Killer Debt.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side - Viewpoint essay

A few days before Congress passed its housing bill, Carlene Balderrama of Taunton, Massachusetts, found her own solution to the housing crisis. Ninety minutes in advance of the time her mortgage company, PHH Mortgage Corporation (may its name live in infamy), was to auction off her home, Balderrama killed herself with her husband's rifle.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This is not the kind of response to hard times that James Grant had in mind when he wrote his July 19 Wall Street Journal essay entitled "Why No Outrage?" "One might infer from the lack of popular anger," the famed Wall Street contrarian wrote, "that the credit crisis was God's fault rather than the doing of the bankers and the rating agencies and the government's snoozing watchdogs." For contrast, he cites the spirited response to the depression of the 1890s, when lawyer/agitator Mary Lease stirred crowds by saying, "We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out.... We will stand by our homes and stay by our fire-sides, by force if necessary."

Grant could have found even more bracing examples of resistance in the 1930s, when farmers and tenants used mob power--and sometimes firearms--to fight foreclosures and evictions. For more on that, I consulted Frances Fox Piven, co-author of the classic text Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, who told me that in the early '30s, a number of cities were so shaken by the resistance that they declared moratoriums on further evictions. A 1931 riot by Chicago tenants who had fallen behind on their rent, for example, left three dead and three police officers injured.

According to Piven, these actions were often spontaneous. A group of unemployed men would get word of a scheduled eviction and march through the streets, gathering crowds as they went. Arriving at the site of the eviction, they would move the furniture back into the apartment and stay around to protect the threatened tenants. In one instance in Detroit, it took 100 cops to evict a single family. Also in Detroit, Piven said, "two families protected their apartments by shooting their landlord and were acquitted by a sympathetic jury."

What a difference eighty years makes. When the police and the auctioneers arrived at Balderrama's house, the family gun had already been used--on the victim of foreclosure herself. I don't know how "worthy" a debtor she was--the family had unsuccessfully tried to file for bankruptcy three times before, though probably not as a...