Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  Did you have contact with the lower … ?

  The lower classes? No. Let’s take the lower middle class, a contractor. He built me a ten-room stone house for $8,500. I would pay him five cents a square foot for knotty pine that would cost you $1.50 today. Same thing. No laborer that worked in my house got more than $5 a day. I asked the contractor what he got out of it. He said, “I ate for six months.” It was catch as catch can. Undersell yourself, do good work, on the hope that you would be recommended to somebody else.

  In those days everybody accepted his role, responsibility for his own fate. Everybody, more or less, blamed himself for his delinquency or lack of talent or bad luck. There was an acceptance that it was your own fault, your own indolence, your lack of ability. You took it and kept quiet.

  A kind of shame about your own personal failure. I was wondering what the hell it was all about. I wasn’t suffering.

  An outstanding feature of the Depression was that there were very few disturbances. People mass-marching, there was some. People marched in Washington and Hoover promised everything was going to be all right. People hoped and people were bewildered.

  Big business in 1930 and later in ’32 came hat in hand, begging Roosevelt. They have never gotten over their humiliation, and they have never forgiven him for having the wits to do something about it. Priming the pump.

  Now people think it’s coming to them. The whole ethos has changed. There is a great deal more hatred and free-floating aggression all over the country. We have reached unprecedented prosperity. Everybody says: “Why not me?” The affluent society has made itself known to people … how the better half lives. It’s put on television, you can see it. And everybody says, “Who the hell are they? What’s the matter with me? My skin is black, so what?” You don’t accept responsibility for your own fate. It’s the other fellow who’s to blame. It’s terrible. It could tear our country apart.

  Do you think there might be a revolution if the Depression came upon us again?

  It would be an inchoate affair. It wouldn’t be organized.

  Today nobody is permitted to starve. Now they think it’s coming to them. As a matter of fact, it was the government that brought this idea to the people, in the Thirties. The people didn’t ask the government. They ask the question they can’t answer themselves: Why am I the goat? Why me? They want pie in the sky… .

  Man and Boy

  Alonso Mosely, 20

  He is a VISTA worker in the black community.

  ALL I KNOW about the Depression is what I studied about it. People suffered and had to carry out food stamps. My parents mentioned it vaguely. I could get no information from them… .

  Clifford Burke, 68

  THE NEGRO was born in depression. It didn’t mean too much to him, The Great American Depression, as you call it. There was no such thing. The best he could be is a janitor or a porter or shoeshine boy. It only became official when it hit the white man. If you can tell me the difference between the depression today and the Depression of 1932 for a black man, I’d like to know it. Now, it’s worse, because of the prices. Know the rents they’re payin’ out here? I hate to tell ya.

  He is a pensioner. Most of his days are spent as a volunteer with a community organization in the black ghetto on the West Side of the city.

  We had one big advantage. Our wives, they could go to the store and get a bag of beans or a sack of flour and a piece of fat meat, and they could cook this. And we could eat it. Steak? A steak would kick in my stomach like a mule in a tin stable. Now you take the white fella, he couldn’t do this. His wife would tell him: Look, if you can’t do any better than this, I’m gonna leave you. I seen it happen. He couldn’t stand bringing home beans instead of steak and capon. And he couldn’t stand the idea of going on relief like a Negro.

  You take a fella had a job paying him $60, and here I am making $25. If I go home taking beans to me wife, we’ll eat it. It isn’t exactly what we want, but we’ll eat it. The white man that’s been making big money, he’s taking beans home, his wife’ll say: Get out. (Laughs.)

  Why did these big wheels kill themselves? They weren’t able to live up to the standards they were accustomed to, and they got ashamed in front of their women. You see, you can tell anybody a lie, and he’ll agree with you. But you start layin’ down the facts of real life, he won’t accept it. The American white man has been superior so long, he can’t figure out why he should come down.

