Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  Monday night, that was the biggest night I had. $4. They had Blue Monday parties, the sporting people. Everybody who’d been out all Saturday and Sunday night, gamblers and hustlers. If they’d been hustlin’ anything, they’d be poppin’, buying moonshine, having fun, on Monday. From five o’clock in the morning until the wee, wee hours, way through the night.

  SAUNDERS: Those Blue Monday parties had a meaning. The night life, the gambling, the prostitution and the pimps—they weren’t just something that happened. They were a necessity. Survival. Women had to sell their bodies for twenty-five cents, fifteen cents. You find fewer black pimps today, because the black woman is more independent.

  In a flat, everything would go. In one room, they were playing a piano and drinking whiskey. In another room, they would have Georgia skin, poker or whatever game. In another room, they’d have whores, hustlers. Everything went. A person had to have some kind of life.

  MONTGOMERY: They were houses where people lived. With a piano in the front room, where people danced. And moonshine, twenty-five cents a half pint. Pulverized alcohol. No admission. The money came from the sale of moonshine and supper. Spaghetti and chili … The house’d be packed, all kinds a ways. Six, five, sometimes four rooms, a hundred, eighty people would be in it. They were givin’ a party to get their rent together.

  Lots of times we were raided by the police. Catch moonshine or catch ‘em gamblin’. They had some bad policemen around at that time. They had Jesse James, Big Six, Callahan’s Squad….

  We had a lot of house party piano players in them days—a guy called Forty-Five, Cripple Clarence Lofton, Pine Top Smith, ‘Sippi Wallace, a guy called Toothpick. Piano’d be ringin’ all night. Guys would come in, weren’t workin’, they’d play. You’d find all kinds of piano players, great ones. Boogiewoogie began in house parties. But we didn’t call it that then. Doodley Joe, we called it … 1928, ’29, ’30. I paid $4 a week for a room. We made $15 a week. We got along pretty good.

  SAUNDERS: There was a pickup in business when beer came in in ’33. They could go out publicly and drink. And the price was right. Beer was fifteen cents and you could get entertainment. With Repeal, you began to see a new light. You had to have these rent parties during Prohibition because there were no night clubs, to speak of. They were black speak-easies.

  MONTGOMERY: I left around the early Thirties and organized a band around Jackson, Mississippi. Sometimes we’d play at a dance and make fifteen cents apiece. (Laughs.) You’d travel maybe two, three hundred miles in a secondhand Cadillac, and a beat-up Lincoln. The whole band. We’d get to a place and couldn’t make gas money. Places like Meridian, Hattiesburg, Vicksburg, all up in the Delta. 1935, ‘36 and up to around’38.

  The main times is when they’re pickin’ cotton. They got a dollar a hundred for pickin’. (Laughs.) Some people could pick two, three hundred pounds a day. We played in tobacco barns down through the South. I remember one band was burned up in one of those warehouses. We played a white dance tonight and a colored dance tomorrow. But we didn’t mix. SAUNDERS: In those days, the black artist was at the mercy of the promoters. In later years, MCA161 and others took them on, but at first they weren’t booking black bands. The hotels and ballrooms were for white bands. This was a time when radio was great. White musicians were having a field day, making all kinds of money in studios, in concerts and legitimate theaters. Big money. The poor black musicians just had the beat-up Lincoln. They were what you called starvation bands. Did you know black musicians created the one-nighters?

  They didn’t have any homes. Out of five years, they’d maybe sit down ten weeks. They lived in the auto. The location jobs were for the Benny Goodmans and the Tommy Dorseys, hotels and ballrooms. The only time they would sit down would be like the Apollo in New York, the Regal in Chicago, the Howard in Washington … .162 MONTGOMERY: Even their music was taken from them. Clarence Williams wrote “Sugar Blues” and that was called Clyde McCoy’s. “Dorsey Boogie” is Pine Top’s, which he played at house rent parties….

  Jack Kirkland

  Writer-producer. His play, Tobacco Road, based upon Erskine Caldwell’s novel, ran “almost eight years.”

