by Studs Terkel
Fifty years later, the Sacramento Bee sent a couple of young journalists, Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, out on the road. They rode the freights for several months. Their elders had told them of the Thirties. They had studied the photographs of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, the others. They saw the same faces. “When people are down and out,” said Williamson, “they always look the same.”
They too found boxcars, with hardly room to move. The new nomads have come from the rust belt, the abandoned farm, small failed businesses; many of them had voted for Reagan because “he made us feel good.” Now they don’t feel so good, but few blame the President. They resent being called losers, though that is what they are called these days. In the Thirties (at least in retrospect), they were called victims. If there is a core difference between Then and Now, it is in language. Then, the words of the winners reflected discomfort in the presence of losers. Now, they reflect a mild contempt.
“I didn’t know it was illegal to be poor in America,” says one of the travelers. Did you know it was illegal to sleep in a car in Louisiana? And that it’s illegal to sleep under an overpass in Portland? And illegal to eat out of a dumpster in Fort Lauderdale? Maharidge and Williamson were told that rat poison is often added to these trash cans.
This is not quite as astonishing as it might seem. In the Thirties, vagrancy was the most frequent charge in arrest and detention. Burglary ran a close second. Today, the FBI reports that burglaries and robberies have doubled in cities where plant closings have become the norm.
A Vietnam veteran, on the move with his wife, two small children, and a tent, is thinking the unthinkable. “I’m trying my damndest to be an upright citizen. I’ve never committed any crimes before, but I’m thinking of hitting that 7-11. I’m not gonna shoot anyone, just food for the kids.”
Ed Paulsen would understand. “Hell, in the Thirties, everybody was a criminal. You were getting by, survival. Stole clothes off lines, stole milk off back porches, you stole bread. I remember going through Tucumcari, New Mexico, on a freight. We made a brief stop. There was a grocery store, a supermarket kind of thing for those days. I beat it off the train and came back with rolls and crackers. This guy is standing in the window shaking his fist at you. It wasn’t a big thing, but it created a coyote mentality. You were a predator. You had to be.”
Today’s paper reports another record-breaking day in the stock market. The financial columnist is euphoric: “The economy will turn in a performance superior to anything that could be dismissed as ‘mediocre.’ The year will be much better than lots of economists, including a number who operate in Wall Street, are willing to concede.”
Business Week is singularly less sanguine. A cover story is called “The Casino Society.” In a stunning piece, at considerable variance with other established journals, it explodes: “No, it’s not Las Vegas or Atlantic City. It’s the U.S. financial system. The volume of transactions has boomed far beyond anything needed to support the economy. Borrowing—politely called leverage—is getting out of hand. And futures enable people to play the market without owning a share of stock. The result: the system is tilting from investment to speculation.”5
It rings a distant bell. Were Arthur A. Robertson still around, he’d recognize the tolling sound—at least, the alarm. He was an industrialist, “a scavenger. I used to buy broken-down businesses that banks took over.” He was a millionaire at twenty-four. He knew all the legendary figures of the market, who’d “run up a stock to ridiculous prices and unload it on the unsuspecting public.”
“In 1929, it was strictly a gambling casino with loaded dice. The few sharks taking advantage of the multitude of suckers. It was exchanging expensive dogs for expensive cats. Frenzied finance that made Ponzi6 look like an amateur. Everything was bought on hope.”
Sidney J. Weinberg whistled in amazement as he remembered October 29, 1929. “It was like a thunder clap. Everybody was stunned. The Street had general confusion. They didn’t understand it any more than anybody else. They thought something would be announced.” I hadn’t the heart to ask him by whom. Emile Coué? God? Roger Babson? Weinberg was senior partner of Goldman-Sachs and an adviser to Presidents.
“A Depression could not happen again, not to the extent of the one in ’29. Unless inflation went out of hand and values went beyond true worth. A deep stock market reaction could bring a Depression, yes. There would be immediate Government reaction, of course. A moratorium. But in panic, people will sell regardless of worth. Today, you’ve got twenty-odd million stockholders owning stock. At that time you probably had a million and a half. You could have a sharper decline now than you had in 1929.”
