by Studs Terkel
The NRA was a clear example of how the New Deal worked. All points of view were entertained. All kinds of advisors were summoned up. People got together and at one point were simply put into a room Roosevelt said: You have to come up with something, whatever it is. The result was a compromise between things labor wanted and things business wanted. It’s a pretty fair indication of the one-sidedness of the kinds of compromises that were arranged in the early New Deal. Business got a suspension of anti-trust laws and labor got a kind of token recognition.
All during the Twenties, corporations and trade associations had campaigned for a new anti-trust law which would exempt price-fixing arrangements of this kind. They didn’t manage to get it until ’33, with a combination of the Depression and a new President who wasn’t as dogmatically committed to laissez faire as Hoover had been.
If the Supreme Court hadn’t declared the NRA unconstitutional, Congress would probably have voted down its renewal. Because there was too loud an outcry from small business and old-line progressives like Borah.146
The prime purpose of NRA was to raise prices and stimulate investments. This could not be done without cartel-like arrangements. Its other purpose was to keep industrial peace by throwing a bone to labor.
There’s a whole school of historiography that talks of two New Deals. The first, represented by the NRA and the AAA, a kind of economy of scarcity, and the second, aimed at raising production and recognizing the rights of labor.
But there were no clear lines of policy followed. The whole New Deal, as far as I can see, was really chaotic. All kinds of experiments were being tried constantly. The immediate aim of all the reforms was simply to end the Depression by whatever means came to hand. It’s a case study of what can happen if you don’t have a clear policy.
Yet that’s not quite the point I want to make about the New Deal. When people look back at the feverish activity of the Thirties, it resolves itself into a conflict between two different points of view within the business community, within a shared body of assumptions about American society.
That it would stay capitalist, there was no doubt. Other alternatives were excluded from the beginning, as a range of serious ideas that might be considered. But within these shared assumptions, two distinct points of view could be discerned. On the one hand were the so-called enlightened businessmen who reflected the view of large, progressively-minded corporations, who recognized the need for regulation, the need to admit labor as a partner in the industrial enterprise—as a junior, and distinctly inferior, partner. They proposed to recognize labor’s right to bargain and to enact welfare programs, if for no other reason than to head off more drastic proposals.
On the other hand, there were the people who clung to a laissez faire ideology, who resented all these measures, partly because—the NRA being a beautiful example—they were clearly detrimental to the interests of small, independent outfits. They were clearly in the interests of giant corporations, in spite of New Deal rhetoric.
What were the excluded alternatives … ?
I’m not sure they were real alternatives at the time. Socialism, for instance, was written off from the very beginning. This point of view was not offered by anyone in the New Deal as far as I know.
To talk in retrospect is to do so coldly and, in a sense, to falsify what people experienced in the Thirties. While one can say, in the relative comfort of the Sixties, that the New Deal measures were palliatives, they were more than that to the people living in the Thirties. They were, in many cases, matters of life and death.
Hardly any of the observers of the Thirties sensed a revolutionary mood among the people. Almost all describe the same sense of dismay and disorientation, futility and shame. Being unemployed seems to have been experienced more often as a humiliation than as evidence of class exploitation. A matter of personal fault. A crisis in capitalist society doesn’t necessarily produce revolutionary changes or even a sense of alternatives, unless people have an awareness of some other kind of social order in which disasters of this kind wouldn’t happen. Depressions have been regarded as natural disasters, much in the same way as earthquakes and floods, and not as social catastrophes, which they are.
People first have to think about alternatives in a very serious way. The fact that there was so little discussion of alternatives, prior to the Depression, partly explains why people reacted as they did.
It doesn’t make any sense to criticize Roosevelt’s Administration for not raising the question of Socialism. You couldn’t very well expect him to. When you talk of alternatives like Socialism not being seriously raised in the Thirties, it’s no criticism of Roosevelt, but of the American Left.
The difference between the pre-World War I Socialist Party in America and the Communists of the Thirties is instructive. Both regarded the union movement as their primary concern. But the Socialists organized workers in their capacity as Socialists. Through this activity they created an awareness of other kinds of social arrangements. The Communists went about organizing as though it was an end in itself.
The failure applies to the whole American Left. If the pre-World War I Socialist Party had been around in the Thirties, working the way it did in that earlier period, devoted to propagating Socialist consciousness—at the same time, being aware of the immediate interests of its constituency, the workingmen, mainly, and not taking the position that every reform was bad because it put off the day of reckoning—if such an organization had been around in the Thirties, things might have been very different.
What you had was a Left, very much like today’s, vacillating between hopes of an immediate revolutionary crisis and a kind of reformism that made it impossible to discuss alternatives.
People who talk in terms of revolution today underestimate the capacity of American capitalism, its resiliency and inventiveness. Whatever else you may say about the New Deal, there was an inventiveness. Aside from its tremendous resources, American capitalism has the capacity to foreclose other alternatives.