  IN THE SPRING of ’32, I woke up with a violent hangover. An agent gave me this book to read for that afternoon: “You’re a southerner, you’ll dig this.” I went home with my hangover and read it and said: this is a play. So I took the book under my arm and went to live in Majorca for three, four months. I was quite broke at the time.

  He completed the play in Hollywood, where he wrote films at “very big salaries.” One was a highly successful Shirley Temple movie. “Shirley Temple’s responsible for Tobacco Road, really.” (Laughs.)

  It opened December 4, 1933. I couldn’t get anyone else to produce it. They all were afraid of it. They thought it wouldn’t run. So I put up all the money myself. No one else had a nickel in it. I gave away a great deal of it to associates….

  The whole thing cost about $9,000 to produce. The reviews in the dailies were not too good for the play, except the raves for Henry Hull’s performance. I just had to get up another five or six hundred dollars a week to carry the play. Until the Daily News163 had the editorial. Captain Patterson164 fell for it and wrote an editorial. And the next day we were in. Later on, the monthlies came out—George Jean Nathan, Bob Benchley, Dorothy Parker, all came out for it.

  Did you have any doubts during the five weeks before the editorial and the magazines appeared?

  No. Or I wouldn’t have spent that money. The play was dealing with poverty. The audience understood and they were concerned. Of course, it was based on a period preceding the Depression. It had existed for some time in the South. Cotton was five cents a pound, and all that sort of thing. There was shock value, sure. But I think its success was determined by its reality and honesty.

  Mrs. Roosevelt helped. She loved the play, because it was about social conditions. When it opened in Atlanta, she went down there in case any trouble happened. But there was none whatsoever.

  Did you encounter much censorship trouble?

  No. Mayor La Guardia threw out burlesque, but he wouldn’t throw out good theater. Later, in Chicago, they called us intellectual New Yorkers.165

  From then on, the Depression was a swinging time for me. Everything was so reasonable, and my income was so big. (Laughs.) I never had it so good. When you’re involved in making a living, gambling all your money, it was just something that passed in front of you without any feeling about it. And I was getting married quite often in those days, too. (Laughs.) Besides my artistic occupations, I had some marital preoccupations. (Laughs.)

  Heaven knows I saw Hoovervilles—out of train windows. It was appalling to look at, even through train windows. But it didn’t touch me.

  A great many people felt it, especially the young. That’s why so many at that time joined the Party. It wasn’t a lack of love for the United States so much as thinking some other system would correct this blasting horror of hunger. They were soon disillusioned….

  But it was a more generous time then. There wasn’t this miasmic fear of unnamed things out there. Then it was specific: hunger. We had a more specific enemy to overcome. We were all in such a mess. When you’re in trouble, you never go to rich friends to help you, you go to poor friends. I was more fortunate, so I was able to help out friends.

  Don’t forget, we were all younger. There was a spirit of adventure then, too. When you’re thirty years old, you don’t have much fear. You don’t have the same kind of fear I would have now after thirty, forty years. As I’m talking to you now, I’m seeing it with the eyes of a young man. Oh, it was a magnificent time for me. There was certainly no lack of girls. (Laughs.) I’m awful glad I was young at that time.

  Herman Shumlin

  Theater producer-director. Among his works: Grand Hotel, The Little Foxes, Male Animal, Watch on the Rhine, The Children’s Hour, Inherit the Wind, The Deputy.

  Two OR THREE BLOCKS along Times Square, you’d see t
hese men, silent, shuffling along in line. Getting this handout of coffee and doughnuts, dealt out from great trucks, Hearst’s New York Evening Journal, in large letters, painted on the sides. Shabby clothes, but you could see they had been pretty good clothes.

  Their faces, I’d stand and watch their faces, and I’d see that flat, opaque, expressionless look which spelled, for me, human disaster. On every corner, there’d be a man selling apples. Men in the theater, whom I’d known, who had responsible positions. Who had lost their jobs, lost their homes, lost their families. And worse than anything else, lost belief in themselves. They were destroyed men.

