Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression

“Jim Sheridan”

Sheridan describes the 1932 Bonus March, when tens of thousands of distressed World War I veterans descended on Washington, DC, to press the federal government for early payment of their promised bonuses. Although he was only a boy, Sheridan accompanied the veterans on the long train ride from Chicago to the nation’s capital. He recalls that the men were upbeat and well-received wherever they stopped, though some traveled with their families, and a baby suffocated to death in one of the boxcars as the train passed through a tunnel. In Washington, the bonus marchers camped out wherever they could. President Hoover called out the army. General Douglas MacArthur ordered the use of brutal tactics, including bayonets and tear gas, to disperse the disgruntled veterans and suppress the Bonus March.

“A. Everett McIntyre”

A Federal Trade Commissioner in 1932, McIntyre watched as General MacArthur and Major Dwight Eisenhower led the 12th US Infantry, “in full battle dress,” against the Bonus Marchers, who stood little chance against tear gas and fixed bayonets (17). McIntyre witnessed the assault in which between 20,000 and 40,000 bonus marchers were driven out of the capital and scattered.

“Edward C. Schalk”

Schalk, a World War I veteran, recalls that the Bonus Marchers had no chance against the army. They simply returned home and melted back into society.

“E.Y. ‘Yip’ Harburg”

Harburg describes the origins and meaning of his famous Depression-era song, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” He recalls feeling an odd sense of relief when the Depression drove him out of business, for it meant that he could try to make a living by writing songs. He also explains that this particular song, written for a satirical play, expresses the righteous indignation of working men who built the country’s wealth and fought its wars only to find themselves reduced to beggary.

“Lily, Roy and Bucky”

Three teenagers from lower-middle-class families recall what they have heard of the Depression from older people who lived it. Lily, the oldest at 18, gives the lengthiest answers based on what she has heard from her grandmother. Lily thinks people would behave much worse if something like The Depression occurred again. Roy, her 16-year-old brother, has heard that he should be grateful to live in a time of more affluence. 17-year-old Bucky expresses indifference.

“Diane”

Diane, a 27-year-old journalist, sees the Depression as a cause of poor communication across the generations, in part because older people who endured the Depression have little tolerance for younger people who seem not to understand it. She admits that she does not know why the Depression occurred, that in her mind the 1920s and 1930s consist of little more than confusing images, and that “[p]erhaps that’s why [she’s] not been as sympathetic as [she’s] expected to be,” for the entire era seems like “an incredible, historical jungle” (24).

“Andy, 19”

Andy recalls viewing a Depression-related documentary film with a group of Cornell students who laughed at inappropriate times because they did not understand it.

“Michael, 19”

Michael does not know depression because he has pot and television.

“Tad, 20”

Tad thinks his parents and the people of their generation control information about the Depression and keep kids in the dark about it because the parents feel guilty about their current affluence and would rather shift guilt onto their ignorant kids than confront their own guilt.

“Nancy, 21”

In five sentences, Nancy explains that money is far more important to her father than it is to her.

“Marshall and Steve”

Twenty-three-year-old Marshall and 21-year-old Steve give the lengthiest of all the answers from young people in Book 1, Chapter 3. Steve explains that during the Depression his mother had to quit school and go to work. Marshall observes that, to many young people, the Depression serves as evidence that the US economic system makes no sense. Both young men reflect on The Generational Gap, claiming that the Depression made older people revere money and wallow in fear. In a postscript, Terkel notes that Marshall, who attended college and then edited underground newspapers, died by suicide on November 1st, 1969.

“Ed Paulsen”

Paulsen recalls a thousand men waiting at the gates of a sugar factory in San Francisco each morning hoping to be selected for one of a handful of jobs. Police on horseback got rough with crowds of unemployed men who marched on City Hall. Paulsen drifted from place to place, sometimes clashing with men from the American Legion who broke up the Hoovervilles by force. He and several companions rode the tops of railroad boxcars from the Pacific Coast to the Midwest.

