Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  (Quickly) So, during the Depression, you’d call on the top man… .

  The reason I’d call on the head of a company, you find a man who has worked his way up from the bottom is much more generous than one who hasn’t. What I really wanted was his permission, and I made it easy for him to give it to me. If he didn’t take the policy, I’d say: (enthusiastically) “Well, thanks just the same. I’ll see you again next year!” Then, as I would leave, I’d say, “Oh, by the way, would it be all right to see the others? If they’re not too busy, I’ll show it to them. If they want it, all right. If not, all right.” I’d be on my way out and the answer would always be yes. Because it’s a reflex action.

  I would certainly not be in the sight of the president too frequently. I’d go from department to department. If it were an office, I’d go from desk to desk.

  Unannounced?

  I wouldn’t even tell ’em my name. Every man, every woman, every child needs protection. In a Depression, they need it more than any other time. If a person had enough money for a ton of coal, it was more advantageous for him to have a half a ton of coal and my policy than just a ton of coal without the policy. The system worked.

  I was a student of the human mind and would get keyed up. If I wanted to sell you an accident insurance policy, you’re sold. Give me one of your liabilities, and I’ll turn it into an asset.

  It’s the Depression, I have three children, my wife is ill, the company is failing, I’m afraid they’ll lay me off… .

  The first thing to do is pray for guidance. Then engage in thinking time. You condition your mind to determine what you want. Figure out the logical way to achieve it. Don’t worry about the thousand reasons you shouldn’t achieve it. All you need is one good reason why you should. If you had PMA, a positive mental attitude, you’d do more than that for which you are paid, so the firm couldn’t afford to let you go. Instead they’d push you up. This is in the Depression, right?

  Right. Now you come up to me. You’re gonna sell me. I’m really worried, I say to you: ‘I’d love to buy your insurance, but I’m so frantic, I just can’t—”

  The response is so simple: “That’s exactly why you need it.” I’d close in on you. If you didn’t have money, that wouldn’t bother me. I’d say, “You can go next door and borrow it.” And if you wanted it badly enough, you would. Why not?

  As a student of the human mind, what you’d do is push the right buttons. If someone would say, “I don’t believe in insurance,” you’d go along with them: “I’ll be truthful with you, I don’t think you’ll have an accident. If I did, in fairness to my company, I wouldn’t sell you a policy.” You’d hesitate. Then he’d say, “You can’t tell.” I’d say, “You’re right.” And I’d show him the policy and sell ’im.

  All this time, with bread lines, apple sellers, people on relief, crisis, you just went along… .

  Rrrright! Because of mental attitude, the power every human being possesses—the human mind.

  In those days, it was very easy to do what others were afraid to do. There might be ten salesmen ahead of me and ten salesmen behind me and it was very interesting. They might be trying to sell insurance. But with my PMA, I sold. Whether they sold or not, I never took the time to find out.

  Ray Wax

  He is a stockbroker, living in a middle-class suburb, just outside New York City. It is a recent endeavor. Previously, he had been a builder and a real estate broker.

  Though his words come easily, he feels he has little of worth to recount. He is restless, a fever possesses him… .

  MY OLD MAN in 1928 had a million dollars in cash. Between the market, the races and the numbers racket, he lost everything. Going to the horses, sitting in a box for almost four years, with the touts who were supposed to pick the winners for him … he went through a million. In ’31, my old man gave me $5: “Here, take care of the house.”

  It took me twenty years to figure out what happened. I always figured there was some kind of logic I didn’t understand. Maybe it was some kind of lack in me. ’Cause I was brought up in a middle-class family: all the privileges, the house with the servant—all of a sudden, one day it’s all gone. Now I had to find out who the hell I was.

  Here I am being thrown into some kind of goddam pot and I had to learn how to live. Really, without Horatio Alger I wouldn’t have made it. I really believed there was room for you in this society, that there was work, that you could overcome adversity.