  One man I had known lived in New Rochelle. Proud of his nice family, his wife and three children. He had been a treasurer in the theater, which housed a play I had managed in 1926. He was very worldly, knew everything—that wonderful kind of knowledge you often find in people of the theater. A completely capable man.

  It was in 1931 that I ran into him on the street. After I had passed him, I realized who it was. I turned and ran after him. He had averted his eyes as he went by me. I grabbed hold of him. There was a deadness in his eyes. He just muttered: Good to see you. He didn’t want to talk to me. I followed him and made him come in with me and sit down.

  He told me that his wife had kicked him out. His children had had such contempt for him ’cause he couldn’t pay the rent, he just had to leave, to get out of the house. He lived in perpetual shame. This was, to me, the most cruel thing of the Depression. Almost worse than not having food. Accepting the idea that you were just no good. No matter what you’d been before.

  The Depression didn’t affect me financially. On the contrary. I was successful almost the moment things crashed. But it did affect me in everything I saw. Making money while all this was going on.

  I co-produced a play in October, 1929. It opened at the Bijou Theater. It wasn’t a very good play. I stood across the street, alongside the old Astor Hotel, and watched people going into the theater. I wondered what was the matter with them. They looked so down, so silent, sullen. How could they have heard of the play already? It wasn’t until the next day, when I got the papers for the reviews, that I realized the stock market crashed. The play closed quickly, but I remember the evening very well.

  It wasn’t really until well into 1930 that it became visible. The theater, for some reason, kept on going much as it had been. It was a slower descent. Plays were still being produced, great numbers of them, people were working.

  Later in the year, I produced and directed Grand Hotel. It was surprisingly successful for me, it being my first time as a director. All of a sudden, a man whose pockets had been empty for years, I was making $7,000 a week. Yet the country’s slide had begun.

  I became very conscious of the effects of the Depression, of the yellowing that seemed to take place on the streets of Broadway, of the stores that were closed, of the shops that had been turned into one or another kind of cheap food places, of shops which had gone bankrupt and were being turned into little gaming parlors with automatic machines.

  Broadway was still alive every night, crowded with people as it had always been. But there was a change. Their clothes were shabbier, they stood around more, they walked aimlessly up and down the streets, rather than going somewhere. And those long lines of silent men, accepting the coffee and doughnuts and moving away…. It was disturbing to me. Here I was, making money and what did I do about it?

  I’ve always remarked at the ability of people to forget. I think even people who were enveloped in its greatest horrors have forgotten, emotionally forgotten. The memory of pain is extraordinarily evanescent. I wonder if the psychological scars are really visible. I know many people who’ve lived through it, my contemporaries. I wonder if they remember the suffering and agony and the shame they went through. I really don’t know.

  When you meet them, does the subject ever come up?

  Never, never. I’ve brought it up sometimes, but I don’t find it a subject anybody is interested in. I don’t think it’s something they want to evade. It’s just a bellyache that’s passed. They’re just not interested in discussing it.

  It’s fear, I suppose. A man is scared of his job, scared someone might cut in, scared of what happens on the street. The fear in people of great means and in people of small means. Were a Depression to come again, 1 fear we could have a Fascist state.

  POSTSCRIPT: “Every time I go over to Central Park, I walk into the Children’s Zoo. This was built during the Depression by WPA workers. It’s an absolutely lovely place. I go into the Park often. And I cannot help remembering —look, this came out of the Depression. Because men were out of work, because they were given a way to earn money, good things were created.”

  Public Servant—The City

  Elizabeth Wood

  She is Chief of Social Services, Housing Assistance Administration. In the late Thirties, through the late Forties, she was head of the Chicago Housing Authority.

