Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  Do you recall the sentiments of people during the depths of the Depression?

  There was a feeling that we were on the verge of a bloody revolution, up until the time of the New Deal. Many people, among them, intellectuals, without knowing what else to do, worked with the Communist Party. The Communists naturally exploited this. It began to change with the New Deal and pretty much came to an end with the Russian-German pact.

  I remember a very sinking feeling during the time of the Bank Holiday. I walked down to the corner to buy a paper, giving the man a fifty-cents coin. He flipped it up in the air and said, “This is no good.” And he threw it in the middle of the street. (Laughs.) Some took the Holiday as a huge joke. Others had hysteria, like this newsboy: there isn’t any money, there isn’t anything. Most people took it calmly. It couldn’t get much worse—and something was being done.

  Everyone was emotionally affected. We developed a fear of the future which was very difficult to overcome. Even though I eventually went into some fairly good jobs, there was still this constant dread: everything would be cut out from under you and you wouldn’t know what to do. It would be even harder, because you were older….

  Before the Depression, one felt he could get a job even if something happened to this one. There were always jobs available. And, of course, there were always those, even during the Depression: If you wanted to work, you could really get it. Nonsense.

  I suspect, even now, I’m a little bit nervous about every job I take and wonder how long it’s going to last—and what I’m going to do to cause it to disappear.

  I feel anything can happen. There’s a little fear in me that it might happen again. It does distort your outlook and your feeling. Lost time and lost faith….

  Ben Isaacs

  It is a house, with garden and patio, in a middle-class suburb on the outskirts of Chicago.

  I WAS IN BUSINESS for myself, selling clothing on credit, house to house. And collecting by the week. Up to that time, people were buying very good and paying very good. But they start to speculate, and I felt it. My business was dropping from the beginning of 1928. They were mostly middle-class people. They weren’t too rich, and they weren’t too poor.

  All of a sudden, in the afternoon, October, 1929 … I was going on my business and I heard the newspaper boys calling, running all around the streets and giving news and news: stock market crashed, stock market crashed. It came out just like lightning.

  I remember vividly. I was on my route, going to see my customer. It didn’t affect me much at the time. I wasn’t speculating in the market. Of course, I had invested some money in some property and some gold bonds, they used to call it. Because I have more confidence in the gold bonds than the stock market. Because I know the stock market goes up and down. But the gold bond, I was told from the banks, is just like gold. Never lose its value. Later we found to our sorrow that was fake.

  They turned out to be nothing. Those banks, they’d take the people’s money that they were saving, they would loan it out a mortgage on the property. The property was worth $100,000, they would sell $200,000 gold bonds on that property. The banks.

  I have suspicions the bankers knew. They were doing it for their own personal gain. If it wasn’t for the Crash, this fake would probably keep going on. Lotta these banks closed down overnight.

  We lost everything. It was the time I would collect four, five hundred dollars a week. After that, I couldn’t collect fifteen, ten dollars a week. I was going around trying to collect enough money to keep my family going. It was impossible. Very few people could pay you. Maybe a dollar if they would feel sorry for you or what.

  We tried to struggle along living day by day. Then I couldn’t pay the rent. I had a little car, but I couldn’t pay no license for it. I left it parked against the court. I sold it for $15 in order to buy some food for the family. I had three little children. It was a time when I didn’t even have money to buy a pack of cigarettes, and I was a smoker. I didn’t have a nickel in my pocket.

  Finally people started to talk me into going into the relief. They had open soup kitchens. Al Capone, he had open soup kitchens somewhere downtown, where people were standing in line. And you had to go two blocks, stand there, around the corner, to get a bowl of soup.

  Lotta people committed suicide, pushed themselves out of buildings and killed themselves, ’cause they couldn’t face the disgrace. Finally, the same thing with me.

