Quotes about Hoovervilles

John F. Kennedy

I never felt the Great Depression firsthand. I learned about it at Harvard.

Ralph Abernathy

Everything I learned about the Great Depression was from a college textbook.

Charles E. Coughlin

Roosevelt or Ruin

Coughlin was an early and valued supporter of FDR, but after Roosevelt’s election the priest became dissatisfied that Roosevelt was not radical enough. FDR also wanted to distance himself from many of the Fascist and Socialist ideas of Coughlin and especially his racism and anti-Semitism. Coughlin then flip-flopped and became a vicious Roosevelt Critic. Few realize that he ever supported Roosevelt.

Carl Reiner

I've lived through the Great Depression.

Sarah Weinman

Out of the ashes of the Great War came the freewheeling cultural renaissance that was the Jazz Age, but the decade-long party of flapper dresses and bootlegging came to a crashing halt with the Crash of '29 - triggering the Great Depression and the New Deal that would help America get back on its feet, just in time for another, greater war.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Remember 1932. You remember the closed banks and the breadlines and the starvation wages; the foreclosures of homes and farms, and the bankruptcies of business; the Hoovervilles: and the young men and women of the Nation facing a hopeless, jobless, future: the closed factories and mines and mills: the ruined and abandoned farms: the stalled railroads and the empty clocks; the blank despair of a whole Nation—and the utter impotence of the Federal Government.

Hoovervilles were camps of people who lived in city parks or empty land. Tar paper shacks sheltered some—others lived in boxes. People had no work and no prospects of work; they had no money for rent; they just lived a meager existence as best they could under conditions that today exist only in the third world. They were named Hoovervilles for the President at the time whose ineptness and philosophy simply let things deteriorate. Republicans were critical of many of Roosevelt’s economic policies, but the president would periodically remind them and the nation of what the situation was when the Republicans last ran the country.

S. Truett Cathy

In the Great Depression, you bought something if you had the cash to buy it.

Kathi Appelt

They were the darkest of times, the years following the crash of the stock market in 1929. Thousands of people across the United States were cast out of their Jobs, off their farms, out of their homes and apartments, and into the crushing depths of poverty.

Ron Howard

I've always been interested in the Depression as this very dramatic pivotal period in American history.

Albert II of Belgium

The crisis of the 1930s and the populist reactions of that time must not be forgotten.

James Garner

I was a Depression kid, growing up in Oklahoma.

William O'Neill

The 1930s had been a time of tremendous economic distress. And the unemployment rate was enormously high by any historic standard.

Hoovervilles Quotes