Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  And I know I voted the right way

  So I’m askin’ you, Mr. President

  Don’t take away this W P and A.

  They had a lot of verses. We used to sing them:Oh, I’m for you, Mr. President

  I’m for you all the way

  You can take away the alphabet

  But don’t take away this WPA.

  When they got on WPA, you know what they’d mostly do. First, they’d buy some clothes. And tried to get a little better place to live. The third thing was to get your teeth fixed. When you’re poor, you let your teeth go. Especially, the child. If she’s got a rotten or snaggle tooth and that tooth may ache, dulled by aspirin or something or whiskey. Then they’d pull them out. They’d get their teeth fixed. WPA….

  There was some humanity then. We don’t have humanity today. No, God damn it, these bastards, they’re not going to do right, as sure as I’m sitting here, they’re not gonna do right. I’ve withdrawn. I feel like I felt when I was in France and Germany in 1935. We’re heading, driven like figures toward a tragedy. I see nothing to do. It’s futile.

  NOTE: At the time of this conversation, he was working on a biography of Richard Wright.

  W. L. Gleason

  He is eighty years old; lives by himself in Minneapolis. He types out a diary—“daily happenings just for the hell of it, to keep boredom from my door.”

  WELL, I went through that Depression, which took place during the good years of my life. The good physical years, the best mental years. But they were years which made a lot of bums out of good people.

  In 1922, I bought a lot and, with my lily-white hands, I built a summer cottage on it. In the same year, I bought a Ford touring car. In the same year, I bought a modern six-room house for six thousand bucks. And in the same year, my wife bought a four-hundred-buck piano.

  Damned if I didn’t pay it all off, every penny. And then give the whole damn thing away as a divorce penalty, along with barrels and barrels of interest at six and a half percent.

  However, when my thoughts run back over the years, as they often do in my dreams, both day and night, one incident, event, happening, never fails to come in for a review….

  My oldest boy, Bob, managed to hook onto a job, cutting lawn down on the lake shore. There was no power for the lawn mower, other than legs, arms and lungs. Bob used all of them. In order to spend the two bits, which he was to get for the job (twenty-five cents to you, $00.25 to the bank).

  The old gal who owned the place was in the money. Bob completed the job in record time, and knocked on the door to collect his two bits. The old gal opened the door and exclaimed, “Oh, but you didn’t trim the trees.” She closed the door. Bob took off down the road, and never, never did come back for his two bits.

  And the hell of it is that all these many, many years, it sticks out in my mind like a damn sore thumb. I suppose it will be growing like a cancer through all the days I have left. There were so many things happened during the Great Depression. There were some nice things happened, there were worse ones. Like three major strikes, which touched closely on my friends. So why in the billy hell has this happening taken the limelight for me over all the others?

  Strive and Succeed

  This was Luke Larkin, the son of a carpenter’s widow…. He had a pleasant expression, and a bright, resolute look, a warm heart, and a clear intellect, and was probably in spite of his poverty, the most popular boy in Groveton.

  He has struggled upward from a boyhood of privation and self-denial into a youth and manhood of prosperity and honor. There has been some luck about it, I admit, but after all he is indebted for most of his good fortune to his own good qualities.

  —Struggling Upward by Horatio Alger, Jr.

  Harry Norgard

  A free-lance commercial artist.

  IN 1933, I lost my job. It was the year of the Century of Progress. It came as a shock. ’Cause one day the man tells me I’m set for life, and the next day he tells me I’m all through. “We have to tighten our belts.”

  I went out to free lance, find my own accounts. Within two months, I was making half again what I left. This was in the heart of the Depression. I always felt deeply in my heart, you could always sell something if you offer the buyer something better than he’s getting.

  It didn’t matter to me whether there was a Depression or not. Bemoaning your fate gets you nowhere. I knew wherever you make an effort, you make headway.