In Omaha, Nebraska, he was taken to a Transient Camp, where a social worker assigned him a job with the National Youth Administration. Paulsen claims that during the Depression people were thinking about jobs, not revolution, but that in those days “[e]verybody was a criminal” because the Depression “created a coyote mentality” (34).

“Pauline Kael”

As a bookish child in San Francisco during the Depression, Kael witnessed violence. She recalls that the wealthy people moved their kids out of town for fear of revolution. Kael’s mother fed hungry men who came to her door, prompting fear from neighboring women who had experienced domestic violence.

“Frank Czerwonka”

Czerwonka’s mother and father ran a speak-easy (a place serving alcohol illegally during the Prohibition years). They bought from a syndicate of moonshiners (alcohol producers) who had paid off the police captain. When Prohibition ended, the price of alcohol plummeted. Czerwonka recalls that freight trains brought in large numbers of transients in search of work. Many were reduced to begging or taking charity.

“Kitty McCulloch”

Seventy-one-year-old Kitty McCulloch remembers giving away one of her husband’s good suits to a beggar. Like many other women who received beggars, she offered food but no money, for cash was scarce. She also turned away several beggars who reeked of alcohol.

“Dawn, Kitty’s Daughter”

Dawn recalls that the bricks on her family’s apartment were marked with chalk. This was a signal between transients that the people inside the apartment would not turn away beggars in need of food.

“Louis Banks”

As a teenager in Chicago in 1929, Banks could not get hired because he was Black. He rode boxcars from town to town, making do as best he could in the company of other desperate people and evading railroad police who would shoot transients off the tops of railcars. He made it as far as Los Angeles and back again to the east, going wherever there was a rumor of work.

Many times he went to jail for vagrancy and became a source of cheap labor for the state. During this time, he took various low-paying jobs. When the Second World War began, he joined the army, and this was his salvation, for in the army he could eat and not feel afraid. Terkel spoke to Banks at a Veterans’ Hospital, where Banks spoke “feverishly” and the “words pour[ed] out” (40).

“Emma Tiller”

A cook in west Texas during the Depression, Tiller recalls that the southern whites were “always nice in a nasty way to Negroes” but would turn away white transients (44). Only the Black women who worked for the southern whites would feed the white beggars. Tiller gave away her husband’s old shoes to men passing through who needed them more.

“Peggy Terry and Her Mother, Mary Owsley”

Mary Owsley married a man who struggled with his experiences from World War I. They moved around a good deal. In Oklahoma City, where they lived from 1929 to 1936, she describes dust storms from the oil boom, as well as many suicides. Her husband joined the 1932 Bonus March.

Peggy Terry recalls the soup lines but does not recall that she was ever made to feel ashamed of poverty. She married at fifteen and moved from town to town. On the Texas–Mexico border, she and her husband picked fruit alongside migrant workers. She remembers having racist feelings and is now ashamed of those. She describes reading Grapes of Wrath and feeling as if “that was like reliving [her] life” (50). She wondered why President Roosevelt had so many gemstone-covered cuff links when most everyone else had nothing at all, and this made her reflect on the unfairness of the system.  

“Kiko Konagamitsu”

Konagamitsu grew up on a family farm in southern California. He recalls “the Grapes of Wrath kind of people” who came to work on the farm. After Pearl Harbor, the US government put many Japanese Americans in internment camps, though Konagamitsu worked on a sugar beet farm in Idaho.

“Country Joe McDonald”

McDonald’s father lived during the Depression and never talked about it except to say that he traveled on freight trains in search of work. Country Joe, a 26-year-old rock musician, finds the Depression difficult to imagine, though he does observe what he imagines to be Depression-era values when he talks to poor migrant workers.

