo says. “And at dead pool, Lake Mead still has 2.5 million acre-feet in storage, but there's just no way to get it out.”

If the lake declines that much, only the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which supplies Las Vegas, has an intake deep enough to continue pumping water. © Mark Henle/The Republic A view of the 30-foot diameter penstock (bottom) from the penstock access room on the Arizona side, May 11, 2021, at Hoover Dam, on the Arizona/Nevada border.

The risks of Mead falling to such lows gave impetus to the last round of negotiations, which led to the signing of the Drought Contingency Plan in 2019 at Hoover Dam.

The river would have been in a shortage years ago if the states and Mexico hadn’t made concerted efforts to prop up Lake Mead’s levels, Bernardo says, and those steps included various conservation programs that have yielded 4 million acre-feet over the past 15 years, about 50 feet of water in the lake.

During the unrelenting dry years, he says, “we knew that we couldn't postpone a shortage forever.”© Mark Henle/The Republic Mike Bernardo of the federal Bureau of Reclamation says that if the water level fell below the elevation of 950 feet, Hoover Dam would lose the ability to generate power.

He reiterates that the shortage measures, including the mandatory cutbacks, were adopted to reduce risks.

“And although it's scary that this will be the first time we're using them, they were designed by very smart people throughout the Colorado River Basin,” Bernardo says. “And let's hope that they work the way that they were designed to work.”

If the situation worsens, he says, everyone involved in managing the river’s water will get together again, as stipulated in the 2019 agreements, to take steps to protect the reservoirs. About 40 million people rely on water from the Colorado and its tributaries, he says, and “all of us as water managers have a responsibility to all of those that are in the basin.”

By mid-June, Lake Mead is set to decline to its lowest levels on record. Hoover Dam will soon hold the smallest amount of water since it was filled in the 1930s. The next few years may show how much water use needs to decrease to rebalance the river and reduce the risk that Hoover Dam might one day fall silent.

Follow reporter Ian James on Twitter: @ByIanJames.

Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.






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The power plant on the Arizona side of Hoover Dam on May 11, 2021.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Hoover Dam, a symbol of the modern West, faces an epic water shortage

Is the US government ready for the rise of artificial intelligence?

Robert Reich
Tue, 7 March 2023 



We’re at a Frankenstein moment.

An artificial intelligence boom is taking over Silicon Valley, with high-tech firms racing to develop everything from self-driving cars to chatbots capable of writing poetry.

Yet AI could also spread conspiracy theories and lies even more quickly than the internet already does – fueling political polarization, hate, violence and mental illness in young people. It could undermine national security with deepfakes.

In recent weeks, members of Congress have sounded the alarm over the dangers of AI but no bill has been proposed to protect individuals or stop the development of AI’s most threatening aspects.

Most lawmakers don’t even know what AI is, according to Representative Jay Obernolte, the only member of Congress with a master’s degree in artificial intelligence.

What to do?

Many tech executives claim they can simultaneously look out for their company’s interests and for society’s. Rubbish. Why should we assume that their profit motives align perfectly with the public’s needs?

Sam Altman – the CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for some of the most mind-blowing recent advances in AI – believes no company, including his, should be trusted to solve these problems. The boundaries of AI should be decided, he says, not by “Microsoft or OpenAI, but society, governments, something like that”.

But does anyone trust the government to do this? If not, how can “society” manage it? Where can we look for a model of how to protect ourselves from the downsides of an emerging technology with such extraordinary upsides, without stifling it?

One place to look is Herbert Hoover. Seriously. Not when Hoover was president and notoriously failed to do anything about the Great Depression, but when he was US secretary of commerce between 1921 to 1929.

One of Hoover’s great achievements a century ago, largely unrecognized and unremembered today, was managing the development of a new and crucial technology in the public interest.

That new technology was electricity. Thomas Edison and other entrepreneurs and the corporations they spawned were busily promoting all manner of electric gadgets.

Those gadgets had the potential to make life easier for millions of people. But they could also pose grave dangers. They could destroy buildings, and injure or kill people.