  I remember a friend of mine, he didn’t know he was a Negro. I mean he acted like he never knew it. He got tied downtown with some stock. He blew about twenty thousand. He came home and drank a bottle of poison. A bottle of iodine or something like that. It was a rarity to hear a Negro killing himself over a financial situation. He might have killed himself over some woman. Or getting in a fight. But when it came to the financial end of it, there were so few who had anything. (Laughs.)

  I made out during that … Great Depression. (Laughs.) Worked as a teamster for a lumber yard. Forty cents an hour. Monday we’d have a little work. They’d say come back Friday. There wasn’t no need to look for another job. The few people working, most all of them were white.

  So I had another little hustle. I used to play pool pretty good. And I’d ride from poolroom to poolroom on this bicycle. I used to beat these guys, gamble what we had. I’d leave home with a dollar. First couple of games I could beat this guy, I’d put that money in my pocket. I’d take the rest of what I beat him out of and hustle the day on that. Sometimes I’d come home with a dollar and a half extra. That was a whole lot of money. Everybody was out trying to beat the other guy, so he could make it. It was pathetic.

  I never applied for PWA or WPA, ‘cause as long as I could hustle, there was no point in beating the other fellow out of a job, cuttin’ some other guy out… .

  God Bless’ the Child

  Them that’s got shall get

  Them that’s not shall lose

  So the Bible says,

  And it still is news.

  Mama may have, Papa may have,

  But God bless’ the child that’s got his own….

  Yes, the strong gets more, while the weak ones fade

  Empty pockets don’t ever make the grade.

  Mama may have, Papa may have,

  But God bless’ the child that’s got his own….

  —Arthur Herzog, Jr. and Billie Holiday39

  Jane Yoder

  A house in Evanston. The green grass grows all around. “We’re middle middle class. Not upper and not lower, either.” Her husband is a junior executive in a large corporation. They have two sons: the elder, a lieutenant in the air force; the other, soon to be married, a graduate of Notre Dame.

  “I love the trees. This house represents his struggle and mine. We bought this house on a shoestring. I’m terribly afraid of debt. If I have one fear, it’s the rich get richer when you buy on time. All these things that are hidden costs—like with this house, we had to buy it up quickly through a friend of my husband’s father. So it was bought without the real estate commission.

  “We’ve always paid our bills along the way. I have a real fear of being trapped into more than I need. I just turn away from it. Security to me is not what we have, but what we can do without. I don’t want anything so badly that I can’t wait for it. I think a second television set in our bedroom might be kind of nice. But I can dismiss it. We have one. How many can you watch?

  “We got married in July of 1940. This cocktail table is an early decision in those days. And that end table. So my brothers come in, and they say, ‘It’s amazing. Same stuff is here, and you’ve added to it. By God, how did you do it?’ ”

  Her father was a blacksmith in a small central Illinois mining town. There were seven children. The mines closed “early, about ‘28 or ’30.” The men, among them her father, went to other towns, seeking jobs.

  DURING THE DEPRESSION, my father took a great deal of psychological abuse. Oh, tremendous. This brother-in-law that was supe
rintendent of the mine … I look at these two men… . I really think my father had a marvelous mind. I wonder what he had the potential to become… .

  He’s like something out of Dostoevsky. My father was, I think, terribly intelligent. He learned to speak English, a couple of languages, and prided himself on not being like the rest in our neighborhood. He was constantly giving us things from either the paper or some fiction and being dramatic about it … “down with these people that didn’t want to think.” Just as proud of his kids … but he was schizophrenic. He could look at himself a little bit, and then just run like hell. Because what he saw was painful.

  We were struggling, just desperate to be warm. No blankets, no coats. At this time I was in fourth grade. Katie40 went to Chicago and bought an Indian blanket coat. I remember this incident of that Indian blanket coat. (Gasps.) Oh, because Katie came home with it and had it in her clothes closet for quite a while. And I didn’t have a coat. I can remember putting on that coat in Sue Pond’s house. I thought, oh, this is marvelous, gee. I took that coat home, and I waited till Sunday and wore it to church. And then everybody laughed. I looked horrid. Here was this black-haired kid, with a tendency to be overweight. My God, when I think of that…. But I wore that coat, laugh or not. And I can remember thinking: the hell with it. I don’t care what … it doesn’t mean a thing. Laugh hard, you’ll get it out of your system. I was warm.

