Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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AMERICAN STORIES
138
From Plenty to Plenty of Nothing:
Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover
Warren G. Harding got elected president in 1920, relying on a single word
for his campaign—“normalcy”: a comforting word that promised no more
wars, no more struggle, no more reforms, no more change. Harding was a
conservative, chain-smoking Republican who—like his successor Calvin
Coolidge—let businessmen do their thing without much interference.
B
y the time Harding took the oath of office in 1921, the first Red Scare,
a national paranoia about the spread of communism, had ended after the
often-warrantless arrests of more than 4,000 foreign resident aliens in thirty-
three cities under suspicion of Communist Party ties. New York City police
officers beat detainees with “makeshift clubs ripped from the stair rails,”
1
and federal officers abused other detainees before deporting them from the
country. J. Edgar Hoover, later the first director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI), had zealously arranged the raids. With the Red Scare
over, President Harding got down to the business of doing very little. Yet
a series of scandals marred his presidency. Nan Britton, a woman from
Harding’s hometown, claimed that she and the president had been having
an affair, sometimes in a White House coat closet. And in what became
known as the Teapot Dome scandal, investigators revealed that Secretary
of the Interior Albert Fall had illegally leased federal oil reserves in Teapot
Dome, Wyoming, to oilmen friends for the whopping sum of $400,000 in
personal “loans.” Harding’s time in office thus included a fair amount of
“normal” political behavior. He died in 1923 while still in office.
Upon Harding’s death, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, “Silent Cal,” was
sworn into office by his father—a notary public—while on vacation in Maine,
an understated ceremony for an understated president. Coolidge continued
Harding’s policies of noninterference with business, summing up his philoso-
phy
by saying, “The chief business of the American people is business.” In
1924, in an effort to placate citizens worried about the supposedly anarchic
influence of certain foreigners, Coolidge signed the most racially restrictive
immigration bill in American history, essentially stopping immigration from
everywhere other than northern and western Europe. Like Harding and, later,
Herbert Hoover, Coolidge endorsed tariff hikes (taxes on incoming goods) in
an effort to protect domestic manufacturing and farm produce. In a world that
was already globalized, however, this kind of international tax mostly served
as a hurdle to slow the exchange of goods, ideas, and technologies and ended
up making bad times more likely rather than less. Coolidge also vetoed a law
to give cash bonuses to World War I veterans in 1945, but Congress passed
the law over his veto. Otherwise, Coolidge contented himself with minor
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INTO THE GREAT DEPRESSION
pranks, like pushing all the buttons on his desk just to see his secretaries
come scrambling into the office all at once in a flustered flurry of notebooks
and pens. Calvin Coolidge was a popular president who avoided any taint of
scandal and presided over what seemed like a golden age of prosperity.
In 1923, Kodak Corporation unveiled equipment for viewing home mov-
ies,
while in the United States neon signs first flickered into sight “as . . .
accent[s] for fantasies: movie houses, cocktail lounges, casinos.”
2
In 1924,
with 1,400 radio stations nationwide, nearly 3 million radio set owners could
turn in to the local selection, and theaters showed Walt Disney’s first cartoon
featuring a real woman interacting with cartoon characters, Alice’s Day at
Sea. In 1925, the first $4 million movie, Ben
Hur, was released while Warner
Brothers engineers worked on “talkies.” In 1926, so many commercial radio
stations were broadcasting that they clamored for governmental regulation
because their signals were mixing. And in 1927, Ford Motor Company sold
its 15 millionth car (while overall car ownership skyrocketed from 8 million
jalopies in 1920 to 22 million by 1930). Cal could stay silent. Business was
talking for him.
The
third president during the 1920s was Herbert Hoover, a hero in his
own right, well liked for his almost-rags to glittering-riches origins and for
his humanitarian relief work during the Great War, when he had organized
food deliveries for the beleaguered masses in Belgium. Born a Quaker into
humble, rural origins in Iowa and raised in Oregon, Hoover studied at Stanford
University and made money in international mining, living overseas more than
in the United States while still young. Steeped in the belief that a man became
a man through grit, sweat, determination, and his own merits, Hoover was
mentally unprepared for the spiraling financial disasters that started in 1929,
his first year in office. When he accepted the nomination for president in 1928,
Hoover had been certain that bright skies and fat paychecks were waiting for
every American: “We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over
poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing
from among us.”