There is a sort of government action today, but not what Weinberg had in mind. Regulations that came into being after the Crash of ’29 have been loosened more than somewhat. Especially for our banks.
In Banks We Trust is Penny Lernoux’s chilling account in chapter and verse. The 1982 collapse of the Penn Square Bank in Oklahoma, Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields in style, may be the metaphor. This small fish, in its wild pursuit of high-interest debtors, attracted schools of much bigger fish. How close the call was for Chase Manhattan, Continental Illinois, and Citibank, we’ll never quite know. Much too close for comfort. Big Guv’mint saved their hides, just as in a wholly different way it bailed out the Depression-stunned banks.
With New Deal regulatory agencies gutted by the Reagan Revolution, aggressive banking—a phrase dear to free-marketeers—has become the order of the day. Free translation: speculation in money. In the go-go climate created, banks are Brewsters profligately handing out their (our) millions in the wild expectation of even wilder returns. Not a penny may come back.
Latin American countries, the biggest debtors, owe $350 billion to a few American banks. If one or two of them default—say, Brazil, Argentina, or Mexico—it could wipe out the capital of our nine largest banks. Talk about panic. Talk about a run on two or three. Or nine.
“In ‘29 and ’30, bank closings got into thousands.” David Kennedy, years before he was appointed by Richard Nixon as Secretary of the Treasury, had served in the early Thirties on the Federal Reserve Board. “There was one bank in New York, the Bank of the United States—in the wake of that closing, two hundred smaller banks closed. Because of the deposits in that bank from the others.”
Penny Lernoux concludes, “It could lead to a situation that would make 1929 look like a birthday party.”
Yet other voices, mostly frequently heard, tell us the outlook is not at all that bleak, no matter what parallels may be drawn between Then and Now. James Nathenson, past president of the Chicago Homebuilders Association, sees as glowing a future as the present President of the United States. Mr. Nathenson is a devout Chicago Bears fan and a season ticket holder. “I see everything that’s happening with the Bears as a positive thing for Chicago housing—if they win.” His reference was to the upcoming Superbowl game. (The Bears won, of course.)
Fortunate is the city—and the society—that is blessed with the legs of Walter Payton, the arm of Jim McMahan, and the .heft of William Perry. Never mind the smokeless chimneys and boarded-up stores of South Chicago. Never mind two hundred young lining up for five jobs. Never mind history. Mr. Nathenson’s euphoria is undiminished: “In Chicago, once we become winners, we begin to think like winners in our pursuits in life. If we’re losers, we have that loser syndrome permeating our attitude.”7 Ronald Reagan couldn’t have said it any better.
In the following pages, testimony is offered by scores who thought “like winners” until they suddenly, astonishingly, wound up losers. “It was like a thunder clap,” Sidney Weinberg recalled. Have our weathervanes been dismantled? No storm signals at all? Or have lessons been learned from an experienced trauma that to some seems only yesterday, to others centuries ago. A young woman, on being told of the Great Depression by her grandparents, says, “It seemed like a fairy tale to me, something of a bedtime story.”
Lessons learned? As with the
drunk before the judge, when asked whether his plea be guilty or not guilty, the reply is: I stands mute.
Ours, the richest country in the world, may be the poorest in memory. Perhaps the remembrances of survivors of a time past may serve as a reminder to others. Or to themselves.
NOTE
This being a book about Time as well as a time; for some the bell has tolled. Heroes and dragons of a long-gone day were old men, some vigorous, some weary, when I last saw them. Some have died.
See, I never heard that word “depression” before. They would all just say hard times to me. It still is.
Roger, a fourteen-year-old
Appalachian boy, living in
Chicago
A Depression might be interesting today. It could really be something. To be on the bum, and have nobody say: “Look, I’ll give you $10,000 if you’d just come back and go to school.” We have a choice today. What would it be like if we had no choice?
Tom, 20
This I remember. Some people put this out of their minds and forget it. I don’t want to forget it. I don’t want it to take the best of me, but I want to be there because it happened. This is the truth, you know. History.
