by Studs Terkel
What happened was this: There were a few rocks thrown at the police when the shooting started. Or even before. They all turned and ran. I said in my testimony before the La Follette Committee: like the shutters of a Venetian blind. As they were running, the police shot into them.
The police weren’t all bad. Some of them quit the force because of the incident. They couldn’t stand what happened. I know this as a fact because some of the guys came up here as patients and told me.
There was a break in the trial at the Criminal Court. I had been testifying. I went out for a smoke. There were about sixty cops in the corridor, and I was nervous. Some big guy comes up to me and I thought: Oh-oh, here it comes. I prepare myself for the blow. He came up very close and said, “Every day I get a pain up here in my stomach. What do you think it is, Doc?” (Laughs.) I wasn’t hostile to all these guys. They committed a brutal act. They were told to do this thing. They were told these people were armed. They were scared, they were trembling and they were shooting, at whom they didn’t know.
Mayor Kelly tried to get me, when he heard about this. I had an excited call from Wesley Hospital: There are people going all over your records. What’s the matter? I said, “They’re trying to find out how many abortions I did during the last few years.” I wasn’t scared. A friend of Kelly’s told him to lay off, he’d be disappointed. I had a pretty clean record. He quit.
The misrepresentation in the newspapers was so great. There was a picture in the back page of the Tribune, for instance: a little old guy lying on the prairie in his white shirt, blood streaming down his face and Lieutenant Kilroy beating the hell out of him with his club. The caption said: “Striker Beats Up Police At Republic Steel Riot.” A few of us said this will be called a historical fact some day unless we do something about it. So we decided to have a mass meeting at the Civic Opera House.
Paul Douglas was the chairman. Robert Morss Lovett63 and Carl Sandburg and A. Philip Randolph came. I described the wounds and an organ was playing and almost everyone in the place was crying. Lovett got up and said, “Captain Mooney is a killer.” Carl Sandburg got mesmerized by A. Philip Randolph and started chanting the words: “The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.” He didn’t say a thing; he got caught up in the rhythm. 64
It’s the tableau I remember: people walking out on the prairie and the police shooting them down.
He recounts the struggles of his group; editorials in the AMA Journal labeling them subversive, un-American; the denial. of hospital facilities. “All through the Thirties, it was difficult. We had no way of calling peoples’ attention to our work, because we were opposed to advertising as much as the AMA.”
In medicine, people were having a hell of a hard time. Doctors themselves were pressed, particularly the younger ones. Doctors coming out now are almost sure to find a place. The kids coming up in medicine now have absolutely no conception. You talk Depression to these boys, nonsense. They’re met on all sides with delightful offers. Their biggest job is to find which piece of French pastry to choose.
In the bad days of the Depression, there was really almost nothing. Competition with the older generation was terrific. One found oneself with a lot of training, knowledge, skills, ready to spring forth on the world—no customers. They weren’t going to doctors because they couldn’t afford it.
The poor got some care, could go to free dispensaries. The rich got good care because they could afford it. There was this big middle class that was not getting any care. The middle class got very much in the position of the poor people… .
The poor people would not hesitate to go to free clinics, there was no loss of self-respect for them. They were used to this business. But the middle class couldn’t drag itself to that point.
People fairly well-off suddenly found themselves without funds. Insull-destroyed teachers, they were in a heck of a fix. A lot of teachers had been actively assaulted by the Insull sales force and lost all their savings. Particularly older teachers who were soon to retire. We had many teachers among our patients.
They couldn’t afford to get medical care, and they couldn’t bring themselves to sitting in a dispensary. They put off care until things got real bad. They probably lost their lives.
The spirit of the free hospital and the spirit of the free clinic was the spirit of the alms house. I was working at the Northwestern dispensary in ‘30, ’31. We noticed a lady coming to. us rather frequently. She’d come in a Cadillac, park three blocks away and walk over. She belonged to a class I used to call the well-dressed destitute. She had the clothes, she had the Cadillac, but she didn’t have any money. She’d come over and get her care for nothing. If she had come up in the Cadillac, and the social worker saw her, she would have been excluded. People of that status would find it very difficult to accept charity.
