by Studs Terkel
Here were all these people living in old, rusted-out car bodies. I mean that was their home. There were people living in shacks made of orange crates. One family with a whole lot of kids were living in a piano box. This wasn’t just a little section, this was maybe ten-miles wide and ten-miles long. People living in whatever they could junk together.
And when I read Grapes of Wrath—she bought that for me (indicates young girl seated across the room)—that was like reliving my life. Particularly the part where they lived in this Government camp. Because when we were picking fruit in Texas, we lived in a Government place like that. They came around, and they helped the women make mattresses. See, we didn’t have anything. And they showed us how to sew and make dresses. And every Saturday night, we’d have a dance. And when I was reading Grapes of Wrath this was just like my life. I was never so proud of poor people before, as I was after I read that book.
I think that’s the worst thing that our system does to people, is to take away their pride. It prevents them from being a human being. And wondering why the Harlem and why the Detroit. They’re talking about troops and law and order. You get law and order in this country when people are allowed to be decent human beings. Every time I hear another building’s on fire, I say: oh, boy, baby, hit ’em again. (Laughs.)
I don’t think people were put on earth to suffer. I think that’s a lot of nonsense. I think we are the highest development on the earth, and I think we were put here to live and be happy and to enjoy everything that’s here. I don’t think it’s right for a handful of people to get ahold of all the things that make living a joy instead of a sorrow. You wake up in the morning, and it consciously hits you—it’s just like a big hand that takes your heart and squeezes it—because you don’t know what that day is going to bring: hunger or you don’t know.
POSTSCRIPT: (A sudden flash of memory by Peggy Terry, as I was about to leave.) “It was the Christmas of ‘35, just before my dad got his bonus. We didn’t get anything for Christmas. I mean nothing. Not an orange, not an apple—nothing. I just felt so bad. I went to the church, to the children’s program and I stole a Christmas package. It was this pretty box and it had a big red ribbon on it. I stole it off the piano, and I took it home with me. I told my mother my Sunday school teacher had given me a Christmas present. When I opened it, it was a beautiful long scarf made out of velvet —a cover for a piano. My mother knew my Sunday school teacher didn’t give me that. ’Cause we were living in one room, in a little shack in what they called Gander Flat. (Laughs.) For a child—I mean, they teach you about Santa Claus and they teach you all that stuff—and then for a child to have to go to church and steal a present … and then it turned out to be something so fantastic, a piano scarf. Children shouldn’t have to go around stealing. There’s enough to give all of them everything they want, any time they want it. I say that’s what we’re gonna have.”
Kiko Konagamitsu
He is a Japanese-American (Nisei), living in a Midwestern city.
MY FATHER had a farm in southern California. I remember the Grapes of Wrath kind of people. They used to work for us, pick crops. It amazed me. They’d say, “Let the Jap boy count it.” They’d come in from the fields, and I’d tally up the totals for the day. I’d weigh them on the scale. I didn’t feel I was qualified. I was just a little kid. But I could count. They would honor my counting. It was a tremendous trust. It seems the less affluent you are, the more you are able to trust people, the more you are able to give others.
My father had many old-type Oriental feelings about things. If one of his friends had trouble and couldn’t afford to have anyone working for him, my father would ask me to go over. I remember once feeling badly. I had worked all day for this man, cleaning lettuce, stacking vegetables. He didn’t pay me. My father gave me a real tongue-lashing: “You’re not expected to get paid. He didn’t ask you to go. I asked you to go.”
The communal spirit of the Nisei is less today than it was in the Depression. The second-generation Japanese has become the most so-called American.
Someone laughingly told: Maybe the war—and the internment camp29 —was good for us. How else could we have gotten out of California? There were hundreds of Nisei Ph.D.’s working on the family’s farm or fruit stands. Their parents would live in shacks so their sons and daughters could go to college. (Laughs.)
Thousands of us—after Pearl Harbor—were assembled at the Santa Anita race track. We were assigned to camps or contracted out to farmers. My brother and I signed up to pick sugar beets for a farmer in Idaho. Here we worked on a sugar beet farm, but we couldn’t get any sugar coupons. I didn’t know the taste of sugar. (Laughs.)
Country Joe McDonald
A rock musician, he’s a member of “Country Joe And The Fish.” He is twenty-six.
I USED TO ask my father what he did. He never said much, except he rode around in freight trains and couldn’t find work, and at one point he went up to Alaska and worked and was hungry. He hardly talked about it at all, as a matter of fact.
Could you imagine what a Depression would be like?
No. But there’ve been times like when the band was first formed. We spent about two years on a below-poverty level. We had incomes of about anywhere from $5 to $25 a week. We managed to make it all right, though it got to be a real drag in the second year. We really started to get a craving for good food. We were surrounded by an affluent society. I just can’t imagine a whole country living like that.
It’s a long ways from me. I remember Woody Guthrie records, where he talked about this big cloud of dust coming along and they losing all their homes. They actually had houses that a bulldozer could just knock over. (Laughs.) I can’t imagine bulldozing my parents’ house down there in Berkeley. You’d have a hard time knocking down a stucco house. Maybe it’s impossible to relive that period.