  One day I started out looking for a job. Within three hours, I found one as a shipping clerk. $10 a week, of which I gave six home. I became a good shipping clerk. I worked alone. My world was the four walls of the shipping room.

  I had no illusion about getting an education. I didn’t have the drive, didn’t know what I wanted to be. I began to feel I was peripheral. I didn’t fit into a world where people spent four years in a institution and came out with a guaranteed job or point of view. Or became a doctor or dentist.

  I used to ride the New York subways and look at the chalk board at employment agencies. In the street, there’d be hundreds of men looking at these boards. I did chance jobs.

  One day on the subway, I picked up a paper and it said: “Experienced Florist Wanted.” The date on the paper was the day before, but I figured the hell with it, I’ll try.

  I showed up at Everybody’s Florist, that’s what it was called. I saw a gang of men in front of Everybody’s Florist and I said, “Are they hiring anybody?” And a guy said, “No, they hired everybody yesterday.” Another guy said, “Look kid, they don’t know who the hell they hired. Just get in the crowd.” So I got in the crowd. As we moved through the door, he said, “What’s your name?” I said, “Ray.” He said, “We didn’t hire you.” And I said, “Yes, you did hire me.” He said, “You’re full of shit.” I said, “So help me God, you really did hire me.” He said, “All right,” and he gave me a batch of flowers.

  Roses and carnations, three cents for this and five cents for that. These guys were buying the glut of the New York flower market. They had the concession to put men out on any station of the IRT system, for which they gave a cut to the IRT. This is the way I became a flower vendor.

  In the early Thirties, guys made a living by buying a batch of flowers and working for themselves. The IRT bull would come along and chase them. But if they worked for Everybody’s Florist, they had a set spot. These guys would say: Look, you poor bastards, don’t go hustling for yourself. Come in with us and you’ll be able to make a living.

  Here I am selling flowers, and they don’t look bad. You can put up a little sign: Thirty-five cents for a dozen roses, fifty cents for a dozen carnations. The only place you can set up is where the turnstiles are. You try to find yourself a little living room and you’re up against the wall, up against the tile. All these people, hundreds and thousands pouring out of the subway, and there I am looking like some sort of sick dog making a chance sale.

  I think the first day maybe I sold $8. My pay working for Everybody’s Florist was $2 a day. Later when I became top drawer, my top pay was like $3.

  How’d you get to be top drawer?

  I grew up on Horatio Alger. I remember reading every Horatio Alger. I was really bit in the ass. I really believed that if you ran out and stopped the horses, you married the boss’s daughter. So help me God. And if you get a fucking job and worked harder than anybody else and they saw the gleam in your eye, they somehow recognized that you had it. There were all these other guys struggling behind you, but somehow you were sitting at the desk and you were calling the orders. It was only right. It was the way the world was made, it was the way it was supposed to happen.

  The next day I brought ’em back the money I got, the $8. And the guy said, “You fucking little bum, is this all the money you brought? Look, you little bastard, you gotta do better.”

  At first, with the roar of the train, up against the wall, with your box on the floor, they wouldn’t see you. So I put up a stand: a board with the stuff at ey
e level, at a height where every one could see it. And I found out that if I began to open my mouth and hollered a little, I did better. “Here y’are, getcha roses here!” I’ll always remember the peonies: “Get your peeeooo-nies here!”

  It used to get so cold down there. I used to wear two pairs of pants. No relief. If you had to pee … I used to time the trains so I could get into the fuckin’ pissoir and unbutton two flies so I could pee before the next train came in. It was a joke trying to get through two pair of pants to get to your pecker and pee and get back out in time for the next train.

  In the worst hour of the Depression, if you were aggressive, if you wanted to scrounge, if you believed in Horatio Alger, you could survive. If you were on your own, you could stumble through, wearing a monkey suit or finding an off-beat job. For me, people that worked all day and went home to their families, they were fags. They were the ones who could come up behind me when I was working and put their hand on my ass. Respectable men going home to their wives and children: Drive you back? Won’t you let me come back later and drive you back? I wanted to sell the son of a bitch flowers, so I wouldn’t put him down completely.