Hoover set out to ensure that the infrastructure for electricity – wires, plugs, connectors, fuses, voltage and all else – was safe and reliable. And that it conformed to uniform standards so products were compatible with one another.

He created these standards for safety, reliability, and compatibility by convening groups of engineers, scientists, academics, experts and sometimes even journalists and philosophers – and asking them to balance public and private interests. He then worked with the producers of electric gadgets to implement those standards.

Importantly, the standards were non-proprietary. No one could own them. No one could charge for their use. They were, to use the parlance of today, “open source.”

Much of today’s internet is based on open-source standards. We take them for granted. Computers could not communicate without shared models, such as HTTP, FTP, and TCP/IP.

Although digital standards haven’t protected the public from disinformation and hate speech, they have encouraged the creation of services such as Wikipedia, which are neither privately owned nor driven by profits.

In fact, you could view our entire system of intellectual property – copyrights, patents, and trade names – as premised on eventual open-source usage. After a certain length of time, all creations lose their intellectual property protections and move into the public domain where anyone is free to use them. (Not incidentally, when he was secretary of commerce, Hoover advanced and streamlined the intellectual property system.)

So what would Hoover have done about AI?

He wouldn’t wait for the producers of AI to set its limits. Nor would he trust civil servants to do it. Instead, he’d convene large and wide-ranging panels to identify AI’s potential problems and dangers, come up with ideas for containing them, and float the ideas with the public.

If the proposed standards stood the test, he’d make them voluntary for the industry – with the understanding that the standards could be modified if they proved impracticable or unnecessarily hobbled innovation. But once in place, if corporations chose not to adapt the standards, their AI products would lose intellectual property protections or be prohibited.

Hoover would also create incentives for the creation of open-source AI products that would be free to the public.

In other words, Hoover wouldn’t rely solely on business or on government, but on society to gauge the common good.

AI has the potential for huge societal benefits, but it could also become a monster. To guide the way, we need the leadership and understanding of someone like Herbert Hoover when he was secretary of commerce.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com

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Temperatures reached a deadly 48.8 °C during the Hoover Dam construction

Randi Mann
Fri, July 7, 2023 





HooverDamJumboRig
"Workers on a "Jumbo Rig"; used for drilling the Hoover Dam's tunnels." 

Courtesy of Wikipedia

This Day In Weather History is a daily podcast by Chris Mei from The Weather Network, featuring stories about people, communities and events and how weather impacted them.

--

On Monday, July 7, 1930, the construction of the Hoover Dam commenced. More than 21,000 men worked on the project, which is considered the eighth wonder of the world. The dam is located in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, between Nevada and Arizona.

1920px-Ansel Adams - National Archives 79-AAB-01

"Photograph of the Hoover Dam (formerly Boulder Dam) from Across the Colorado River." Courtesy of Wikipedia

The dam was constructed in response to the Mississippi River flood in 1927. The flood, which is one of the worst in Unites States history, inundated 70,000 km2 with up to 9 m in water. The flood caused around 500 deaths. President Herbert Hoover was committed to creating the infrastructure to prevent future flooding.

The Hoover Dam was built during the Great Depression; unemployment was high in the area. Six Companies, Inc. was contracted to be the structural architect.

Six Companies hired thousands of people, with 3,000 on the payroll by 1932. Peak employment reached 5,251 in July 1934. The company was contracted to house the employees. Six Companies built bunkhouses that were attached to the canyon wall. The homes were able to accommodate 480 single men, so those with families needed to find their own accommodations.

The Hoover Dam site experiences extremely hot weather, especially in the summer. During the summer of 1931, the heat reached 48.8 °C. Just between June 25 and July 26, 1931, 16 Dam employees died from heat prostration.

Even with all the extreme heat, Six Companies completed the Dam and turned it over to the federal government on March 1, 1936, over two years ahead of schedule.

The Hoover Dam generators provide power for utilities in Nevada, Arizona, and California. It's a tourist attraction and around a million people tour the dam each year.