“Cesar Chavez”

The 41-year-old president of the United Farm Workers of America, Chavez recalls that in 1934, a local bank foreclosed on his father’s farm near Yuma, Arizona, and the family had no choice but to move off the land and travel west. Chavez’s father never again owned his own land. In California, the family was often cheated by crew pushers, labor contractors who promised itinerants jobs and wages and then either failed to come through or pocketed a large percentage of the money.

Chavez also remembers the hurt he felt when a young waitress in Indio, California, refused to serve his family because, she said, they were Mexicans. Finally, Chavez estimates that he attended school perhaps five months out of the year, and that he attended a total of 37 different schools.

“Fran”

A 21-year-old from an affluent family in Atlanta, Fran believes that schools do not teach the real history of the Depression and that young people feel angry about it because they do not want to be protected from their own history.

“Blackie Gold”

A car dealer with a suburban home, Gold confesses to never having discussed the Depression with his children, for he does not want them to know about it. In 1937, he enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Then he served in the US Navy for more than five years. In each case, he enjoyed the work, the feeling of equality, and the orderliness. He complains of too much crime and a lack of obedience in the modern world. He also bemoans the fact that so many kids receive cars when they turn 16, though he admits to giving his own daughter a car at that same age.

“William Benton”

A former US Senator, assistant secretary of state, and vice-president of the University of Chicago, Benton worked for an advertising firm in 1929. He did very well during the Depression, making effective use of radio and drove sales to companies such as Pepsodent and Maxwell House. When the economy tanked again in 1937, he lost $150,000 by following the advice of Lehman Brothers, so he decided to get more personally involved in his investments. He bought Muzak and pushed for its installation in establishments beyond hotels and restaurants. This made him millions. To summarize the Depression’s impact on him personally, Benton uses the same phrase at the beginning and end of his interview: “progress through catastrophe” (60-61, 65).

“Arthur A. Robertson”

Robertson was a businessman who had earned more than a million dollars by the mid-1920s. Speaking on the nature of the stock market, he calls it “a gambling casino with loaded dice” (65). In the 1920s, people bought stock on margin (i.e., credit), so when the stock prices plummeted they did not have the money to cover their purchases. Robertson views this as the cause of the Crash.

Robertson prospered during the Depression by buying failed businesses from bankers who were bailed out by the federal government but still had no idea how to manage a regular business. Less-fortunate associates often called him begging for money. He remembers many deaths by suicide. Jesse Livermore, for instance, owned controlling stock in IBM and Philip Morris, but during the Depression he suffered two bankruptcies and later shot himself over his final ruinous investment. Robertson sold most of his stocks in May 1929 and then took money out of the banks because he sensed that something bad was coming.

“Jimmy McPartland”

An accomplished jazz musician, McPartland marvels at the number of despondent people who died by suicide over something as insignificant as money. During the Depression, the people in McPartland’s circle of acquaintances, which included a number of well-known musicians such as Benny Goodman, helped each other as best they could. McPartland, a white man, recalls only a few difficulties on account of “race.”    

“Sidney J. Weinberg”

A senior partner at Goldman Sachs, Weinberg served as an industrial adviser to President Roosevelt during the Depression. Weinberg credits Roosevelt with saving the day, though he later fell out with the president over Roosevelt’s decision to seek an unprecedented third term. Weinberg does not believe that another Depression is likely to occur.

“Martin DeVries”

DeVries blames people for living without more caution in the 1920s. A ruined friend, for instance, died by suicide after buying on margin. DeVries denounces the New Deal’s relief programs for what he perceives as the diminished work ethic of those who receive relief. His “blood begins to boil” at the mere mention of President Roosevelt and the “bunch of young Harvard theorists” in his administration who failed to accomplish anything by all their moralizing (74). DeVries concludes that President Hoover was not to blame for the Depression, which in fact had global origins and consequences.