  I was so downcasted that I couldn’t think of anything. Where can I go? What to face? Age that I can’t get no job. I have no trade, except selling is my trade, that’s all. I went around trying to find a job as a salesman. They wouldn’t hire me on account of my age. I was just like dried up. Every door was closed on me, every avenue. Even when I was putting my hand on gold, it would turn into dust. It looked like bad luck had set its hand on my shoulder. Whatever I tried, I would fail. Even my money.

  I had two hundred dollar in my pocket. I was going to buy a taxi. You had to have your own car to drive a taxi, those days. The man said: You have to buy your car from us. Checker Cab Company. So I took the two hundred dollar to the office, to make a down payment on the taxi. I took the money out—he said the kind of car we haven’t got, maybe next week. So I left the office, I don’t know what happened. The two hundred dollar went away, just like that. I called back: Did you find any money on the table? He said no, no money.

  Things were going so bad with me, I couldn’t think straight. Ordinarily, I won’t lose any money. But that time, I was worrying about my family, about this and that. I was walking the street just like the easy person, but I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.

  I didn’t want to go on relief. Believe me, when I was forced to go to the office of the relief, the tears were running out of my eyes. I couldn’t bear myself to take money from anybody for nothing. If it wasn’t for those kids —I tell you the truth—many a time it came to my mind to go commit suicide. Than go ask for relief. But somebody has to take care of those kids….

  I went to the relief and they, after a lotta red tape and investigation, they gave me $45 a month. Out of that $45 we had to pay rent, we had to buy food and clothing for the children. So how long can that $45 go? I was paying $30 on the rent. I went and find another a cheaper flat, stove heat, for $15 a month. I’m telling you, today a dog wouldn’t live in that type of a place. Such a dirty, filthy, dark place.

  I couldn’t buy maybe once a week a couple of pounds of meat that was for Saturday. The rest of the days, we had to live on a half a pound of baloney. I would spend a quarter for half a pound of baloney. It was too cold for the kids, too unhealthy. I found a six-room apartment for $25 a month. It was supposed to be steam heat and hot water. Right after we move in there, they couldn’t find no hot water. It wasn’t warm enough for anybody to take a bath. We had to heat water on the stove. Maybe the landlord was having trouble with the boiler. But it was nothing like that. The landlord had abandoned the building. About two months later, all of a sudden—no water. The city closed it for the non-payment of the water bill.

  My wife used to carry two pails of water from the next-door neighbors and bring it up for us to wash the kids and to flush the toilet with it, and then wash our hands and face with it, or make tea or something, with that two pails of water. We lived without water for almost two months.

  Wherever I went to get a job, I couldn’t get no job. I went around selling razor blades and shoe laces. There was a day I would go over all the streets and come home with fifty cents, making a sale. That kept going until 1940, practically. 1939 the war started. Things start to get a little better. My wife found a job in a restaurant for $20 a week. Right away, I sent a letter to the relief people: I don’t think I would need their help any more. I was disgusted with relief, so ashamed. I couldn’t face it any more.

  My next-door neighbor found me a job in the factory where he was working. That time I was around fifty. The man said, “We can’t use you.” They wouldn’t hire nobody over for
ty-five. Two weeks later, this same man said, “Go tell Bill (the name of the foreman) I sent you. He’ll hire you.” They hire me. They give me sixty cents an hour. Twenty-year-old boys, they were paying seventy, seventy-five cents an hour. They were shortage of hand, that’s why they hire me.

  I read in the paper that some place they’re paying a good salary, dollar an hour. I took the street car to go look for that job. On the way … I don’t know what happened … something, like kicked me in the head. I said: I’m going back to my old business. People are now doing good, people’s working in the war factory. So I got off the street car and I came into the store I was dealing with before.

  I told them I was gonna go back to my old business. They laughed at me: What are you gonna sell? You can’t find no merchandise. I said: Whatever you people are selling, I’ll do the same thing. All this time that I was working, skimping, and my wife was working, I had saved $400. So I invested that $400 and start to go back into business.