  It’s true a great many people lost their shirts. In many ways, it was their own fault. There were millions of people buying stock, being hot shots. It stands to reason when people engage in a business they know nothing about, they’re gonna get hurt.

  One man I know made a killing in the market—on paper. “I’m gonna have a house on Sheridan Road, I’m gonna have a Packard, I’m gonna have a chauffeur, I’m gonna have everything.” Hoggish. He used to take his children to see four or five apartment buildings: “… this one is for you, that one is for you, this other is for you.” He was gonna leave his children a big legacy. He had no business calling it his property. His equity in each of them was so small, they were topped by first, second and third mortgages. The man was up to his eyebrows in debt on each one. His dominoes fell, one on top of the other.

  People with real money didn’t get hurt during the Depression. Because they were able to take advantage of the distressed property. Buying them up. The people who got hurt were people who had no business doing what they were doing in the first place. They were lambs in a den of wolves.

  I was prudent. I always liked to feel liquid. I knew where I could lay my hand on a dollar whenever I needed it. The Bank Holiday didn’t even touch me.

  Some people were victims of circumstance. It was no fault of their own. Many people did their best to find something to do. I heard of a former banker who became a caddy at the golf club he had at one time been a member of. There were people with a great deal of spunk, who wouldn’t frighten easily.

  Someone once said to me: The worst thing that can happen to a man is to have a good job. Because when you have a good job, you’re in a safe, secure, snug harbor. People will stay where it’s nice and warm and cozy. A man really does better for himself if he’s thrown to the wolves, so to speak.

  Our greatest successes in business were made by illiterate men. They couldn’t speak the language. They couldn’t write. They made no appearance you could be proud of. From sheer necessity, they had to go into business for themselves. They had to roll up their sleeves and go out. If they became junk men, they opened a junk shop. Then they were dealing in scrap metal. Before you know it, they were steel tycoons.

  The Depression made a lot of people. I know one man who found himself out of work. He began thinking and thinking. He wrote sixteen letters to manufacturers and explained he could offer them a service at no cost. Three or four of them wrote back. In a few short years, he became an extremely wealthy man. He gave them something they needed, even though at the time they didn’t know they needed it.

  Al Capone operated a soup kitchen. People would line up a half a block long. He was becoming kind of a Robin Hood in that era. He would go to ball games, people would get up and cheer him. They didn’t regard him as an underworld character. They thought of him as a sport. He was spreading good cheer among the poor. Things like that were happening everywhere.

  They don’t give you medals for money. But they don’t give you medals for being poor, either.

  Roosevelt was to the people like the Holy Father was to the Catholics. At first, I felt pretty much the way everyone else did. Later on, it became apparent to me he was selling the country down the river to the big unions.

  The consequence: when the first sit-down strike happened in Detroit—I happen to know some people who lived through it—these strikers tore the place apart inside. They tore up the pipes, they broke the windows, they ripped the machinery out, they did hundreds of thousands of dollars damages.

  You heard this from … ?

/>   People who saw it, people who sat it. And they weren’t even punished for a thing like that. I’m sure if General Motors had sent in a squad of goons to wreck the headquarters of the United Automobile Workers, something would have been done about it. Unionists got special treatment all along the line.

  I think a great deal of this was encouraged by Socialist agitators. I never marched up and down the street to help myself. It never occurred to me to blame anybody but myself for what was happening to me. It would be the last thought to enter my mind.

  As for the WPA, a picture comes to my mind of men leaning on shovels, as I’m driving through Outer Drive. I’ve seen photographs of these people, sitting on curbs and smoking cigarettes.

  So today a man will do the least he can for the most he can get. In the Depression, those who acted that way never lasted very long. In those days, you could pick up an employee any hour on the hour, just open up the window and yell and somebody would come in for a job. Those who retained their job had the fear of God put in ‘em. One thought was uppermost in their minds: I got to do as good a job as I can or else I’m gonna get canned. I firmly believe the only way you can get most people to do a job is to put the fear of God into ’em.

