Snapshots from the Great Depression

by: Hannah Farber

Fri Dec 19, 2008 at 03:37:05 AM EST

It's become more than cliche to compare our various economic crises of the past year to the Great Depression. So this week I picked up Hard Times,  a collection of interviews the late Studs Terkel conducted with people who lived through the actual Great Depression. Whether or not you'd see any parallels with today, it makes for great reading, especially for those folks interested in labor history.

A recurring theme of Hard Times is that most people had absolutely no information about what was happening, or why, even as it dragged on for years and years and years. Another theme is the way protesters were marginalized (frequently with billy clubs). As one man reflected years later,

People would regard a depression today as man-made. In the past, depressions fell in the same category as earthquakes and bad weather. An act of Providence or God. [Today] I don't think there'd be the acquiescence of the Thirties. I think there'd be a rebellion ... There was some of this [rebellion] in the Thirties, the left wing. There was anger and frustration ... these were the nuts, the fringe. They wouldn't be in the fringe today...

Do you think he's right about this? I've been going back and forth. On the one hand, since we know so much about how the economy works these days, it's easier to feel that there is some story in the crisis, some themes, some lessons to be learned.

On the other hand, these days, even when actual humans admit that they and their companies lost billions of dollars because of bad decisions they and their employees made, it's all on such an incomprehensibly broad scale, and there are so many tangled relationships of causality, that in some sense it all still feels like an act of God. It's hard to gin up any outrage against the latest Wall Street Buffoon staring out of your local paper, because you know next week they'll dig up someone who did something even stupider.

But if - God forbid - a deeper crisis emerged, and if it went on for year after year after year, would Americans demand something more from their government than they did in the Great Depression? And would they get a response?

Some more excerpts, below (an excessive number of excerpts, because I just love the simple language Terkel pulls out of people):

• Yip Harburg, who wrote "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"

    "We thought American business was the Rock of Gibraltar. We were the prosperous nation, and nothing could stop us now. A brownstone house was forever. You gave it to your kids and they put marble fronts on it... Suddenly the big dream exploded....

    "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" opens up a political question. Why should this man be penniless at any time in his life, due to some fantastic thing called a Depression or sickness or whatever it is that makes him so insecure? In the song the man is really saying: I made an investment in this country. Where  the hell are my dividends?"

•     Ed Paulsen, a vagrant train rider:

     "Before Roosevelt, the Federal Government hardly touched your life. Outside of the postmaster, there was little local representation. Now people you knew were appointed to government jobs. Joe Blow or some guy from the corner. It came right down to Main Street. Half of them loved it, half of them hated it.... in Aberdeen, Main Street was against it. But they were delighted to have those green relief checks cashed in their cash registers. They'd have been out of business had it not been for them. It was a split thing. They were cursing Roosevelt for the intrusion into their lives. At the same time, they were living off it. Main Street still has this fix."

• Peggy Terry, on first seeing a Hooverville in Oklahoma City:

    "Here were all these people living in old, rusted-out car bodies. I mean that was their home. There were people living in shacks made of orange crates. One family with a whole lot of kids were living in a piano box. This wasn't just a little section, this was maybe ten-miles wide and ten-miles long. People living in whatever they could junk together."

• Cesar Chavez:

Labor strikes were everywhere. We were one of the strikingest families, I guess. My dad didn't like the conditions, and he began to agitate. Some families would follow, and we'd go elsewhere. Sometimes we'd come back. We couldn't find a job elsewhere, so we'd come back. Sort of beg for a job. Employers would know and  they'd make it very humiliating...

    [Studs Terkel asks: Did these strikes ever win?]

    Cesar Shavez: Never.

• Saul Alinsky:

I'm going around organizing, agitating, making trouble ... I'd go in to see this Catholic priest. I'd say, "I heard your sermon denouncing the union, calling it Communist. You know something, Father? Your people nodded and then walked out and joined the union. Know why? They're unemployed, their families are shot to hell and you're not doing a God damn thing about it... Everyone is disregarding you. You want to be a leader? Get back with your people, get out in  the streets and fight for the union." ...

... You don't talk Judaic-Christian moral principles to a priest, a rabbi or a minister. They wouldn't know what the hell you're talking about.