Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression

“Win Stracke”

During the Depression, from 1933 to 1940, Stracke sang at Chicago’s upscale Fourth Presbyterian Church. The parishioners' uniform opposition to Roosevelt in the 1936 election convinced Stracke that America was divided along class lines. In 1940, Stracke lost his singing job at the church when the head of the music committee learned that Stracke had also been singing at union events.

“Sally Rand”

A well-known dancer and burlesque performer who once worked with Cecil B. De Mille in Hollywood, Rand describes at length how she made a name for herself in Chicago. She explains the origins of her coquettish fan dance, as well as her famous performance at the 1933 World’s Fair, where she was arrested four times for indecent exposure, though her costume only gave the appearance of actual nudity. She denounces the wealthy who acted as if nothing unusual was happening, and she predicts that another Depression will occur, only this time the poor people will not be so patient.

“Tony Soma”

Soma owned a New York speak-easy and did relatively well during the Depression. He describes himself as a capitalist but also credits First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for the ideas behind her husband’s policies. Soma’s literary clientele included novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and humorist Robert Benchley. During Prohibition, the authorities mostly left Soma and his establishment alone. He regards poverty as a sign of laziness.

“Alec Wilder”

A songwriter and instrumental composer, Wilder recalls thinking that there was something ominous about all the pre-Crash optimism. He remembers the speak-easy with romantic fondness and enjoyed them so much that when Prohibition ended he did not know how to behave. Though not political by nature, he recalls Roosevelt’s election as a positive development.

“Carl Stockholm”

In the 1920s and early 1930s, Stockholm competed in bicycle races. He was paid very well. The sport attracted many wealthy and well-connected followers, including millionaires and bootleggers. Stockholm frequented speak-easies simply “to be seen in certain places” (179). The Crash destroyed bicycle racing, and the sport never recovered.

“Doc Graham”

In one of Terkel’s lengthier and more colorful interviews, Doc Graham begins by referring to himself as a “caged panther,” a “con man,” and a “parasite” on society (180). In the 1920s and 1930s, Graham did jobs for Chicago gangsters, paid off policemen, and spent time in prison. His circle of acquaintances included the gangsters John Dillinger and Arnold Rothstein. Graham considered President Roosevelt a lowlife fraud and voted against him four times. Graham also believes that modern women are too liberated, for in the 1930s a woman would be in serious trouble if she had two drinks with you and then refused sex. On the difference between generations, Graham sees the people of the 1930s as a tougher lot, whereas the young men of the 1960s are “feminized, embryo homosexuals” (187).    

“Jerome Zerbe”

An artist in the early 1930s, Zerbe took photographs for socialites at the ritzy El Morocco nightclub in New York City. Two of his closest friends were William K. and Rose Vanderbilt. Zerbe’s father, president of a coal company in Ohio, offered to make Zerbe his successor, but Zerbe wanted no part of the mines. Zerbe remembers the mining town as a “horror,” for he was always spoiled as a child—always had breakfast in bed (191). He wonders why the women of those mining towns kept such dirty houses.

Zerbe preferred his life in New York City, where he could photograph. Zerbe claims that the Depression was basically over by 1934. The Crash of 1929 had no impact on his family. He and his Manhattan friends never discussed the people who lived on relief because it simply was not the thing to do when you were socializing.

“Judy”

A 25-year-old who works in public relations, Judy hates the fact that World War II ended the Depression because she hates the association of war with affluence. She also suspects that in the event of another Depression, she and her fellow female college graduates would be deemed expendable in the labor force. 

“Dr. Nathan Ackerman”

A practicing psychiatrist and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University, Dr. Ackerman treated well-to-do patients during the Depression, when “psychiatry was quite removed from social problems” (195). He conducted field observations among unemployed miners in Pennsylvania, and noted that these men suffered from depression often because their wives treated them as failures. Dr. Ackerman recalls that in the 1930s, his patients agonized over material conditions and feelings of guilt, whereas in the 1960s those concerns have given way to general feelings of loneliness.

Unlike nearly every other interviewee whose recollections appear in Terkel’s book, Ackerman predicts that another economic crisis akin to the Depression would have a partially salutary effect by bringing people closer together.

“Buddy Blankenship”

Blankenship worked in the West Virginia coal mines. When work was available, he could spend sixteen hours per day underground, getting paid only in company-store credit. In 1931-32, he often worked no more than two days per week, so from 1932 to 1937 he did farm work, which he preferred. In 1937, he returned to the mines, and by then things had improved thanks to unionization. 

“Mary Owsley”

Owsley’s husband worked in the Kentucky coal mines in the 1920s. He pointed out a serious safety hazard and then quit his job when the company refused to fix it. Three weeks later, an explosion killed three men. The Owsleys moved to Oklahoma.

“Aaron Barkham”

Barkham worked in the coal mines of Logan County, West Virginia. He and his brothers earned extra money by making moonshine and bootlegging. Both the company and the county sheriff employed strikebreakers. In the early years of the Depression, the miners belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, the “union and the Ku Klux was about the same thing” (204). The West Virginia Ku Klux Klan welcomed both white and Black miners, who lived alongside one another in the same communities. It had nothing to do with “race” and everything to do with protecting the workers. Eventually the United Mine Workers union replaced the Klan.

“Edward Santander”

Santander’s family worked in the Illinois coal mines. Now a college teacher, Santander recalls the privation of his youth. The miners loved Roosevelt, though some were Socialists or even Anarchists. He believes that the Depression shaped people’s attitudes and behavior for the rest of their lives, and he sees this as the primary reason for the inability of the older and younger generations to understand one another.

