The Worst Hard Time (19 page)

In the last years of the wheat boom, Bennett had become increasingly frustrated at how the government seemed to be encouraging an exploitive farming binge. He went directly after his old employer, the Department of Agriculture, for misleading people. Farmers on the Great Plains were working against nature, he thundered in speeches across the country; they were asking for trouble. Even in the late 1920s, before anyone else sounded an alarm, Bennett said people had sown the seeds of an epic disaster. The government continued to insist, through official bulletins, that soil was the one "resource that cannot be exhausted." To Bennett, it was arrogance on a grand scale.

"I didn't know so much costly misinformation could be put into a single brief sentence," he said.

He cited the land college report, which stated that Oklahoma had lost 440 million tons of topsoil, and another survey out of Texas, which said 16.5 million acres had been eroded to a thin veneer. And now that people were leaving the land to blow, it looked to Bennett as if they were walking away from an accident without accepting any responsibility. What people were doing was not just a crime against nature, he said, but would ultimately starve the nation. The land would become barren; the country would not be able to feed itself.

Americans had become a force of awful geology, changing the face of the earth more than "the combined activities of volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes and all the excavations of mankind since the beginning of history."

A
SEARCH FOR SKUNK HIDES
sent Bam White wandering around the High Plains in the year that Americans threw out their president. On the road, the cowboy found that a lot of his countrymen were living like him, close to the bone, looking twice at another man's garbage, swapping half a day's labor for a meal. He hoisted his bindle and moved from camp to camp, hearing about low-grade opportunities to stay alive. A man could pick citrus in deep Texas for a nickel a bushel, or collect bottles for bootleggers at a dime a bucket load, or cut asparagus in the spring for twelve cents an hour. Cashing in a skunk hide, at $2.50 apiece, seemed more dignified and less hard on the back of a man in his late fifties. What Bam White saw on the road made him shudder. There was a big "Hooverville" in Oklahoma City, thousands of people living out of orange-crate shacks or inside the mildewed, rusted-out hulks of junk cars. Entire towns were broke, shutting down city services. In the string of communities that had sprouted up along the new rail lines, schoolhouses closed, unable to pay teachers or heat classrooms. Texhoma, just up the road from Dalhart, disconnected its streetlights. Couldn't afford to bring light to darkness. The land was baked, brown, and blowing, and there wasn't much feed left for cattle, and still in the cafés of Clayton or Boise City was Rudy Vallee singing that life is just a bowl of cherries. Bam returned home to kids sick and coughing in the two-room house that leaked wind. He rubbed a mixture of skunk oil, turpentine, and
kerosene on Melt's chest, a family remedy, and Melt said he felt better. But at school, the kids said the boy smelled like road kill.

When you're hungry, you listen when a politician talks about food, and in the election of 1932, growling stomachs drove many people to develop a sudden interest in democracy. Alfalfa Bill Murray said if he were president nobody would go without bread, butter, bacon, or beans. The man from Toadsuck said the problem was that America had gone soft. Look at those college people at Oklahoma A&M, asking for public money to build a swimming pool. "As far as I am concerned they can go to the creek to swim," he said. Murray thought everyone should get a piece of land, get out of the crowded and unworkable cities, and turn back the clock. With his wrinkled suits and cigar that seemed to be an extension of his mouth, Murray took to the hustings in the 1932 Democratic primary season, planting Four B's clubs. Hoover was sinking fast. Most Americans paid no federal income tax in 1932. But Hoover wanted to tax the untaxed to pay for a sizeable deficit. He scoffed at the pictures of fruit vendors on city streets; they were selling apples at five cents apiece, he said, because it was more profitable than working a regular job. The Republicans had been routed in the 1930 midterm elections, losing seventeen seats in the Senate and control of the House. The presidential election year of 1932 looked to be even worse for Hoover's party. In the capital, a whiff of genuine class warfare was in the air. Congress voted to raise taxes across the board on the wealthy to cries of "Soak the rich!" Others pushed for an estate tax, taking nearly half the worth of anything over ten million dollars.