  Before that I had one coat. It must have been a terrible lightweight coat or what, but I can remember being cold, just shivering. And came home, and nothing to do but go to bed, because if you went to bed, then you put the coat on the bed and you got warm.

  The cold that I’ve known. I never had boots. I think when I got married, I had my first set of boots. In rainy weather, you just ran for it, you ran between the raindrops or whatever. This was luxuriating to have boots. You simply wore your old shoes if it was raining. Save the others. You always polished them and put shoe trees in them. You didn’t have unlimited shoe trees, either. When the shoes are worn out, they’re used around the house. And of the high heels, you cut the heels down and they’re more comfortable.

  We tell our boys: you have a black sweater, a white sweater, and a blue sweater. You can’t wear ten sweaters at once, you can only wear one. What is this thing? … some of the people that I know have thirty blouses. Oh, my God, I have no desire to think where I’d hang them. For what? I can’t even grasp it.

  If we had a cold or we threw up, nobody ever took your temperature. We had no thermometer. But if you threw up and you were hot, my mother felt your head. She somehow felt that by bringing you oranges and bananas and these things you never had—there’s nothing wrong with you, this is what she’d always say in Croatian; you’ll be all right. Then she gave you all these good things. Oh, gee, you almost looked forward to the day you could throw up. I could remember dreaming about oranges and bananas, dreaming about them.

  My oldest brother, terribly bright, wanted to go on to school to help pay those grocery bills that were back there. But my youngest brother, Frankie, didn’t know. Oh, it just overwhelms me sometimes when I think of those two younger brothers, who would want to get some food and maybe go to the store. But they would see this $900 grocery bill, and they just couldn’t do it.

  We all laugh now, because Frankie is now down in New Mexico, and superintendent of two mines. And we all say, “Remember, Frankie?” Frankie’s “To košta puno?” That’s “Did it cost a lot?” Everything that came into the house, he’d say, “To košta puno?”

  Did it cost much? No matter what you brought in: bread and eggs and Karo syrup. Oh, Karo syrup was such a treat. I don’t remember so much my going to the store and buying food. I must have been terribly proud and felt: I can’t do it. How early we all stayed away from going to the store, because we sensed my father didn’t have the money. So we stayed hungry. And we talked about it.

  I can think of the WPA … my father immediately got employed in this WPA. This was a godsend. This was the greatest thing. It meant food, you know. Survival, just survival.

  How stark it was for me to come into nurses’ training and have the girls—one of them, Susan Stewart, lived across the hall from me, her father was a doctor—their impressions of the WPA. How it struck me. Before I could ever say that my father was employed in the WPA, discussions in the bull sessions in our rooms immediately was: these lazy people, the shovel leaners. I’d just sit there and listen to them. I’d look around and realize: sure, Susan Stewart was talking this way, but her father was a doctor, and her mother was a nurse. Well, how nice. They had respectable employment. In my family, there was no respectable employment. I thought, you don’t know what it’s like.

  How can I defend him? I was never a person who could control this. It just had to come out or I think I’d just blow up. So I would say, “I wonder how much we know until we go through it. Just like the patients we take care of. None of them are in that hospital by choice.” I would relate it in abstractions. I think it saved me from just blowing up.

  I would come back after that and I’d just say: Gee, these are just two separate, separate worlds.

  Tom Yoder, Jane’s Son

  He had entered the room during my conversation with his mother. His fiancée accompanied him.

  IT SEEMS just absolutely—it’s almost in a black humorous sense—funny to me. To realize that a hundred miles from Chicago, about forty years ago, my mother’s brothers, whom I know well now, were out with little rifles, hunting for food to live on. And if they didn’t find it, there were truly some empty stomachs. I mean, this is just too much. I don’t think my generation can really comprehend what all this means. I’ve never gone to bed hungry—I wish I had. I haven’t, and I probably never will.