“John Hersch”

A senior partner in a large Chicago brokerage firm, Hersch worked as a mere margin clerk in 1929. The Crash, which “didn’t happen in one day,” (76) wiped out his meager savings. A young and ruined friend in Cincinnati died by suicide so his family could collect on the life insurance. The entire securities industry collapsed. Hersch believes that people in the late 1960s have forgotten the Depression. He also marvels at the fact that the Depression produced no violent protest, let alone social revolution.

“Anna Ramsey”

Ramsey’s father bought a building before the Crash. He then borrowed and scrambled to make mortgage payments. Decades later, Ramsey still feels anxiety at the thought of making her own mortgage payments.

“Dr. David J. Rossman”

A psychiatrist who studied with Sigmund Freud, Rossman has treated many well-to-do and well-connected clients since the 1920s. Rossman received financial insights from clients, including one large merchant who reported in May and June 1929 that his orders had suddenly stopped. Rossman claims that the Depression had little human impact, at least as far as he saw. He notes that people seemed to blame themselves for their own circumstances and to accept their misfortunes. Big businessmen, though, went to Roosevelt for relief and never recovered from their shame.

“Alonso Mosely, 20”

Mosely, a young Black AmeriCorps worker, knows little of the Depression because his parents have told him little about it.

“Clifford Burke, 68”

According to Burke, the “Negro was born in depression” (82). He credits Black men’s wives for knowing how to make do with less. He claims that white men died by suicide during the Depression because they were ashamed at being unable to meet what they perceived as their wives’ expectations. Burke made money by playing pool and hustling people.

“Jane Yoder”

Yoder’s father worked as a blacksmith in central Illinois until the mines closed, which she remembers as occurring in 1928 or 1930. She also remembers feeling cold all the time because she lacked blankets, coats, and boots. Her father eventually got a job with the WPA. When Yoder went into nurses’ training, it stung her that girls from better-off families would mock the WPA workers as “these lazy people, the shovel leaners” (87).

“Tom Yoder, Jane’s Son”

Tom does not believe the young people of his own generation will ever understand the feeling of hunger and everything else associated with the Depression.

“Daisy Singer”

Singer was six in 1929. She came from a well-to-do family in New York and has only vague impressions of the Depression’s reality, though she is conscious of the fact that she never suffered.

“Robin Langston”

A Black social worker and jazz musician, Langston recalls that lights went out in the family’s restaurant because his father could not pay the electric bill, so he made do with kerosene. As a boy, Langston read Frederick Douglass but not Booker T. Washington, who “was anathema in my home” (89). He senses that the Depression became “The” Depression because white people also were struggling. He describes Hot Springs, Arkansas, as a segregated town built on gambling and outside money, where police looked the other way as long as Black people stayed in their place. He notes that Roosevelt had the support of the Black community. Finally, Langston observes that young Black men are much more militant in the 1960s than they were in the 1930s.

“Dynamite Garland”

Garland, whom Terkel describes as “an attractive forty-five-year-old waitress” (92) in Chicago, recalls that her family moved into a double-garage after her father lost his job during the Depression. He took a part-time job in a Chinese restaurant, and to this day Garland still cannot eat fried noodles or anything else her father used to scrounge in order to feed his family. Her mother always dreamed big, and the family went house hunting on Sundays, but it was to no avail. Garland took a job with the NYA when she was fourteen. She got married and pregnant shortly after high school. Hearing a train whistle in the distance, she pauses to think about leaving the area: “I’d like to take off like my grandfather did” (95).  

“Slim Collier”

Collier’s father, a farmer and tool-and-die maker at a John Deere factory in southern Iowa, was wiped out by the Depression. Collier remembers his father’s anger. Collier also recalls a local farm foreclosure that attracted a crowd of onlookers, “partly by morbid fascination, partly by sympathy, partly by—well, there was something going on” (97). Collier ran away from home and worked as an itinerant in a very competitive labor market, but among farm workers there was never any talk of organizing a union.