  IN ’33, I’d just been hired as a social worker by the United Charities. Social work at that time was beginning to get psychiatric. I found this absolutely obnoxious. I got taken by some of my clients in a way that made me keenly aware of how stupid were some of our approaches. The irrelevance of the kind of goodies we were handing out. It was the psychiatric approach. Sit, be passive, and let your client tell you what’s wrong. It was my first contact with poverty. I found out the hard way.

  I saw the impact on one family. There were nine children and two parents living in three rooms. I found them a great, big, sunny apartment, with enough bedrooms for a decent sleeping arrangement. And a dining room table for the first time. And enough chairs for the first time. I saw the magic that house performed. The family bloomed. I learned my first lesson about the meaning of a house. But that wasn’t the whole story. This is my point.

  There was a drunken father and a tough little German wife, toothless. I’ll always remember that. The children had every ailment in the book. The twelve-year-old boy was a truant because he had to wear his sister’s shoes. He was very proud, the only possessor of a toothbrush in the whole family.

  I remember the girl I thought was feeble-minded. She changed completely when they moved into the new house. I couldn’t quite understand it. Her mother confessed to me that she used some of the food budget to get this little girl a permanent. She was scared to death I was gonna scold her. But that was one of the things that helped this girl out of her condition. She found a job.

  In that three-room apartment, when the father came home drunk, he beat up his wife. The girl was right there, next to it. It obviously had an effect on her. In the new place, when the father wanted to beat up his wife, the boys would put him in the back bedroom and lock the door. So there was no more of this savageness near the girl. These things happened just by the virtue of room. But there was the quality of the mother, too. She was one of the best social workers I ever knew.

  She made the house work its full magic. When the other girl, the sixteen-year-old, started to date, there was a front parlor for her to sit in. There was a plant, there was a sofa. I had kept this room bare. She filled it. The mother had the girl buy a pink electric light bulb, so it looked pretty when she had a date. That’s what I call social work. (Laughs.)

  In a way, this shows a falsity of the New Deal concept: All you need is a good, sanitary house. The person herself had ideas.

  In 1937, the United States Housing Act was passed. The concept was a good one, different from those sterile words. We built quite beautiful projects throughout the country. The standards of the Federal Administration were high. But it never occurred to anybody that the people might make their own decisions about playgrounds, housing design or management policies. So the institutions became more and more institutionalized, while we took in more and more deprived people. In many cases, we tried to pick the nicer of the deprived and avoid the less-nice. We had absolutely no insight …

  Our legislation is still not phrased in concepts which wor
k today: that sometimes these people have awfully good ideas, better than ours. We’re just beginning to learn. Tenants have a right to make their own decisions.

  In the early Forties, we ran out of ’37 money. By that time, austerity had set in. The new policy seemed to be: Because public housing was for poor people, it ought to look poor. There was a great resentment if it looked nice. That was the beginning of the sterile, barracks-like housing projects.

  It had a multiple effect. We housed fewer and fewer people who benefited by the house alone. We found that housing itself was not enough for people who were really defeated. So the rules of the New Deal era aren’t good enough today. ’Cause at best we were awfully kind, benevolent Lady Bountifuls. And, boy, that doesn’t work these days.

  “Project people” was a term of pride back in ‘37 and ’38. Incredible pride. Our problem was preventing the tenants from becoming snobbish about their belongings. I had to get it clear to them that the children across the street had a right to use their playground. There wasn’t any other around.

  I can remember a young woman who moved into Jane Addams.166 She got married about the time we planned to build the project. From the day she saw the houses go up, she wanted to move in. She got pregnant and bought new furniture to store in the barn where she was living at the time. When she moved in with her new baby and new furniture, she was the proudest woman in the world.

  I remember Mrs. Pacelli. She said, “I never used to talk to my neighbors when I lived in the slums. But here we’ve all been selected.” There was a sense of aristocracy which was very funny. It’s quite the opposite today.

  There were lots of unsystematized, uninstitutionalized, good native works. After two babies died of whooping cough, a group of women in the project volunteered to find out about preventives. They knocked on all the doors, so that all youngsters under six got whooping cough inoculations. They had so many creative ideas.