I travel around and talk to some of the Mexican migrant workers. In a way, they seem closer to each other than most well-off middle-class people. Their impoverished condition somehow made them very real people. It’s hard to be phony when you haven’t got anything. I mean when you’re really down and out. I think the Depression had some kind of human qualities with it that we lack now.
Cesar Chavez
Like so many who have worked from early childhood, particularly in the open country, he appears older than his forty-one years. His manner is diffident, his voice soft.
He is president of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW A). It is, unlike craft and industrial unions, a quite new labor fraternity. In contrast to these others, agricultural workers—those who “follow the crops”—had been excluded from many of the benefits that came along with the New Deal.
OH, I REMEMBER having to move out of our house. My father had brought in a team of horses and wagon. We had always lived in that house, and we couldn’t understand why we were moving out. When we got to the other house, it was a worse house, a poor house. That must have been around 1934. I was about six years old.
It’s known as the North Gila Valley, about fifty miles north of Yuma. My dad was being turned out of his small plot of land. He had inherited this from his father, who had homesteaded it. I saw my two, three other uncles also moving out. And for the same reason. The bank had foreclosed on the loan.
If the local bank approved, the Government would guarantee the loan and small farmers like my father would continue in business. It so happened the president of the bank was the guy who most wanted our land. We were surrounded by him: he owned all the land around us. Of course, he wouldn’t pass the loan.
One morning a giant tractor came in, like we had never seen before. My daddy used to do all his work with horses. So this huge tractor came in and began to knock down this corral, this small corral where my father kept his horses. We didn’t understand why. In the matter of a week, the whole face of the land was changed. Ditches were dug, and it was different. I didn’t like it as much.
We all of us climbed into an old Chevy that my dad had. And
then we were in California, and migratory workers. There were five kids—a small family by those standards. It must have been around ’36. I was about eight. Well, it was a strange life. We had been poor, but we knew every night there was a bed there, and that this was our room. There was a kitchen. It was sort of a settled life, and we had chickens and hogs, eggs and all those things. But that all of a sudden changed. When you’re small, you can’t figure these things out. You know something’s not right and you don’t like it, but you don’t question it and you don’t let that get you down. You sort of just continue to move.
But this had quite an impact on my father. He had been used to owning the land and all of a sudden there was no more land. What I heard … what I made out of conversations between my mother and my father—things like, we’ll work this season and then we’ll get enough money and we’ll go and buy a piece of land in Arizona. Things like that. Became like a habit. He never gave up hope that some day he would come back and get a little piece of land.
I can understand very, very well this feeling. These conversations were sort of melancholy. I guess my brothers and my sisters could also see this very sad look on my father’s face.
That piece of land he wanted … ?
No, never. It never happened. He stopped talking about that some years ago. The drive for land, it’s a very powerful drive.
When we moved to California, we would work after school. Sometimes we wouldn’t go. “Following the crops,” we missed much school. Trying to get enough money to stay alive the following winter, the whole family picking apricots, walnuts, prunes. We were pretty new, we had never been migratory workers. We were taken advantage of quite a bit by the labor contractor and the crew pusher.30 In some pretty silly ways. (Laughs.)
Sometimes we can’t help but laugh about it. We trusted everybody that came around. You’re traveling in California with all your belongings in your car: it’s obvious. Those days we didn’t have a trailer. This is bait for the labor contractor. Anywhere we stopped, there was a labor contractor offering all kinds of jobs and good wages, and we were always deceived by them and we always went. Trust them.
Coming into San Jose, not finding—being lied to, that there was work. We had no money at all, and had to live on the outskirts of town under a bridge and dry creek. That wasn’t really unbearable. What was unbearable was so many families living just a quarter of a mile. And you know how kids are. They’d bring in those things that really hurt us quite a bit. Most of those kids were middle-class families.
We got hooked on a real scheme once. We were going by Fresno on our way to Delano. We stopped at some service station and this labor contractor saw the car. He offered a lot of money. We went. We worked the first week: the grapes were pretty bad and we couldn’t make much. We all stayed off from school in order to make some money. Saturday we were to be paid and we didn’t get paid. He came and said the winery hadn’t paid him. We’d have money next week. He gave us $10. My dad took the $10 and went to the store and bought $10 worth of groceries. So we worked another week and in the middle of the second week, my father was asking him for his last week’s pay, and he had the same excuse. This went on and we’d get $5 or $10 or $7 a week for about four weeks. For the whole family.
So one morning my father made the resolution no more work. If he doesn’t pay us, we won’t work. We got in a car and went over to see him. The house was empty. He had left. The winery said they had paid him and they showed us where they had paid him. This man had taken it.
Labor strikes were everywhere. We were one of the strikingest families, I guess. My dad didn’t like the conditions, and he began to agitate. Some families would follow, and we’d go elsewhere. Sometimes we’d come back. We couldn’t find a job elsewhere, so we’d come back. Sort of beg for a job. Employers would know and they would make it very humiliating … .
Did these strikes ever win?
Never.
