Hoover's Individualism

Today the government provides many forms of aid for farmers, the unemployed, the disabled, and others in need. However, at the beginning of the Depression these programs did not exist. President Hoover opposed direct welfare payments to people. Why was the government slow to help individuals at the beginning of the Depression? At the time of the Great Depression, the Federal Government had never done anything on such a large scale as to create programs like the Reconstruction Finance System (RFS) or the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). Furthermore, Hoover’s policy at the beginning of the depression was to let people help themselves, or “rugged individualism”. Therefore helping individuals was against Hoover’s philosophy and was seen as very radical at the time. Hoover, on the matter of government interference stated, “Any practice of business which would dominate the country but
Farmers were crushed in debt, often forcing them to foreclose their farms. Veterans returned to the country jobless and homeless. Industrial workers were put out of work and in some cases could not afford nickel-a-night flophouses, forcing them to sleep in the streets. The group which suffered the most were the industrial workers, being put out of work which never paid enough in the first place. In 1933, one-quarter of citizens were unemployed, left with nothing to do but search for jobs. As stated by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, “...the men and women for whom life had changed most drastically and immediately were no longer in the factories. They were among the masses of the unemployed, and their struggle had to take another form, in another institutional context”(para. 1). The newly unemployed industrial workers often got evicted from their homes, not being able to pay rent any longer. Every day there was a new struggle to find food, shelter, and warmth in the big cities as a jobless