Robert A. Baird
He is president of a large conglomerate in a city of the far Northwest. One of the most powerful men in the region. He engages in many charitable enterprises.
MY FATHER had been a salesman all his life, a very successful one. Even though he had only a fifth-grade education. In the great financial period of the middle Twenties, he sold bonds. The house he worked for went broke. The president of the company overextended himself and committed suicide.
My father went back to selling trucks, but there were no trucks to be sold. There were times when we didn’t know whether we’d have anything to eat at night. I tell that to my children today, and they think the old man’s flipped his lid.
My dad lost the house he was buying, and we rented for a while. He went through bankruptcy, which was a common thing at the time. He grubbed a great deal with all his remarkable energy, but he was plenty worried. Could he provide for his family? I have a great understanding of the Negro male today, because I saw it first-hand with my father.
But he had no doubts. He believed in the system he had grown up with. He was an inspirational man, like many good salesmen are. You have to believe in it. Because he had only a limited education, he believed all his sons and daughters should go to college. And we did.
When the Crash came, he talked about the fortunes that were lost that day. He felt there’s nothing really wrong with our system. Just a few speculators. It was a popular theme in those days. He was wrong, of course. Radical changes were called for. And Roosevelt made them. But this was the kind of salesman’s spirit in him.
Things kept going downhill in Detroit. The automobile plants laid off so many men. They began organizing the unions. They were organizing everything there for a while. I remember being in Stouffer’s Restaurant and someone blowing a whistle and all the waitresses sitting down. People were reacting against the suffering. What could be a better way?
I can remember the trouble at Ford’s, the clash at the Rouge plant.1
47 A big demonstration. The chant of the crowd that was marching: We wanted bread, you gave us bullets. It’s funny how a little thing like that sticks in your mind.
When I got out of college, I went to work at the Packard plant. I hoped eventually to get into the industrial relations end of the business. After working in the plant for six months, I could understand the men and their grievances. I was working on the assembly line. I can still remember my badge number. FSG348. This was ’37.
I learned a great deal about employee relations. I learned how not to treat men. They did a lot of things at the Packard plant in those days that earned them the animosity of their workers.
They used to take a train into the plant. They’d often do it when the workers were coming to work. So you were held up fifteen or twenty minutes by the train. If you were a minute late, they docked you thirty minutes’ pay. That was the way it was. There were no ifs, ands or buts about it. I can remember talking to my foreman about it. It made no difference.
We were making new models of the 1938 car for the New York Auto Show. On the assembly line, you work at a certain pace. If they change the speed, and don’t tell you about it, pretty soon you’re working in the next man’s space trying to keep up. This chassis has gotten ahead of you. This goes all down the line. Finally, you have to shut it down. Nobody wanted to shut the line down, because you got hell if you did.
I can remember how they speeded up the line and we got in everybody’s way, and finally they hollered: Shut the line down. Steve, the big foreman, weighed about three hundred pounds, came swearing all the way down the line: What was the trouble? The union was new then. The steward said: We’re not working.
An hour later, out comes the plant manager with the foreman. The steward explained. The manager said he was sorry. He apologized to the men. He said, “We have a train waiting to take the cars to the New York Auto Show. Next year’s business depends on us getting a good start in the show.” The steward said, “Why didn’t you tell us? We’ll knock these cars out.” They got those guys going at twice the speed. Nobody complained.
It illustrated to me something I never forgot. If you tell people what you want them to do and why you want them to do it, they’re very cooperative. I’ve always said around here: We could sell any reasonable program to our union if we looked at it from their standpoint, and made a reasonable explanation. But if you try to push them around, they aren’t going to stand for it.
I got laid off in December of 1937. It was the down draft of the Roosevelt recession. In Detroit, when the automobile industry goes down, everything goes down.
I wrote a series of letters to companies that had interviewed me when I was in college. A large mail-order house said if I wanted to come to their city, they had a job for me. So I came over on the bus. It cost $6 to ride from Detroit to this city. I got the job.
I had about an hour and a half to kill before going back to the bus station. So I stopped in to see a fellow at this company. He had also interviewed me while I was at school. I thought it would be nice to know him. He talked me into working here. So I called up the other company and said no.
Tom, His Younger Son
At twenty-one, he is now somewhere in Canada, in defiance of his 1-A draft status.
MY FATHER talks about the Depression didactically. He tries to draw little lessons from it. He has an anecdote every time the subject comes up. It’s sort of a heroic past for him. It makes him an extremist: you have one analysis you can fit everything into. He has an extremist definition of what the goal of a nation should be … what a guy should be preparing for at school. Since most people feel this way, it’s not called extreme. But it is.
All the clichés that you hear. Americans are always saying, “I’m not enjoying what I’m doing now, but I’m making money. I’m preparing to do a thing which will be more important in the future.” In the meantime, make a buck. That’s pretty extreme. They all agree and reinforce one another, the people who lived through the Depression.
