Hoovercrats in ’28… Hoover carts in ’32

“In Wayne County, N. C., a depressed farmer cut off the rear end of his ‘disused’ automobile, fastened shafts to the axle, backed in a mule, went riding…. Soon the roads of eastern North Carolina were overrun with similar vehicles pulled by mules, horses, oxen, goats or a pair of husky boys. North Carolinians, many of whom had been Hoovercrats in 1928, transposed two letters of the term, called their conveyances Hoovercarts.

“In Goldsboro, one Gene Roberts, newshawk, promoted a Hoovercart Rodeo as a publicity stunt. Goldsboro entertained its biggest crowd since William Jennings Bryan spoke there 34 years ago. Some 400 Hoovercarts paraded through the town…. Filling stations did their best day’s business in many a month — selling hay….

“[Soon after] rodeos and parades were held in Oxford (469 entries), in Roxboro, Kinston and Wendell….”

— From Time magazine, Oct. 10, 1932

Sunday night gave me the opportunity not only to see my old friend Ed Williams inducted into the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame, but also to inquire about a longtime curiosity of mine: Who named the “Hoover cart” (the more common spelling), that emblematic vehicle of the Great Depression?

Gene Roberts, a Wayne County native who went on to a Pulitzer-studded newspaper career, told me the coinage in fact belonged to his father, Eugene L. Roberts Sr., Time’s aforementioned “newshawk,” who combined preaching with publishing the weekly Goldsboro Herald.

The Depression eventually ended, but the Hoover cart lived on, at least in political rhetoric….

“Nowhere in the United States this year have I seen a single exhibit of that famous North Carolina farm invention — that product of ingenuity and hard time, of personal despair and political mockery — the Hoover cart….

“First you had the Hoovercrats, and then you had the Hoover carts. One always follows the other.”

— President Truman, giving ’em hell in a campaign speech at the N.C. State Fairgrounds, October 19, 1948

The credit line on this photo of Truman admiring a Hoover cart will surprise no reader of the Miscellany or A View to Hugh.

Democrats in Eastern North Carolina were still getting mileage out of the Hoover cart even as late as 1952.

Elvis, a waitress and Joyce Carol Oates

Waiting On Elvis, 1956

This place up in Charlotte called Chuck’s where I
used to waitress and who came in one night
but Elvis and some of his friends before his concert
at the Arena, I was twenty-six married but still
waiting tables and we got to joking around like you
do, and he was fingering the lace edge of my slip
where it showed below my hemline and I hadn’t even
seen it and I slapped at him a little saying, You
sure are the one aren’t you feeling my face burn but
he was the kind of boy even meanness turned sweet in
his mouth.

Smiled at me and said, Yeah honey I guess I sure am.

— Poem by Joyce Carol Oates (1987)

“Oates takes off from an incident described by Kays Gary in ‘Elvis Defends Low Down Style,’ Charlotte Observer, June 27, 1956: ‘The waitress brought his coffee. Elvis reached down and fingered the lace on her slip. “Aren’t you the one?” “I’m the one, baby!” ‘….

“Oates’s poem… suggests a more complete and convincing match than anything I know between Elvis Presley and Bill Clinton: one man who could, and one man who can, charm you almost to death.”

— From “Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives” by Greil Marcus (2000)