by Studs Terkel
Berkeley was a cauldron in the late Thirties. You no sooner enrolled than you got an invitation from the Trotskyites and the Stalinists. Both were wooing you. I enrolled at sixteen, so it was a little overpowering at the time. I remember joining the Teachers Assistants Union. We had our own version of Mario Savio. He’s now a lawyer specializing in bankruptcies. We did elect a liberal as president of the student body. It was a miracle in those days.
The fraternity boys often acted as strikebreakers in San Francisco—the athletes and the engineering students. And the poor boys were trying to get their forty cents an hour. The college administration could always count on the frat boys to put down any student movement.
It’s different today, the fraternities and sororities having so much less power….
Robert Gard
Professor of Drama, University of Wisconsin.
I SET OUT for the University of Kansas on a September morning with $30 that I’d borrowed from my local bank. I had one suit and one necktie and one pair of shoes. My mother had spent several days putting together a couple of wooden cases of canned fruits and vegetables. My father, a country lawyer, had taken as a legal fee a 1915 Buick touring car. It was not in particularly good condition, but it was good enough to get me there. It fell to pieces and it never got back home anymore.
I had no idea how long the $30 would last, but it sure would have to go a long way because I had nothing else. The semester fee was $22, so that left me $8 to go. Fortunately, I got a job driving a car for the dean of the law school. That’s how I got through the first year.
What a pleasure it was to get a pound of hamburger, which you could buy for about five cents, take it up to the Union Pacific Railroad tracks and have a cookout. And some excellent conversation. And maybe swim in the Kaw River.
One friend of mine came to college equipped. He had an old Model T Ford Sedan, about a 1919 model. He had this thing fitted up as a house. He lived in it all year long. He cooked and slept and studied inside that Model T Ford Sedan. How he managed I will never know. I once went there for dinner. He cooked a pretty good one on a little stove he had in this thing. He was a brilliant student. I don’t know where he is now, but I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s the head of some big corporation. (Laughs.) Survival….
The weak ones, I don’t suppose, really survived. There were many breakdowns. From malnutrition very likely. I know there were students actually starving.
Some of them engaged in strange occupations. There was a biological company that would pay a penny apiece for cockroaches. They needed these in research, I guess. Some students went cockroach hunting every night. They’d box ’em and sell them to this firm.
I remember the feverish intellectual discussion we had. There were many new movements. On the literary scene, there was something called the Proletarian Novel. There was the Federal Theater and the Living Newspaper. For the first time, we began to get socially conscious. We began to wonder about ourselves and our society.
We were mostly farm boys and, to some extent, these ideas were alien to us. We had never really thought about them before. But it was a period of necessity. It brought us face to face with these economic problems and the rest…. All in all, a painful time, but a glorious time.
Chance Stoner
A financial consultant on Wall Street.
“I actually in my own life did not see any difference between the Twenties and the Thirties. I was living in a small Virginia town, and it was poverty-stricken. You had five thousand rural bank failures in the Twenties…. My father was a typewriter salesman who did the best he could….”
THEY GAVE me a $100 scholarship to the University of Virginia. That’s in 1931, which was damn good. And my mother gave me $100. I had a pair of khaki pants, a pair of sneakers and a khaki shirt. That was it.
The first year on the campus, I organized a Marxist study class. The students fell into two groups. About nine hundred of them had automobiles. About nine hundred had jobs or scholarships. The other nine hundred fell in between. We had real class warfare. The automobile boys and the fraternities—we had thirty-three little Greek palaces on fraternity row—they had charge of the student government. So I organized the other nine hundred, and we took the student government away from them and rewrote the constitution.
I spent half my time on radical activities. I was trying to organize a union in Charlottesville—and bringing Negroes to speak on the campus. We had the first black man to speak there since Reconstruction. He was an old Socialist.
This threw the dean into a fit. He still believed in slavery. He forbade the use of any university building. I was then writing a weekly column for the campus paper. So I attacked the dean: “What manner of small-minded men have inherited Mr. Jefferson’s university?” (Laughs.) It was reprinted all over the Eastern seaboard. On the front pages of newspapers, including The New York Times. (Laughs.)
The president sent for me. He had a stack five inches high of clippings. He said, “Now look what you’ve done.” (Laughs.) I said, “It’s not my fault. The man’s been properly invited, he’s qualified and he’s going to speak at the Episcopal Church chapel.” The dean was one of the deacons of the church. So we had quite a time of it.
There were writings on the sidewalk of the university: “Down With Imperialistic War. Scholarships Not Battleships.” Again I was invited to the president’s office. He asked me if I couldn’t stop people from writing all over the sidewalk. I said to him: We’re perfectly willing to abide by a general rule. If the secret societies and fraternities aren’t permitted to write on the steps or sidewalks, we won’t either. So he walked me to the window and outside in great purple letters was the slogan: “Down With Imperalist War.” He said, “Couldn’t you please at least get the spelling right?” (Laughs.)
