Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  A squadron of cavalry was in front of this army column. Then, some staff cars, and four trucks with baby tanks on them, stopped near this camp. They let the ramps down and the baby tanks rolled out into the street. When the army appeared, the bonus people, who were in these old buildings, started beating on tin pans and shouted: “Here come our buddies.” They expected the army to be in sympathy with them.

  One of these staff cars unloaded—not very far from where I was standing—and out of it came MacArthur, Chief of Staff. He had a youngish major as an aide. His name was Dwight Eisenhower. With their hands on their hips, they surveyed the situation.

  The 12th Infantry was in full battle dress. Each had a gas mask and his belt was full of tear gas bombs. They were given a “right face,” which caused them to face the camp. They fixed their bayonets and also fixed the gas masks over their faces. At orders, they brought their bayonets at thrust and moved in. The bayonets were used to jab people, to make them move.

  Soon, almost everybody disappeared from view, because tear gas bombs exploded. The entire block was covered by tear gas. Flames were coming up, where the soldiers had set fire to the buildings to drive these people out. The infantry was apparently under orders to drive this group toward the bridges, across the Potomac. Through the whole afternoon, they took one camp after another.

  My colleagues and I decided that the army would assault the camp in Anacostia Flats, across the river. There were about twenty thousand to forty thousand bonus people there. We went on the roof of a building and watched what occurred there that evening. It happened after dark.

  The 12th Infantry did march across the bridge, in full battle dress as before. This was quite a sight. We could see the fires. Soon, all the occupants of that camp were driven into the Maryland Woods, into the night.

  The next day, I read accounts of some of the people who had been jabbed with bayonets. Some had been injured seriously. People who had raised their arms had their arms cut by some sabres. Others were hit by the flat of the sword. In some instances, ears were cut off….

  Edward C. Schalk

  A veteran of World War I.

  WHEN THE ARMY came out, what else could they do? They just walked off, like good Spartans would do.

  I remember when they come back from Washington. They landed over here on State Street. They had sort of a reunion. It was nice weather, summertime. And all kinds of people came to visit ‘em. They had a flag spread out, and everyone was throwin’ money in—quarter, half a dollar. Showin’ that they were welcomin’ ‘em back and were all for ’em. They had quite a time. After that, where they went, nobody knows.

  The Song

  Once in khaki suits,

  Gee, we looked swell,

  Full of that Yankee Doodle-de-dum.

  Half a million boots went sloggin’ through Hell,

  I was the kid with the drum.

  Say, don’t you remember, they called me Al—

  It was Al all the time.

  Say, don’t you remember I’m your pal—

  Brother, can you spare a dime.16

  E. Y. (Yip) Harburg

  Song lyricist and writer of light verse. Among the works in which his lyrics were sung are: Finian’s Rainbow, The Bloomer Girl, Jamaica, The Wizard of Oz and Earl Carroll’s Vanities.

  I NEVER LIKED the idea of living on scallions in a left bank garret. I like writing in comfort. So I went into business, a classmate and 1. I thought I’d retire in a year or two. And a thing called Collapse, bango! socked everything out. 1929. All I had left was a pencil.

  Luckily, I had a friend named Ira Gershwin, and he said to me, “You’ve got your pencil. Get your rhyming dictionary and go to work.” I did. There was nothing else to do. I was doing light verse at the time, writing a poem here and there for ten bucks a crack. It was an era when kids at college were interested in light verse and ballads and sonnets. This is the early Thirties.

  I was relieved when the Crash came. I was released. Being in business was something I detested. When I found that I could sell a song or a poem, I became me, I became alive. Other people didn’t see it that way. They were throwing themselves out of windows.

  Someone who lost money found that his life was gone. When I lost my possessions, I found my creativity. I felt I was being born for the first time. So for me the world became beautiful.

  With the Crash, I realized that the greatest fantasy of all was business. The only realistic way of making a living was versifying. Living off your imagination.