3
By 1930, people could tell that poverty had not been licked,
and they needed help. Hoover wanted them to help themselves.
The
Great Depression was not Herbert Hoover’s fault. He had been in
office for less than a year when the stock market crashes began in October
1929. However, by the time Hoover left office in early 1933, much of the
economy had been gutted, and he had done little to alleviate the suffering
or to improve the outlook for either capitalists or laborers. When about
150,000 farm families faced starvation in drought-afflicted Arkansas at the
end of 1930, Hoover refused to authorize direct food relief. He was not cruel
or heartless, but he had never experienced hunger himself, had never gone
without a meal, and this rich man—who sipped grapefruit juice every morn-
AMERICAN STORIES
140
ing after a brisk exercise—did not believe, could not believe, that citizens of
his country actually had no food to eat. Resistant to reality or too shielded
from it, Hoover informed journalists, “No one is actually starving,” when in
fact some Americans actually were.
4
In England, Arkansas, about 300 farm-
ers marched into town on January 3, 1931, and informed the authorities they
would either take food or allow the Red Cross to save face and authorize the
disbursement. The Red Cross said it would pay for up to $2.50 in food per
person. Red Cross officials might have been nearly broke themselves, but they
were not stupid. The immediate crisis passed, but national papers picked up
the incident and labeled it a “riot.” Hunger and sorrow were being thrust into
Hoover’s face. (Later, as if to solidify his image as removed and uncaring,
Hoover sarcastically recalled in his Memoirs, “Many persons left their jobs
for the more profitable one of selling apples.”
5
)
In a sardonic tribute to the president, urban shantytowns of the unemployed
were called “Hoovervilles.” In every city of size, ragged rows of squalid nests
made from packing crates, cardboard, and corrugated metal scrounged from
scrap yards equaled home for thousands of Americans. But not everyone was
reduced to a nickel and a song; while some people had to roost in a Hoover-
ville,
others either kept their car or earned enough to buy a new one. Car sales
climbed during the 1930s—nearly 3 million autos were purchased. Never a
nation to entirely lose its sense of humor, Americans managed to laugh at
comedian Will Rogers’s quip, “We’re the first nation in the history of the world
to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.”
6
Former farmers fleeing the dust
bowl of Oklahoma and Kansas loaded chickens and couches into the backs of
their autos and drove west, looking for any kind of work on the Pacific Coast.
The laughter stopped where starvation started, and something would have to
be done. Hoover, however, only repeated his calls for private acts of charity
and other nongovernmental forms of aid, particularly through the Red Cross,
which simply did not have the resources to feed the masses.
The Bonus Expeditionary F
orce and the Election of
Franklin D
. Roosevelt
Out of work and out of patience, a thirty-four-year-old former World War
I medic named Walter Waters took matters into his own hands after losing
his last job at a cannery in 1930. In the spring of 1932, Waters seized some
railroad cars in Portland, Oregon, and led cross-country the first small group
of what would soon become an orderly but haggard legion of World War I
veterans calling themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF). As the
train sped across the continent, bisecting mountain passes and chasing the
Midwest horizon, veterans by the hundreds hopped on board. By June more
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INTO THE GREAT DEPRESSION
than 20,000 thick arrived in Washington, DC, to beg for early payment of
their promised service bonuses, $1.25 apiece for each day spent overseas,
$1 for each day spent in the States, which would have equaled about $1,000
apiece as of 1945 when the bonuses were slated to be paid under the original
plan. The “Bonus Army” had been inspired by a Texas congressman, Wright
Patman, who had tried in 1929 to get his colleagues to initiate immediate pay-
ment
of the bonuses. The bill went nowhere other than into the newspapers,
where it caught Walter Waters’s attention. He had been having a miserable
time making a living before the Wall Street woes of 1929, and prospects had
only deteriorated for him and his wife. From battlefield medic to the elected
“general” of the BEF, Waters stood outside the Capitol Building with thou-
sands
of his men on a hot June day to hear how the House of Representatives
would deal with demands for early payment of the bonus.
