Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  POSTSCRIPT: “My family thought very highly of Roosevelt, except my grandfather. As a young man, he had known José Marti, the Cuban liberator. He’d say, ‘We learned to eat stones and survived on it.’ He’d say, ‘Hoover was just a mean old skinflint and Roosevelt is just another Mussolini.’ But the New Deal did become the basis of a new union drive. And people did find jobs… .”

  Evelyn Finn

  She has worked as a seamstress. It was St. Louis in the early years of the Depression… .

  You COULD UPSET the shop quite a bit. Even when there was no union. You’d get the girls on your side, one by one, until you had a majority. I remember this one straw boss. He wanted us to speed up. In the morning, the girls’d be tired. He’d go through the shop: “Is everybody happy today?” I’d say: “I’m not happy.” He says, “What’s the matter with you?” I’d tell him: “I come here to fight.”

  Another girl sided with me. He fired us. “Troublemakers.” He had the nerve to say, “I’ll write you a letter of recommendation.” This poor little thing, she was crying. I said, “I’d be ashamed to show anything you’d write on paper. I wouldn’t want anybody to know I worked for a person like you.” Lucky we got another job.

  Sometime you’d have to fight for your moral support against your boss. I’ve even lost jobs against that. I was still pretty young. I weighed about 115 pounds, brown hair. I didn’t notice my personality because I had such fight in me. I used to tell ’em off.

  He just kept after me, this one. Nagged me and nagged me to go out with him. So all right, I said. Boy, he was so excited. We got in his car. He said, “Where we going? Your house?” “No,” I said, “we’re goin’ to your house. For supper.” You should’ve seen the look on his face. (Laughs.) I knew his wife, a sweet little woman. I used to sew and fix her clothes. I made him do just that. His wife was glad to see me. (Laughs.) He never asked me again. And he was an old gray-haired man with two grown sons.

  One time I was on piecework. You get paid for the amount you do. But the boss wanted us to ring the time clock. If you’re a pieceworker and you’re very fast and very apt, which I was, you don’t want him to know this, that or the other. I refused to ring the clock. Did they have a time with me! They didn’t want to lose me. I was skilled.

  “Why won’t you please punch it?”

  “You want me to work here?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “Then don’t bother me. If you stand when I come in in the morning, you punch it. Watch me all day long. And when I get home, you punch it again. O.K.?” (Laughs.)

  They put up with it, even during the Depression. I had a gift in my fingers. And I wasn’t scared. (Laughs.)

  One day I took out the whole shop. There never was a shop yet I couldn’t take out. This is when we had the union. I was the chairlady. They didn’t get us what we wanted. I think they were playin’ sweethearts with the boss. So we had a sit-in. I said to the girls: Just sit, don’t do nothin’. We sat and joked about a lot of things and had a lotta fun. The boss was goin’ crazy. The union officials came down. They went crazy, too. It was a hilarious day. They called us a bunch of Communists. The girls didn’t know what it meant. I knew what it meant, but I wasn’t. So, if that’s the way they behave, I said, “Girls, it’s a nice day. Let’s all go for a walk.” So we did, the whole shop. They got us what we wanted.

  After all, I played a big part in organizin’ our union in St. Louis. We used to go to the homes of people. It wears you out, but when you’re young, you don’t think about it. One day, this other girl and me, we’re ringin’ the bell, and somebody throwed buckets of water out on us. Everybody was not in favor of the union. They were just scared to death.

  I don’t remember ever bein’ scared. Even if I didn’t have a penny. And I was supporting a little girl. What can we lose? We haven’t got that much to lose. But some people are just afraid of every little thing. What was there to be afraid of?

  There were no colored girls in our shop. The one next door to us had four or five. They did very menial work. But they didn’t work with white girls. Not in St. Louis. Now, three of us work together, these two colored girls and I. The rest of the shop can be dormant, but we’ve always got something going on in that corner. Not a dull moment. You wouldn’t think we’re doin’ a thing, but we produce more than the rest of ’em. Even when we get mad about something, we laugh about it. When the boss nags us, we just laugh him to death.

