Financial History Issue 113 (Spring 2015) | Page 31

By Julia Bricklin
The plight of Detroit’s unemployed
during the Depression of 1893 — triggered
in large part by the collapse of the Reading
Railroad and then the failure of the banks
that depended on it — had a profound
impact on its mayor, Hazen S. Pingree.
During the early months of this downturn,
thousands of workers in his town had their
wages cut, and they soon faced even worse
problems. The city’s leading employers,
including the Detroit Stove Works, the
Michigan Peninsula Car Company and
the Pullman Company, either suspended
or drastically slashed production, forcing

footsteps, obtaining mixed results. “Pingree’s Potato Patches,” as the Empire State
press dubbed them, were proclaimed as
an effective buffer against the hunger and
poverty brought on by the Depression.
Community gardens were the most
widely adopted and supported self–help
concept during the Depression of the
1890s. There were others — farmers’ railroads, food and goods cooperatives, labor
exchanges and intentional communities — but gardens were characterized as
a “useful emergency measure” to help
those who are temporarily out of work to
immediately sustain their families with
nutrients, by way of “honorable toil.”

the value of the prior year’s goods was
produced, and while these goods still
consisted mostly of potatoes, beans and
turnips, citizens also raised other vegetables. Detroit worked out kinks in its
system, too. The Common Council, for
example, paid $5,000 for 48 plots, instead
of depending on private donations, making the program less vulnerable to private
land sales. It justified the cost by earmarking the farms for future park use if they
became unnecessary.
Papers in New York took notice. On
September 27, 1894, for example, the Herald-Tribune wrote that there seemed to be
“good margin of profit for the poor in the

New York’s Response to Unemployment in the 1890s
about a quarter of the city’s labor force into
unemployment. This economic disaster
brought distress to both urban and rural
populations. There were few social safety
nets for the poor and destitute; programs
like Social Security and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — food
stamps — came much, much later.
Fortunately for both Detroit and the
nation, Mayor Pingree was not only
sensitive to human suffering, but also
devised an immensely popular and effective response that soon bore his name,
“Pingree’s Potato Patch.” He formulated
a plan to raise private funds to buy seed
and tools, which would be used to turn his
city’s vacant lots into g \