In October of 1931, a lumberjack named Jesse Jackson and twenty other men walked onto nine acres of empty waterfront land a few blocks south of Pioneer Square in Seattle. The lot had once been a shipyard. The Skinner and Eddy company built warships there during the first World War, but the yard closed in 1920 and the land had been sitting vacant ever since, owned by the Port of Seattle, useful to nobody. Jackson and his crew started building.
They used whatever they could find. Packing crates. Scrap wood. Flattened tin cans hammered into something resembling walls. Within a few days they had fifty shacks standing on the mudflats. They were ugly and rough and not much to look at, but they had roofs, and for men who had been sleeping under bridges and in doorways, a roof was plenty.
Jackson had been a logger for nearly twenty five years. The forests of the Pacific Northwest were his life, and like most men in the woods, he made good money and spent it just as fast. He had a small savings account in a Seattle bank, but after the stock market crash of 1929, that account disappeared a little at a time until there was nothing left. "Before I found myself in a shanty town on the Seattle waterfront," he later wrote, "I had been a lumberjack for nearly 25 years. The forests of the Pacific Northwest were my home."
He was not unusual. The Great Depression had been grinding through the country for two years by then. In Seattle, twenty thousand people were out of work. Wages had fallen thirty five percent. Forty lumber mills across the Northwest had closed their gates. The construction industry had dropped seventy percent. There was no unemployment insurance. No safety net. If you lost your job, you lost everything, and the distance between a paycheck and a doorway was shorter than most people wanted to believe.
Within a month, a hundred more shacks had gone up on the mudflats. The city noticed. The Seattle Health Department posted official notices on every door: the shacks were unfit for human habitation. The residents had seven days to vacate.
Seven days passed. Nobody left.
So the police came with cans of kerosene. They burned everything to the ground.
The men rebuilt. They pulled together whatever scraps they could salvage and put up new shelters on the same spot. A month later, the city burned them out again. This was, by any measure, a questionable strategy for dealing with people who had already lost everything and therefore had very little left to lose.
This time, Jackson and his crew did something different. The old shipyard had left behind concrete machinery pits sunk into the earth. The men grabbed shovels, picks, anything that could dig, and cleared the sand out of the pits. They laid down bedding, covered the tops with sheets of scrap tin, and moved in. Concrete does not burn. Tin does not burn. Their message to the city was clear enough.
Someone suggested a name. "This is the era of Hoover prosperity," he said. "Let us call this place Hooverville." It was a jab at President Herbert Hoover, who had taken office in 1929 promising the country that its future was bright with hope. For the men now living in holes in the ground on the Seattle waterfront, the irony required no explanation.
The city eventually stopped trying to destroy Hooverville. Instead, they imposed rules. Keep your shack clean. No women or children living on site. Maintain order. Jackson became the unofficial mayor, though he never campaigned for the position. "I am just a simple person," he wrote, "living among simple people, whose status in life is the same as theirs, trying to do the best I know how to administer in my poor way to their wants." The only perk he received was a radio donated by a local Seattle company. He set it up in his shack so the men could gather in the evenings and listen to the news together. It was, for many of them, the closest thing to a living room they had.
The community grew. By its peak in the winter months, Hooverville held around twelve hundred people in six hundred shacks spread across those nine acres. They came from everywhere. Loggers from the Olympic Peninsula. Fishermen from the coast. Miners from eastern Washington. Immigrants from Scandinavia, Italy, Russia, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico. In 1934, a University of Washington sociology student named Donald Francis Roy paid fifteen dollars to buy a shack in Hooverville so he could live among the residents and conduct research for his thesis. He found that nearly twenty nine percent of the population was non-white. He also found something that surprised him: the racial barriers that held firm in the rest of Seattle did not seem to exist inside Hooverville. Black and white men shared shelters out of convenience and became friends out of something more. Roy noted that the community had a spirit of tolerance that the city surrounding it could not match.
They governed themselves. No fighting. No stealing. No drinking in the streets. If someone caused enough trouble, a group of residents would physically take apart the offender's shack and carry the pieces to the edge of the settlement. Only then would they call the police. They had their own justice system, and by most accounts, it worked.
Journalists started visiting. Politicians started campaigning there, standing among the shacks and asking for votes, which takes a certain kind of nerve. The famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle came on assignment. President Roosevelt sent his Secretary of Commerce to see the place and report back. The press, which had spent years calling the residents bums and vagrants, slowly changed its language. They began using words like "pioneers" and "forgotten men."
Jackson had his own phrase. "Hooverville," he wrote, "is the abode of the forgotten man."
It lasted ten years. From 1931 to 1941, Hooverville stood on those mudflats while the rest of Seattle tried to climb its way out of the Depression around it. The New Deal brought some jobs. The Grand Coulee Dam brought more. But Hooverville did not empty out until the thing that finally ended the Depression arrived: war. In 1941, shipbuilding contracts flooded the waterfront. The port needed the land. Many of the residents found work in the very shipyards that were about to be built on the ground where they had been living. Others simply moved upriver and put up new shacks somewhere quieter.
Hooverville was demolished. The shacks came down. The land was cleared for warships. Within a few years, the spot where twelve hundred forgotten men had built a city out of nothing would be covered in cranes and steel and the machinery of a world at war. And somewhere in the mud beneath all of it, the concrete pits were still there, filled in and paved over, holding the shape of the rooms where men once gathered around a donated radio and listened to the news.