  I never made my work a drudgery. I always made it a hobby. I enjoy my work today like if I was sitting down reading a book.

  Hank Oettinger

  A linotype operator. Much of his spare time is devoted to writing “Letters to the Editor.” “I like to throw barbs into my political opponents. I hang around bars in the Loop. I like arguments and I get into dillies. Even Birchers look toward my coming into the place. When I don’t show up, they get worried: ‘Where the hell ya been?’

  “I go to’work late in the afternoon, get through at midnight. See my friends at the taverns. Agitate. Get my sleep. I wake up, and it’s nice and warm and it’s light. I go down and maybe have a couple of arguments before I go to work.”

  I CAME from a very small town in northern Wisconsin. It had been ravaged by the lumber barons. It was cut-over land, a term you hear very often up there. It was a one industry town: tourist business. During the winter, there was nothing.

  A lot of people who suffered from the Depression—it was new to them. It wasn’t new to me. I was number ten in a family of eleven. My father, who had one leg, worked in a lumber mill for a while. Lost it, held a political job for a while, Registrar of Deeds. Lost it. Ninety-two percent of the people in the county were on welfare in the early years of the Depression.

  We could have gone on relief, but my father refused. Foolish pride. He would not accept medical care, even. I had, oh God, a beautiful set of teeth. To have one filled was $2 at the time, I think. Oh, my gosh, my teeth just went. Eventually, I got to work and saved most of them. But the fact that he wouldn’t even accept medical relief—stubborn Dutchman!

  He was a great admirer of Bob La Follette. He liked the idea of Bob’s fighting the railroads and being against our entering the First World War. I came from German stock, that was a factor. People up here loved old Bob. They had been so downtrodden and knew they had been misused by the lumber companies. In 1924, my mother said to my father, “You know La Follette isn’t going to win the Presidency. Why don’t you vote for somebody who can win it?” He said, “I vote for what I believe in.”

  I remember seeing a hunger march to City Hall. It was a very cold, bitter day. My boss was looking out of the window with me. I didn’t know what the hell it was. He says, “They ought to lock the bastards up.” I thought to myself: Lock them up for what? All of a sudden, the printing business like everything else went kerplop. I was laid off in ‘31. I was out of work for over two years. I’d get up at six o’clock every morning and make the rounds. I’d go around looking for work until about eight thirty. The library would open at nine. I’d spend maybe five hours in the library.

  The feeling among people was beautiful. Supposing some guy was a hunter. He’d go out and get a hold of some ducks or some game, they’d have their friends over and share it.

  I can remember the first week of the CWA47 checks. It was on a Friday. That night everybody had gotten his check. The first check a lot of them had in three years. Everybody was out celebrating. It was like a festival in some old European city. Prohibition had been repealed, of course. You’d walk from tavern to tavern and see people buying ponies of beer and sharing it. They had the whole family out. It was a warm night as I remember. Everybody was so happy, you’d think they got a big dividend from Xerox.

  I never saw such a change of attitude. Instead of walking around feeling dreary and looking sorrowful, everybody was joyous. Like a feast day. They were toasting each other. They had money in their pockets for the first time. If Roosevelt had run for President the next day, he’d have gone
in by a hundred percent.

  I had it drilled in me: there are no such things as classes in America. I awoke one day. I was, by this time, working for a newspaper in Waukesha. They had a picture of this farm woman, standing in the window of her home and the dust had completely covered everything, and there was a dead cow. And here, at the bottom of the same page, they had a picture of Bernard Baruch. He had made some big deal in the stock market and was on somebody’s yacht. I looked at one picture and then the other. No classes in America.

  I was making sixty-seven cents an hour as a linotype operator. At about $27 a week, I was a big shot. I was rolling. And gradually got involved in the union movement. The printers played a big role in the early days of the CIO. This may seem unusual, a high class craft union went along with John L. Lewis against the old aristocracy of labor.