Hoover was an engineer and entrepreneur who was worth four million by the start of the First World War. As president, his past statements haunted him like a bill collector. It was not just his inaugural prediction that the United States was close to eliminating poverty forever, nor his prosperity-around-the-corner forecasts. One statement, defining character by how much money somebody had, followed Hoover everywhere. "If a man has not made a million dollars by the time he is forty, he is not worth much," Hoover had said in the giddy days, when America was a crapshoot with good odds.

The national unemployment rate remained at 25 percent. It seemed as if the country had been sick forever. The economist John Maynard Keynes was asked if there was ever a worse time. "It was called the Dark Ages," Keynes said. "And it lasted four hundred years."

To Murray, anybody who could stand up straight and string four sentences together had a shot at being president. One wing of the Democratic Party favored the 1928 nominee, Al Smith, but you know about Catholics, Murray said. And then at the other end of the spectrum were the Reds; Murray had shown he would deal with socialists when he sent the National Guard to Henryetta, Oklahoma, to break up a May Day parade last year.

Out of New York came a governor from the moneyed class, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he drove Murray to fits—being from that hated family. (FDR's cousin, Teddy, had forced Murray to remove a white supremacist plank from the Oklahoma constitution before he would allow it to join the union.) At first, Franklin Roosevelt was dismissed as a man without heft, a dilettante running on one of the nation's great names. Then he took up the cause of the "forgotten man"—the broken farmer on the plains, the apple vendor in the city, the factory hand now hitting the rails. And though he spoke with an accent that sounded funny to anyone outside the mid-Atlantic states, and he seemed a bit jaunty with that cigarette holder, Roosevelt roused people with a blend of hope and outrage. He knew hardship and the kind of emotional panic that comes when your world collapses. He had been felled by double pneumonia in 1918, which nearly killed him, and polio in 1921, which left him partially paralyzed. He had been told time and again in the prime of his young adulthood that he had no future, that he would not walk again, that he might not live much longer.

"If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your toe, after that anything would seem easy," he said.

Hoover believed the cure for the Depression was to prime the pump at the producer end, helping factories and business owners get up and running again. Goods would roll off the lines, prosperity would follow. Roosevelt said it made no sense to gin up the machines
of production if people could not afford to buy what came out the factory door.

"These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized, the indispensable units of economic powers," FDR said on April 7, 1932, in a radio speech that defined the central theme of his campaign. He called for faith "in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid." That forgotten man was likely to be a person with prairie dirt under the fingernails.

"How much do the shallow thinkers realize that approximately one half of our population, fifty or sixty million people, earn their living by farming or in small towns where existence immediately depends on farms? They have today lost their purchasing power. Why? They are receiving less than the cost to them of growing these farm products."

As the campaign wore on, prices fell further. In No Man's Land, a farmer could get only six cents for a dozen eggs, four cents a pound for a hog or chicken.

At the Democratic convention in Chicago, Murray roared one last time, joining the forces trying to stop Roosevelt. But FDR won the nomination on the third ballot. Alfalfa Bill was crushed; he finished with twenty-three delegates, a curious presence, the Four B's clubs gone, unbending even as "Happy Days Are Here Again" started to play and people sang:

"
Your cares and troubles are gone
There'll be no more from now on.
"

Murray glowered. "Object of many an urban stare was the rustic figure of Governor William Henry (Alfalfa Bill) Murray of Oklahoma sipping gallons of black coffee, chewing soggy cigar butts," wrote
Time
magazine. Oklahoma, Murray insisted, would vote for Roosevelt only "'after frost—and frost our way don't come until after the election.'"

In November, Roosevelt carried Oklahoma and every other state but six, mostly in New England. Hoover said the Democrats under Roosevelt had become "the party of the mob." The mob voted. FDR's take in Oklahoma was 73 percent; in Texas it was 88 percent. Alfalfa
Bill Murray later said that Franklin Roosevelt—son of Hudson River Valley Protestant aristocracy, cousin to a president, product of Groton and Harvard—was a Jew, who kept his ancestry secret.

