by Studs Terkel
The complaints were specific. Familiar symptoms. A young man can’t drive to a hospital without going into a panic, or drive by a cemetery. A phobia, an obsession.
Did any of the symptoms have to do with status in society, say, losing a job and thus losing face … ?
No, it was internal distress. Remember the practice was entirely middle-class.
I did a little field work among the unemployed miners in Pennsylvania. Just observing. What the lack of a job two, three, four, five years did to their families and to them. They hung around street corners and in groups. They gave each other solace. They were loath to go home because they were indicted, as if it were their fault for being unemployed. A jobless man was a lazy good-for-nothing. The women punished the men for not bringing home the bacon, by withholding themselves sexually. By belittling and emasculating the men, undermining their paternal authority, turning to the eldest son. Making the eldest son the man of the family. These men suffered from depression. They felt despised, they were ashamed of themselves. They cringed, they comforted one another. They avoided home.
Many complaints today are pitched to the level of social actions. We have a great ideal of acting out. Instead of patients coming with a constrained neurosis, today they are less prone to choke up their distress. They live out their emotions in conflict. They get into difficulty with other people. They create social tensions. They act out: drinking, drug-taking, stealing, promiscuity … In place of complaining, they explode. They live out some of their urges. They don’t contain the disturbance within their own skin.
Thirty, forty years ago, people felt burdened by an excess of conscience. An excess of guilt and wrongdoing. Today there’s no such guilt. In those days, regardless of impoverishment, there was more constraint of behavior. I cannot imagine looting thirty-five years ago. Despite want, the patterns of authority prevailed. Today, those standards have exploded. Looting and rioting have become sanctioned behavior in many communities.
Society was unquestioned and the miner accepted his own guilt … ?
That’s right. The way of life was an established one. It did not explode in a chaotic fashion. Despite deprivations, there was predictability. You could make long-term plans. If you were willing to work your ass off, you could look forward to reward ten years hence. Even during the Depression, there was more continuity in the way of life. Today there’s no such conviction. People can’t predict five years hence.
In the Depression, most people knew where they stood. Whether they were haves or have-nots. Despite the want, there was a greater degree of organization. The violence was more contained. Today it is anarchic.
The complaints then were more concrete. The poor wanted food, clothing, the sheer necessities of life. Today the demand is for egalitarian status.
During the Depression, I saw a young Negro lad, seventeen. He came to my office. He had been a leader of a very violent gang of kids in Harlem. He had shifted roles from being a gang leader to a community leader, making peace between black gangs and neighboring white gangs. He was going through an emotional crisis. I tried to treat him, but he bolted. It was the anxiety of being treated by a white doctor in an office near Madison Avenue. The surroundings were too comfortable; the office was too comfortable; the couch was too comfortable. He took flight. It was a silent color barrier. Today, it is no longer silent. It is open; it is vocal. Today, consideration from a doctor or a teacher is not viewed as privilege but as a right.
Thirty years ago, the patients’ complaint was familiar. Today, the common complaint is much more vague: they’re unhappy, anguish in their aloneness. They don’t know where they belong…. Feeling lonely, unappreciated and alienated was no basis for going to a psychiatrist in those days.
Money is not a complaint … ?
Not at all. They complain of feelings of disorientation. They are afraid of close relationships. They are not happy with their wives. They fail utterly in controlling their children. They are bewildered, they are lost.
Like the unemployed miner in the Thirties … ?
Yeah. Rootlessness. The miners felt that, even if for a different reason. They felt they were outside society. There is something similar in the lost-ness of middle-class people today. But this has nothing to do with money. It has to do with the social community.
I think a depression today would have a paradoxical effect, at least temporarily. Political upheaval, on one hand—and bringing people closer together, on the other. Greater consideration for one another. Something like the quality of caring in London during the blitz. Everybody’s suffering was everybody’s concern. They drew together and gave each other solace.
Sixteen Ton
You load sixteen ton and what do you get?
