It is difficult to measure the human cost2 of the Great Depression. The material hardships were bad enough. Men and women lived in lean-tos made of scrap wood and metal, and families went without meat and fresh vegetables for months, existing on a diet of soup and beans.3 The psychological burden was even greater4: Americans suffered through year after year of grinding poverty with no letup in sight5. The unemployed stood in line for hours waiting for relief checks, veterans sold apples or pencils on street comers, their manhood — once prized so highly by the nation — now in question6. People left the city for the countryside but found no salvation on the farm. Crops rotted in the fields because prices were too low to make harvesting worthwhile7 ； Sheriffs fended off angry crowds as banks foreclosed long overdue mortgages on once prosperous farms8. Few escaped the suffering. African Americans who had left the poverty of the rural South for factory jobs in the North were among the first to be laid off. Mexican Americans，who had flowed in to replace European immigrants，met with competition from angry citizens，now willing to do stoop labor in the fields and work as track layers on the railroads9. Immigration officials used technicalities10 to halt the flow across the Rio Grande11 and even to reverse it； nearly a half million Mexicans were deported in the 1930s, including families with children born in the United States. The poor — black, brown, and white 一 survived because they knew better than most Americans how to exist in poverty. They stayed in bed in cold weather, both to keep warm and to avoid unnecessary burning up of calories12 ； they patched their shoes with pieces of rubber from discarded tires13，heated only the kitchens of their homes, and ate scraps of food that others would reject. The middle class，which had always lived with high expectations，was hit hard. Professionals and white-collar workers refused to ask for charity even while their families went without food ； one New York dentist and his wife turned on the gas and left a note saying, “We want to get out of the way before we are forced to accept relief money. ’，14 People who fell behind in their mortgage payments lost their homes and then faced eviction when they could not pay the rent.Health care declined. Middle-class people stopped going to doctors and dentists regularly, unable to make the required cash payment in advance for services rendered.16 Even the well-to-do were affected, giving up many of their former luxuries and weighed down with guilt as they watched former friends and business associates join the ranks of the impoverished. lt “My father lost everything in the Depression” became an all-too-familiar refrain18 among young people who dropped out of college. Many Americans sought escape19 in movement. Men, boys, and some women, rode the rails in search of jobs，hopping freights to move south in the winter or west in the summer. On the Missouri Pacific alone, the number of vagrants increased from just over 13,000 in 1929 to nearly 20，000 in 1931. One town in the Southwest hired special policemen to keep vagrants from leaving the boxcars. Those who became tramps had to keep on the move, but they did find a sense of community in the hobo jungles20 that sprang up along the major railroad routes. Here a man could find a place to eat and sleep, and people with whom to share his misery. Louis Banks, a black veteran, told interviewer Studs Terkel what these informal camps were like:Black and white, it didn’t make any difference who you were，’cause everybody was poor. All friendly, sleep in a jungle. We used to take a big pot and cook food, cabbage, meat and beans all together. We all set together, we made a tent. Twenty-five or thirty would be out on the side of the rail，white and colored: They didn’t have no mothers or sisters，they didn’t have no home，they were dirty，they had overalls on， they didn’t have no food, they didn’t have anything.21