Cesar Chavez
They loved us who had passed away.
They forgot all our errors. Our names were mixed.
The story was long.
The young people danced. They brought down new boughs for the flame. They said, Go on with the story now. What happened next?
For us there was silence….
Genevieve Taggard, 1940
A Personal Memoir
(and parenthetical comment)
THIS is a memory book, rather than one of hard fact and precise statistic. In recalling an epoch, some thirty, forty, years ago, my colleagues experienced pain, in some instances; exhilaration, in others. Often it was a fusing of both. A hesitancy, at first, was followed by a flow of memories: long-ago hurts and small triumphs. Honors and humiliations. There was laughter, too.
Are they telling the truth? The question is as academic as the day Pilate asked it, his philosophy not quite washing out his guilt. It’s the question Pa load asked of Preacher Casy, when the ragged man, in a transient camp, poured out his California agony.
“Pa said, ‘S’pose he’s tellin’ the truth—that fella?’ The preacher answered, ‘He’s tellin’ the truth, awright. The truth for him. He wasn’t makin’ nothin’ up.’ ‘How about us?’ Tom demanded. ‘Is that the truth for us?’ ‘I don’ know,’ said Casy.” 8
I suspect the preacher spoke for the people in this book, too. In their rememberings are their truths. The precise fact or the precise date is of small consequence. This is not a lawyer’s brief nor an annotated sociological treatise. It is simply an attempt to get the story of the holocaust known as The Great Depression from an improvised battalion of survivors.
That there are some who were untouched or, indeed, did rather well isn’t exactly news. This has been true of all disasters. The great many were wounded, in one manner or another. It left upon them an “invisible scar,” as Caroline Bird put it.9 To those who have chosen to reveal it in this work, my gratitude. And to those hundred or so others, in scattered parts of this land, whose life-fragments I did not include, my apologies as well as my profound appreciation: they have enriched my own sense of this neglected time.
There are young people in this book, too. They did not experience the Great Depression. In many instances, they are bewildered, wholly ignorant of it. It is no sign of their immaturity, but of ours. It’s time they knew. And it’s time we knew, too—what it did to us. And, thus, to them.
I myself don’t remember the bleak October day, 1929. Nor do I recall with anything like a camera eye the events that shaped the Thirties. Rather, a blur of images comes to mind. Faces, voices and, occasionally, a rueful remembrance or a delightful flash. Or the astonishing innocence of a time past. Yet a feeling persists….
Even now, when on the highway, seeing in faint neon, VACANCY, outside a modest motel, I am reminded of my mother’s enterprise, The Wells-Grand. I ask myself, with unreasonable anxiety, perhaps, “Will it survive? Will this place be here next year?”
Fear of losing things, of property, is one legacy of the Thirties, as a young colleague pointed out. An elderly civil servant in Washington buys a piece of land as often as she can afford. “If it comes again, I’ll have something to live off.” She remembers the rotten bananas, near the wharves of New Orleans: her daily fare.
That, thanks to technology, things today can make things, in abundance, is a point psychically difficult for Depression survivors to understand. And thus, in severe cases, they will fight, even kill, to protect their things (read: property). Many of the young fail to diagnose this illness because of their innocence concerning the Great Depression. Its occasional invocation, for scolding purposes, tells them little of its truth.
In the mid-Twenties, all fifty rooms of The Wells-Grand were occupied. There was often a waiting list. Our guests were men of varied skills and some sense of permanence. The only transients were the wayward couple who couldn’t afford a more de luxe rendezvous. Mysteriously, there was always room at the inn, even for sinners. Ours were the winking Gospels.
On Saturdays, most of our guests paid their weekly rent. On those evenings, I walked at a certain pace to the deposit window of the neighborhood bank. All the guests, with the exception of a few retired boomers and an ancient coppersmith (made idle by the Volstead Act), had steady jobs. It was a euphoric time.