“These simple things we stood for—group medicine and prepayment—have been achieved. I read some of the arguments for Medicare. They were almost verbatim the arguments we used thirty years ago, the same damn thing. With an innocent air of discovery they’re just finding out about this scuff. This has been the habit of the AMA. They sing the praises today of what they condemned yesterday.”
All of a sudden, I find myself taking care of an ex-president of a university. And there was a widow of the curator of an art museum, well-dressed, white hair, genteel. We were surprised. The kind of people we expected to find were the dispensary-goers… . It was a mixture of people, with one common denominator: difficulty in paying their medical bills.
And people starved on the street and on streetcars. I knew a resident at People’s Hospital. Every day, he told me, somebody would faint on a streetcar. They’d bring him in, and they wouldn’t ask any questions. They’d look the patient over briefly. The picture was familiar, they knew what it was. Hunger. When he regained consciousness, they’d give him something to eat. People were flopping on the streets from hunger.
They would just sit there. This was a kind of incoherent, senseless structure we were facing. Some of us figured it was collapsing. We decided we were gonna reconstruct the thing. This was sort of unique medical care in the new society. We were kidding around, really. Chewing the rag.
But there was a feeling of creativeness. We belonged to a thing called New America. Our outlook was socialism. The leadership was mostly from the Union Theological Seminary. It was up to us to create a substitute for the society that was disappearing. (Laughs.) We were arrogant, perhaps, but this was the feeling. Splendid ideas about what we could accomplish.
There was a feeling of perplexity. Unless something like the New Deal happened, people might have become violent. I remember an ominous march down Michigan Avenue one day. It was about ’34. A very silent, scraggy march of the unemployed. Nobody said anything. Just a mass of people flowing down that street. In their minds, I think a point was reached: We’re not gonna take it any more. I remember it particularly because of the silence. No waving of banners, no enthusiasm. An undercurrent of desperation.
It was the hopeful voice of F.D.R. that got this thing out of the swamps. He didn’t have much to offer, but it was enough. He was a guy flexible enough to understand the need for experiments, for not being rigid and for making people feel there was somebody who gave a damn about them.
In the late Thirties, I’d say our society was saved again. By Hitler. Because the stopgap wasn’t working, and things were sliding back. The war, in a sense, ended the Depression. It’s like an incurable disease in which there is a remission. Like Hodgkin’s disease. Everybody is happy, the gland gets smaller. And then the guy dies. The war stopped the second slide, which might have gone as far as violent upheaval. You see, people now undergo improvement with leukemia. They feel good, but they all die.
But there is something important about this treatment, about stopgaps: the hope that if the patient keeps on living, somebody will come up with something new. We saw this with pernicious anemia. A doctor friend had it. We kept him going for months and months with transfu
sions. His daughter said: Why do you guys keep this poor man living and suffering? I said: Because there’s always a chance somebody will come up with something. This man died. But three months later, Murphy and Minot came out with Vitamin B12. If this fellow had been kept alive with transfusions, he would probably be alive today. I’m in favor of stopgaps for a man or for a society.
Those were terrible days, remarkable days. We had achieved goals. We wanted to promote the interests of labor. Outsiders like myself and Bob Lovett and the rest felt their interests were along with ours. The Social Security Laws, Unemployment Compensation, all that was connected with the labor movement. Some of these goals—largely achieved. Today, I think, it is much more terrible. This terrible sense of wondering how we’re going to get out of things. Then, we got out. And we felt good.