  We thought American business was the Rock of Gibraltar. We were the prosperous nation, and nothing could stop us now. A brownstone house was forever. You gave it to your kids and they put marble fronts on it. There was a feeling of continuity. If you made it, it was there forever. Suddenly the big dream exploded. The impact was unbelievable.

  I was walking along the street at that time, and you’d see the bread lines. The biggest one in New York City was owned by William Randolph Hearst. He had a big truck with several people on it, and big cauldrons of hot soup, bread. Fellows with burlap on their shoes were lined up all around Columbus Circle, and went for blocks and blocks around the park, waiting.

  There was a skit in one of the first shows I did, Americana. This was 1930. In the sketch, Mrs. Ogden Reid of the Herald Tribune was very jealous of Hearst’s beautiful bread line. It was bigger than her bread line. It was a satiric, volatile show. We needed a song for it.

  On stage, we had men in old soldiers’ uniforms, dilapidated, waiting around. And then into the song. We had to have a title. And how do you do a song so it isn’t maudlin? Not to say: my wife is sick, I’ve got six children, the Crash put me out of business, hand me a dime. I hate songs of that kind. I hate songs that are on the nose. I don’t like songs that describe a historic moment pitifully.

  The prevailing greeting at that time, on every block you passed, by some poor guy coming up, was: “Can you spare a dime?” Or: “Can you spare something for a cup of coffee?” … “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” finally hit on every block, on every street. I thought that could be a beautiful title. If I could only work it out by telling people, through the song, it isn’t just a man asking for a dime.

  This is the man who says: I built the railroads. I built that tower. I fought your wars. I was the kid with the drum. Why the hell should I be standing in line now? What happened to all this wealth I created?

  I think that’s what made the song. Of course, together with the idea and meaning, a song must have poetry. It must have the phrase that rings a bell. The art of song writing is a craft. Yet, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” opens up a political question. Why should this man be penniless at any time in his life, due to some fantastic thing called a Depression or sickness or whatever it is that makes him so insecure?

  In the song the man is really saying: I made an investment in this country. Where the hell are my dividends? Is it a dividend to say: “Can you spare a dime?” What the hell is wrong? Let’s examine this thing. It’s more than just a bit of pathos. It doesn’t reduce him to a beggar. It makes him a dignified human, asking questions—and a bit outraged, too, as he should be.

  Everybody picked the song up in ’30 and ’31. Bands were playing it and records were made. When Roosevelt was a candidate for President, the Republicans got pretty worried about it. Some of the network radio people were told to lay low on the song. In some cases, they tried to ban it from the air. But it was too late. The song had already done its damage.

  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

  It was twenty years ago today,

  Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play

  They’ve been going in and out of style

  But they’re guaranteed to raise a smile.

  —John Lennon and Paul McCartney17

  Lily, Roy and Bucky

  Lily is eighteen. Her brother, Roy, is sixteen. Bucky is seventeen. They are of lower middle-class families.

  LILY: My grandmother’d tell us things about t
he Depression. You can read about it, too. What they tell us is different than what you read.

  Roy: They’re always tellin’ us that we should be glad we got food and all that, ’cause back in the Thirties they used to tell us people were starving and got no jobs and all that stuff.

  LILY: The food lines they told us about.

  Roy: Yeah, you had to stay in line and wait for food.

  LILY: And everything. You got when it was there. If it wasn’t, then you made without it. She said there was a lot of waiting.

  BUCKY: I never had a Depression, so it don’t bother me really.

  Roy: From what you hear, you’d hate to live in that time.

  BUCKY: Well, I ain’t livin’ in that time.

  ROY: We really don’t know what it would be like. It seems like a long time ago.

  LILY: There’s a time I remember bein’ hungry. Livin’ away from home. I didn’t have anybody to depend on. (Indicates the others.) But they didn’t leave home. They stay home where it’s at.

  ROY: Like little things when you’re home: where’s the butter? There’s no butter, you go out and buy it. But like them people: where’s the butter? No butter, you gotta wait till you get the butter.