To learn more about the Hoover Dam construction, listen to today's episode of "This Day in Weather History."

Subscribe to 'This Day in Weather History': Apple Podcasts | Amazon Alexa | Google Assistant | Spotify | Google Podcasts | iHeartRadio | Overcast'

Thumbnail: Courtesy of Department of Interior Bureau of Reclamation

A summer of protest, unemployment and presidential politics – welcome to 1932

July 1, 2020 8.27am EDT

An election looms. An unpopular president wrestles with historic unemployment rates. Demonstrations erupt in hundreds of locations. The president deploys Army units to suppress peaceful protests in the nation’s capital. And most of all he worries about an affable Democratic candidate who is running against him without saying much about a platform or plans.

Welcome to 1932.

I am a historian and director of the Mapping American Social Movements Project, which explores the history of social movements and their interaction with American electoral politics.

The parallels between the summer of 1932 and what is happening in the U.S. currently are striking. While the pandemic and much else is different, the political dynamics are similar enough that they are useful for anyone trying to understand where the U.S. is and where it is going.
Tanks and mounted troops advance to break up a Bonus Marchers’ camp of veterans protesting lost wages, Washington D.C., July 28, 1932. PhotoQuest/Getty Images
Multiracial street protest movement

In 1932, as in 2020, the nation experienced an explosion of civil unrest on the eve of a presidential election.

The Great Depression had deepened through three years by 1932. With 24% of the work force unemployed and the federal government refusing to provide funds to support the jobless and homeless as local governments ran out of money, men and women across the country joined demonstrations demanding relief.

Our mapping project has recorded 389 hunger marches, eviction fights and other protests in 138 cities during 1932.

Although less than the thousands of Black Lives Matter protests, there are similarities.

African Americans participated in these movements, and many of the protests attracted police violence. Indeed, the unemployed people’s movement of the early 1930s was the first important multiracial street protest movement of the 20th century, and police violence was especially vicious against black activists.

Atlanta authorities announced in June 1932 that 23,000 families would be cut from the list of those eligible for the meager county relief payments of 60 cents per week per person allocated to whites (less for Blacks). A mixed crowd of nearly 1,000 gathered in front of the Fulton County Courthouse for a peaceful demonstration demanding US$4 per week per family and denouncing racial discrimination.

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The biracial protest was unprecedented in Atlanta and yielded two results. The eligibility cuts were canceled, and police promptly hunted down one of the organizers, a 19-year-old Black communist named Angelo Herndon. He was charged with “inciting to insurrection,” a charge that carried the death penalty. Lawyers spent the next five years winning his freedom.
Protests over unemployment

Five hundred unemployed ‘Hunger Marchers’ protest on Boston Common on their way to the State House, demanding unemployment insurance and other relief measures, May 2, 1932. Bettman/Getty

But race was not the key issue of the 1932 protest wave. It was government’s failure to rescue the millions in economic distress.

Organizations representing the unemployed – many led by communists or socialists – had been active since 1930, and now in the summer of 1932 protests surged in every state. Here are examples from the Mapping American Social Movement Project timeline from one week in June:

• June 14

Hundreds of Chicago police mobilize to keep unemployed demonstrators at bay at the start of the Republican Party nominating convention.

• June 17

A so-called “hunger march” of 3,000 jobless in Minneapolis ends peacefully, but in Bloomington, Indiana, police use tear gas on 1,000 demonstrators demanding relief, while in Pittsburgh unemployed supporters crowd a courthouse to cheer the not-guilty verdict in an “inciting to riot” case.

• June 20

Police break up a march by 200 unemployed in Argo, Illinois, and a much larger protest by jobless in Rochester, New York. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, 500 protesters successfully demanded an end to evictions of unemployed mill workers; in Pittsburgh, protesters block the eviction of an unemployed widow. The same day in Kansas City, a mostly Black crowd of 2,000 pleads unsuccessfully with the mayor to restore a recently suspended relief program.
Farmers’ uprising

The unemployed protests in urban areas of 1932 seem similar to today’s protest culture, but that was not true in the farm belt.