Another day older, and deeper in debt.
St. Peter, don’t you call me, because I can’t go.
I owe my soul to the company store.
—Merle Travis
Buddy Blankenship
A West Virginian émigré, living in Chicago. Illness has kept him jobless. Children, ranging wide in age from late adolescence to babyhood, stepchildren, son-in-law, grandchild and a weary wife are seated or wandering about the apartment: trying to keep cool on this hot, muggy summer afternoon. Hand-me-down furniture is in evidence in all the rooms.
I’VE BEEN in a depression ever since I’ve been in the world. Still, it’s better and worse. ’31, ’32, that’s about the worst we ever been through.
I told my dad I wasn’t going to school any more. He said: Why, you just come on and go work with me. I went in the mines, and I went to work. From ‘31 to about the last of ’32. The Depression got so bad, we went to farming, raising our own stuff. He worked in the mines fifty-one years. He was sixty-three when he got killed. A boy shot him.
We lived eight miles from the mine, and we had to ride it horseback. I was riding behind my dad. Many times I’d have to git off and hammer his feet out of the stirrups. They’d be froze in the stirrups. It was cold, you know. When you come out of the mines, your feet would be wet of sweat and wet where you’re walking on the bottom. And get up on those steel stirrups, while you’re riding by eight miles, your feet’d be frozen and you couldn’t git ‘em out of the stirrups. I’d have to hammer ’em out. His feet were numb, and they wouldn’t hurt till they started to get warm, and then they would get to hurtin’.
We got up at five in the mornin’, start at six. We got out at ten that night. We’d work about sixteen hours a day, seventeen hours. The boss said we had to clean up. We didn’t clean it up, the next morning there’d be another man in the mine to clean it up. The motor man would say: How many cars you got? Five more. Well, hurry up, we want to get out of here.
They was gettin’ a dollar seventy-five a day. We’d get sixty to sixty-five ton a day—that is, both us, me and Dad. Then they changed me off and let me get a dollar and a half a day. I was trappin’.
Trappin’? The trap door was shut so the air would circulate through the mine. Then the motor come along, I’d open it up. I had to stay there till everybody quit. Then we’d walk about two miles and a half till we got outside. We walked about a mile before we got to where we could get our horses. We got down to the horses, why we rode about eight miles before we got to home. Summertimes it wasn’t too bad. But in wintertime, boy, it was rough. You’d get snowbound and it would get so you couldn’t get in and out. Ice’d be so bad … an’ dangerous. Of course, we had to go to work. We didn’t eat if we didn’t go.
They had what they called safety devices, but it wasn’t real safety. They had an axe and a saw and you cut your own timbers. You brought ‘em in, strapped on your back. You went out on the mountain with your one-man saw. You sawed down a bush or whatever size prop you wanted and you tuck ’em in on your back. On Sunday, I packed timbers on my back, about two miles to the place … to set ‘em on Monday. Company furnished the timber but you had to cut ’em. You had to lay your own track….
I’ve seen several accidents. I’ve had to take
four out of the mines dead. I didn’t think about nothin’ like that, though. I packed one for seven miles, and he got up and walked better’n I could. I was gonna give out, and he wasn’t hurtin’ any bit. There was some rock on him, and I took a jack and lifted it up and pulled ‘im out. Just his breath knocked out of’im… .
About ’32, it got so they wouldn’t let us work but two days a week. We saved $20 in the office. They laid us off two weeks till we traded that $20 in the store. We had to trade it out in the store, or we didn’t get to work no more. It was a company store. What we made, we had to go next evening and trade it off. If we didn’t, they’d lay us off. They didn’t let you draw no money at all. It was scrip. They had a man top of the hill who took your tonnage down, how many tons you loaded, and it was sent up to the scrip office. If you made $20 over your expenses—for house, rent, lights and all—why, then they laid you off till you spent that $20.
