In 1932, Americans Built Whole Towns From Scrap — So Why Did They Name Them After the President?

In October 1931, a jobless logger named Jesse Jackson and about twenty other men built shacks on nine empty acres of Seattle's waterfront. Around a campfire, one of them named the place: "This is the era of Hoover prosperity; let's call this place Hooverville." The city answered with kerosene at six in the morning, and burned the camp again a month later. By 1934 it held 639 people, 93 of them with at least two years of college, and a student who lived there wrote that it proudly bore the surname of "one of its distinguished founders." In this video, we open the records the shack towns and their president left behind: Jesse Jackson's own account of Seattle's Hooverville, Donald Roy's 1934 census of the camp, the St. Louis riverfront colony that named itself Hooverville in September 1931, Central Park's "Hoover Valley," Hoover's 1928 promise of "the final triumph over poverty," his February 1931 statement on relief, the Democratic publicist Charles Michelson, the night of July 28, 1932, when the Army burned the Bonus Army camp at Anacostia, the 1933 memo that took Hoover's name off his dam, and the bulldozers that ended Seattle's Hooverville on May 6, 1941. This is the story of how Americans built whole towns from scrap during the Depression, and why the name they gave those towns outlived the president it mocked. 💬 If your family remembers the shack towns, tell us in the comments: what did people in your town call those places? Sources: Jesse Jackson, "The Story of Hooverville, in Seattle" (in Schmid, Social Trends in Seattle, 1944): http://depts.washington.edu/depress/resour... Donald F. Roy, "Hooverville: A Study of a Community of Homeless Men in Seattle" (1935): https://depts.washington.edu/depress/resou... Herbert Hoover, Statement on Public vs. Private Financing of Relief Efforts, Feb. 3, 1931: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/... Statement About the Bonus Marchers, July 28, 1932 (with Hurley's order and MacArthur's press conference): https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/... Bureau of Reclamation, the naming of Hoover Dam: https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/History/... Where sources differ: Jackson's account is dated 1935 by the Seattle archive, 1938 by the University of Washington, and was printed in 1944. One account credits Michelson with printing "Hooverville" in 1930; the St. Louis colony was using the name by September 1931. Seattle's 1941 deadline to leave is given as May 1 or May 2. #AmericanHistory #Hooverville #GreatDepression #1930s #HerbertHoover #BonusArmy #Seattle #ShantyTown #Homelessness #NewDeal #FDR #DepressionEra #HistoryDocumentary #Documentary #OldAmerica