In March 1933, the new president was sworn in on a snowy day that seemed to match the winter mood of the country. Hoover, his tank of ideas empty, handed Roosevelt a shell of a country, its confidence shot. "We have done all that we can do," Hoover said on his last day in office. "There is nothing more to be done."

Roosevelt did not waste an hour. The gates of possibility sprang open, and Roosevelt went on a hundred-day dash. For American capitalism, it had been a truly frightening time, full of "dark realities," as Roosevelt said. Money was not circulating, even in the capital. James A. Farley, the postmaster general, said he could not cash a check in Washington. The president blamed "unscrupulous money lenders" and "a generation of self-seekers." Some in his government urged him to nationalize the banks. After all, they had robbed a nation of savers, the argument went, disregarding the laws of nature in a binge of speculative excess. Roosevelt immediately called a bank holiday, four days to stabilize a system in which nine thousand banks had failed in three years. And then he took to the airwaves.

"I want to talk for a few minutes about banking."

It was his first radio chat with the country, just days after his inaugural. Roosevelt tried to reassure people that when the banks reopened, the system would stay afloat. But privately, he told reporters later in what he thought was an off-the-record session, he was afraid that there was not enough money to prevent another run. "On Friday afternoon last we undoubtedly didn't have adequate currency," he said to the informal press gathering. "No question about it: there wasn't enough circulating money to go around." He called Congress into session and signed the Emergency Banking Bill into law—eight hours after it had been introduced. It worked. By the end of Roosevelt's first week in office, deposits exceeded withdrawals. A few months later, more provisions were added to the new law, insuring individual deposits up to ten thousand dollars. He told people they could take their savings out of mattresses and from beneath the floor. The government would back their dollars.

Next up: try to save the farm. Free-market agricultural economics was over, for good. Look what it had done, Roosevelt said: America had produced more food than any country in history, and farmers were being run off the land, penniless, while the cities couldn't feed themselves. The average farmer was earning three hundred dollars a year—an 80 percent drop in income from a decade earlier. From now on, government would try to shape the price and flow of food. To force prices up enough for farmers to make a living, Roosevelt had the government buy surplus corn, beans, and flour, and distribute it to the needy. Over six million pigs were slaughtered, and the meat given to relief organizations. Crops were plowed into the ground—like slitting your wrist, to some farmers. In the South, when horses were first directed to the fields to rip out cotton, they balked. Next year, the government would ask cattlemen and wheat growers to reduce supply in return for cash. Hoover had been leery of meddling with the mechanics of the free market. Under Roosevelt, the government
was
the market. The Agricultural Adjustment Act created the framework, and the Civilian Conservation Corps drummed up the foot soldiers. They would try to stitch the land back together. Build dams, bridges. Restore forests. Keep water from running away. Build trails in the mountains, roads on the prairie, lakes and ponds. In May, Roosevelt signed a bill giving two hundred million dollars to help farmers facing foreclosure. Now, before some nester's land could be taken to satisfy a bank loan, there was a place of last resort.

The Volstead Act was amended to permit the sale of 3.2 percent beer, and by December, the rest of federal prohibition was gone. Signs went up in Boise City: "
BEER IS HERE!
" But some counties in the southern plains kept prohibition. Dalhart was still dry, meaning the whiskey stills would stay in business and prescriptions for spirits would continue at the drugstore.

That son of a Carolina cotton farmer, Big Hugh Bennett, continued to rage against the killing of the land by his countrymen. What was happening in Oklahoma, in particular, appalled him.

"It seems not so long ago since hundreds of homesteaders, at the crack of muskets fired by United States troops, were rushing into the
Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma for the purpose of locating free farmsteads," he said. "What has happened in this region since is tragic beyond belief."

Bennett could make these kinds of statements and not seem like a scientific nag or an urban elite, because he had an earthy populism. He milked cows and fed slop to hogs on his own farm. He chopped cordwood for winter fuel. He knew soil, but he also knew every farmer's daughter joke. He could talk cotton in the South, wheat in Kansas, oranges in California. He loved nothing more than digging with his big hands in earth that was the greatest of American endowments. And at the end of the day, he poured himself a few tumblers of bourbon and swapped tall tales.