  Thank goodness, things changed. I came back. I came back. It was the end of 1944. If I had stayed in the factory I would probably still be on relief. Lotta people, even my wife, they told me don’t go. We have only a few hundred dollar saved, you’re gonna throw it out into the street. I said I’m not going back in the factory.

  So for you the hard times were—

  1928 to 1944. I was realizing that many and many other people are in the same boat. That gave me a little encouragement. I was looking at these people, waiting in line to get their relief, and I said, My God, I am not the only one. And those were wealthy people … they had failed. But still my heart won’t tick. Because I always prayed in my heart that I should never depend on anybody for support. When that time came, it hurted me. I couldn’t take it.

  Shame? You tellin’ me? I would go stand on that relief line, I would look this way and that way and see if there’s nobody around that knows me. I would bend my head low so nobody would recognize me. The only scar it left on me is my pride, my pride.

  How about your friends and neighbors?

  They were the same thing, the same thing. A lot of them are well-to-do now and have much more money than I have. But in those days, we were all on relief and they were going around selling razor blades and shoe laces.

  We were going to each other’s. That was the only way we could drown our sorrow. We were all living within a block of each other. We’d come to each other’s house and sit and talk and josh around and try to make a little cheerfulness.

  Today we live far away from the rest of our friends. Depression days, that time, we were all poor. After things got better and people became richer and everyone had their own property at different neighborhoods, we fall apart from each other.

  Howard Worthington

  I DON’T KNOW how I survived. I was working with a bond house on LaSalle Street. We were specializing in foreign securities. I was so grateful we were not mixed up in the stock market. Thank goodness, it wasn’t going to affect me. The next thing I know, we failed. The head of the company disappeared with $7 million worth of assets.

  Oh gosh, a friend of mine was making $25,000 a year. They cut him to $5,000. He walked right over the Board of Trade Building, the top, and jumped. I wasn’t even makin’ five at the time. (Laughs.)

  I don’t think I should have been in the investment business. It was pressure from my wife. A man in that business has to know lots of people with money. I was never an opportunist. I like people because they’re people. They could be broke.

  I got a job with the Cook County Board of Public Welfare. I had to eat. I earned $95 a month—I was going to say a week. (Laughs.) My boss was as nice a colored woman as you ever met in your life. I had a title—I keep saying it. I don’t know whether it was true or not. I was Director of Occupational Assistance and Self Help. There was no status working for Illinois Emergency Relief. My wife felt it a great deal more than I did. She dolled it up. She used that title among her friends. I really enjoyed some of the experiences, I really did.

  I have to pay tribute to my wife. She managed an apartment building in Evanston. We got a six-room apartment free. I also picked up gadgets that I bought for fifty cents and sold for a dollar. It bought my lunch, paid my carfare. I drove some of my friends nuts. Every time I got a new gadget, I was in to sell it to ’em. They had jobs.

  There was a fellow invented something called Bergenize. It was beautiful to demonstrate. You’d dip your hands in a can of it. It was colorless. Then you’d dip your hands in the dirtiest grease, wash it off with cold water, and they’d be as clean as could be.

  I had six cans of Bergenize. Before I went out to sell, I’d dip my hands in this stuff. I walked into a garage and went to the grease pit. I dipped my hands into it, walked over to the faucet and turned the water on. My hands got dirtier and dirtier and dirtier. (Laughs.) You see, I had washed my hands back home and forgot to put the stuff back on. I can still remember the garageman looking at me and shaking his head. I panicked and walked out. (Laughs.)

  “My dad was sales manager for a leading coffee. house. He was over sixty-five and still earning an excellent salary. This was in the early Thirties. Jesus, I remember this as though it were yesterday. My mother was playing the piano, I was playing the mandolin, my brother and sister were singing. The doorbell rang. A special delivery for my dad. He was fired. After thirty-eight years with the company. Just like that. A cloud over the whole festive… .