They won’t allow any argument about other ways, which they call extreme. In any major corporation, you can’t depend on getting the same profit every year. You’ll fold. The only way a corporation, which sells stock, can keep existing, is to increase profit. This seems to me unlikely as a policy that will last a hundred years. Yet, the welfare capitalism they built can’t be denied….
My father is slick. He tries to say something we will dig. The other night, we played Billie Holiday, and he started naming some of her other songs. You see, he’s really saying, “I am one of you.” He uses the same sort of mechanism at work.
He’s become a king in welfare capitalism, because he knows how to work with labor. He’s always said that unions are the greatest. I’m sure he was a real slick worker, when they were changing their roles from real unions to company-minded unions. Which they are today. He learned all this in the Depression. It was his war.
Peter, His Older Son
He is twenty-four. A college graduate, he works full time as an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) organizer. He travels along the West Coast, recruiting members.
As A PERSON, my father is a good person. He means well. His motives are all of the highest. He feels sincerely that the way you do good for the people of the world is to expand welfare capitalism.148 The important thing to understand about a man like my father is that in a society like this, whether a person is a nice guy or a bad guy, is irrelevant. People play certain roles. It’s not so much their attitudes as the roles they play. Although he’s the kind of guy you wouldn’t mind having dinner with, he plays a bad role in this society.
I’m sure the Depression was important in molding my father’s life. A lot of older people look at young people today and say, “Those punks, they never felt the Depression. Look at the things they’re doing.” I don’t think this attitude makes any sense. My brother and I grew up with a certain kind of history, and he grew up with another. I don’t condemn him for his experience. I condemn him for the role he plays today.
In the Depression, people were up against the wall. Fear. So when you’re up against the wall like that, any kind of solution is grasped at. In the case of those people, it was military spending, war. 149
We didn’t see the Depression. We have grown up in a time when going to school is like going to a factory. It’s not totally parallel: we are materially privileged. But the conditions students face are increasingly like Depression factory conditions. We’re not treated as intellectually curious beings. We’re being manufactured. We’re being channeled for certain roles. We’re lined up, sorted into jobs … as well as being kept off the job market as long as possible. So growing up becomes a later and later thing.
Because of their education and the nature of communications, many young people identify with the other people of the world. We had grown up in a post-Depression, affluent society feeling this is the way it is everywhere. Then came the rude awakening: two-thirds of the world is starving and exploited by the same corporations that run our universities. My father is a member of the board of a leading university out here. He’s also a board member of a bank that does lots of business with South Africa.
He’s a philanthropist in many ways. That, too, is part of the approach of the individual who has made it. This is part of the whole psyche of competition: I made it—now I can help others. What competition really means is: there is a stacked deck. Some people will fight against others for a few crumbs, while the guy with the stacked deck makes most of it.
My father does want to understand us. He wants to think we’re following the values he taught us. But when what we do becomes more than a childish pastime, he feels threatened. He can’t really face it, because what we’re saying is: We want to build a society in which roles like his are no longer possible.
(Softly.) He used to tell me that of all his kids—there are five of us—I could have been the one to make it. Perhaps even his successor as president of the conglomerate. He always felt I had the brains a
nd drive to be a ruler. I think he’s disappointed in me. I don’t think he’s quite given up hope that I’m going through a stage and will come out of it….
Much of his ambition, drive and energy comes from the Depression, I’m sure. But I also have a lot of energy and I did not have that experience.
He always downgraded campus radicals in the Thirties. He called them a minority—psychologically disturbed young people….
POSTSCRIPT: Peter has since become one of the leading spokesmen of the Weatherman faction of SDS.
Campus Life
Pauline Kael
WHEN I attended Berkeley in 1936, so many of the kids had actually lost their fathers. They had wandered off in disgrace because they couldn’t support their families. Other fathers had killed themselves, so the family could have the insurance. Families had totally broken down. Each father took it as his personal failure. These middle-class men apparently had no social sense of what was going on, so they killed themselves.
It was still the Depression. There were kids who didn’t have a place to sleep, huddling under bridges on the campus. I had a scholarship, but there were times when I didn’t have food. The meals were often three candy bars. We lived communally and I remember feeding other kids by cooking up more spaghetti than I can ever consider again.
There was an embarrassment at college where a lot of the kids were well-heeled. I still have a resentment against the fraternity boys and the sorority girls with their cashmere sweaters and the pearls. Even now, when I lecture at colleges, I have this feeling about those terribly overdressed kids. It wasn’t a hatred because I wanted these things, but because they didn’t understand what was going on.
I was a reader for seven courses a semester, and I made $50 a month. I think I was the only girl on the labor board at Berkeley. We were trying to get the minimum wage on the campus raised to forty cents an hour. These well-dressed kids couldn’t understand our interest. There was a real division between the poor who were trying to improve things on the campus and the rich kids who didn’t give a damn.