The national chairman of the Red Cross, Judge John Barton Payne, was perhaps the most outspoken opponent of federal grants, insisting that the $10 million he could raise from private individuals would be more than adequate to meet the problem. When the Congress temporarily allocated $25 million to the Red Cross for hunger relief, Judge Payne refused to take it. “Leave us alone,” he told Congress. But the insistence on private aid, with an emphasis on self-help, was a cruel joke in the face of starvation. Photographs of gaunt and tattered farmers holding Red Cross seed kits for kitchen gardens dramatized the Red Cross’s failure to come to grips with the problem. The Red Cross was run by the elite—in the South that meant the planters—and their charity was top-down and inadequate, as the “England riot” demonstrated. The charity they gave kept everyone, the poor white sharecroppers and their even poorer black counterparts, in their place.

Can You Hear Their Voices implied, that the country was ripe for revolution. No one would ever know, General Hugh S. Johnson said later, “how close we were to collapse and revolution. We could have got a dictator a lot easier than Germany got Hitler.” Even Congressman Hamilton Fish, Jr. of New York, a patrician of the old school, argued in 1932 that major changes were necessary. “I am trying to provide security for human beings which they are not getting.” he said. “If we don’t give it under the existing system, the people will change the system. Make no mistake about that.”

Apparently Franklin Delano Roosevelt sensed this too. After his huge victory against the out-of-touch Herbert Hoover in November of 1932, Roosevelt returned to his childhood home in Hyde Park, New York, to work out his plans for rescuing the country from the worst Depression in its entire history. A visitor to Hyde Park told him that he could go down as the greatest American president if he succeeded, and the worst American president if he failed. “If I fail,” Roosevelt answered, “I shall be the last one.”