“Roger”

Roger, 14, lives with family in Chicago. His mother is dead, and his father, whom he rarely sees, is somewhere in West Virginia coal country. Roger never heard anyone talk about “depression,” only “hard times” (211).

“Harry Terrell”

Terrell, 77, grew up in Iowa and worked on a farm. He remembers a good deal of desperation during the Depression. A foreclosure on a farm mortgage could bring violence upon a judge. Farmers destroyed their produce in an attempt to prop up prices. Terrell credits Henry Wallace, President Roosevelt’s Secretary of Agriculture, with temporarily saving the farmer, though Terrell also notes that the small farmer has become a relic of a bygone era. Terrell laments the fact that it took World War II, and the death of many young people, to put an end to the Depression.

“Oscar Heline”

Heline, 78, has spent his life on a farm in northwest Iowa. He recalls Depression-era foreclosures and farm sales, which took the farmer’s property but did not cover his debts. Farmers destroyed crops for which prices had plummeted. Heline sympathized with their plight but thought the situation required more than destructive militancy.

Heline later worked with Henry Wallace on federal aid that helped raise corn prices. Heline also credits Wallace with saving the farmer. Having lost a son in the Second World War, Heline considers war too high a price to pay for prosperity. He does not blame Hoover for the Depression, but he does believe that the federal government must play a role in helping people during tough times. 

“Frank and Rome Hentges”

Clothing merchants in Iowa before the Depression, Frank and Rome recall the Farm Holidays, the injustice of foreclosures, and the violence against Judge Bradley in Le Mars, Iowa, when a group of angry farmers put a rope around the judge’s neck and threatened to lynch him. Frank and Rome had four clothing stores in Iowa and South Dakota. They closed the stores in 1933 and never reopened them.

“Orin Kelly”

Kelly was the leader of the Farm Holiday movement in Le Mars, Iowa. Though he was not in town on the day of the attack on Judge Bradley, he was arrested by the Iowa National Guard and thrown into a camp behind barbed wire. The state governor, backed by the large farmers and others who profited off the foreclosures, wanted to suppress the farmers’ revolt. Kelly recalls that his movement had 1600 members but that young people in Le Mars know nothing of the era or the incident involving Judge Bradley.

“Emil Loriks”

Loriks, a South Dakota state senator from 1927 to 1934, recalls that the Depression hit agriculture in the 1920s, long before the Crash. He describes the era’s “militancy” as “close in spirit to the American Revolution” (227). He credits Roosevelt’s election with staving off serious trouble, though Loriks bemoans the fact that reactionary, corporate interests continue to dominate South Dakota. Loriks disliked Communists, but in 1938 he lost an election for US Congress after he was branded a Communist. Meanwhile, agribusiness crushes the small farmer.

“Ruth Loriks, His Wife”

Ruth Loriks recalls a plague of grasshoppers in 1933, as well as terrible dust storms. After the Loriks’s neighbor lost her husband, the bank foreclosed on the widow’s farm.

“Clyde T. Ellis”

A former Arkansas congressman, Ellis recalls the dust storms and bank failures of the early 1930s. During the first Roosevelt campaign, Ellis and a group of other young professionals ran for office and won as part of the “Revolution of 1932” (231). Ellis then became involved in flood-control and rural-electrification projects.

“Emma Tiller”

Tiller and her husband were sharecroppers in west Texas, and “[t]his horrible way of livin’ with almost nothin’ lasted up until Roosevelt” (232). She recalls an incident in which three armed white men threatened a corrupt relief agent who had been hoarding government-issued meat. The three men stood guard to ensure that everyone in line, Black and white, received their food. She never understood the deliberate destruction of cotton and other crops during the Roosevelt-era, and she wept over the killing of cows.

“Sumio Nichi”

Nichi had a prosperous farm in California, but the Depression’s second downturn in 1937 left him deeply in debt. By 1941, he had paid off his debts. Before leaving for an internment camp, he received $6,000 from appraisers on $80,000 worth of equipment.

“Fred Sweet”

In the late 1930s, Sweet published and edited the Mount Gilead Union-Register, “a New Deal paper in a Republican town” in Ohio (236). Sweet gave positive coverage to unionization efforts at a local factory. Those efforts succeeded, but Sweet’s paper failed when anti-union advertisers pulled their ads.

“W.D. (Don) Maxwell”

Longtime editor of the Chicago Tribune, Maxwell reflects on his experiences working for Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the newspaper’s publisher during the Depression. Maxwell acknowledges that the newspaper printed whatever McCormick wanted. He admires McCormick as a patrician who initially supported his fellow patrician, President Roosevelt, but then bitterly opposed the administration when the president tried to pack the Supreme Court in order to implement his preferred NRA legislation. McCormick never liked the New Deal or any of its so-called “Brain Trusters,” the president’s Ivy League-educated advisors.

“Carey McWilliams”

Editor of The Nation magazine, McWilliams grew up in Colorado, where the collapse of the cattle market after World War I prepared him for the Crash. He never believed that the economy was sound in the 1920s, and he marvels at the experienced businessmen who testified in government hearings on the Depression but seemed to know nothing about their own businesses or the economy in general. He did not think much of Roosevelt, who “was an innocent,” “had no program,” and “was pressured into doing the things he did” (242).

In 1938, McWilliams was appointed Chief of the Division of Immigration and Housing in California. He observed bigotry against refugees from the Dust Bowl of the Plains and Midwest, saw deportation trains filled with Mexican-American families, and fought against the internment of Japanese Americans.