Dealing with collapsing prices and escalating farm evictions, farmers in many regions staged near-uprisings. Black farmers in the cotton belt braved vigilante violence when, by the thousands, they joined the Alabama Sharecroppers Union, which advocated debt relief and the right of tenant farmers to market their own crops.

Newspaper headlines focused on the white farmers mobilizing in Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Minnesota and the Dakotas in the summer of 1932. The Farmer’s Holiday Association formed that year pledging to strike (“holiday”) to raise farm prices. The strike that began on August 15 involved sometimes heavily armed white farmers blocking roads to stop the shipment of corn, wheat, milk and other products. The strike withered after a few weeks, but farmers had sent a message, and some state legislatures quickly enacted moratoriums on farm foreclosures.

Counties that today are marked as Trump territory distinguished themselves in 1932 as centers of what became known as the “Cornbelt Rebellion.”
Farmers set up a roadblock near Sioux City, Iowa, during Farmer’s Holiday Strike, August 1932. State Historical Society of Iowa

Unrest helped FDR defeat Hoover

Periods of grassroots protest and civil unrest interact in unpredictable ways with presidential elections. In 1932, unrest helped Franklin Roosevelt defeat incumbent Herbert Hoover. Again, there are similarities between that summer and this one.

Democratic presidential candidate Roosevelt, like today’s Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, enjoyed the luxury of running on platitudes instead of programs. Roosevelt used the phrase “new deal” in his nomination acceptance speech, but details were few and it was not until he took office that the phrase acquired real meaning.

Roosevelt could avoid commitments because the political dynamics of 1932 forced the incumbent to play defense, much like today.

Herbert Hoover was no Trump, almost the opposite. Cautious, principled, quiet, a moderate Republican, he had made major errors in the first years of the Depression, and his reputation never recovered. Democrats accused him of inaction (which was not true), while the unemployed movements fixed the label “Hoovervilles” on the homeless encampments and shacktowns that sprang up in cities across the country.

Hoover’s credibility was further damaged in the summer of 1932 when more than 15,000 World War I veterans converged on Washington, D.C. under the banner of the Bonus Expeditionary Force, commonly called the Bonus Army. They demanded that Congress immediately pay them the bonuses they were due to get in 1945.

When the Senate rejected the proposal, the Bonus Army settled into a massive encampment across the Anacostia River from Capitol Hill.
Shacks burned by the U.S. Army in the shantytown constructed by protesters called the ‘Bonus Army’ after they were forced out by the military. Bettmann/Getty

A month later, Hoover called in U.S. Army troops. During a night of violence, the army burned thousands of tents and shacks and sent the Bonus Army marchers fleeing.

For Hoover, the deployment of U.S. Army units played out much as it did for Trump this May, when he had Lafayette Park violently cleared of protesters. Hoover’s action deepened his image problems and strengthened the sense that he lacked compassion for those in need, including those who had fought for their country only 14 years earlier.

Hoover tried to mobilize a backlash against the summer of protests, claiming that Communists were behind all of the unrest, including the Bonus Army, which in fact had banned all Communists. It didn’t work: Roosevelt won in a landslide.
The poor handling of the unrest and economic crisis by President Hoover, right, led to his election loss to Roosevelt, left. Roosevelt: Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Hoover: General Photographic Agency/Getty




In the end, the protests helped Democrats in the election of 1932. In Congress, Democrats gained 97 House seats and 12 in the Senate, taking control of Congress for the first time since 1918. And equally significant, they helped propel the agenda of the New Dealers, as the new administration prepared to take power and launch the ambitious legislation of the first 100 days.

Three years of grassroots action had forced even reluctant politicians to recognize the urgency of reform. The early New Deal would race to provide debt relief for farmers and homeowners, jobs for the unemployed, and public works projects – part of what demonstrators had been demanding for years.

Author

James N. Gregory
Professor of History, University of Washington