“The Rarig kids ain’t going hungry, so why should we?” yelled the little girl as she brandished her sign.
“Why can’t you give my Dad a job?” asked the boy dressed in workers’ overalls, who’d been told what his sign said.
The Great Depression had gripped the nation. The economy had collapsed, and the days were growing darker for working people. Every day was famine, anguish and misery. The farmers had pulled up everything in their fields. There were no more potatoes growing, no more rutabaga or pumpkins. Nothing. The fields were deserted, upturned. “We have nothing left!” cried one protester. Things had gone too far. In Chicago, the fat cats strutted along the sidewalks while ordinary folks pushed and shoved for bowls of soup. In New York, Wall Street brokers watched poor people line up around the block for handfuls of sugar. In Columbus, Ohio, tycoons like Mr. Rarig handed out stale bread to workers who had agreed to work for half-pay. Day-in, day-out, the chasm widened between rich and poor. The best-off were growing richer than ever; there were ten men in the country with enough to buy the whole world, and ten million who could not afford to eat. Rarig, whose name was written on the little girl’s sign, was one of the tycoons whose belly and pockets remained swollen even as the food crisis worsened. He had one of the most extensive and modern production facilities in all of America. His factory made Corliss engines, gun carriages for the military, blast furnaces, steel rolling machines and all manner of heavy metal structures. Heavy industry, they called it. But you couldn’t eat metal. A cannon carriage wouldn’t save your life. The crowd chanted: “We’re hungry, and we want to work!”
The men had lost their jobs and their bank accounts were empty. There was nothing left under their mattresses, or in their wallets. The banks, like most American institutions, had gone belly-up. Here in Columbus their local bank had shut down, its safe doors hanging wide open. The men were hungry, and the children protested alongside their parents to express their distress and desolation. No longer able to pay their rent, families were packed into shantytowns known as Hoovervilles, which began to spring up after the 1929 Wall Street Crash. These were named after President Herbert Hoover, whose actions had failed to stem the rising tide of unemployment and misery. In 1932 the new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, promised the people jobs. He was resolved to lift America out of poverty. He put forward the “New Deal” to save the economy, but it could not fix everything overnight. Men were killing birds to eat, and trapping rats to fill their bellies. It was madness.
“There’s no food left in America,” the little girl said to her mother. “I’m hungry, but I won’t say anything to Papa,” she went on, proudly.
“My father works like a dog to put bread on the table,” the little boy boasted.
But the wooden table was bare, and wood did not sustain them. The unthinkable had happened to the nation. Americans were going hungry. Men wanted to work and were desperate to go back to the factories, to the construction sites or the roadworks, to the fields or to the scaffolds, laboring a hundred feet above the hard ground if they had to.
Poor fellows, those desperate fathers. Hunger is the worst thing that can gnaw at a man.
Alan Alfredo Geday
コメント