  LILY: Maybe it was margarine.

  ROY: Now you just walk into your house and sit down, turn on the TV, walk out into the kitchen, get a glass of milk or somethin’, watch a football game, baseball game for a few hours. They couldn’t do that. If they were hungry and there was nothin’ there, they’d just have to wait.

  BUCKY: When my parents talk: you should be glad and happy that we got all this now. The clothes you’re wearin’, the food we eat and all that stuff.

  LILY: They used to tell us about this one silver dollar that they had. Whenever they ran out, it was this silver dollar they used to take down to the little shop on the corner and get a dollar’s worth of food. They’d give the silver dollar. The guy’d hold it for ’em and when they got a dollar of currency, they could take it in and get their silver dollar back.

  I think we’d hurt more now if we had a Depression. You don’t see how they’d make it if it happened to ‘em again. Because they take a lot of things for granted. I mean, you see ’em now and they have everything. You can’t imagine how they would act if they didn’t have it. If they would even remember what they did. ’Cause they’re past it now. They already done it, and they figure they’re over it. If we fell now, I think everybody would take it a lot harder.

  Everybody’d step on each other. They’d just walk all over and kill each other. They got more than they ever need that they’d just step on anybody to keep it. They got cars, they got houses, they got this and that. It’s more than they need, but they think they need it, so they want to keep it. Human life isn’t as important as what they got.

  Diane

  A twenty-seven-year-old journalist.

  EVERY TIME I’ve encountered the Depression, it has been used as a barrier and a club. It’s been a counter-communication. Older people use it to explain to me that I can’t understand anything: I didn’t live through the Depression. They never say to me: We can’t understand you because we didn’t live through the leisure society. All attempts at communication are totally blocked. All of a sudden there’s a generation gap. It’s a frightening thing.

  What they’re saying is: For twenty years I’ve starved and I’ve worked hard. You must fight. It’s very Calvinistic. Work, suffer, have twenty lashes a day, and you can have a bowl of bean soup.

  I’ve never understood a society of want. We don’t have a society of want—not on a general level. We have a society of total surplus: unwanted goods and unwanted people.

  The society I was raised in … you got into a car and you were driven to a high school, where you didn’t do a lot of work and you got A’s. I thought white gloves was the total protection. It was the ultimate armor.

  To me, the Depression is old newsreels and the term, “soup line,” and Grapes of Wrath with Henry Fonda looking sincere and downcast. I can identify with the Industrial Revolution sooner than I can with the Depression, because that was an instance of men being thrown out of work by things beyond their control.

  I never could understand why the Depression occurred. Perhaps that’s why I’ve not been as sympathetic as I’m expected to be. You’re supposed to admire them because they’ve been in the “Flaring Twenties”—is that what it was called? 18—where they danced a lot and drank gin in automobiles, hail F. Scott Fitzgerald! The connection is not made economically, but socially.

  It runs from the morally errant generation of the Twenties, with the too-short skirts and the bathtub gin, the rise of the stock market and bad poetry. It’s all confused in my mind. Prohibition comes in somewhere. I’m not quite certain whether it preceded or came after the Depression. And then there’s Al Capone and people on film in wonderfully wide-shouldered suits, with machine guns, gunning down other people. It’s an incredible, historical jungle. It’s cinematically very mixed up, terribly fluid.

  Andy, 19

  WHEN I WAS at Cornell, a documentary film group showed The River, the Pare Lorentz thing, a fantastic movie.19 So much of it is this sentimental, renaissance-type feeling, which they got out of the TVA, which I’m sure sprung up out of the Depression, sort of regeneration and so on. The poem that Lorentz wrote, with all the names of the rivers, so, so derivative, but sort of nice when you listen to it—the great thing about the river.

  And people were laughing, all through the movie. Laughing at all the corny lines. I was so horrified. It sort of hurt me. I said to the faculty guy, “What’s the matter with these people?” He said, “It doesn’t mean anything to them.” So, I suppose that’s the way it goes… .