  Every day I took back more money and took out more flowers. By the time I came in after the third or fourth day, they were kinda glad to see me. I worked for Everybody’s Florist for twenty-three days without a break. In the course of those twenty-three days, something happened to me.

  Wherever I worked, I made more money than anybody else. In my ignorance, I thought I was a better hustler than anybody else. The reason I made more money than any of the other guys was that they stole. I used to work and bring them all the money, for a lousy $2 a day. But these other guys, the hustlers, were making a lot of money and every day, depending on what their gross take was, stole a proportionate amount of money. They didn’t steal it. Clipping, they called it. They clipped a few bucks.

  After I worked there ten, twelve days, I said to the three thugs who ran Everybody’s Florist: I want to tell you how to run this business. I began to tell them their checkout stinks, half their flowers come back, they don’t know what the hell they’re buying. Right out of Horatio Alger. I’m twenty years old and they’re listening. O.K., but there’s one thing wrong. The transom’s open.

  I walk out the door, two guys grab me by the throat. They put me up against the wall and they say, “Listen, you little son of a bitch, when you work here, you work like everyone else. If you’re gonna work here and sell flowers, you’re gonna steal. And then you’ll make a living.” From then on, I never make less than $75, $100 a week and a hundred and a quarter. I became one of their top men.

  I could clip ten, fourteen, twenty dollars on a good day. I’d have to hustle $100, $150 in flowers. And that was a lot of hustling ‘cause they were selling roses at three cents apiece and ’mums at, big deal, five cents apiece. To live in that atmosphere, you had to play their game. Eventually, I became one of the boys.

  When you’d come in at ten o’clock or whatever, Tommy or Harry would say, “You little bastard, how did you do today?” I’d say, “Gee, Harry, I had a good day. I did $40.” “That stinks,” he’d say. Then, “Have a drink.” And toss a bottle of booze over to you. I hadn’t eaten all day and that goddam subway, between trains I’d run up and grab a sandwich and be right down. Now they push the bottle in your face and you take a slug because you got to prove you’re one of the boys.

  And they’d say, “You wanna get laid? We got a hooker downstairs. Three ways for a half a dollar.” I’d walk down the goddam stairs and sure enough there’d be a black broad on the table and some guy banging away at her and her hollering and moaning and slightly drunk…. What are you gonna do? This is the world I lived in. At least twice a week, there’d be a broad in the basement. There’d be booze on the table. Somehow you had to survive. I never went down in the basement.

  Under the Brooklyn Bridge, you’d find the guy with a pink cat sittin’ on top of a fire hydrant. He’s the pimp. He’ll say, “Wait a minute. There’s another guy that wants to go up. I’ll take you both up.” You go through a locked door and you’d be trooping up and through another locked door and you’d come out into a kitchen. You’d come into an apartment which was made up of a hot stove—heating douche water—and a round wooden table, where there’d be an old Italian man, sitting there, looking down.

  … This was a Luciano house, a syndicate house. I guess the cops got paid off.

  Myself, when I would come in I’d look down, sit down, not look at the other men. And you didn’t know what would come out. There would be two girls, a little beat around the edges. If you went in a room, you made it quick with the girl. It was the best thing you could do for the girls. She’d say, “Honey, you were great, don’t worry about it. You’ll be around when these old bastards won’t be able to get it up.” The girl was good for forty, fifty men a day. I came back to the house often. This was a dollar house in the Thirties.

  I’ve been to a few houses later in life, in Europe, but I’ve never gone through a locked door or up some stairs without me being back in Sand Street … following Louie up the stairs with my heart beating, to break into a room with a couple of old men sitting around a wooden table, looking down.

