Hard Times (78 page)

Authors: Studs Terkel

Tags: #Historical, #Non-Fiction, #Autobiography, #Memoir, #Biography, #Politics

BOOK: Hard Times

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(Musing.) It wasn’t as if it was a memory, but an open wound. He talked about the Depression as if it had just happened yesterday. We touched a nerve.

You know, his ship’s come in. He doesn’t want to see our raft go out.

Virginia Durr

A TOUCH OF RUE

Wetumpka, Alabama. It is an old family house on the outskirts of Montgomery. A creek runs by… . She and her husband, Clifford, are of an old Alabamian lineage. During Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration, he was a member of the Federal Communications Commission. She had been a pioneer in the battle to abolish the poll tax.

OH, NO, the Depression was not a romantic time. It was a time of terrible suffering. The contradictions were so obvious that it didn’t take a very bright person to realize something was terribly wrong.

Have you ever seen a child with rickets? Shaking as with palsy. No proteins, no milk. And the companies pouring milk into gutters. People with nothing to wear, and they were plowing up cotton. People with nothing to eat, and they killed the pigs. If that wasn’t the craziest system in the world, could you imagine anything more idiotic? This was just insane.

And people blamed themselves, not the system. They felt they had been at fault: … “if we hadn’t bought that old radio” … “if we hadn’t bought that old secondhand car.” Among the things that horrified me were the preachers—the fundamentalists. They would tell the people they suffered because of their sins. And the people believed it. God was punishing them. Their children were starving because of their sins.

People who were independent, who thought they were masters and mistresses of their lives, were all of a sudden dependent on others. Relatives or relief. People of pride went into shock and sanitoriums. My mother was one.

Up to this time, I had been a conformist, a Southern snob. I actually thought the only people who amounted to anything were the very small group which I belonged to. The fact that my family wasn’t as well off as those of the girls I went with—I was vice president of the Junior League —made me value even more the idea of being well-born… .

What I learned during the Depression changed all that. I saw a blinding light like Saul on the road to Damascus. (Laughs.) It was the first time I had seen the other side of the tracks. The rickets, the pellagra—it shook me up. I saw the world as it really was.

She shamed, cajoled and persuaded the dairy company into opening milk dispensaries. When they sought to back down, she convinced them that “if
these people got a taste of milk, they might get in the habit of buying it—when they got jobs.”

When the steel companies closed down in Birmingham, thousands were thrown out of work. She was acquainted with some of the executives; she argued with them: “You feed the mules who work in your mines. Why don’t you feed the people? You’re responsible.”

The young today are just play-acting in courting poverty. It’s all right to wear jeans and eat hamburgers. But it’s entirely different from not having any hamburgers to eat and no jeans to wear. A great many of these kids—white kids—seem to have somebody in the background they can always go to. I admire their spirit, because they have a strong sense of social justice. But they themselves have not been deprived. They haven’t experienced the terror. They have never seen a baby in the cradle crying of hunger… .

I think the reason for the gap between the black militants and the young white radicals is that the black kids are much more conscious of the thin edge of poverty. And how soon you can be reduced to living on relief. What you
know
and what you feel are very different. Terror is something you
feel.
When there is no paycheck coming in—the absolute, stark terror.

What frightens me is that these kids are like sheep being led to slaughter. They are romantic and they are young. I have a great deal more faith in movements that start from necessity—people trying to change things because of their own deprivation. We felt that in the labor surge of the Thirties. The people who worked hardest to organize were the ones in the shops and in the mills.

The Depression affected people in two different ways. The great majority reacted by thinking money is the most important thing in the world. Get yours. And get it for your children. Nothing else matters. Not having that stark terror come at you again… .

And there was a small number of people who felt the whole system was lousy. You have to change it. The kids come along and they want to change it, too. But they don’t seem to know what to put in its place. I’m not so sure I know, either. I do think it has to be responsive to people’s needs. And it has to be done by democratic means, if possible. Whether it’s possible or not—the power of money is such today, I just don’t know. Some of the kids call me a relic of the Thirties. Well, I am.

THE END

Chicago
Sun-Times,
February 8, 1986.

“Broken Heartland,” by Bob McBride,
The Nation,
February 8, 1986.

“Farm Country’s New Right Knight,” by James Ridgeway,
Village Voice
, February 4, 1986.

Head of the Holiday Association, a militant farmers’ group of the Thirties.

Business Week,
September 16, 1985.

A Boston financier of the Twenties. His “empire” crashed, and many people were ruined. He went to prison.

Chicago Tribune,
January 25, 1986.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
(New York, Viking Press, 1939), p. 261.

Caroline Bird,
The Invisible Scar
(New York, David McKay Co., 1965).

It was “on the house.”

Subsequently, during Insull’s trial in Chicago, “Little Orphan Annie,” the comic strip, was featuring the ordeal of Daddy Warbucks, the indomitable redhead’s benefactor. He, too, was being crucified by alien forces.

In 1894, Jacob S. Coxey led a march of unemployed into Washington. It failed in its purpose. The small size of the group led to the coinage of the derogatory phrase, “Coxey’s Army.”

Chesapeake and Ohio Railway.

