Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  I would go down and look at those cows—to me it was sorta like human beings, because they would just groan and go on—when they was killin’ ’em and they wasn’t dead. I remember one day I went down there, and all of a sudden it hit me. I seen the war.

  When I listened to those cows and looked at how they were carryin‘ on, then I seen how horrible wars were. I thought then: Why do they have wars? To me, those cows were like women, moanin’ over their husbands, their children and the starvation and the places where they were, everything was wiped out. I ran up to the house and I sit up there a long time and then I went to cryin’ because they was doin’ these cows this way.

  Sumio Nichi

  A second-generation Japanese-American.

  WE HAD A BIG FARM near Salinas, California. Lettuce, celery, cauliflower, broccoli…. In 1934, I bought a truck for $1600. Paid everything back within a year. I bought another. In 1936, I bought four trucks and trailers for $24,000. We had our own packinghouse. It got rough in ‘37 and ’38. There were too many crops, over-production. In those two years, we lost almost everything. We wound up owing the bank $78,000. In ‘39, ’40, ’41, we covered up our losses. The day I was to report to the assembly center, in 1941, we brought that mortgage down to $9,875. The day I left for the internment camp, I walked into the bank, paid them $9,875.

  We had an inventory of $80,000 worth of equipment. The people around, the whites, knew we had to leave. They were just standing around, waiting. I was thinking of storing it, but they told us we couldn’t do it. It would be hampering the war effort. So they set up appraisers. I got $6,000 for it.

  After the war—I wound up in the army, counter-intelligence, would you believe it? (Laughs.) I took a trip back to Salinas. I couldn’t lease one acre of land. Nothing available. The people who took over our place, they’re doing quite well. (Laughs.) So I came to Chicago, and here I am. (Laughs.)

  Editor and Publisher

  Fred Sweet

  During the last years of the Depression, he was editor and publisher of the Mount Gilead Union-Register. The town in central Ohio had a population of 2,500.

  OH, GOD, one of the reasons I went broke is that a farmer would say: “I want to put an ad in the paper. I had to sell the place off.” He had so many head of Jersey cattle and a baler and a tractor and wagon and this and that. At the bottom of the ad, there was always the line: “And other articles too numerous to mention.”

  You’d go to the auction and what would you see among the “articles too numerous to mention”? A doll, a couple of books, a basket with the Bible in it, the kids’ wagon…. Here you had the whole history of the family in all this junk. People pawing over it and buying it for a penny on the dollar.

  I never had the heart—the guy wanted a forty-inch ad. Twenty-five cents an inch. That’s ten bucks, isn’t it? And he always wanted about fifty or a hundred handbills to put on telephone posts and fences. How could you charge a guy who’s dead broke for those extra handbills? You’d feel funny about charging for the ad in the first place.

  The paper had 843 subscribers when I took over. When I left, it had about 2,780. It was a great success editorially. But I was running a New Deal paper in a Republican town. The two other papers got the legal advertising. I didn’t have a share of that stuff.

  You see, the judge of the Probate Court is a Republican. The law says he’s got to publish certain kinds of ads in two newspapers of general circulation. If he’d been a Democrat, I would’ve gotten a piece of the business, see? But that was only one of the reasons I went broke.

  There’s one factory in Mount Gilead at the time. It’s making hydraulic presses for airplane fuselages. 1940—the war’s coming, but it’s still Depression down here. Highly skilled mechanics are working for sixty, seventy cents an hour. In Cincinnati, Cleveland and Toledo, they’re making $2.50.

  Into town one day, comes a walking delegate from the union. He says, “I find there’s nobody around here wants to be seen even talking to me. Everybody’s scared.” I said, “The back end of the shop is yours any time you want a bunch of guys to come down here. We’ll pull the shades down and you can sit behind the press down there and nobody will see you.” So our little newspaper office became the center where the plot was laid to organize the company.