“Dorothe Bernstein”

In 1933, Bernstein went into an orphan home, where she recalls sharing her brown-bag lunches with men outside the home. She also believes that many people who lived through the Depression still feel so much shame about it that in some cases they pretend it never happened.

“Dawn, Kitty McCulloch’s Daughter”

Dawn remembers her father “being derisive of the strikers” and admiring Father Coughlin, whom Dawn “hated” (100). She also believes that life feels cheaper in the 1960s than it did in the 1930s.

“Phyllis Lorimer”

Lorimer hailed from a well-off family in Connecticut, but things got rough. Her parents divorced. She moved out to California with her mother, who married a drunk. Her father already had blown much of his fortune even before the Depression. Her brother, in school at Dartmouth, was obsessed with status and ashamed of his family’s situation. Lorimer got a job as a swimming- and diving-extra at Warner Brothers, in which capacity she performed aquatic stunts for movies. She joined the Screen Actors’ Guild and left behind her snobbish Connecticut upbringing.

“Bob Leary”

A part-time cab driver and student in New York City, Leary recalls that his father was out of work for so long during the Depression that he painted his own father’s house twice simply because it gave him something to do. All told, the Depression had an adverse effect on Leary’s father’s outlook.

“Larry Van Dusen”

Van Dusen, a social worker and labor organizer, was arrested several times in Kansas City and elsewhere in the 1930s. He recalls the “brutality in the jails, the treatment of the unemployed, especially Negroes” (106). He also remembers a vague feeling of disappointment at the failures of his own father, a skilled carpenter who drank too much. After the war, things improved for Van Dusen’s father, as for most everyone else, but Van Dusen still feels a significant chasm across the generations, for instance, when his own children refuse to eat their entire dinner, or the younger workers’ little interest in unionism.

“Jose Yglesias”

Author of multiple books, Yglesias describes a 1931 strike among Cuban-born cigar makers in Ybor City, Florida, near Tampa. Yglesias recalls that the “extraordinarily radical” strike “left a psychological scar,” (110) for his mother was part of the strike, he was in junior high at the time, and school officials were hostile to the strikers. All the strikers supported the Spanish Republic; some were openly Communist. After the strike failed, its leaders were charged with conspiracy and sentenced to a year in prison. People in the community always helped one another and were always keen on learning, which is why Iglesias resents “New Left” intellectuals who denigrate the working class.   

“Evelyn Finn”

In the early 1930s, Finn worked as a seamstress in St. Louis. She describes several conflicts with management, in which she encouraged the entire shop to stop working. In this way, she “played a big part in organizin’ our union in St. Louis” (113).

“Hank Oettinger”

Oettinger was a linotype operator from a tiny Wisconsin town. During the Depression, he was laid off and searched in vain for work every day. He began to think about America’s class structure. When he returned to work, he became heavily involved in union organization. Like many of his generation, he thinks the young men of the 1960s will never understand the early labor struggles.

“E.D. Nixon”

President of the Montgomery branches of both the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the NAACP, Nixon played a prominent role in the Civil Rights Movement. Rosa Parks was his secretary, and he recommended Martin Luther King Jr. to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, which organized the famous 1955 bus boycott.

Nixon learned about labor organization and civil rights while working for the Pullman Company from 1928 to 1964. He describes the difficult and often humiliating working conditions, especially on lengthy railroad trips. A. Philip Randolph, the eloquent president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, did “more to bring me in the fight for civil rights than anybody” (119). Nixon recalls the Pullman Company using spies (“stool pigeons”) and threatening his job on several occasions due to his involvement in the Brotherhood, but Nixon always stood up to the Company, including one instance in which the Brotherhood successfully defended him in a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board. Nixon returned the favor for a fellow porter whom the Company was trying to force off the job on bogus charges.