This town you lived in …
It was a cave, a coal cave. Thirty-two families lived in the caves. It was nice buildings, built up inside, but they was just rough lumber. The company was the landlord, too. They owned it all. They still got company houses yet.
I worked about two years on the mines, then we went back to the farm from ‘32 to ’37. It seemed like you lived a lot better on the farm than today. The works was bad, but you didn’t have to pay some big price for the stuff. You raised your own hogs, you could have your own cattle. And you had your own meat, your own bacon, lard. You didn’t have to buy nothin’ but flour and meal. You raised your own potatoes. You never had money because you didn’t make it to have it. It was a pretty bad time. It seemed just like a dream to me, the Depression did. I was young and didn’t pay no attention to it. I didn’t get the clothes or the underwear or stuff like that, but the eatin’ part was good. I’d rather be back on the farm than anything I ever done.
Then we went to camp—minin‘—in ’37. The same mines. Roosevelt brought the mines arolling again. Things got to moving, and money got to circulating through. I worked the mine from ‘37 up to ’57. Then it was a lot different. They had the union there and we worked just seven hours and fifteen minutes. We didn’t work as hard as when the Depression was on. And they wouldn’t let us stay no overtime, ‘cause they didn’t want to pay the overtime. I guess. We made some good money, me and my dad, both. He worked up to ’41 and they cut him out. Age. He never did get a pension. He never worked long enough in the union to get a pension.
I took part in four strikes. They fined us one time for takin’ a strike. A wildcat, that’s what they called it. I helped organize about six mines. Now the company didn’t like this, and they was kickin’ on us all at the same time. They’d do anything, they’d kill and everything else. One place in West Virginia, they was shootin’ us all to pieces. They had guns of all kinds there.
They had three hundred state troopers there. They was on the labor’s side, and they took a lot of smoke bombs out of the men’s pockets, the scabs. They said: “If you fellows wants to sign up or not wants to sign up … but go to carryin’ no guns. You fellas ain’t paid to carry ’em and ain’t paid to use ‘em, we’re paid to use ’em. If you want to sign ‘em up, you go ahead and sign ’em up.” And they signed up.
It surprised everyone that these three hundred state police come—on our side. The captain said: If they don’t want to organize, shut ‘em down. He walked into the bathhouse and, boy, they had guns hanging out all around, the scabs. See, the company furnished ’em guns. They had machine guns and everything. They took the state police in there to take all them guns out. I know the name of the Governor if I could think of it—he was on labor’s side.89 That was ’42.
As he remembers, past and present fuse…. “The mines were runnin’ out, except this little wagon of a mine, and it didn’t have no tracks. You had to get on your knees, coal was so low. Coal was just twenty-eight inches. Panther Creek, West Virginia. We drove tunnels clear through the mountain to the other side. We’d drive up as far as we could go without air, and we’d come back and get a sniff and drive it up again as far as we could again without air. We could get breakthroughs to the other place and get air, you see.
“They cut one tunnel there was twelve miles long one way and twenty-eight miles long the other way, ‘cause it was a ridge one way. They took twenty-eight inches of rock from the top, make it high enough for the men to work. I traveled about seven miles a day back and forth on my knees. They’d be knots on ’em big as your double fist… .”
I liked the mines till it got so I couldn’t work no more. My wind was too short, and there was too much dead air and I just choked up and couldn’t do no good. I went to work for a dollar an hour … on the roads. Till that run out. And I come to Chicago.
Mary Owsley
Before setting off with his family for Oklahoma in 1929, to follow the oil boom, her husband was a dynamite man in Kentucky mines.
ONE DAY HE NOTICED on the side of the boiler a place as big as a saucer. They call it a breather—it’s a weak place on the boiler. He told the boss that had to be fixed, because he didn’t want to get killed. Monday morning, I saw him comin’ back home. They hadn’t fixed it, hadn’t done a thing about it. He told ’em in less than three weeks there’ll be an explosion. Sure enough, there was. Killed three men and two mine mules from that very thing. He left.