  The president of the company was the superintendent of the Presbyterian Sunday School. He dominated the whole town. But the men in the plant responded. Pretty soon, the paper was covering the organizing drive. I’m trying to play it right down the middle in the news columns. Every time the union’s got something to say, I’d call up this guy: “Have you got anything to say?” I’d print ’em side by side. But in my own column, I’d express my personal thoughts.

  Pretty soon, the head of the town’s biggest department store comes over. “Fred, you gotta get off this union kick.” I said, “It would be a good thing for this town to have a union.” A couple of weeks later, he jerks his ad. Biggest advertiser. (Laughs.)

  Pretty soon we’ve got the Legion with ax handles and all the rest of it. The county sheriff lets the highway repair trucks haul the Legionnaires with their Legion caps. The highway department supplies the ax handles, and they beat up the pickets.

  Eventually, the place gets organized. On a Saturday night, this department store man comes in, takes me to his place, and puts me near the cash register. He says, “I want you to stand here and watch for a while.” Here are these machinists coming in with their paychecks bigger than they ever had in their lives. They’re payin’ bills they’ve been runnin’ for six months or a year, two years.

  The guy’s amazed. He says, “I shouldn’t have taken the ad out. You were right. I was wrong.” But it was too late. I haven’t got any money. I’m consistently overdrawn at the bank. One day it’s gotten to the point where the kid linotype operator is sitting on the front porch with a knife about this long in his lap. He’s also got the paycheck he tried to cash at the bank. “I want my $15.” Well, I simply failed in the country newspaper business….

  W. D. (Don) Maxwell

  He recently retired as editor of the Chicago Tribune. As much as any living journalist, he reflects the thoughts and spirit of the paper’s singular publisher, Colonel Robert R. McCormick.

  “The first interview I really had was on a Saturday. I got a call from the Colonel’s office. His first question was: ‘How far is it from Vladivostok to Shanghai?’ I said, ‘Colonel, that’s one of the few things I don’t know. But if you’ll excuse me, I’ll run downstairs and look it up.’ I called him back in five minutes and told him how many miles it was. He was pleased that I didn’t bluff it.

  “He had a push button on his desk. Whenever he’d use it, his secretary knew he wanted to get rid of the visitor. On one occasion, the head of the UP had come up to tell of an interview he had with MacArthur. He had a cropped haircut, like the boys used to wear in college. He talked and he talked, and the Colonel was listening intently. I heard the button, so the man had to go. The Colonel said, ‘Don, I want to talk with you.’ I assumed it was something important concerning MacArthur. He looked at me and said, ‘Why does he wear his hair like that?’

  “The Colonel and MacArthur were very good friends. He admired military men very much. You know, he wrote the life of Grant and all kinds of treatises. When he visited Russia as a boy, he went around with the Grand Duke Nicholas. He wrote about the efficiency of the Russian Army. It didn’t prove to be valid later on, but at that time… .”

  What was the Colonel’s reaction to the Crash of ’29?

  I KNOW HE BOUGHT a lot of cattle downstate, so he’d be sure to have steaks (laughs), if things went completely to pieces. He also had money in different lock boxes in New York, so he’d have plenty when he went there.

  Did he ever say anything when Roosevelt’s name was mentioned?

  I don’t think anybody would mention it. (Laughs.) The way to get along with the Colonel was very simple. When he proposed something, you’d say: “That’s interesting. I’d lik
e twenty-four hours to think it over.” If you came back with more arguments against it than for it, he’d say, “I think you’re right.” He wasn’t infallible.

  Hardly anybody ever got fired. An exception was Bob Jones, who quit. It was silly. The Colonel asked him to put a map in the paper. He was great on maps. During the war, we were probably the best map-making paper in the United States on battles and so forth. Well, Jones told the Colonel, “We just had it three days ago.” That was not the right thing to say. The Colonel hadn’t seen it (laughs), and if he hadn’t seen it, why …

  … It wasn’t there.

  That’s right. Anyway, I became the news editor. That’s in ’30. You see, he was a patrician. So was Roosevelt. They weren’t going to push around, either by the other one. The Colonel had control of his paper, and no boss could tell him: I like Roosevelt, don’t print that. He hated Roosevelt’s hypocrisy.

