A crucial election was approaching and the country was desperate. Despite promises that economic conditions were improving, nearly a quarter of the US was out of work as voters headed to the polls in 1932.
It was the darkest time since the civil war, a period so dire that in California’s capital people fought each other for work. In early 1931, a crowd of 200 men scuffled over a handful of temporary jobs moving back-breaking loads of granite, the Sacramento Bee reported.
That same newspaper urged its readers to find odd jobs to save fellow citizens from hunger and homelessness. Those who had already lost shelter set up along the banks of the Sacramento River, as unhoused people would do decades later, and were, in some cases, near starvation, according to the Bee.
