Down and Out in Ryde

1936     "When [in October 1934] I saw signs advertising our ranch for sale I knew my father had lost his home and believed there was little that could be done about it," explains Thomas L. Bettencourt, a teenage resident of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta community Ryde. Having read that other ordinary people in dire straits had written appeals for personal assistance to President Roosevelt, the Bettencourt boy threw just such a Hail Mary. And it landed! Within a couple weeks, somebody in the Roosevelt administration forwarded the letter to the Farm Credit Administration (FCA), labeling it an "emergency matter." The combined efforts of FCA and a northern California chapter of the  National Farm Loan Association (NFLA) put a hold on the foreclosure proceedings, reduced the Bettencourts' debt (by a whopping 20%!), and transferred the debt to NFLA, a  farm credit cooperative. In January 1935, the ranch was formally returned to the Bettencourts.

The article quoted above, a bit of blatant politicking in the Sacramento Bee's October 23 edition, came a week before Roosevelt made a footnote of Kansas governor Alf Landon, whose taste for household pets finally cost him an election. Of course, the paper was up-front about its support for FDR, but this support surfaced--often and very conspicuously--far from the editorial page. Aside from column after column of endorsements hiding, not so cleverly, in news copy, there were the Bee's illustrated instructions for voting for FDR on a moderately complicated ballot that listed presidential electors rather than candidates. The paper offered no such instructions for casting a vote for Landon, and much of the coverage of his campaign was buried in the paper's back pages.

Still, whatever the Bee's motives in publishing this article, Thomas Bettencourt's story is a notable example of both the extraordinary connection many Americans felt with FDR and the willingness of a relief agency to go the extra mile to respond to a family's emergency. Largely in response to the president's caring and paternal public image, Depression-era Americans made direct requests for Roosevelt's help surprisingly often. In fact, there's at least one whole book devoted to letters to the Roosevelt administration. Robert S. McElvaine's Down and Out in the Great Depression collects letters to the Roosevelt administration (usually to the president or the first lady, but sometimes to other members of the administration) from a wide cross-section of the population. Most of the letters McElvaine reprints here are, like the one written by the Bettencourt boy, direct pleas from the poor for personal assistance, though he also includes a significant number of letters from critics. The most moving letters are the humblest pleas, in which writers ask for nothing more than a bit of cash or, most heartbreakingly, hand-me-down clothing from the first lady.

And in case you were longing for a parallel to our current mess: Recent reports note that Barack Obama receives, and to his credit, answers, similar requests for help. Apparently, he's even sent personal checks to a few down-and-out Americans. My fingers are crossed.