by Studs Terkel
Mediapolis had always been one of our very good towns. We heard a rumble that people on relief were going to our show. They were threatened to be taken off the rolls. That night I made a little speech: “Many of our dear friends, who have always come to our shows, don’t have the money. If anyone comes to me and tells me he can’t afford it, I’ll be happy to have him come as my guest.” It took all the thunder away from these birds. I couldn’t see whose business it is if people would sacrifice a hamburger to see a show.
We had to work all kinds of gimmicks to survive. At Burlington, I made a deal with the merchants. 110 paid me a dollar apiece. I gave them all the tickets they wanted to give away to their customers. That’s how circle stock was born. Out of the Depression. A company would have a base and book six or seven towns nearby. A different town each night. They’d explain to the merchants, “We’ll be in your town every Tuesday night.” Another town, another night. We give them all the tickets they’d want for a dollar, which they’d give away. That plus ten cents would admit you.
Since time immemorial, “repertore” shows opened: ladies free. As a result, we’d have a big crowd on Monday and on Tuesday hardly anyone. We reversed the nights. So we had good Tuesdays and bad Mondays. I’d send postcards out to all the rural mailboxes: an absolutely free season ticket. But it had to be used every night. So the farmer would give it to someone, if he couldn’t go. And we’d get a dime for the chair.
During the early Depression, Chatauqua was murder. They were our biggest competition. They started out as educational programs—lectures, Swiss bell ringers. They were subsidized by the local citizens. But then they changed to entertainment. They tried to tie up all the choice lots in town for their tents. Sometimes they’d get in with the mayors and try to raise our license fees. But we survived.
Talk about desperate ideas. We decided our titles weren’t catching. So we changed Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm—that is, my version of it—to Her Unwelcome Relative. A play I wrote called Chain Stores, we changed to What Mothers Don’t Know. We sat up till broad daylight thinking up these titles. Business doubled.
In about ’32, I paid $150 royalties for The Family Upstairs. The audience enjoyed it, all right. They’d say, “I tell you, Toby, it was the best show I ever saw. Enough to last me for a month.” So they never came back.
I made a serial out of the whodunit, Jittering Spooks. After opening night, we’d invite the audience to remain and give them the opening act as a free gift. On the second night, the second act, and so on. Anything to get them back….
Talk about bad luck. They had a terrible dry spell. On this hot night, I announced, “Toby predicts that tomorrow you’ll have rain.” They hooted and howled. It did rain. They marveled so at it, they never came back to see the show.
We worked all kinds of dodges. This guy comes up one day with the idea of a balloon ascension in front of our tent. For $10. So I made the deal. I advertised the free balloon ascension. He gets up there, and it floats five miles out into the country. The crowd follows him, and the sonuva-guns never came back.
Sure, I made gags about the Depression. The traveling salesman called on the farmer. He sees him out in the field with a fishing rod, casting. So he turns tail. He visits another farmer tying a rope around a pullet. The farmer says, “That other guy’s gone daffy. It must be the Depression’s done it.” So the salesman asks, “Why are you wrappin’ the rope around the pullet?” The farmer says, “When I get this outboard motor started, I’m gonna join ’im.” (Laughs.)
The Depression ended for us in 1936. We did a Toby-Susie act on the radio, five times a week, fifteen minutes. Then, went on the “National Barn Dance” for Alka-Seltzer over NBC. 550 stations. We got thousands of letters. Stores wouldn’t wait on customers when the show was on. They had loudspeakers where the men were pitching horseshoes. Farmers would come in out of the fields to listen….
POSTSCRIPT: “The Federal Theater had no connection with us. It was an idea of Mrs. Roosevelt. She thought it would alleviate unemployment among actors. Instead of putting William A. Brady in charge or some other recognized theatrical man, they chose Hallie Flanagan, who had gone to Vassar. It became a haven for all the short-haired gals and long-haired boys and weirdies of all kinds. And legitimate actors were walking the streets.