My habit of life has been changed by the Depression. I’m sitting here in this office … these wounds are permanent. My father was a doctor, and his life’s savings were in one piece of property. It was foreclosed on him by the University of Chicago, and he lost every cent he had. They simply took it away because they had the legal right to take it away. And he taught at Rush Medical College65 for twelve years for nothing. (Laughs.) So there was no help from Papa any more. I had planned research work, but the Depression got me into this—I don’t have too many regrets. I would have been a nice rich guy probably, with a practice … I would have been one of many other fellows. As it is, I’m myself, unique, as they say. (Smiles.) I have no regrets… .
BOOK TWO
Old Families
Edward A. Ryerson
Retired chairman of the board, Inland Steel Company. On the eighteenth floor of a modern structure, the Inland Building, is his office. Facing us, on the far wall, are portraits of family members: his grandfather, his father, his brother, his son, himself.
The early Ryersons had established iron furnaces out East in the 1600s. They supplied bullets and cannon for the Revolutionary War. His grandfather had come to Chicago in 1842 to sell boilermaker supplies for the growing city.
UNTIL THE LATE 1920s, everything was going pretty well with us. The Depression hit us like everyone else. People weren’t buying steel. Most of my friends, who represented wealth, were all in some way affected. There were some smart guys, so-called, who claimed they saw the handwriting on the wall and liquidated their securities in advance. Most I knew suffered setbacks.
We’d have to readjust our way of living. We all did. We did more for ourselves. I did away with my chauffeur and so forth. I drove my own car, my wife did and all that sort of thing.
We had to cut ourselves down so that it would not look too far out of line. After all, I was in the midst of a very close relationship with a lot of people who had nothing. I was running the welfare field.
During the Depression, he was head of the Council of Social Agencies—later to be known as the Welfare Council—and chief of the newly created Public Aid Commission. He was on the board of Chicago Commons, a settlement house…. “Very early, I was aware of the problems of the distressed.”
Before Hoover’s term ended—I called on him personally—I got for the State of Illinois, the first federal money for relief ever granted. It was a curious thing for me to do. I was bitterly opposed to federal funds at that time. But I realized the problem was beyond the scope of local government.
I first went to Springfield to obtain funds. I got $12 million. You can imagine how far that went in relief programs in 1932. It lasted only three months.
The legislature couldn’t understand it. They had no comprehension of what was needed. We had to battle. They didn’t believe any public money should be used in this way. It should all be left to the private welfare agencies.
I think the Old Deal, the Hoover Deal, would have accomplished many of the reforms of the New Deal. I was very close to Hoover, a great admirer of his. He had asked me to take some appointments in Washington, but I declined because of my other responsibilities. If he had been reelected … but the public wanted a change. Hoover was a humanitarian, more than any President we’ve ever had. Certainly in my lifetime.
In 1935, the Ryerson Company, distributors, merged with Inland Steel, manufacturers. Inland was part of a loose association of companies known as Little Steel, among others being Jones & Laughlin and Republic. Tom Girdler, president of Republic Steel, was the most recalcitrant in dealing with the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee of the newly emerging CIO.
That strike of 1937 was a terrible one. Were seven people killed?
Ten.
Tom Girdler was quite a different kind of person than anyone at Inland. I knew him very well. He had great ability, but he was a little too hard-boiled to deal with. He never quite grew up to accept the fact that conditions were different in this country than they had been years before. You remember the statement he made: he would never sign up with the CIO, he would go down and sell apples, or something.
Our philosophy was different. We recognized the difficulties. We recognized the seriousness of some things in the demands of labor. We all realized we had to deal with it in a different way than we were used to in the old days, when the industry was being run by the so-called steel barons, Gary, Schwab and so forth. Tom Girdler and a few others were a carryover from that philosophy. I think they saw the light before they were through.
Sewell Avery was another. He was a colorful, brilliant, able man, before he began to go to pieces. He was in full command of his capacities up to the time he was carried out by the army.66 A change came upon him after that. He felt the country was going to pieces under the New Deal. Bitter. I was sympathetic to him. But I didn’t agree that everything was going to the dogs. I felt we’d pull out of it.
