Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression

Terkel’s interviews took place in the late 1960s, near the end of the Civil Rights Era’s most tumultuous decade. The book, therefore, features numerous references to the “race” problem as readers in the late 1960s would have understood it. At its core, however, Hard Times seeks to preserve Depression-era memories, including those pertaining to “racial” assumptions and conditions. While some of Terkel’s interviewees insist that “race” was not a serious issue in the 1930s, the majority describe experiences that suggest otherwise.

Those who claim that “race” did not intrude upon American life in the 1930s as it did in the 1960s speak not from ignorance but from a general sense of the Depression’s leveling effect. Louis Banks, Arkansas native and later a soldier in the US Army, rode freight trains in search of work during the Depression. Banks recalls that on these trains, “[b]lack and white, it didn’t make any difference who you were, ‘cause everybody was poor” (41). William L. Patterson, a Communist and descendant of slaves, remembers that after he was arrested while trying to recruit miners in Ohio and Pennsylvania, “White and Negro workers placed their picket line around the prison and marched all night” (294). According to Jimmy McPartland, a white jazz musician from Chicago, “it didn’t make any difference if you were colored or white. If you were a good musician, that’s all that counted” (71). Former miner Aaron Barkham explains that in the coal-mining counties of southern West Virginia, even the Ku Klux Klan “was formed on behalf of people that wanted a decent living, both black and white” (205).

Notwithstanding these few instances in which “race” seemed irrelevant, the majority of recollections suggest that in an era when legal segregation prevailed in the American South and de facto segregation existed nearly everywhere else, “race” remained highly relevant. As Clifford Burke, 68, declares, the “Negro was born in depression” and that the Depression “only became official when it hit the white man” (82, emphasis added). Dr. Martin Bickham, who conducted a study of unemployed handicapped workers in Chicago in the late 1920s and early 1930s, observes that by 1931, “thousands of Negroes had been laid off. They were the first to go” (396).

Similarly, Red Saunders, a band leader who helps Black musicians find work, recalls that in the 1930s, the “hotels and ballrooms were for white bands” (378, emphasis added). John Beecher, an author and New Deal administrator whose work focused on the rural South, laments the fact that his own migratory labor program in Florida fell apart after the Depression: “The minute it was turned over to the locals, in the days of the war, they evicted all the black people” (279). These various instances point to a wider pattern in which the “levelling” effect of the Depression was not all that it seemed—many Black Americans and other minorities were still disproportionately affected by the economic fallout of the times, and continued to face additional hurdles on account of their ethnicity.

In some cases, Terkel’s interviewees recollect not economic conditions but attitudes and feelings associated with race. Emma Tiller, who worked as a cook in west Texas and is one of the few interviewees whose recollections appear in multiple sections of Terkel’s book, remembers that “southern white people” would never feed a hungry white transient, but “if a Negro come, they will feed him,” for they were “always nice in a nasty way to Negroes” (44). Later in the book, Tiller describes the feeling she had when she was able to quit working for a wealthy white woman who mistreated her and cheated her out of money: “That was my awakenin’. I felt good. I think all Negroes have this feelin’, when they feel secure enough they can hold up their heads like mens and womens” (449). 

Unspoken attitudes, informed by centuries of experience, shaped nearly all inter-racial exchanges in the South, even in cases where the white person was sympathetic. When she began working for a relief office in North Carolina, for instance, Diana Morgan encountered Caroline, an elderly Black woman who once worked as a cook for Morgan’s family. When she saw the familiar face, Caroline, who now needed assistance, was effusive in her praise of Morgan and repeatedly expressed gratitude. Morgan recalls, “[i]n the typical southern Negro way of surviving, she was flattering me. I was humiliated by her putting herself in that position, and by my having to see her go through this” (155). Therefore, while the Depression blurred “racial” lines in some respects, on the whole it merely altered the context in which “racial” injustices occurred.