“A friend of mine ran the project in Peoria. He made a profit. This horrified Miss Flanagan. She said: ‘This is art, not commercial theater. You’re not supposed to show a profit.’
“They could have solved actors’ unemployment at very little cost. All they had to do was make a survey. If they said to each manager of each show: Add one more actor to your company. Uncle Sam will pay his salary. That would have been the easiest way. But, no, they couldn’t do that. That’s the practical way….”
Paul Draper
Solo dancer.
I HAD no money before the Depression. I had no money then. So I wasn’t aware of anything affecting my life. I was a dancer. I worked up in the rehearsal hall every day, looked for jobs, and auditioned.
In ’33, we were performing on what was known as half-salary—breaking in. Whenever we got through with the breakin period, this manager would replace somebody in the act—make up another name for the act, and it would become another breakin. So we always worked on half-salary. I wasn’t aware of it for a long time. I worked on half-salary for years.
Vaudeville was still alive. We used to do five shows a day at movie houses. You did thirty-five shows a week. I was always being hired for 19/35 of one week’s work. Some act would get sick, and they’d say: Who can come in without rehearsal? I was at the time a flash act soloist. I used to work on a marble table top and had one number, “Bye Bye Blues.” I was not hard to place in a show.
A flash act goes on and off. It is without personality in any way. It is only the act. A juggler or acrobats. A dancer was, at that time, a flash act. It was only the exhibition of one’s physical skills. You could always be fitted into a show without interfering with anything else.
In the late Thirties, he perfected the tap dance technique to the accompaniment of classical compositions. He became a night club headliner and, subsequently, a concert performer. “I was no longer on the marble pedestal. I had achieved a sort of status.”
My political awareness had nothing to do with the Depression. It was the Spanish Civil War. It was around 1937, ’38. I danced to raise money for the Spanish Loyalists. Of course, I had a little more stability as a performer and could afford the luxury of outside interests.
If I have any nostalgia of the Thirties, it does not concern the social-economic changes which took place. It’s the memory of the Persian Room.159 It was a very smart room. Everyone was in evening clothes. You weren’t able to get in without a black tie. If the host didn’t like the way someone looked, he would say there are no more tables.
I used to work there three months straight. You’d often get the same audiences, but it was all right. On last nights, every table had champagne. We all stood up, made a toast and sang “Auld Lang Syne.” This was ‘37,’38, ’39.
We thought of the poor, at that time, as quite divorced from us, who were not poor. By the exercise of one’s charity, life could be made all right. You would always have the poor with you, they were the unfortunate, and you made donations. You could handle them. It was mildly unpleasant, but not fundamentally upsetting.
Now, for the first time, we face the dreadful reality that we are not separated. They are us. They are something we have made. There is no conceivable way today to say: Fish, and you’ll be all right. In hurt, in anguish, in shock, we are becoming aware that it is ourselves, who have to be found wanting, not the poor.
Robert Gwathmey
A Virginia-born artist living in New York. He is Visiting Professor at Boston University.
“Our family had a polite name, poor but polite. We never went hungry. We had a little garden and everything. We had dogs, cats, pigeons, every damn thing. We had wealthy relatives, but I only s
aw them at weddings and funerals.”
RICHMOND, Virginia, didn’t feel the Depression to any great extent. It’s a tobacco town. A strange thing, I don’t give a damn how deep a Depression might be, people seem to insist on smoking. That sort of sustained the city, I’m certain. Richmond had only one bank failure.
But there were many people committed suicide in Richmond, at the time. The most important citizens began to go to church. And they became rather superstitious about palmistry and the occult. The ouija board was a big deal then. They couldn’t afford to go to a movie, perchance, so they’d say: We’ll all play the ouija board tonight. The questions people would ask! They wouldn’t ask: May I speak to my grandfather? or something like that. They would ask: Is So-and-So’s bank going to fail tomorrow? Things were that current. Call it mystique if you will, but things came down to the rock-bottom.