  Do you think another Depression might be good for us?

  No, I wouldn’t say that. What I do say is we are not all deserving the sympathy some of these bleeding hearts have for the people. A great deal of their misery is self-inflicted. These people are constantly looking for assistance. What would happen if we all had this attitude?

  General Robert E. Wood

  In the library of his Lake Forest home, he is watching a television baseball game. At eighty-nine, “I have three bosses—my wife, my secretary and my nurse. It’s terrible.” (Laughs.)

  “MacArthur and I were great friends. We were cadets at the Point together. We were in the same class. When he formed the Rainbow Division, he offered me a colonelcy in it. I was transferred to Pershing’s general staff and became Quartermaster General of the army.”

  He had left Montgomery Ward, a mail-order house, in 1924 and came to Sears, Roebuck as a vice president.

  I ALWAYS ASSOCIATED the Depression with one of the best things I ever did for Sears, Roebuck. I founded All-State Insurance in ‘31, which was the depth of the Depression. It proved an enormous success. Now its earnings are in the neighborhood of ninety million a year. All-State started out pretty slow. But it never lost money, even in ’31.

  It was a mail-order business. I transferred it into a chain store as well as mail order. Pass goods over the counter instead of through the mail. I gradually converted it from mail order serving the rural people exclusively to a chain store in the cities. That’s what made me president. In 1928. The same year as Hoover, who was a friend of mine.

  With the Crash, you became aware of trouble because your sales absolutely disappeared. Business didn’t drop off gradually. It took a plunge, just like that. Of course, it hit me as well as everybody else. But I felt sure things would come back.

  I voted for Roosevelt in ’32. Yeah. That surprise you? I thought it was time for a change. While I was a Republican, I voted for Roosevelt. I’ve forgotten just when I became disenchanted with Franklin D. It was sometime during his Administration. I liked him, couldn’t help liking him. I was one of the few men in so-called Big Biz that voted for him and supported him. He was very kind to me. He offered me several appointments. Had me down to Washington several times. But he did oversell the truth, you know. He’d shift from one thing to another. I lost confidence in him.

  Did the Wagner Act affect you in any way, the emergence of the CIO?

  Not with Sears. We’ve never had a strike. We had no organization. Sears was one of the first firms in the United States that shared the profits with employees. We’ve always had peaceful labor relations. For over fifty years, we never had a strike. We’re not unionized. But we never lifted a finger. We told employees they could join a union if they wanted to: if you want to join, go ahead and join it. But they never figured it brought them anything.

  Things began to pick up around ’34 and ’35. It was ‘36 before they began to pick up strong. ’32 was bad, ‘33 was bad, ’31 was the worst of all. We cut, including myself. I started with a salary cut. We had to cut or we’d have perished.

  We had to lay off thousands of people. It was terrible. I used to go through the halls of the building and these little girls, they were all terrified. I remember one Italian girl I called in. She had a family of ten, father, mother and eight children. She was the only one working. It was terrible. But we had to lay ’em off. I could see how frightened to death they were.

  The Depression ended in ‘33. But it didn’t begin to recover on a big scale until ’36.

  Some people say it didn’t end until the war.

  Oh, that’s ridiculous. You began to pick up in ’36. It wasn’t big but it was all right.

  Were there friends of yours who suffered?

  Neighbors and friends. Not my college friends because I went to West Point and all my classmates were in the army. They were immune at that time. It was a good place to be. (Laughs.)

  I was very fortunate. While I had no capital of my own, I had a very good salary. I didn’t have to shut down, so to speak. (Laughs.) No, I didn’t have to cut down on servants or anything like that.

  I always felt the Depression was temporary. You couldn’t stop this country. I founded All-State in the darkest period, didn’t I?