In a book made up entirely of personal reminiscences, political reflections abound. There are two reasons for this. First, the Depression wrought sudden economic misery on an unprecedented scale, and Americans everywhere sought solutions, which created opportunities for peddlers of radical ideology. Second, if poverty makes people desperate, and if desperate people often turn to political radicals, as they did in Nazi Germany and elsewhere during the 1930s, then there remains the question of how close the United States came to experiencing a revolution during the worst years of the Depression.

In American historical memory, President Franklin D. Roosevelt towers over his contemporaries. By and large, the same holds true in the memories of those whom Terkel interviewed for Hard Times. Composer Alec Wilder, for instance, notes the “cheery moment” when “Roosevelt came in,” for the new president’s “miraculous quality seemed to hit everybody” (178). Edward Santander, whose father, grandfather, and uncle worked in Illinois coal mines during the Depression, recalls, “Roosevelt was idolized in that area” (207). Actress Myrna Loy spent much of her life “dialed out” on politics and “didn’t come to life until Roosevelt” (360).   

Despite Roosevelt’s popularity, Terkel’s interviewees also have clear memories of other significant political figures and forces. The Depression created millions of angry populists who gravitated toward men such as Dr. Francis Townshend, advocate for the elderly and father of Social Security; Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest whose weekly radio broadcasts reached tens of millions of listeners (See: Key Figures); and Senator Huey Long of Louisiana, described by friend and fellow populist Gerald L. K. Smith as “the only man of this century who knew how to think like a statesman and campaign like a demagogue” (321). Senator Russell Long, son of Huey Long, explains that his father, Dr. Townshend, and Father Coughlin “were all aware of what the others were doing” and “were speaking from the same point of view” (318).

Their argument, in short, was that moneyed interests—namely, bankers and finance men—had control of the US government and were working against the interests of ordinary people. While Father Coughlin in particular advanced this argument with anti-Semitic undertones, the broader populist message has always resonated with many American farmers and laborers. Raymond Moley, one of Roosevelt’s economic advisors before splitting with the administration in 1936, believes that the president became obsessed with the populists, especially Huey Long, and by the mid-1930s “was out-Huey Longing Huey Long” in “using the same demagogic tactics” and railing against the evil rich man (253).

The political populists’ widespread appeal stemmed in large part from the Depression’s harsh economic conditions. This raises the question of whether Americans in the 1930s came close to revolution. Terkel’s interviewees appear split on the subject.

On one hand, pockets of revolutionary sentiment unquestionably existed in both industrial and agricultural sectors. Communists, the most revolutionary of all leftist radicals, worked hard to organize labor unions and imbue their members with a sense of the capitalist system’s inherent corruption. Joe Morrison, an Indiana coal miner and steelworker, remembers that younger workers “read Socialist and Communist publications” and “were talkin’ revolution all over the place” (123). Ward James recalls “a feeling that we were on the verge of a bloody revolution, up until the time of the New Deal” (423). Emil Loriks, a South Dakota farmer, describes the feeling in the Heartland as “close in spirit to the American Revolution” (227). Even in the Deep South, in Birmingham, Alabama, where steel and textile workers lived in close proximity to old-time sharecroppers, the sentiment was much the same. According to author John Beecher, the “ferment…in Birmingham was just tremendous” (278).

On the other hand, for every interviewee who observed revolutionary conditions in the 1930s, there was another who dismissed the idea altogether. Ed Paulsen, who traveled the country on freight trains in search of work, remembers more practical confusion than outrage: “We weren’t talking revolution; we were talking jobs” (31). Noni Saarinen, a Finnish immigrant who worked as a maid, believes that “revolution wasn’t near, no nearer than it’s now” (162). Max Shachtman of the American Socialist Party recalls that revolution was never likely because “the unemployed worker was uninterested in communism” (298). Tom Sutton, a Chicago lawyer and opponent of integration, concludes that the United States has “too large a middle class,” so “I don’t think we’re basically a revolutionary country” (445).

In sum, Hard Times depicts a charged political atmosphere amidst desperate economic conditions in which revolution might or might not have been possible. Regardless, the economic catastrophe of the times forced Roosevelt’s government to initiate ambitious reforms to stave off the specter of more radical political and social upheaval.