n the price that it cost to grow and harvest it. Since the farmers were not making any money, they could not afford to keep their homes. In 1932 more than 273,000 farming families lost their houses to the banks. Many of those families packed up all of their belongings and headed west. The population of the Pacific states was rapidly growing. In some southern states, many of the unemployed worked picking cotton for only one dollar a day. Many of the more fortunate people who still had jobs had pity on those who had lost theirs. Some grocers provided food to needy families on credit. Teachers and policemen would bring lunches to the hungry students in the schools. Some people just could not take it any more. One woman from New York drowned her own son, saying, "I couldn't feed him , and I couldn't see him go hungry." During the last few years of the depression, the birth rate significantly declined, and the suicide rate greatly increased. Many unemployed men were ashamed to admit that they had lost their jobs. They would dress up like they were going to work and then go into town and beg for food or money. When a large trade agency in Russia advertised that they were looking for six thousand Americans to move there and work, more than one hundred thousand people applied for the jobs. Realizing how terrible the economic situation was, the United State Congress tried to pass a bonus bill for Americans who were veterans of World War I. They did not act fast enough, however. So many were now starving and homeless, that thousands of people, including war veterans, started to gather in Washington D.C. to protest. By May 1932, nearly twenty thousand of them had set up Hoovervilles, there. The World War One veterans waved signs that said, "Heroes in 1917-Bums in 1932." President Hoover soon became angry and afraid of all of the extra people around the White House. He even refused to meet with the leaders of the Bonus Expeditionary Force, and call...