We were among these families who always honored somebody else’s grievance. Somebody would have a personal grievance with the employer. He’d say I’m not gonna work for this man. Even though we were working, we’d honor it. We felt we had to. So we’d walk out, too. Because we were prepared to honor those things, we caused many of the things ourselves. If we were picking at a piece rate and we knew they were cheating on the weight, we wouldn’t stand for it. So we’d lose the job, and we’d go elsewhere. There were other families like that.
Sometimes when you had to come back, the contractor knew this … ?
They knew it, and they rubbed it in quite well. Sort of shameful to come back. We were trapped. We’d have to do it for a few days to get enough money to get enough gas.
One of the experiences I had. We went through Indio, California. Along the highway there were signs in most of the small restaurants that said “White Trade Only.” My dad read English, but he didn’t really know the meaning. He went in to get some coffee—a pot that he had, to get some coffee for my mother. He asked us not to come in, but we followed him anyway. And this young waitress said, “We don’t serve Mexicans here. Get out of here.” I was there, and I saw it and heard it. She paid no more attention. I’m sure for the rest of her life she never thought of it again. But every time we thought of it, it hurt us. So we got back in the car and we had a difficult time trying—in fact, we never got the coffee. These are sort of unimportant, but they’re … you remember ’em very well.
One time there was a little diner across the tracks in Brawley. We used to shine shoes after school. Saturday was a good day. We used to shine shoes for three cents, two cents. Hamburgers were then, as I remember, seven cents. There was this little diner all the way across town. The moment we stepped across the tracks, the police stopped us. They would let us go there, to what we called “the American town,” the Anglo town, with a shoe shine box. We went to this little place and we walked in.
There was this young waitress again. With either her boyfriend or someone close, because they were involved in conversation. And there was this familiar sign again, but we paid no attention to it. She looked up at us and she sort of—it wasn’t what she said, it was just a gesture. A sort of gesture of total rejection. Her hand, you know, and the way she turned her face away from us. She said: “Wattaya want?” So we told her we’d like to buy two hamburgers. She sort of laughed, a sarcastic sort of laugh. And she said, “Oh, we don’t sell to Mexicans. Why don’t you go across to Mexican town, you can buy ’em over there.” And then she turned around and continued her conversation.
She never knew how much she was hurting us. But it stayed with us.
We’d go to school two days sometimes, a week, two weeks, three weeks at most. This is when we were migrating. We’d come back to our winter base, and if we were lucky, we’d get in a good solid all of January, February, March, April, May. So we had five months out of a possible nine months. We started counting how many schools we’d been to and we counted thirty-seven. Elementary schools. From first to eighth grade. Thirty-seven. We never got a transfer. Friday we didn’t tell the teacher or anything. We’d just go home. And they accepted this.
I remember one teacher—I wondered why she was asking so many questions. (In those days anybody asked questions, you became suspicious. Either a cop or a social worker.) She was a young teacher, and she just wanted to know why we were behind. One day she drove into the camp. That was quite an event, because we never had a teacher come over. Never. So it was, you know, a very meaningful day for us.
This I remember. Some people put this out of their minds and forget it. I don’t. 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 this is what happened. This is the truth, you know. History.
Fran
Fran is twenty-one. She’s from Atlanta. Her family is considered effluent.
MY MOTHER HAD a really big family, she was one of seven kids. She brought me up, not on fairy tales, but on stories of the Depression. They feel almost like fairy tales to me because sh
e used to tell bedtime stories about that kind of thing.
The things they teach you about the Depression in school are quite different from how it was: Well, you knew for some reason society didn’t get along so well in those years. And then you found out that everybody worked very hard, and things somehow got better. People didn’t talk about the fact that industries needed to make guns for World War II made that happen. “It just got better” ‘cause people pitched in and worked. And’cause Roosevelt was a nice guy, although some people thought he went too far. You never hear about the rough times.
A lot of young people feel angry about this kind of protectiveness. This particular kind is even more vicious somehow, because it’s wanting you not to have to go through what is a very real experience, even though it is a very hard thing. Wanting to protect you from your own history, in a way.
Blackie Gold
A car dealer. He has a house in the suburbs.
WHATEVER I HAVE, I’m very thankful for. I’ve never brought up the Depression to my children. Never in my life. Why should I? What I had to do, what I had to do without, I never tell ’em what I went through, there’s no reason for it. They don’t have to know from bad times. All they know is the life they’ve had and the future that they’re gonna have.
All I know is my children are well-behaved. If I say something to my daughters, it’s “Yes, sir,” “No, sir.” I know where my kids are at all times. And I don’t have no worries about them being a beatnik.
I’ve built my own home. I almost have no mortgage. I have a daughter who’s graduating college, and my daughter did not have to work, for me to put her through college. At the age of sixteen, I gave her a car, that was her gift. She’s graduating college now: I’ll give her a new one.
We had to go out and beg for coal, buy bread that’s two, three days old. My dad died when I was an infant. I went to an orphan home for fellas. Stood there till I was seventeen years old. I came out into the big wide world, and my mother who was trying to raise my six older brothers and sisters, couldn’t afford another mouth to feed. So I enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC. This was about 1937.
