The Oil Drum

There was a phenomenon known as a penny sale however:

http://www.rootsweb.com/~iacalhou/1930.html

Father says more people are going to lose their farms because of low prices. The newspapers tell about the Farmers' Holiday movement and how it is spreading over the corn-belt. Today's story is about a farm in northwest Iowa where a mortgage was foreclosed and the farmer's goods and livestock sold at auction. The neighbors made it a penny sale. Everything the auctioneer offered for sale brought a bid of one cent. When the sale ended, the livestock, grain, machinery and household goods were returned to the owner for pennies. The reporter said, " One look at the hard, determined faces of men surrounding the auctioneer discouraged any outsider from raising the bid." At the town of LeMars in northwest Iowa, a district judge tried to stop a penny sale with a legal writ and found a rope around his neck and the other end over a tree limb, and there were plenty of hands willing to pull it tight.

I don't know how many of these took place, but my Dad remembered similar such things while growing up in Minnesota.