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the Unemployed Citizens League petitioned the U.S. Shipping Board to use a condemned ocean liner, the George Washington, as housing. The Los Angeles Street Railway Company donated fifty of its old streetcars to be used as living quarters. Some of the unemployed of New Orleans lived in houseboats on Lake Pontchartrain. The Detroit Department of Public Works borrowed 300 tents from the Michigan National Guard and planned a tent city to house homeless families. The city was a step behind the twenty families who had already formed a tent colony in the city’s Clark Park in August 1931. In New York, proposals for emegency housing included piers on Staten Island; the Bronx Terminal Market on the Harlem River, where fruits and vegetables were received into the city; and vacant warehouses and lofts.
    Except for miserable and scattered schemes such as these, the homeless were largely on their own. In the cities, police regularly rousted them from vacant lots, fire escapes, abandoned buildings, and subway platforms. Invariably, these sweeps picked up someone with a hard-luck tale that caught the attention of sharp-eyed police reporters, and readers opened their newspapers to learn of British heirs and formerly well-paid professionals among the indifferent depression’s victims. But romanticizing the homeless did nothing to ease their squalor, malnutrition, disease, and brutal exposure to the weather.
    “Nobody is actually starving,” said Hoover, for whom seven-course meals and black tie were customary whether he was hosting an official dinner or dining alone in the White House with his wife, Lou. “The hoboes, for example, are better fed than they have ever been. One hobo in New York got ten meals in one day.”
    The evidence contradicted him. New York City health authorities recorded twenty deaths by starvation in 1931, ninety-five in 1932. Numerous others were barely averted. Police in Danbury, Connecticut, found a mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter huddled in a makeshift shelter in the woods, where they had been eating apples and wild berries to survive. The same week, constables in North Babylon, Long Island, came upon a forty-four-year-old woman starving in a maple grove, where she had been sleeping in a pile of old clothes and eating scraps she had begged from local restaurants. Interviewing her, the police learned she was a registered nurse who had served in France during the world war but had been unable to find work for several months.
    But even hunger was subject to spin. The nation’s health was better than ever in 1931, said the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, because less money and less food meant people were no longer overeating.
    Food was not scarce. If anything, it was too plentiful. Farmers continued to utilize the productive capacity they had developed when Europe needed their food, but crops rotted in the fields now because there was no one to buy them and the farmers could not afford to harvest them. Wheat and corn could not be sold for what they cost to produce. Breadlines in the Midwest snaked past stuffed grain silos. Ranchers shot livestock rather than ship them to market; it cost $1.10 a head to transport a sheep that would sell for $1, while at the consumer end of the food chain, the many without jobs went hungry because at 16 cents a pound for bacon, 15 cents for a dozen eggs, 23 cents a pound for butter, and 13 cents a pound for beef chuck roast, food cost too much to buy. The same was true of wool and cotton. Bales of fabric for coats and dungarees and dresses piled up in warehouses, but at $7.50 for a child’s coat, $1.50 for a pair of overalls, and $1 for a woman’s dress, families all across the country could not afford to put even basic new clothes upon their backs.
    The extent of hunger, if not actual starvation, was highlighted when New York State’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, the first state agency set up to aid the unemployed, arranged for jobless men on relief to