Diana Morgan
She was a “southern belle” in a small North Carolina town. “I was taught that no prince of royal blood was too good for me.” (Laughs.) Her father had been a prosperous cotton merchant and owner of a general store. “It’s the kind of town you became familiar with in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. You knew everybody. We were the only people in town who had a library.”
Her father’s recurring illness, together with the oncoming of hard times —the farmers and the townspeople unable to pay their bills—caused the loss of the store. He went into bankruptcy.
THE BANKS FAILED about the time I was getting ready to go to college. My family thought of my going to Wellesley, Vassar, Smith—but we had so little money, we thought of a school in North Carolina. It wasn’t so expensive.
It was in my junior year, and I came home for Christmas…. I found the telephone disconnected. And this was when I realized that the world was falling apart. Imagine us without a telephone! When I finished school, I couldn’t avoid facing the fact that we didn’t have a cook any more, we didn’t have a cleaning woman any more. I’d see dust under the beds, which is something I’d never seen before. I knew the curtains weren’t as clean as they used to be. Things were beginning to look a little shabby… .
The first thing I noticed about the Depression was that my great-grandfather’s house was lost, about to be sold for taxes. Our own house was sold. It was considered the most attractive house in town, about a hundred and fifty years old. We even had a music library. Imagine my shock when it was sold for $5,000 in back taxes. I was born in that house.
I never felt so old in my life as I felt the first two years out of college.’Cause I hadn’t found a new life for myself, and the other one was finished.
I remember how embarrassed I was when friends from out of town came to see me, because sometimes they’d say they want a drink of water, and we didn’t have any ice. (Laughs.) We didn’t have an electric refrigerator and couldn’t afford to buy ice. There were those frantic arrangements of running out to the drugstore to get Coca-Cola with crushed ice, and there’d be this embarrassing delay, and I can remember how hot my face was.
All this time, I wasn’t thinking much about what was going on in this country… . I was still leading some kind
of social life. Though some of us had read books and discussed them, there wasn’t much awareness… . Oh, we deplored the fact that so many of our young men friends couldn’t find suitable things to do… .
One day a friend of my father stopped me on the street and said, “Would you like a job? A friend of mine is director of one of those New Deal programs. She’ll tell you about it.”
Oh, I was so excited, I didn’t know what do do—the thought of having a job. I was very nervous, but very hopeful. Miss Ward came. She looked like a Helen Hokinson woman, very forbidding, formal. She must have been all of forty-five, but to me she looked like some ancient and very frightening person from another world.
She said to me, “It’s not a job for a butterfly.” She could just look at me and tell that I was just totally unsuitable. I said I was young and conscientious and if I were told what I was supposed to do, I would certainly try to the best of my ability… . She didn’t give me any encouragement at all.
When she left, I cried for about an hour. I was really a wreck. I sobbed and sobbed and thought how unfair she was. So I was very much amazed to receive a telegram the next day summoning me to a meeting in Raleigh —for the directors of women’s work.
There were dozens of women there, from all over the state, of all ages. It seemed to me very chaotic. Everyone was milling around, talking about weaving projects, canning, book binding… . Everyone there seemed very knowledgeable. I really didn’t know what they were talking about. And nobody really told me what I was supposed to do. It just seemed that people were busy, and I somehow gathered that I was in.
So I went back home. I went to the county relief offices at the courthouse. There were people sitting on the floor of a long hallway, mostly black people, looking very depressed, sad. Some of them had children with them, some of them were very old. Just endless rows of them, sitting there, waiting… .
My first impression was: Oh, those poor devils, just sitting there, and nobody even saying, “We’ll get to you as soon as we can.” Though I didn’t know a thing about social work, what was good and what wasn’t good, my first impulse was that those people should be made to feel somebody was interested in them. Without asking anybody, I just went around and said, “Have you been waiting long? We’ll get to you just as soon as we can.”
