VintageSeattle.org

“I am just a simple person, living among simple people,” Jesse Jackson, an out-of-work lumberjack once said. “My status in life is the same as theirs, trying to do the best I know how to administer in my poor ways.” In October 1931 Jesse Jackson was long out of employment, without money, seeking relief from charities already overrun with men with similar stories. The Depression had come, Seattle was no safe harbor from it, and Jackson was one of thousands of simple people just trying to hold on and survive it. He helped found Hooverville, a shantytown near Pioneer Square, becoming its “Mayor.”

“I walked down to the waterfront to the vacant property of the Seattle Port Commission where a shipyard once was located,” he recalled. When the shipyard had moved, it had leftover a plethora of metal scrap, concrete, pits, timber, and tin. It could be used, he thought, “to build crude shelters, any of which would be a big improvement over the hard floors of the charitable institution.” He, and 20 other like-minded men, began building shacks. Within a few days, they built 50. Within third days, as more men came, 100.

The squatters were brought to the attention of city officials. The shacks were unfit for human habitation, though Jackson and his neighbors he called “the forgotten men”, inhabited them. Seattle Health officials posted notices on the makeshift shelter doors. Vacate in seven days they ordered.

Seven days later, Jackson recalls, “at 5 am, just as daylight was breaking, in one of the heaviest downpours of rain that fell in Seattle that fall, a regiment of uniformed officers of law and order swooped down upon us with cans of kerosene, and applied the torch.” The shanties burned. The officials left. The squatters rebuild. The officials came again. The shanties burned. The officials left. The squatters rebuilt again. Hooverville was born and reborn as a community for destitute men.

Seattle’s Hooverville was but one of many shantytowns that dotted the nation during the Great Depression. There were several in King County, in fact, including Louisville, located on Harbor Island, and elsewhere along the banks of the Duwamish River. Named, sarcastically after President Herbert Hoover, who slid the country into the Depression, Hoovervilles were home to tramps and hoboes, the umemployed and the unemployable, beggars, men down on their luck, just wanting a roof over their heads, no matter if it was made of thrown away scrap.

St. Louis, in 1930, had the nation’s largest Hooverville. Racially integrated, it had a mayor, churches and social institutions within its borders. A Hooverville sat in New York City’s Central Park at the future site of the Great Lawn and Turtle Pond. Washington D.C.’s Hooverville was home to 15,000 men at its peak. The camp was later demolished by the U.S. Army, commanded by General Douglas MacArthur and Major (later General) George S. Patton.

Seattle’s shantytown was nine acres, south of Pioneer Square at the former location of Skinner and Eddy Shipyard Plant 2 that closed in 1920. The residents built houses out of whatever they could find. Leslie Erb noted in 1935, visiting Hooverville for a sociological study, one such abode. “It was a little, green two-roomed shack, with window flower boxes neatly planted.” The owner, age 50, was “seemingly clean.” Invited in, Erb noticed that “the floors were laid with linoleum, his bed covered with a clean, white spread; his suit and overcoat neatly folded were on hangers.” Other hovels were “rough, unpainted.” They were “dark and gloomy.” They smelled of fish. “I was impressed,” he wrote, “with the scene of activity around Hooverville. Everybody seemed to be working at something.”

Working, but not being paid to work. They were being counted, too. They were loggers like Jesse Jackson, civil engineers, butchers and minors, barrel-head makers and dope peddlers, tinsmiths and teachers, electricians and missionaries. During March 1934 a census was taken of Seattle’s Hooverville. 632 men and 7 women lived in 479 shanties. They ranged in age from 15 to 73. They were 292 foreign-born Caucasians, 186 U.S.-born Caucasians, 120 Filipinos, 29 Negroes, 3 Costa Ricans, 2 Mexicans, 2 Native Americans, 2 Eskimos and a man from Chile.

“Hooverville,” Jackson noted, “is a colony of industrious men, the most of whom are busy trying to hold their heads up and be self-supporting and respectable. A lot of work is required in order to stay here, consequently, the lazy man does not tarry long in this place.” The place, a 12 to 15 square block community had shacks built out of every sort of material. Some were no bigger than piano boxes. Some had five rooms. There was no gas, no electricity, no running water in Hooverville. Kerosene was used for light and wood was used for cooking and heating.

In the winter of 1934, Donald Francis Roy, a University of Washington student, paid $15 to settle in with the forgotten men of Hooverville. He was working on his master’s thesis. It was entitled “Hooverville, a Study of a Community of Homeless Men in Seattle.” Roy wrote of “a conglomerate of grotesque dwellings, a Christmas-mix assortment of American junk that stuck together in congested disarray like sea-soaked jetsam spewed on the beach.” The shanties were “scattered over the terrain in insane order.” It was a labyrinth that Roy was convinced could be put in some sort of order.

It was Jesse Jackson and “the college boy,” as Jackson called Roy, who divided the community into 12 lettered parts. Each residence was identified by a letter and number whitewashed beside the door. With that, relief payments could be delivered and residents could register to vote.

The residential demographic was this, according to Roy, who interviewed 650 Hooverville residents. Mr. Hooverville was “jobless, propertyless, familyless.” They were “rustlers,” scrounging to improve their dwellings and bummed food from grocery stores. They were “shovel stiffs” living there, a place where “the spirit of camaraderie is carried over racial barriers.”

Camaraderie was there, but not always. There were undesirables amongst them. “Hooverville’s record was dark, indeed,” noted Leslie Erb. “It showed that stabbings, fights, stealing, and drunken brawls had taken place.” Jesse Jackson, and others, did their best to curb this element within their community. “The most of our people try to do the right thing.” He was aghast at “unfortunates who drink denuded alcohol or canned heat.” Trouble came and went and came again like the seasons. Jackson and others handled the booze element when they could. When they couldn’t, the police were called. “The most unruly offenders must also suffer a punishment meted out by the residents of Hooverville.” The offender’s shack was removed.

The city was never fond of Hooverville but let the squatters be left alone if the area was safe and sanitary. By the end of the 1930s, however, wartime manufacturing was looming, shipbuilding was returning, and the local economy was steadily improving. Hoovervillle was beginning to fade away. Men found jobs, pulled up stakes.

Finally, in spring 1941, the Seattle City Council convened a shack abatement committee chaired by a Health Department representative. Eviction notices were posted. Jackson, and the hundreds of other men, had shuffled off to other towns, other jobs. On April 10, 1941, Hooverville was bulldozed and then burned to the ground.