  Michael, 19

  WHAT DOES the Depression mean to me? I don’t know. I’m not depressed. I can pot out any time I want. A Depression is to me when I can’t sit down on my chaise lounge and have a beer and this boob tube right in my face.

  Tad, 20

  IT’S SOMETHING that has been filtered through by my parents. I didn’t know much about it, and they don’t mind my not knowing much about it. They control the source of information—sort of like the high priest: you can’t approach the altar too closely, or you’ll be struck dead. This purple heart in their background has become a justification for their present affluence. If we got the idea they didn’t have it so bad, they’d have less psychological control over us. That’s why they don’t approve of the hippies. These people are saying: our parents told us it was this way. Now we’re doin’ it, and it’s not so bad. Our parents don’t like that. They want to keep it a secret. They try to control the information that filters down to us. They’re screwed up and they don’t want people to find out about it.

  They say, “You have it soft now.” The point is, they have it soft now. They sort of feel guilty about it. If they make other people feel guilty about it, it won’t be so noticeable in their own instance.

  Nancy, 21

  MONEY is one of my father’s big values. He wishes he was a millionaire. I don’t think of money in that way. I think of it as a sideline, as something you have to have. But I don’t think day and night about it….

  Marshall and Steve

  Marshall is twenty-three. Steve is twenty-one. They had both attended college. One edits a syndicated service for underground newspapers. The other manages a coffeehouse.

  MARSHALL: I never really thought much about the Depression until last year when I was at Resurrection City. I guess the first time there was a march of the poor, soldiers cleared the people off and there was a lot of fighting. The Depression is something I don’t think about. I guess I should. It’s been no part of my experience.

  STEVE: It means something very personal to me. My mother graduated high school when she was young and had a chance to go to college. But she had to go to work, her parents were starving. Her life since has been one unremitting struggle to make do. I think of dreams people had, they were forced to give up in order to st
ay in American society. To make a buck. Like my mother did. Crushed hope.

  It gets across to me that there were a great many Americans who were ashamed of the Depression. I remember the McCarthy period. People were recanting what they had done during the Depression. And publicly proving they were ashamed of what they had done.

  MARSHALL: The Depression is an embarrassing thing. It is a shame to the system: the American Way that seemed so successful. All of a sudden, things broke down and didn’t work. It’s a difficult thing to understand today. To imagine this system, all of a sudden—for reasons having to do with paper, money, abstract things—breaking down.

  In a lot of young people’s minds today, it’s proof of the irrationality of this kind of economic system. After all, there were all those factories, and all those people who wanted to work. There was the equipment. Yet nothing was being worked. Today, if we had great storehouses of grain, if they wouldn’t be opened up immediately to feed people who are starving, people would take guns and see that they were opened up. People are not imprisoned by the idea that you don’t have a right to food. Why should people starve to death when there is food?

  STEVE: Many times, young people are told idealism is fine for youth, but there comes a point when one must face up to the realities of existence. That lesson was learned during the Depression. At least by my parents. They were forced to give up their idealism, forced to face the hard realities of making a buck to stay alive. This lesson was so hard learned, they felt it necessary to transmit it to us. These experiences have come to me second hand. I see its effects.

  I repudiate it. I have repudiated the kind of life my parents were forced into. I repudiate the lessons that they seem to have learned.

  MARSHALL: The issue between the generations is what is known as value. The value of the dollar. What it means to your generation is blood, sweat and tears … what you had to do to make a buck.

  When a group of young people burnt money at the stock exchange and threw the bills down from the balcony, it caused pandemonium. There was a scramble for the dollar bills on the floor of the exchange. They were trying to say something about the value of money. A Vietnamese person can be burned with napalm. Animals are slaughtered. But a dollar is sacred. A dollar is not to be burned. In fact, it’s a federal crime. This worship of the dollar is inherently an alienated idea. The people who killed themselves in 1929 were victims of it.