On
June 15, the House approved immediate payment, a vote paved by the
dying speech of a Tennessee congressman, Edward Eslick, who had keeled
over the day before on the floor of the House, midway and mid-sentence
through an impassioned plea for approval. Only miles away at the main BEF
camp, the New York Times noted that “veterans . . . lowered many of the
tattered banners flying from their crazy shacks” and took up a collection of
nickels to buy a wreath in honor of Eslick, who had spent his last breath on
their behalf.
7
But two days later, the Senate, unwilling to raise taxes to fund
the $2.5 billion bonus, voted not to pay the veterans before the scheduled
date of 1945. The Bonus Army had come from all over the country, hitching
free rides on empty railroad cars or walking or even whirring in by plane.
Once in the capital, they had encamped peacefully, up to 15,000 men at the
Anacostia flats across the Anacostia River from downtown, where some
built tiny houses with picket fences. No one had been allowed inside the
main camp without first proving he had no weapons, and the camp had been
racially integrated. Others stayed in Hoovervilles on Pennsylvania Avenue
and in abandoned buildings without exterior walls. After news of the Senate’s
rejection of proposed bonus bill, the veterans staged silent “Death Marches”
for a month until Congress adjourned on July 17. War veterans without shoes
on their feet, fed sparingly by sympathetic donors (once getting fifteen tons
of watermelons from growers in Brawley, California), paraded up and down
the streets outside the White House and the Capitol Building, playing to the
swarms of clicking cameramen and never for a moment allowing legislators
to overlook their plight.
T
wo weeks later, on July 28, the attorney general ordered the veterans—
including about 1,000 wives and children—to be dispersed, but twitchy police
officers fired into a crowd that was pelting them with bricks. Two veterans were
killed. More skirmishing ensued, and President Hoover unleashed army troops
AMERICAN STORIES
142
under General Douglas MacArthur. Rumors of anarchism and communism
had swirled through the White House and the halls of Congress for weeks,
and MacArthur assumed that communist hearts thumped radically underneath
the dungaree overalls and old military uniforms covering the peaceable, stick-
bodied veterans. MacArthur felt no mercy and showed none, either, for men
he considered enemies of the state. On July 28, the veterans’ request for early
payment was fulfilled with tear gas, miniature tanks, bullets, and bayonets.
MacArthur’s young troops rode down the older veterans, beating, scattering,
and arresting them. Even though President Hoover had ordered MacArthur
only to “surround the affected area and clear it without delay,” MacArthur led
his troops across a bridge into the Anacostia camp and burned it.
8
One baby
died after being subjected to tear gas. The veterans filed out of the capital with
less than they had brought, their hope stolen. Hoover’s public image suffered
a new blemish with every blow the troops struck.
That
year, 1932, was an election year. The Republicans had been in power
and popular for more than a decade. Now bank doors were slamming shut,
sealing empty vaults from the gaze of accountants, mechanics, farmers, and
retirees who had thought their money would be safe. By 1932, about 9 million
Americans, almost 15 percent of the population, had seen their savings van-
ish.
Hoover’s efforts to relieve nationwide hardship and overcome economic
ruin seemed uncaring and weak. He asked leaders of industry not to fire too
many people and to keep wages high. He told local governments it was their
responsibility, not that of the federal government, to feed and house the hungry
and homeless. Missing only the motto “too little, too late,” Hoover started
the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) in 1932 with a capitalization
of $2 billion: a lot by the standards of the day, but not enough to reinvigorate
an economy grinding along with more than 20 percent unemployment (up
from 4.4 percent in 1928). The RFC was supposed to provide assistance,
particularly to railroads and banks, to jump-start the economy. RFC money
started at the top with big industry and was intended to trickle down to the
everyday worker. During the next year, however, the Depression worsened.
Big businesses like U.S. Steel and GM laid off more workers. Ford Motor
Company stopped making the new Model A—stopped entirely and shut down
the miles of rolling metal at its River Rouge plant in Michigan. With little
work and less luck, millions of Americans read about the veterans’ efforts to
get some help. When Hoover turned his back on the Bonus Army marchers,
the voters turned their backs on Hoover.