  The whorehouses on Sand Street were the only thing that saved my sanity. I had no relationship to the rest of the world.

  I lived in a world completely alone. The only thing that sustained me during that period: I continued to read, I continued to hustle. I had a vague sense of myself. Every guy had a gun or a knife except me. I carried a book, so they called me the professor. But finally I began to forget English. Everything reduced to four-letter words.

  Also the money I made was slowly being eaten up by my family. I used to keep the cash I stole in The History of the Jews in Poland. I used to come home and find a note from my old man: Dear boy, took twenty. Signed, Pop. At the end of that year, I had $150 for all my effort. I left them a note saying I was going to Baltimore for a week. I never came back. I felt I had paid my debt in the subways.

  His Baltimore experiences involved “Textile U,” a huge shipping room, where the employer urged long working hours on the promise of his “finding a place in the firm,” where colleagues put him wise to the way of things; setting up lending libraries in drugstores…. “I liked handling books,” meeting radicals, intellectuals, students at Johns Hopkins…. It was the time of the Oxford Pledge and the movement against Fascism; his temptation to go to Spain as a member of the Lincoln Brigade… . “I was an ideal recruit, alone, on the run, searching for something”; a serious affair with a schoolteacher, running away…. “This is part of the Depression. You lived in a fear of responsibility for another person. You backed off when someone got close.”

  New Orleans, Corpus Christi, Houston, Port Isabel, down the Gulf to Mexico. “The Richard Halliburton dream, I had that one, too. There was a great world of adventure. If you believe in Horatio Alger and Richard Halliburton, you believe something will work out.”

  The Depression ended for me about ’37. There seemed to be more work available. You weren’t feeling guilty if you drove through the streets with a car. I moved into the middle classes, a little unhappy….

  Where I lived in this suburb, there’s so much hostility. They feel the welfare people are getting a ride on their back, playing a game. During the Depression, you felt they had a right…. Oh, they were crazy for Roosevelt, my neighbors. They’ll even tell you why. He was a good man to them because he saved the economy.

  The young people growing up in that hour, they were not afraid of the society, they weren’t threatened by it. They had great hope. They felt somehow they would overcome it. Today the young people are in rebellion, but they’re frustrated. They haven’t the illusions we had….

  I was born out of the Depression. I gave up my illusions. No more Horatio Alger. I had a few bad hours, a few bad years. But I found excitement. It was an awakening.

  Epilogue

  Reed

  THE RAFT<
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  He is from an upper middle-class suburb of Chicago, attends college and has worked during the summer months. He is nineteen.

  CHESTER AND I planned to go down the Mississippi on a raft. Prompted, of course, by Mark Twain. We’d build ourselves a raft, start at Joliet and go down to New Orleans. My father thought I was joking. He said I couldn’t go. I called Chester and told him to come over.

  As the conversation started, it was good-humored. When my father saw we were serious, tears began to well up in his eyes, and he got a lump in his throat.

  He started saying he had dreams when he was young, wanted to do the same sort of things. He was young during the Depression. To put himself through school at Amherst—and all the time very emotional about it—he’d gone with no money and had little to eat. That he and my mother had to scrimp during the early years of their marriage. I had an opportunity which he never had.

  What struck me as rather strange was his saying: if I saved some money this year, maybe next summer I could go to Europe. Which is something, he said, he’d always wanted to do. While he was talking about the Depression, he was almost on the verge of crying.

  Why would he agree to a European trip and not to the other one?

  I think the Mississippi trip was just not his idea of fun. He saw it as a hardship. It might just be that he’d like to tell his friends that his son is off to Europe. He wouldn’t want to tell his friends that his son is on the Mississippi River on a raft.

  How often has he brought up this subject—the Depression?

  Oh, very rarely. It was a surprising thing. And never before in such terms, never as emotionally. He said, “Why, now, Reed!” As if I’d done something very wrong. Very seldom have I been addressed in that tone of voice, as if I had committed some serious insult to him.