The weekly magazines, Judge and Life (pre-Luce), were exciting with George Jean Nathan and Pare Lorentz critiques and Jefferson Machamer girls. Liberty carried sports pieces by Westbrook Pegler—the most memorable, a tribute to Battling Siki, the childlike, noble savage destroyed by civilization. Literary Digest was still around and solvent, having not yet forecast Alf Landon’s triumph some years later. On the high school debating team, we resolved that the United States should or should not grant independence to the Philippines, should or should not join the World Court, should or should not recognize the Soviet Union. We took either side. It was a casual time.
Perhaps it was the best of times. Or was it the worst? Scott Nearing inveighed against dollar diplomacy. Bob La Follette and George Norris took to the hustings as well as the Senate floor in Horatio-like stands against the Big Money. Yet two faces appear and reappear in my mind’s eye: Vice Presidents Charles G. Dawes and Charles Curtis; the first, of the responsible banker’s jaw, clamped determinedly to an underslung pipe; the other, a genial ex-jockey, of the Throttlebottom look. There was an innocence, perhaps. But it was not quite Eden’s.
As for the Crash itself, there is nothing I personally remember, other than the gradual, at first, hardly noticeable, diminishing in the roster of our guests. It was as though they were carted away, unprotesting and unseen, unlike Edward Albee’s grandma. At the entrance, we posted a placard: VACANCY.
The presence of our remaining guests was felt more and more, daily, in the lobby. Hitherto, we had seen them only evenings and on weekends. The decks of cards were wearing out more quickly. The black and red squares of the checkerboard were becoming indistinguishable. Cribbage pegs were being more frequently lost… . Tempers were getting shorter. Sudden fights broke out for seemingly unaccountable reasons.
The suddenly-idle hands blamed themselves, rather than society. True, there were hunger marches and protestations to City Hall and Washington, but the millions experienced a private kind of shame when the pink slip came. No matter that others suffered the same fate, the inner voice whispered, “I’m a failure.”
True, there was a sharing among many of the dispossessed, but, at close quarters, frustration became, at times, violence, and violence turned inward. Thus, sons and fathers fell away, one from the other. And the mother, seeking work, said nothing. Outside forces, except to the more articulate and political rebels, were in some vague way responsible, but not really. It was a personal guilt.
We were carrying the regulars on the books, but the fate of others was daily debated as my mother, my brother and I scanned the more and more indecipherable ledger. At times, the issue was joined, with a great deal of heat, as my brother and I sought to convince our mother that somehow we and our guests shall overcome. In reply, her finger pointed to the undeniable scrawl: the debts were mounting.
With more frequency, we visited our landlord. (We had signed a long-term lease in happier days.) He was a turn-of-the-century man, who had no telephone and signed all his documents longhand. His was a bold and flowing penmanship. There was no mistaking the terms. His adjustments, in view of this strange turn of events, were eminently fair. A man of absolute certainties, who had voted the straight ticket from McKinley to Hoover, he seemed more at sea than I had imagined possible. I was astonished by his sudden fumbling, his bewilderment.
A highly respected Wall Street financier recalled: “The Street had general confusion. They didn’t understand it any more than anybody else. They thought something would be announced.” (My emphasis.) In 1930, Andrew Mellon, Secretary of Treasury, predicted, “ … during the coming year the country will make steady progress.” A speculator remembers, with awe, “Men like Pierpont Morgan and John Rockefeller lost immense amounts of money. Nobody was immune.”
Carey McWilliams suggests a study of the Washington hearings dealing with the cause of the Depression: “They make the finest comic reading. The leading industrialists and bankers testified. They hadn’t the foggiest notion… .”
As for our guests, who now half-occupied the hotel, many proferred relief checks as rent rather than the accustomed cash. It was no longer a high-spirited Saturday night moment.
There was less talk of the girls in the Orleans street cribs and a marked increase in daily drinking. There was, interestingly enough, an upswing in playing the horses: half dollar bets, six bits; a more desperate examination of The Racing Form. Bert E. Collyer’s Eye, and a scratch sheet, passed from hand to hand. While lost blacks played the numbers, lost whites played the nags.