Herbert Hoover missed an essential ingredient in recovery: getting people
to feel hopeful. Also, starting with the 1928 election, Hoover had maintained
a commitment to Prohibition when most of the rest of the country had come
to realize that they wanted a legal drink at a legal bar. Hoover’s opponent for
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INTO THE GREAT DEPRESSION
the presidency in 1932 was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a handsome, two-term
governor from New York with a soothing, actor’s voice suited for radio, and
he thought Prohibition ought to be old news. The nation agreed and, nervous
with hope, ushered Roosevelt into office in 1933.
On March 3, 1933, a black convertible with Franklin Roosevelt in the back
seat pulled up in front of the White House, and Herbert Hoover reluctantly
took the seat next to his victorious rival. They were headed together to Roos-
evelt’
s swearing-in and inaugural address. Doffing his top hat to the crowds,
Roosevelt tried to talk pleasantly with Hoover, but the outgoing president
sat stony-faced, saying not a word. Herbert Hoover disliked Roosevelt as a
politician and a man. In the coming years, that dislike would intensify with
every piece of New Deal legislation that Roosevelt proposed to a compliant
Congress. Roosevelt was getting ready to involve the federal government in
an experiment unlike anything the country had ever known. From the wings
of civilian seating, Herbert Hoover would watch his successor take the federal
government from economic regulator to major player. Within two years, the
Democratic-controlled Congress would create the Federal Emergency Relief
Agency (1933) to offer direct relief payments, the Civilian Conservation
Corps (1933) and the Works Progress Administration (1935) to oversee work
relief, and a safety net for the old, sick, and unemployed—Social Security
(1935). These programs would not end the Depression, but for more than
half the country Franklin Roosevelt would become, in his radio broadcast
“fireside chats,” the reassuring voice in the living room, the voice of a federal
government that seemed to care. As one man put it, Roosevelt was “the only
man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is
a sonofabitch.”
9
When the convertible arrived at the Capitol, Roosevelt made his careful
way to the podium. Speaking in the tones of a strong father, Roosevelt told
the throngs of assembled citizens:
This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and
boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country
today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will
prosper. So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we
have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which
paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
10
Though few knew it, other than close advisers, family, friends, and journalists
taken into his confidence, Franklin Roosevelt understood paralysis: he had
been stricken by the polio virus in 1921 and had lost the use of his legs. After
a long convalescence, Roosevelt pushed himself through a grueling physical
AMERICAN STORIES
144
therapy regimen. He had gradually built back his muscles to the degree that
he could stand—and stand for hours—though he could not walk without leg
braces and crutches and spent most of his time in a wheelchair. (Journalists of
the 1920s and 1930s, however, had an unwritten ethical code—general respect
for presidential privacy. Only three photos of Roosevelt in a wheelchair are
known to exist, and the public never saw them. A journalist who had caught
President Harding peeing in the White House fireplace did not publish that
incident either.) Roosevelt had known fear and paralysis, and somewhere in
his resonant voice there was a sweet note of hope that Americans, gathered
around radios to listen to his inaugural address, could hear and trust.
The Depr
ession: Why?
The Great Depression was caused by a variety of factors, but that does not mean
historians can really explain with complete certainty why the Depression hap-
p
ened or why it lasted until the United States entered World War II in 1941.
Certain causes seem likely. Europeans were still in a slump trying to recover
from World War I, and their economies may not have been helped by U.S.
tariffs, especially not the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, which placed taxes
on thousands of incoming items. High tariffs on major goods like Canadian
lumber resulted in retaliatory tariffs that most likely damaged economies on
both sides of the border. Britain and France could not repay the $11 billion
they had received in loans during the war, particularly not after Germany
defaulted on its reparation payments to them, leaving American lenders in the
lurch. Throughout the world, inflation became a problem: prices for everyday
goods and services rose relative to the value of a dollar. In the United States
during the 1920s, major companies produced more goods than consumers
were buying (largely because the dollar had dropped in value), so warehouses
and shelves were overstocked by 1929, spurring layoffs and general worry.