I got out of art school in 1930. That was the proper time for any artist to get out of school. (Laughs.) Everybody was unemployed, and the artist didn’t seem strange any more. I got a job teaching at a girls’ school in Philadelphia, Beaver College. This was 1932. I taught two days a week and spent the rest of the time painting. The WPA was founded then, ‘33,’34.
The Artists’ Union in Philadelphia came into being. Although I was not on the WPA, I was vice president of the union. We’d say: Tomorrow is a better day. It was an affirmative time. We did much political agitation. We made posters for the Roosevelt campaign, for Loyalist Spain, for May Day parades.
Many Congressmen called the WPA boondoggling, barrel rolling and what not. So many energies were spent going down to Washington, interviewing Congressmen, asking them to sustain the WPA….
The total cost of the Federal Arts Project was only $23 million. Many of these paintings, sculptures and prints were given to museums, courthouses, public buildings…. I think that today those in museums alone are worth about $100 million.
Not only did this twenty-three million support young artists just out of school, but artists in transition. I’ll wager if there were five hundred gallery artists who made it, who are represented by dealers, about four hundred were on WPA.
Nobody was buying art in those days. The Whitney Museum had $35,000 a year to buy contemporary art in the Thirties. We thought that was just the greatest thing ever. Now a man will pay $35,000 for a single painting.
Guys on the project made something in the neighborhood of $94 a month. Then a guy might have a sweetheart on the project, so that would be almost $200 a month. You could live very well.
But the most important thing was: the artist had a patron who made no aesthetic judgments. Occasionally, you’d find a director in a given neighborhood who played favorites…. So artists for the first time, I dare say, had a patron—the Government—who made no aesthetic judgments at all.
The director of the Federal Arts Project was Edward Bruce. He was a friend of the Roosevelts—from a polite family—who was a painter. He was a man of real broad vision. He insisted there be no restrictions. You were a painter: Do your work. You were a sculptor: Do your work. You were a printmaker: Do your work. An artist could do anything he damn pleased.
You did have supervisors. They were artists who had already made it. They would visit your studios maybe two days a week. When the work was done, it belonged to the Government, of course.
I painted this thing called “Tobacco.” If I’m going to paint tobacco, let me do some work on tobacco. It was 1936. I spent a summer on this tobacco farm in North Carolina. They had three sharecroppers on this farm. I said I’d give each of the three guys a day a week. Harvesting tobacco is difficult. It’s almost communal in a way. Here are six farmers. There are six days in a week, one day for rest, right? These six get together, and they would prime tobacco.160 Mondays on this farm, Tuesdays the next farm, and so forth.
I picked tobacco because I wanted to know the whole story. An instant observer could do all this surface quality. To be involved, it has to have a deeper meaning, right? We’re all total fellows, aren’t we? Right. I insist on being a total fellow. I couldn’t sit there and make a sort of representational and calling it priming tobacco, if I hadn’t done it myself. I had to.
I lost my job at Beaver College. I used to discuss articles out of The Nation at lunch time, where the teachers gathered. They didn’t say this was the reason. I’d done simply this. Four girls were graduating. They wanted to come to New York to do some grad work. I drove them up, and we went to see some of the schools. Also, we saw Marc Blitzstein’s Cradle Will Rock. Then we went to an Italian Restaurant, and we had a cocktail and ate and returned to Pennsylvania.
The president wrote me a letter—we were with my wife’s people in North Carolina at the time; she was pregnant: “It has come to my attention that you have been in a drinking establishment with your students. You have been unfaithful to your president and your institution….”
The president of Beaver College was a Presbyterian minister, but he acted like a traveling salesman. He lost his job because he ordered furniture from the purchasing agent for his married daughter and didn’t reimburse the college. The guy that fired me.
I don’t mind losing jobs. Every time I lose one, I get a better one. I got one at Carnegie Tech. I taught for three years there. I came to New York in 1942 and have been here ever since.
