Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to Se below... Hoover didn't cause the Great Depression...

Hoovervilles were the names given to the shantytowns...
Mary Anne — (archived)

...that grew up during the Great Depression. They were named that by the people who lived in them.

They blamed Hoover for the Crash -- which, as we know, was not his fault -- and for the subsequent Depression -- which was not entirely his fault, though he wasn't entirely innocent either. They also blamed him for his insistence that the economy should correct itself, as if it were made of numbers, not people. There, I'm afraid they were right.

The conditions faced by hundreds of thousands of people during the Depression were horrendous squalor and starvation. Many people who would not otherwise have done so became predatory thieves, and others fell under the sway of demagoguery. Despair has a powerful effect on people. It's never a good one.

The tone of the post to which I replied was pretty much "I've got mine and to hell with everyone else". I suggest you learn from the social history of that period exactly what happens when so many people don't have anything to call theirs, and apply the lesson to the world your children will be living in.

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