  The union man today under forty knows absolutely nothing about the struggles. They don’t want to upset the wonderful applecart they have. We used to sing, in the organizing days of the CIO, “Solidarity Forever.” The Communists were active in it. Hell, we’d even sing “The Internationale” on occasion. Could I get a young printer today, who drives a big Buick, who has a home in the suburbs—could I get him to sing “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation …”? It’s like when I was in the civil rights marches of 1965, they’d start chanting, “We want freedom.” Here I am, a printer making $200 a week. It sounds silly as I chant, “I want freedom now.” I know it’s theirs I’m asking for, and, in a way it’s mine. But it does sound silly, as I say it.

  During the Depression, the La Follette movement grew, with Bob, Junior, and Phil. When the New Deal came in, they worked with Roosevelt. By this time, my father was getting pretty old and bitter. Being an extreme strict Catholic, he fell for Coughlinism.

  It was quite a deal between him and his favorite son. He even wanted to sell Social Justice. I hated to do it, but I had to tell him: If Social Justice is quartered in this home, I’m not quartered in this home.

  How do you explain the switch from Bob La Follette to Father Coughlin?

  Even in the Depression, he wasn’t able to accept the idea that there were different classes in America. The same as I couldn’t when I was a child. And he was violently anti-Red. He objected to a lot that was going on: that’s why he liked La Follette. But it was still the Great America. So there had to be some other reason for all the injustice.

  He had great respect for the priestly collar, for one thing. While he was for Roosevelt in the beginning, he felt he was now in the hands of the Jews. The latent anti-Semitism had always been there.

  Well, the rise of Hitler comes along the same time as the rise of Roosevelt. And after all, Hitler certainly took care of the Communists in Germany. I think it was his anti-Communism more than his rigid Catholicism that was the cause.

  When Father Coughlin’s silver market manipulations were uncovered, my father felt it was another plot. He just couldn’t bring himself to believe that Coughlin was in it for anything except to help the poor people who were at the mercy of Roosevelt and the Jews. He was about eighty-two at the time and never gave up his belief. He followed Coughlin until the end.

  When Coughlin was on, Sunday afternoons, everything in the house had to be absolutely quiet, not a whisper. You could walk down the street and every single Catholic house—it was Coughlin. To hell with the ball game or going out for a ride… .

  Every time Coughlin would mention the name of a movie actor who was of Jewish extraction, and add his real name after his stage name, my father would gloat. And yet, my father was a good and kind man, and suffered along with his neighbors.

  At the same time, he didn’t see any benefits in social legislation: giving people something they didn’t deserve, he felt. He liked Bob La Follette because he could see with his own eyes what Bob was fighting. He was for Workmen’s Compensation. Oh, my father was full of contradictions… .

  In 1938, I threatened The Freeman—the Waukesha paper I was working on—to pull the boys out on strike, if they wouldn’t raise our wages from ninety cents an hour to ninety-five. We finally got it up to $1 an hour. I was making forty bucks a week. I’m reading Esquire, seeing what kind of shoes I should buy, suits and stuff. I was really a big shot. I’d go out drinking on Saturday night, sometimes I’d spend as much as seven or eight dollars. Tavern keepers would welcome me with open arms. He’s a big spender.

  E. D. Nixon

  For twenty-five years, he had been president of the Montgomery (Alabama ) branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

  “A Pullman porter can always get into a conversation anywhere. He walked into a barber shop, somebody’d say, ‘I didn’t see you around here,’ or maybe they’d notice his pants with the stripe. Everybody listened because they knowd the porter been everywhere and they never been anywhere themselves.

  “In cafes where they ate or hotels where they stayed, they’d bring in papers they picked up, white papers, Negro papers. He’d put ‘em in his locker and distribute ’em to black communities all over the country. Along the road, where a whole lot of people couldn’t get to town, we used to roll up the papers and tie a string around ’em. We’d throw these papers off to these people. We were able to let people know what was happening. He did know a whole lot of things.”