  POSTSCRIPT: “I was an isolationist, you know. I still think it was a mistake for us to have gone into the war. We’ve got an empire here, and we’ve got two great undeveloped continents, North and South America. Why should we get mixed up in the affairs of Europe which is an old-time continent? We’ve got unlimited room to expand, and why we should get mixed up in an old, tired Europe, I couldn’t see.”

  A. A. Fraser

  For thirty years, he looked over the books of a lumber company. At last, he became an officer and a member of its board.

  WE HAD SAWMILLS in Arkansas, Mississippi and South Carolina. The money was flowing in so fast, we didn’t know what to do with it. But that year, ’28, we liquidated these holdings. There wasn’t any more timber to cut. We left in Arkansas 45,000 acres of stump.

  We bought it at $1, $1.50 a thousand. But we figured by the time it ran out, it was worth $5 a thousand. So when a million feet went through the mill, you could deduct $5 million from your income tax return. Depletion allowance. You see, when the stump is left, that’s the end of the capital. Like oil and coal.

  Was an attempt made to replant?

  No, not in those states. We had houses to liquidate and a railroad and a big store. These towns belonged to the company. You should have seen our offices, beautiful. Like old plantation mansions. Our money was made with cheap wages. A dollar a day. Mostly Negroes. We sold it en bloc to speculators.

  People would fight for those jobs. A case of supply and demand. Why didn’t we pay more? That was the going wage. You had to make money. You see, without money, we would never have been able to build those mills. We were capitalists. It was free enterprise. We employed a lot of men, so you certainly can’t blame us.

  What did these people do when the homes were sold?

  What did who do?

  The people who lived there.

  Oh. Some of them got jobs with other companies. Some of them lost their jobs. That was a tragedy.

  Then I realized my lifelong ambition to be on the board of directors of several companies. First thing I know, I’m sixty-eight and in good health. So I quit. I finally made it to the Gold Coast. So I just follow my own investments. Got rid of all the cats and dogs. I only buy blue chip stocks. All I do is study stocks and give advice to widows, who live in my building. They stop me in the lobby every day: “What’s good today?” I give’em free advice.

  Tom Sutton

  A lawyer, with offices in a suburb, west of Chicago. His wife, a physician, shares the quarters.

&nb
sp; He heads Operation Crescent, an organization of white property owners:

  “The wealthy have a place to run. My people are caught in a trap. They’re lower middle class, the forgotten ones. Every member on our board is a former liberal. Our best ideas come from the skilled laborers. They have the pulse of the people. They feel abandoned by their priests and their schools. They are hurting, hurting, hurting… . They have no place to go but themselves. They don’t hate Negroes. They may prefer whites, but that doesn’t mean they hate Negroes. And nobody really wants to admit hate… .”

  THE REASON a man works is not because he enjoys work. The only reason any of us work is because if we don’t work, we don’t eat. To think that any man may sit in society and say: I don’t wanna. O.K., if you want to starve, starve. He’ll work. Believe me, he’ll work.

  Those who went through the Depression have a little more pride in their possessions, have a little more pride in the amount of possessions they have. They know that it was a fortunate person in the Thirties who have as much as they have today. They’re much more money conscious.

  Money is important to people, especially children of the Depression. You can see when they come into the office here, they’re trying to see: Am I a wealthy or am I a poor lawyer? If I’m poor, they don’t have that much confidence. They’re sort of happy that they’re shaking hands with some of the wealthy.

  I hate people to know how much money I have. I would never want to admit it if I was broke. I would never want to admit I was a millionaire. One thing the Depression did was to make us secretive. It was ours. During the Depression, nobody would admit that they were broke. My friends who went through the Depression with me, I’ll never know how much money they have, because they won’t talk about it. Whether they’re broke or wealthy.

  In the Depression, you didn’t want to admit you had problems, that you were suffering. This is mine. If I don’t have the money, that’s my problem, not your problem. If I did have money, that’s not your affair. I don’t know if our family was particularly secretive….