  “Dad opened an employment agency for salesmen. He had been president of the Sales Managers’ Association. He had a lot of friends. But he never made it. A salesman would come in, suit not pressed, needed a haircut. My dad would give the guy two bucks. The guy’d get the job and my dad never collected his fee. (Laughs.) He died in 1936.”

  I think I drank more than I should have. It was a release. I didn’t lose my job because of it. But … my wife’s mother lived with us. She wasn’t a member of the WCTU182 but she was close. She considered it a weakness on my part that I wasn’t able to withstand all the tensions without some release. In the afternoon, I had a few drinks. I had to time it so I didn’t get home until after she was in bed. (Laughs.)

  My wife did such a good job of managing that Evanston building, the bank moved us to a four-room flat on the South Side. A hell of a neighborhood. She had rented all but our own apartment, so the bank said: Out. They got $150 for it. This was the reward for doing a good job.

  We had four generations living in that four room. My son, my wife, her mother and her mother’s mother. Grandma was delightful, but trouble! Margaret and I slept under the table.

  Oh, I tell you…. If I only had the guts and knowledge I could have done so much better. I would have gone into something that I felt….

  When I got out of school in 1921, we had kind of a depression in ’21. (Laughs.) While at the University, I managed the Illinois Agriculturalist. I think my place was with Prairie Farmer or something of that nature. But I happened to get into the investment business. If I had gone into agriculture….

  POSTSCRIPT: “I’ll never forget that Depression Easter Sunday. Our son was four years old. I bought ten or fifteen cents’ worth of eggs. You didn’t get too many eggs for that. But we were down. Margaret said, ‘Why he’ll find those in five minutes.’ I had a couple in the piano and all around. Tommy got his little Easter basket, and as he would find the eggs, I’d steal ’em out of the basket and re-hide them. The kid had more fun that Easter than he ever had. He hunted Easter eggs for three hours and he never knew the difference. (Laughs.)

  “My son is now thirty-nine years old. And I bore him to death every Easter with the story. He never even noticed his bag full of Easter eggs never got any fuller… .”

  Stanley Kell

  It is an all-white, middle-class neighborhood on Chicago’s Northwest Side. “The majority of homes here are around from $17,000 to $24,000.” He heads the organization dedicated to the proposition of keeping blacks out. “My white Christian neighbors? They agree with me about the in
tegration problem. But they think I’m too strong, too active.”

  His is a one-family dwelling on the corner. Among the appliances within, aside from a 25-inch color TV set, are a stereo set, a Hammond organ and a grandfather’s clock.

  It is after supper. His wife is at a neighborhood meeting: tonight’s subject—the school busing crisis. Their two small boys, in the manner of small boys, are running around the house, excitedly, laughing… .

  He is forty-two years old.

  IT’S A LONG WAY from Maxwell Street,183 I’ll tell ya. Where I had to dig for a loaf of bread. If I told my children exactly what a kid had to do in them days to get something to eat in his stomach in order to live….

  The first thing that hits me about the Depression is my dad. His business—he’s coming up from downstairs. We’re living above the machine shop that my dad owned. He was in the cap business, making caps for milk bottles. I remember him coming up the stairs and saying: “Well, the business is gone. We’re broke. And the banks have no money.”

  And my mother being a European woman of Polish ancestry, and knowing how to make ends meet, I remember her for many, many weeks, pots of soup. And the main ingredient was that loaf of bread. I had been used to going for bread. But from now on, it was a daily venture. In them days, we used to wear knickers. This daily venture was always full of peril.

  I think it was only a nickel a loaf. I had to take that nickel and make sure I got to that Maxwell Street. There was a long viaduct, and you had to be sure you ducked through there to save that nickel. Coming back with that bread was full of danger, too. There was always somebody waitin’ to grab it off ya. Poor kids, too. No doubt they were hungry. Negro kids. I was such a good runner, later I got to be a track man.