  Whenever I’ve griped about my home life, Mother’s always said, “I hope you always have it so good.” And I’m the kind of person that will say, “Look, what do you mean you hope I always have it so good? I intend when I’m forty to be making $25,000.” But I understand what she means. I am grateful for what I have. But it’s only human nature that we all want to go on and find something better.

  Daisy Singer

  A photographer.

  I WAS six when the Crash came. Of classic, upper middle-class Jewish, you know, second-generation American. My father was sort of self-made.

  He was something of a phony. He could always appear to be richer than he was. A lot of his friends were richer than he was, but he was the most flamboyant. He made what he had go a long way. Like he wasn’t terribly intelligent, but he was fantastic at giving advice. People would come to him when they were contemplating suicide.

  Headwaiters instantly knew he was someone to contend with. Like if he was on a transatlantic voyage, he would meet, at one time, Cardinal Spellman and, at another time, Al Capone. He was that kind of man.

  We lived on Park Avenue before the Depression, like in eleven or fourteen rooms. One of those big apartments which are essentially very dreary. But they’re what people hoped to achieve. After the Crash, we moved to Central Park West which wasn’t such a terrible come-down. Except my grandparents moved in with us: keep up appearances and double in brass.

  I remember vaguely family conferences, which took place behind closed doors. Like loans negotiated and things like that. The front would have to be maintained because I’ve learned that in business if people smell failure in you, you’ve had it.

  I always had governesses. I had one I really loved when I was young, until I was seven. Then I had a succession of ones I loathed.

  I remember going to the park with the one I really liked. There was a shanty town. Like a Hooverville. It was for me the palpable memory of the other side of the tracks. Ever since, when I encounter poverty, it is this memory … holding the hand of one’s governess. For years, I felt exempt. I grew up feeling immune and exempt from circumstance. One of the things I suffered from was that I never felt adversity. I was confirmed in a sense of unreality. I never saw a real bread line. I
saw it in the movies.

  The outside world was so far from us, one didn’t expect to encounter it. The doors were shut, as if there were some kind of contagion out there. I guess it was innocence, but I don’t think of it as anything pretty as all: the less you experience, the better.

  When my father was dying of cancer, he would hallucinate. Some of them were businessmen’s hallucinations. He had an imaginary pocket with imaginary papers. He kept stashing them away. In a gesture that was familiar to him. Important papers. He always had a brief case or something and he had millions of papers… .

  Robin Langston

  He is a social worker by day, a jazz musician by night. He is forty-three years old. He lived in Hot Springs, Arkansas, until he was seventeen.

  “… there are so many places that would have been worse. Suppose I had come up, say in Mississippi … ?”

  I KNEW the Depression had really hit when the electric lights went out. My parents could no longer pay the $1 electric bill. The kerosene lamps went up in the home. And in the business. My father had a restaurant. This did something to me, because it let me know that my father was not the greatest cat in the world. I always thought he was.

  My father couldn’t read or write. If an airplane wrote his name in the sky, he wouldn’t be able to read it. But he had a thirst for knowledge. It was our task, my sister and I, to read to him. He was the type of cat who would keep the radio on all day, just to listen to the news.

  I remember that kerosene lamp, because for Christmas, ‘30, around in there, I got a little book that pictured Lindbergh’s flight. My mother was telling me how great Lindbergh was. She told me I would fly a plane like that. But she didn’t tell me about my chances of flying. That was the point, you see. ’Cause they were trying to shield me.

  My mother was a teacher. She never did teach, because my father never did want her to work. He was the person to wear the pants in the family. He wanted to be the strong one. I was exposed to a lot of books: Pushkin, Frederick Douglass, Raymond Moley, Time Magazine. No Booker T. Washington. He was anathema in my home.