Banks throughout the decade had been closing, in part because farmers could
not pay back their loans as farm prices fell from 1921 to 1929 and in part
because banks were poorly regulated. And more Americans privately invested
in stocks during the 1920s than ever before. By the end of the decade, shares in
a company could be purchased from brokers who would lend up to 90 percent
of a stock’s value. Brokers loaned more money than the federal government
spent: in 1929, for example, the federal government’s budget was $3.1 billion
while stockbrokers loaned $8.5 billion to investors. The economy was sitting
on a giant bubble filled with speculative wishes.
The bubble burst in October 1929 in a series of spectacular runs. Beginning
with a deluge of sell orders on October 24, the crash reached its deafening
crescendo on Tuesday, October 29—“Black Tuesday”—when 16.4 million
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INTO THE GREAT DEPRESSION
shares were sold for a total daily loss of $15 billion. This was like having
burglars break into Ford’s River Rouge factory and steal four out of every ten
cars in one day. Overall, during October 1929, companies traded on the New
York Stock Exchange lost $50 billion in value, nearly 40 percent of their pre-
September worth. The plummet in companies’ values meant that millions of
mostly amateur investors lost—and lost big. Overproduction, falling wages,
layoffs, firings, gloomy financial forecasts, and devastating stock news worked
like a chain reaction: fear feeding on bad news led to more bad news and more
fear. Once begun, the Depression would only get worse. The stock market
crashes did not so much cause the Depression as signal its beginning, like a
fever breaking out days after a virus has entered the body.
The Great Depression was grim. In New York City, two weeks before
Christmas in 1930, crowds filled the pavement outside the Bronx branch of
the Bank of the United States, intending to withdraw all their savings, hav-
ing
heard a rumor that the bank was running out of money. With insufficient
cash on the premises, the bank went out of business the next day, December
11, initially taking 400,000 people’s deposits with it. Businesses relying on
the bank to meet their payrolls had nothing to offer employees. Reporting
that New Yorkers generally took the closure “philosophically, realizing that
there was nothing they could do about it,” the New York Times said, how-
ever
, that “in the less favored parts of the city . . . the foreign-born, many of
whom did not understand English, stood determinedly in the rain, hoping
that something would show up to enable them to get their money.”
11
Later,
80 percent of the bank’s deposits were paid out, but national confidence in
banks was badly shaken. By 1932, the companies listed on the Big Board at
the Stock Exchange on Wall Street had watched 89 percent of their total value
evaporate. On average, one dollar of stock in 1929 was worth eleven cents by
1932. Investors who had borrowed heavily from brokers to buy their stocks
owed ten dollars for a one-dollar sandwich. General Motors, the leading car
company in sales, lost 92 percent of its value in three years. By 1933, there
was not a single full-time employee at U.S. Steel, though in 1929 there had
been 250,000. In 1932 alone, almost one-quarter of a million people were
evicted from their homes (one out of every 480 people), and one out of every
four capable, working adults was unemployed. Capitalism seemed to many
Americans like a failed system.
When
local, state, and federal governments did not help, people turned to
simple solutions. At the cloudy edge of the continent in Seattle, Washington,
50,000 residents formed the Unemployed Citizens League and promptly began
their own barter economy, trading eggs for carpentry, fish for dentistry. They
simply gave up on money because there was not any. Children, adolescents,
and adults wandered the nation, hopping rides on railroads, begging for food
AMERICAN STORIES
146
at back doors, stooping into basement soup kitchens. People who had always
been poor seemed to do better, however, than those suddenly out of a job. The
previously poor had already figured out where to go for help, how to ask for
help, and how to distinguish between pride and survival.
Something
else beyond the scope of accountants, bureaucrats, and econo-
m
ists was going wrong as well. As though the very air itself had been infected
by the mood of the nation, the weather began to change. In 1930, the spring
rains did not fall, and by the summer, temperatures in the Midwest lingered
around 100 degrees, day after day.
Plenty of Dust: Stories from Inside the Storm
Six years after the stock market went bust, a rolling mountain of airborne dirt
swept across the Great Plains on April 14, 1935—“Black Sunday”—coating
creation in more grainy soil than engineers, diggers, and mechanical shovels
had removed from the Isthmus of Panama while cutting out the canal over
more than seven years.
12
What may have been the worst environmental
disaster on the planet in the entire twentieth century crashed into northern
Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, and parts of Colorado and Nebraska in peak
fury, smothering sod huts, dugout tar-paper shacks, wheat and corn fields,
jackrabbits, cattle ranches, people’s lungs, and endless miles of flat prairie.