  I WORKED for the Pullman Company from 1928 to 1964. It was a hard job. We had a rest period: 10 P.M. to 2, for one porter, and 2 to 6, for the other. During that time, one man guarded two cars. From 6 in the morning to 10 at night, he was plenty busy with his one car: touch it up all the time, clean up, call a man at a certain time. You get that man off, you run back and tidy up the place, you run back and bring a new man in. By that time, they holler “All aboard!” you got to get that step up. You have to touch up the men’s room, the ladies’ room, the vestibule. You carried a mop and a broom and the Company said: just bring me the handle back.

  When I first went to work, they had a cuspidor set between every section. That means you had six on each side and three in the men’s room and two in the ladies’ room. Seventeen, they had to shine like gold. Twelve lowers and twelve uppers and three beds in the drawing rooms. Twenty-seven, they had to be made up all the time.

  Maximum sleep was four hours a night. And some trips were Chicago to Los Angeles, Chicago to Miami. Before the Brotherhoood, we had to cover 11,000 miles a month. No established time. Sometimes it took four-hundred hours to make it.

  Passengers wrote up complaints. Sometimes conductors wrote up complaints. Newsboys could write up complaints, just so he’s white. Here a man could leave his pocketbook at home. He’d swear he had it on the train: “That nigger porter took it.” A whole lot of porters were searched and humiliated, and they found the man left it at home.

  I was in New Orleans one day. The supervisor came in ahead of me. I had four bags, one in each arm and one in my hand. He opened the drawing room door. I said, “Thank you.” He turned around and said in a rough manner, “I didn’t open ’at door for you.” I said, “Thank you again.”

  We got $62.50 a month. We had to depend a lot on tips. Some of the passengers would get hot about something. He wouldn’t give you nothing and run down and tell the other passengers not to give you anything. “Didn’t shine my shoes right… .” “Didn’t get my pillow.” They said it loud for other people to hear.

  The porter instructor was a Negro man. The permanent inspector was a white man. They would have a mimeographed sheet. All he had to do was put a cross opposite any rule. The porter instructor would set there and watch you and write down when you turned your back. They turned in plenty on me because I was active in the Brotherhood. They were stool pigeons. They watched me my every move. They’d turn in what I said. A lot of men were scared off. But in spite of all that, we had a few here, there—kept the Brotherhood alive.

  “The Brotherhood was born after several attempts by porters who were fired for it. The Company set up a Pullman Porter Benefit Association. Controlled by the Company. Three of the men we
re walkin’ down the street one day and heard Randolph speakin’ on a soap box.48 These three porters heard him and said, ‘This is the man we need.’

  “They didn’t have any salary to offer him. Randolph took the chance. We had a women’s auxiliary. They would have fish fries and raise some money. He stuck it out for twelve long years without a salary. Never knew when he’d come back to a place, because he didn’t have the money to get there.”

  When Pullman fought the Brotherhood, almost all the Negro papers sold out to the Company. I think the Pittsburgh Courier was an exception. And we carried these papers. They’d have big red headlines lambasting Randolph. They’d point out that the Pullman Company been good to the Negro: decent jobs, opening schools for children, all that kind of stuff. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

  When I heard Randolph speak, it was like a light. Most eloquent man I ever heard. He done more to bring me in the fight for civil rights than anybody. Before that time, I figure that a Negro would be kicked around and accept whatever the white man did. I never knew the Negro had a right to enjoy freedom like everyone else. When Randolph stood there and talked that day, it made a different man out of me. From that day on, I was determined that I was gonna fight for freedom until I was able to get some of it myself. I was just stumblin’ here and there. But I been very successful in stumblin’ ever since that day. It was in 1928.

  Shortly after, he became president of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP. His was the first private home that was bombed. In the late Thirties, “I got a call about a sheriff who beat a woman to death. I got a telephone call about two o‘clock in the morning from a white man: ’I don’t like what happened. I can’t tell you on the phone. Come see me.’

  “It was pouring rain. You might think I was crazy, but I drove forty miles out there. I walked on the front porch. Knocked on the door. Would I get a shotgun blast? I hear a man’s voice, ‘Is that you, Nixon?’ He opened the door and told me what had happened. But he wouldn’t sign anything. I don’t blame him. If he did, they would’ve done something to him.