American experience

This film takes a long journey downward to the most desperate year of the Great Depression, 1932. In the industrial north, while factories were idled, soup kitchens, pawn shops and "Hooverville" shantytowns proliferated. In the south, crops failed; families starved. Eighty percent of the workforce was unemployed. An army of veterans and their families marched towards Washington to claim the cash bonuses promised by Congress and Herbert Hoover. Twenty thousand people set up camps and began making radical demands on behalf of all of America's hungry and poor. President Hoover, considered the enemy, loaned them tents, cots and rations. But when Douglas MacArthur's Army troops attacked the protesters, their wives and children, burnt their shacks and possessions, the country became convinced that their President had no compassion for the dispossessed. The collapse of the Hoover administration paved the way for the meteoric rise of FDR.

Aired as part of the PBS series, American Experience.