We lived in a company house. We had to buy every bucket of water we used, ’cause the company undermined things so bad, they ruined all the water wells. I bought my food from the company store, and we bought our furniture from the company store, and we paid three prices on it. I’ve seen my husband have to borry from his next pay check—what they call scrip—to buy just medicine and things like that. And we didn’t live extravagant either. We paid over 260 some odd dollars for furniture from the coal company. We paid it all back but $20. And when he went and got another job, he bought a truck down there for the furniture. And they took the whole thing away from us. They wouldn’t let us pay the $20.
Because he was a troublemaker … ?
No, because he quit that job there where the breather was on that boiler. That’s the kind of troublemaker he was, you’re mighty right he was. He wanted to live.
We lived in this coal mine camp, this next one, and there was a pump out in the middle between four houses. The four families of us shared that one pump. In the wintertime, that thing would get covered up with ice a foot thick. Us women had to keep a tub of water on our coal stove hot. The men would have to get up at three in the morning to get out there and melt the ice off the pump before they went to work. Just for the simple want of a shed built over a water pump. It might deflate the company’s bank account.
Aaron Barkham
“I’m too young to retire and too old to work in the coal mines. When a man gets to be up around thirty-five, forty years old, been in a mine ten or twelve years, they want somebody younger. When they get the chance, they’ll replace him.”
He is from West Virginia. His father, a miner all his life, died in a coal camp. “Silicosis wasn’t even heard of. He died of hardened arteries.90 Dad belonged to the Oddfellows, and they paid Mother about $11 a month. We had a cow and a hog. When things got tight, we let loose of that. We had a hardscrabble farm, worn-out ground, not worth much. From the time I was four years old, that’s all I knowed, hard times.”
PEOPLE WORKED fifteen hours a day, loaded a four-ton car, they got a dollar out of it. If the company could, it’d take that. (Laughs.) I think they made about $2 a day, most of ’em. We had boarders from the coal camp, others weren’t that lucky. My oldest brother, he was fifteen, he went to work as a breaker boy at the tipple.
Years before, he and my other brother, who was twelve, got the idea of sellin’ moonshine. We’d pay a dollar a gallon and sell it for twenty-five cents a pint. So that worked all right. We sold sometimes three gallons a day. During Prohibition, and after, people that got the relief checks was the ones that bought the whiskey. We’d get it in half-gall
on jars and put it in pint bottles.
That’s where a playful little boy comes in. A little boy—I was about six, seven—could get aholt of somethin’ and carry it right along the road where a man could get arrested. 1931 was when that started and come to about 1936. That was ’bout the only family income. The only obstacle I had, I had with my own second cousin. He was a deputy sheriff. He was big and fat, and I could get around him. He chased me miles through the thickets.
Nine revenuers were split up into three bunches. Work in the woods, lookin’ for stills. They’d put down a marker. It was my job to switch the markers. And they’d get all confused. Everybody bootlegged. It kind of got to be a legitimate business. You had to be foxier than the foxes, that’s all.
That second cousin, he was on the political side of the fence. So when WPA come in, we didn’t get any relief from the local politicians. My mother was a Republican. I think it was her pride that wouldn’t change our politics. Not much use complainin’ about somethin’ like that. We had enough to eat from the bootleg. About four out of five was unemployed in the county till ’bout 1938.
I never did get a whole year of school—maybe five or six months. I started workin’ when I was thirteen. In a sawmill at ten cents an hour. I worked for the guy that had all the timber monopoly for the company. I worked for the bulldozers. I finally got twenty-five cents an hour, but he raised the board to seventy-five cents a day. Get up at four o’clock in the mornin’, we clumb on a big truck and was hauled about fifteen miles. We started about a quarter to five and worked till we couldn’t see. Then we’d quit. It was nearer sixteen hours than it was eight hours. I know we’d get into bed and turn over one time, and they’d be yellin’ for breakfast.