I wouldn’t expect a man in 1930 to think like a man in 1968, would you? Of course not. But there are many people who will take a point of view as artists: I’ll be an idealist. I’ll be a romanticist, I’ll be this or that or the other. You’ve got to be what you are, churning up the day in which you live and pull out of that experience something that is representative in artistic terms.
Artists have to live, right? Eat, sleep, breathe, build. The great difference is when you have a government as a patron or anyone else as a patron, who made no demands on you at all, there were no enlarged notions of making that extra buck. That was a very free and happy period. Social comment was in the wind. Now the wind has changed. But despite the direction any artist follows, he is still pure politically.
Artists have a chance of being good people ’cause they work alone. I go to my studio. I don’t work on a belt line. When your work is done, after dinner, you meet people and you become talkative. You’ve been alone all day. Now give me that first drink, will you? Right?
Some fear Government as an arts boss because of the dangers of political censorship….
I think it’s the craziest thing. We live in a democracy. We call it a democracy, right? I can vote. I can agitate for my franchise, right? Why should I be fearful of my Government. I am a part of it, am I not?
Perhaps, there could be a dictatorial Government—that’s another story. Like Hitler, say: You can only paint blondes with strong breasts….
It’s fearful to think that today’s times are so affluent for me. I live real, real well. I’m in the upper ten percent. But when I see poverty, it’s still poverty. I hate it.
During the Depression, we were all more or less engulfed. Today when people say poverty, they turn their head. They don’t want to admit poverty exists. They’re living too high, so on-the-fat, right? If you’re living on-the-fat and see poverty, you simply say: They’re no good. In the Depression, there was a little more Godlike acceptance of the unemployed guy, because you could be he.
Knud Andersen
The studio of a portrait painter and sculptor. Piercing eyes are fixed upon us: a self-portrait of the artist as a young man. The eyes of others illuminate the twilight of the room. They are in oils: Senator Henrik Shipstead, among others. Of this portrait, Harold Laswell said, “The blue eyes of the subject do not stare vacantly into the future, but intently into reality… .”
He had come to Chicago from Norway forty-five years ago: “It was a grand adventure, the arts in the new land.” Powerful men in the worlds of politics and finance had commissioned him to do their portraits, in times past.
His eyes wander from work to work, from face to face, as he r
emember s….
You SEE, to me the Depression was a blessing. When the shock of losing what you had worked for comes, I found refuge in my art. To stew in a deplorable situation … where people were affected … some to suicide … I lost myself in my art. The pain that came with economic loss, I felt would pass. These things, like the eclipse of the sun … People first observed it and committed suicide … not realizing that this would pass.
I felt quite prayerful, and so I was at peace. Of course, the knock on the door of economics … disturbed. But you survived. I constantly counseled myself on the best way of survival.
Did you join the Federal Arts Project?
No, no, no. It was so disappointing, I couldn’t participate. If it is done in the right way, the gifted artist benefits from the state and contributes: thus, body and soul are nourished. Then I would have participated. But the program went against my grain. I did not recognize true artistry in evidence.
Oh, the Depression years were hard. I managed with a commission now and then.
Days without food … ?
Those are days I don’t recall. Self-respect never allowed anyone to know I was in that state. I had quite a duplex studio. I had Bach and Beethoven. Nothing else mattered. I worked in the cathedral of the spirit. My body may have needed food, but I was unaware.
Once in the studio, a rat ran across my arm and bit me. Luckily, a visitor had left a bottle of whiskey, without my knowing about it. The bottle came of good use, I told him afterwards. I poured the whiskey over the wound. These are accidents, like the Depression. I avoid bringing accidents to mind.
Little Brother Montgomery and Red Saunders
The first is a jazz pianist and the other a band leader, who devotes much of his time to finding jobs for black musicians.
MONTGOMERY: I was making a dollar a night on Sunday nights. And a spaghetti dinner. Playing house rent parties. On a Saturday night, I was playing for $3. No supper there. Weekends is when the stockyards workers would go. Tuesday night, I was playing for $2. My weeks were filled up with two, three dollars a night.