  He was friendly to Roosevelt at the start. So was Patterson.94 But when F.D.R. tried to wreck the Supreme Court and shove through the NRA, the Colonel was against him. It was an attempt to impose upon people something you could get by with in Russia. When a delegation of merchants came over and demanded the Tribune quit attacking the NRA, the Colonel listened to them, ushered them out and ordered a front page cartoon. It had a great big barbed wire fence, with poor people trying to get through. The caption was: “No Relief Anywhere. NRA.”

  Did the Colonel think up the cartoons himself?

  He had an editorial conference every day, which the cartoonists and writers attended. He did all the talking. There wasn’t much discussion. He’d have something he wanted written about or cartooned. John Mc-Cutcheon never paid much attention to that.95 Orr was a kind of hatchet man that would be the political cartoonist.

  He fought Roosevelt from that time on. Not very successfully. We had a candidate named Landon that got nowhere. We had Willkie, though The Colonel wasn’t sold on him. He fought hard for Taft two times. The Illinois delegation stayed right in line. He liked to have a state delegation that went down the Tribune line all the way.

  At one time, the Colonel was so irritated with the New Deal, he ordered a star taken out of our flag. It was on a standard in the lobby of the Tribune Tower. The Rhode Island Supreme Court had upheld some New Deal measure. He wanted the star representing that state removed from the flag.

  I called up our law firm. They said: “You better put it right back or you’ll all be in jail. You can’t deface the American flag.” Now they let ’em burn it on the streets, like Spock and those other fellows. The Colonel would have taken after those kids that burn and desecrate flags.

  There were numerous anti-WPA cartoons, as I recall… .

  He didn’t believe in this WPA. He thought it was a waste of money. Guys that should be doing something useful were sweeping leaves. We never fought relief as relief. We fought this boondoggling.

  And those cartoons portraying New Deal professors in mortarboard hats… .

  There’s nothing that proved him more right. A lot of people agree with him today. If he was against professors, it was the kind that today join these rebels in destroying these universities. It’s about as silly as joining with the rebels in the Civil War when you wanted to protect the North.

  I’m thinking about the Brain Trusters… .

  He was against Tugwell. As it happened, everybody else turned on Tugwell, too. The Colonel was against Wallace. He was against Ickes. Ickes hated him, and he hated Ickes. When they showed their animus and tried to get the Colonel, he counter-attacked. The first thing you know, we’re on the aggressive and they’re on the defensive.

  Did those protest marches in the Thirties bother him?

  Not too much. He’d be against ’em, but there’s nothing like this stuff today. When Episcopal ministers led a rabble from down here to Georgia or something like that.

  All of the Colonel’s behavior fits in with the pattern of the patrician. I gave him the title, “The Duke of Chicago.” As a duke, he was kind to the peasants and fought for their rights. You might say he treated his subjects very well.

  Carey McWilliams

  Author; editor, The Nation.

  I“ had been conditioned for the 1929 Crash. My father was a prosperous cattleman in northwest Colorado. In 1919, in the wake of World War I, the cattle market fell apart. From 1914 to 1918, Western cattlemen had experienced a bonanza. They continued to expand. They thought it was going on forever. It didn’t. They all went to the wall, including my father. It had a tremendous impact on my family.

  “My mother took my brother and myself to live in California, which is where you go under these circumstances… .”

  THE LATE TWENTIES and early Thirties was a time of innocence.

  After the stock market crash, some New York editors suggested that hearings be held: what had really caused the Depression? They were held in Washington. In retrospect, they make the finest comic reading. The leading industrialists and bankers testified. They hadn’t the foggiest notion what had gone bad. You read a transcript of that record today with amazement: that they could be so unaware. This was their business, yet they didn’t understand the operation of the economy. The only good witnesses were the college professors, who enjoyed a bad reputation in those years. No professor was supposed to know anything practical about the economy.