General Pelham D. Glassford.

He was aided by General George Patton and Major Dwight Eisenhower. “Thank God,” said President Hoover, “we still have a government that knows how to deal with a mob.”

“The Roaring Twenties.”

It was produced under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the late Thirties. (See C. B. Baldwin in the sequence “Concerning the New Deal.”)

“Thirteen public aid families squatted in a vacant building … they defied the police to evict them. Most were victims of a recent fire. The others decided to abandon their sub-standard housing in favor of the three-story building… . ‘Man, we’re going to stake out those apartments just like the early settlers when they took it away from the Indians,’ announced Mrs. Pearl Moore, a Tenants’ Union representative.” (Chicago
Daily News
, February 21, 1969).

The Salvation Army.

He was candidate for Governor of California. EPIC was his symbol and credo: End Poverty In California.

A blackjack.

The refrigerator car.

He has an administrative job with UNICEF.

“A jumper is a way of puttin’ a wire on it so the current goes around the meter instead of through it and doesn’t rotate the wheels. The current is goin’ all the time, but not registerin’.”

A Chicago area in which many of the southern white emigres live; furnished flats in most instances.

Thousands of Japanese families living on the West Coast were interned in relocation camps, during World War II. These structures are still standing.

“That’s a man who specializes in contracting human beings to do cheap labor.”

At one time, Governor of Connecticut; later, American Ambassador to India.

It is now the
Playboy
Building.

A Boston financier of the Twenties. His “empire” crashed, many people were ruined. He went to prison.

“Selling short is selling something you don’t have and buying it back in order to cover it. You think a stock is not worth what it’s selling for, say it’s listed as $100. You sell a hundred shares of it, though you haven’t got the stock. If you are right, and it goes down to $85, you buy it at that price, and deliver it to the fellow to whom you sold it for $100. You sell what you don’t have.” Obviously, if the stock rises in value, selling short is ruinous… . Ben Smith sold short during the Crash and made “a fortune.”

Securities and Exchange Commission.

See Doc Graham in the sequence, “High Life,” p. 180.

“Now under SEC rules, you can only sell if the stock goes up an eighth. You can’t sell it on the downtake.”

Milo Reno, leader of the Farm Holiday Association.

Her older sister.

National Youth Administration.

A movement popular in the early days of the Depression. It was based upon a price system measured in units of energy rather than dollars and cents. The society envisioned was to be run by engineers and scientists. Founded by Howard Scott, a young engineer, it was the subject of much discussion. With the election of Roosevelt, it fell out of public grace and memory.

An archaic rural phrase: “That was your board. If you got sick, the farmer paid the doctor bill. The wife washed your clothes and saw you had a clean shirt on Sunday for church.”

Busby Berkeley’s extravaganza, starring Ruby Keeler, Richard Powell and Toby Wing.

A bindle: possessions wrapped in a handkerchief.

“Tiff is a material used in making paint, comparable to white lead. It was dug out of straight shafts, like little wells. The miners didn’t own the land, of course. They were simply sinking these wells, getting the tiff out and selling it to big companies.”

Civil Works Administration. It presaged the WPA.

A. Philip Randolph, founding president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

The National Labor Relations Board. An election was held in 1938, under the supervision of the Federal Government. “There were sealed ballots, and the Brotherhood won. We got a closed shop. Plenty folks didn’t want to join the union, but they wanted the gains that the union got for them.”

An idiom for labor organizers who didn’t give a damn.

It was popularly known as “The Red Squad.”

With the passage of the Wagner Act, the National Labor Relations Board came into being. It became illegal to fire or blacklist any employee on the grounds of union activities.

The men who worked from 4:30 P.M. to 12:30 A.M.

Frank Murphy. He subsequently became a Supreme Court Justice.

See Harry Norgard’s interpretation in the sequence, “Strive and Succeed,” p. 439.

Several other General Motors plants in Flint were the scenes of similar sit-downs. “At Chevrolet Four, there was a knock-down and drag-out fight. That’s where the Battle of Bull Run happened. The boys took it over, and the city police and the sheriffs men decided they were gonna throw ’em out. Between the tear gas the police used and the nuts and bolts the strikers used, there was hell to pay. We run ’em off. When the tear gas got in the plant, the women’s brigade smashed every damn window they could find to let the air in. It was vicious. (Laughs.) Hans Larson, he was shot in the Battle of Bull Run.”

When Governor Murphy was being urged to use the National Guard to oust the sit-downers, Lewis orated: “I shall personally enter General Motors’ Chevrolet Plant Number Four. I shall order the men to disregard your order, to stand fast. I shall then walk up to the largest window in the plant, open it, divest myself of my outer raiment, remove my shirt and bare my bosom. Then, when you order your troops to fire, mine will be the first breast that those bullets will strike. And, as my body falls from the window to the ground, you will listen to the voice of your grandfather as he whispers in your ear, ‘Frank, are you sure you are doing the right thing?’”

Shortly after GM had signed with the UAWU, Walter Reuther and Dick Frankensteen were assaulted at the overpass, near Detroit’s River Rouge plant, while in the act of passing out union handbills. The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee confirmed the charge that the assailants were members of Ford’s service department.

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