“Joe Morrison”

Morrison worked in Indiana coal mines and later in steel mills. He recalls hundreds of people, including women, riding freight trains in 1930 and 1931. There was talk of revolution as workers read Socialist and Communist literature. Morrison was blacklisted in the 1930s and, two decades later, called before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

“Mary, 22”

Mary’s father grew up on a farm but moved to New York City during the Depression. He took a job as a strikebreaker until he learned what it was. He promptly quit.

“Gordon Baxter”

A Yale- and Harvard-educated attorney, Baxter took a job as vice-president and general counsel for a large manufacturing company in Chicago. He describes sit-down strikes in the plants and how the company dealt with such disturbances. The Chicago police department, for instance, featured an Industrial Squad led by Lieutenant Make Mills, who ordered his police officers to harass or arrest labor leaders and thus earned generous tips from the company. The union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, and there was proof of illegal blacklisting. Baxter relates a humorous anecdote in which one of the company’s older attorneys named Blair, who was roughly 70 years old at the time and had spent his career as an attorney for the railroads, refused to believe that such a thing as the Wagner Act existed. Baxter suggests that people in the 1960s would not be so tolerant of another Depression as people were in the 1930s.

“Bob Stinson, The Sit Down”

In 1936, Stinson took part in a sit-down strike at a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. He recalls that up to that point, labor organizers in the Michigan auto industry had faced hostility not only from management but from anti-union operatives in the community who behaved like the KKK. On this particular occasion, however, men refused to leave the plant. Their wives, families, friends, and well-wishers provided them with food, which they hoisted through the plant windows. Strikers patrolled the plant to ensure no property was damaged. The National Guard appeared, though Governor Frank Murphy was eager to avoid conflict. Finally, the strikers prevailed when General Motors formally recognized the union of the United Auto Workers with John L. Lewis’s Congress of Industrial Organizations.

“Gregory”

Born in Flint, Michigan, in 1946, Gregory never heard of the sit-down strikes.

“Charles Stewart Mott”

At 94, Mott is the oldest member of the General Motors Board. He is also a former mayor of Flint. In the 1930s, Mott never dealt with the strikes directly. He only heard reports at board meetings. He is convinced, however, that Governor Murphy failed in his duty to protect property during the sit-down strikes. The governor, Mott believes, should have used the National Guard to evict the strikers even if a few were shot and killed. Mott blames President Roosevelt for America’s presumptive decline.

“Scott Farwell”

Farwell, 22, comes from an upper-middle-class neighborhood, though his father worked in the steel mills during the Depression. Farwell curses a great deal, believes that books have not told the whole truth about that era, and blames society for it.

“Mike Widman, The Battle of Detroit, A Preface”

In October 1940, Widman led the campaign to organize workers from Ford Motor Company, the last holdout against the UAW. Ford employed spies and thugs whose sole purpose was to intimidate workers and prevent them from forming a union. Widman called a strike for 12:15am on April 2nd, 1941. The company called in the AFL to sow dissent among the workers and even, Widman believes, to trigger a race riot by appealing to the Black workers, who constituted a distinct minority of the overall labor force. By April 11th, however, Ford had agreed to an election, and the workers voted to join the UAW-CIO.  

“Howard”

Born in Detroit in 1947, Howard never heard of the Ford strike, though he does explain that his grandfather, though anti-union in principle, wanted a union because he thought it would keep out the Black workers.

“Dr. Lewis Andreas, Memorial Day, 1937”

Dr. Andreas describes the Republic Steel Massacre of Memorial Day, 1937, when police used lethal force against a mixed holiday crowd that included both picketers and families. Ten people died. Dr. Andreas treated wounds. Most were shot in the back, though Dr. Andreas believes many of the policemen were simply frightened and following orders.

Dr. Andreas expresses disgust with the Communists, but he was pro-labor and helped establish a group practice where people who could not afford expensive doctors could still get care. He recalls treating many people who were suffering from starvation. He credits President Roosevelt for being open to experimentation and helping stave off possible revolution, and he believes that World War II stopped the Depression’s “second slide,” (146) which began in 1937.