In the furnace heat of a lasting drought, “black blizzards” like this had been
descending on the plains ever since 1931, only two years after Wall Street’s
stocks had started to dry up. With bank doors closing and stocks dropping, now
it seemed nature would help itself to what was left of the farms and ranches
on plains that had been better suited all along to buffalo and buzzards.
During the 1930s, about 250,000 parched and starved sodbusters hiked,
rode, and drove back out of the scorched, dirt-encrusted remains of prairies
that had been home to short grass and millions of buffalo for thousands of
years. These were the Exodusters and Okies immortalized in John Steinbeck’s
decade-defining novel, The Grapes of Wrath. In days gone by, Kiowas,
Comanches, and Apaches had roamed the southern plains, first by foot and
then on horse. To disinherit the Indians of their range, the buffalo had been
slaughtered, their shaggy hides made into leather goods, their flesh fed to
work crews pounding spikes on railroads, their bones ground fine to fertilize
northern fields. Cattlemen like Charles Goodnight replaced the vanished bison
with cows, which lacked the insulating coats of shag that let buffalo withstand
a temperature range from minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit up to a blistering 110
degrees. In 1885 and 1886—two of the coldest years on record—the cattle
herds froze, studding the prairies with bovine statues in mute commemora-
tion
of a bad idea. Cattlemen and cowboys carried on, soon joined by the
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INTO THE GREAT DEPRESSION
homesteaders who showed up in the first two decades after 1900, would-be
farmers drawn in by the lure of free government land. The Homestead Act of
1909 offered 320 acres to anyone uninformed, desperate, or crazy enough to
plant wheat in a tumbleweed garden.
F
or a few planetary heartbeats, the misled farmers got by, even experienced
boom times: hunks of sod got uprooted to expose arable soil watered by spray
sucked out of cool underground lakes, aquifers with reservoirs that might last
an eternity, the thinking went; oil jets plumed, and the black slime fell back to
the earth in the shape of gold bars; prices for wheat were high, and Prohibi-
tion
meant that corn farmers could get high prices, too, just by boiling corn
mash with sugar and yeast and selling the whiskey to the likes of Al Capone.
In previous centuries, the plains and prairies could withstand a drought. Sod
grass kept the underlying soil in place. But now the sod was being torn up or
trampled under hoof by cows. Millions of square acres of newly exposed soil
were endlessly churned by new John Deere tractors, and if their treads did
not do the job, gusts of northern winds whipped down day and night to rip
up the fertile but limited dirt held in place now by crops that were seasonally
removed. This system of environmental plunder was what historian Donald
Worster called “agribusiness”:
13
ever bigger and more ecologically out-of-tune
farming operations creeping over the southern plains with unregulated hunger;
farmers mortgaging their futures to insolvent banks to buy more machinery
to plow and harvest more acres of wheat and corn.
The
hurricane of dirt that beat down on the plains on Black Sunday had
been caused, in large part, by people, though the final catalyst was drought.
Assigning fault, however, felt irrelevant in the face of death. Louis Sanchez
was eleven years old in April 1935, a Mexican-American boy born in Dodge
City, Kansas, to a father who had been recruited around 1900 from Ciudad
de Guanajuato to work on the Santa Fe Railroad.
14
Louis’s father settled in
Dodge City, bringing his children and wife to the Mexican section of town,
where Louis grew up speaking Spanish at home, learning English at the
Catholic school, and doing his best to avoid tuberculosis, which robbed many
of his playmates of lung and life. Louis had worked fourteen-hour days in
the beet fields, a giant sun blasting every field hand, cricket, and wilted leaf
with its radiance; he had gone for two weeks without milk, and when his boss
finally brought some by, it had to be drunk on the spot because they had no
refrigeration. He had known hard work, tough times, and five years of dust
storms, but Black Sunday was something new again. More than sixty years
later, Mr. Sanchez recorded his memory of the April 14, 1935, storm for his
granddaughter, recounting a trip to the local library where he went to read a
newspaper, which he could not afford to buy. After reading in the library, he
stepped out into the street, just as the dust storm was arriving.