  It was a mood of great bewilderment. No one had anticipated it, despite the fact that we had many severe panics in the past. The innocence of the business leaders was astonishing. There were groups pictured at the time as being vicious, arch-reactionary and so forth … the Liberty League, for instance. There was a bit of truth in it, but by and large, they were babes in the wood or comedians.

  There were obvious symptoms before the Crash … ?

  Oh, yes. There was a runaway stock market. The value of stocks was all out of relation to earnings. There was indication of severe trouble in Europe. Reparations had gone from bad to worse in Germany. Hitler was beginning to make noises in the early Twenties. Mussolini in Italy …

  Could the Depression have been avoided?

  In ’29 I’m sure it could. If you started back at some point well before 1929, with modern fiscal management, with an understanding of the business cycle.

  As a result of my father’s experience in Colorado in 1919, and my own during the Great Depression, my confidence was destroyed in the operation of this economy. I’ve tried—unsuccessfully—not to acquire any property. I didn’t have confidence in stocks and bonds. The whole thing was put together in a way that didn’t inspire my confidence. And it doesn’t now. This may be an unreasonable attitude on my part, nonetheless….

  There was a delayed reaction to the events of October, 1929. I was practicing law in Los Angeles. In a year or two, I saw the impact on clients—the kind of widows who are legion in southern California. Who had brought money out from the Middle West and had invested it in fly-by-night real estate promotions. They began to lose their property. I was bugged when I saw what was happening. There was a feverish activity in foreclosures.

  When I got out of law school in 1927, I was not a political person. I was an H. L. Menckenite character. My interests became increasingly social and political as the Thirties began to unfold.

  My first reaction to Roosevelt was very adverse. I remember particularly my great disappointment in a 1932 speech he made at the Hollywood Bowl. I thought it was fatuous. He didn’t have a ghost of an idea, really, of what the Depression was all about. He was going to balance the budget, he was going to do all kinds of things, unrelated to the problems he had to face. He, too, was an innocent. He had no program. He was pressured into doing the fine things he did.

  The labor movement, the sit-ins, were responsible for the labor legislation. The Farm Holiday movement was responsible for the farm program. Dr. Townsend, Coughlin, Huey Long and company were responsible for the pressures that brought about social security. Roosevelt was responsive, sympathetic. In later years, I became a great admirer.

&nbs
p; There were many pension movements in California, aside from Doctor Townsend’s. It was fascinating to attend these early meetings. At the same time, you had some apprehensions about their character. They had elements of the demagogic. The Allen Brothers and “Ham and Eggs.” The Utopian Society …

  The critical year, in my own personal experience, was 1934. First, you had the San Francisco General Strike. Then you had Upton Sinclair’s campaign for Governor. I had known Sinclair. We were good friends. I covered the campaign for the Baltimore Sun. It was amazing. He ran as the Democratic nominee and almost won. This man started out a year before the elections with a pamphlet and no resources—and a reputation of being an atheist, a Socialist and a free love advocate. The motion picture industry brought obscene pressure to bear on their employees, threatening to close the studios if Sinclair was elected. He rolled up a vote of 800,000.

  He had this passionate conviction that he could in fact end poverty in California.96 I remember six or eight years after the ’34 campaign, way in the wilds of northern California, written on rocks or on approaches to bridges, you could see this slogan in chalk: “End Poverty In California.” It was an enormously educational campaign. I think it would have been a disaster if Sinclair had been elected. He wouldn’t have known what to do. But he did have the conviction that poverty was man-made, that you didn’t need it.

  Going around the state in those years, you saw California as synonymous with abundance. It’s so enormously rich, especially in agriculture. Yet you saw all kinds of crops being destroyed. There were dumps in southern California, where they would throw citrus fruits and spray them with tar and chemicals. At a time when thousands of people were in real distress.97 So my Menckenisms began to fade as the Thirties progressed.

  You could easily romanticize the Thirties. The racial attitudes were not very good. I was intimately involved with these issues, and the attitudes were incredible. Though there was no categorization of the poor as there is today—the former doctor, the man who lost his law practice, the businessman, everybody was in on it—there was no feeling that there was a national race problem.