In 1935, we had the first official shutdown of all university classes for a peace demonstration. Guess who the featured speaker was? J. B. Matthews. He later ran the Un-American Activities Committee, as staff director for Martin Dies. He was the man who invented the complete file and cross-reference system, and the theory of associations and fronts and all the rest of it. A very remarkable fella. He started out as a Protestant minister, came to socialism and wound up with Martin Dies. Joe McCarthy was impossible without J. B. Matthews. And we shut down the university for him…. Oh, well….
I was a troublemaker then. (Laughs.) I wish I still were.
BOOK FOUR
Merely Passing Through
Edward Burgess
Like most guests in this once-elegant hotel, he’s a pensioner. His room is overwhelmed by old-time appliances. There are light-housekeeping facilities. A table radio … “I used to build ’em, battery set. I still got things to do. I got a set of tools there that would knock your eyes out, worth about $200. All kinds of tools… .”
He is eighty-two. During the Thirties, he had a steady job as a printer at Donnelly’s.
I SPOTTED this Studebaker in the window at Twenty-sixth and Michigan. So I says to May, let’s buy that car. So we just stopped in, give ’em $600, all we had with us, and bought the car. The sales manager—his name was Compton—I told him that’s the one we want. So we just had a couple of fellas push it out and put air in the tires and a couple of gallons of gas and away we went, down South Parkway. So we went all around, down Field Museum…. It was a six-wheel job.
The foreman down at Donnelly, he said, “You sure did your bit for the Depression.” He bought one, he bought a new Ford. I said, “If everybody would spend ten cents more a day than they ordinarily spent, we’d sneak out of this in a hurry.” (Laughs.) I said that. My theory, I felt that way. Because we were makin’ money. We never got laid off or nothin’. There was no cause to feel otherwise.
When did you become aware of the Depression?
I really didn’t pay no attention to it. The way I looked at it, without advertising there’ll be no business, of any kind. And you can’t have no advertising without printing it. See what I mean?
Did your standard of living change during the Depression?
It didn’t change mine. I never did spend money foolishly. Never drank very much, just a little bit here and there. But I was kind of liberal, too, in a way. Always tried to help the other fella. Never hurt me any.
I co-signed a couple of times for loan companies and things like that. Fact I did that for a fella in Fort Wayne, and he skipped out. And I had to pay it, $55. When my dad died in 1919, he was on a train going to Ohio. I wanted him buried with my mother. I always tried to help out the other guy.
You don’t remember bread lines?
No, we didn’t have that here in Chicago, that I know of.
Billy Green
Among his enterprises in the Thirties: bookmaker.
I DIDN’T get hurt too bad. I didn’t own any stocks. I didn’t believe in the market then, I’m not too crazy about it now, if you know what I mean. (Laughs.) The stock market is like shooting craps or playing horses. You hear about the ones that win, but you never hear about the ones that lose. There’s more losers than winners, I promise you.
Any time you’re guessing, you got to lose. The only way to win is to have the other fella guess. That’s my theory: never be a guesser. Never take a position in life. You give the other guy the first guess, and you always come out best. You can’t make a mistake that way. You always wind up the winner. I’ve proved that on many, many occasions. Many occasions.
All the people around me in them days—successful businessmen—the stock market just knocked ’em right out of the box. Oh, do I remember the panic. Bedlam.
I never worked, always went in business for myself. I was lucky. You got to have that Guy Upstairs with you. You got to have his arms around you. I made a buck.
From an orange juice stand to a hotel, I branched out into a bowling alley. Made some investment in real estate. And here I am, with nothing to do. Call it semi-retired. But I’m always interested in a new proposition. Action.
I got no reason to be discontented. It’s just lookin’ fer somethin’ that I don’t think I’m gonna find. You just can’t call your shots any more. Everything is regimented today. Understand? Maybe it’s from the Depression days, who knows? So what I’m lookin’ fer don’t exist, strange as it may seem. You follow me? But I have no complaints. I’d be the last guy in the world to complain. Because, like I say, life’s been good to me. God has been good to me. You gotta have Him.
Scoop Lankford
He is seventy-five years old. He spent thirty-one years of a life term in a state penitentiary: 1919 to 1950.
THE DEPRESSION hit that prison pretty bad. We were practically not eating. We really scratched. One time they wanted us to eat some kind of fish. They called it halibut. This had black skin all around—didn’t have that little white side, you know. This was baby shark they tried to feed us. It smelled so the entire building was stunk up. (Laughs.) So they all threw it on the floor and refused to eat it.
If you know what it was like for you, just multiply. The quality of food was low to begin with. We would get some kind of meat once a day. It was kind of scraps you wouldn’t even keep in a butcher shop. Just tiny pieces all boiled up in a pot. It was rich enough so one man would get about a fourth of what his system needed. More people died during that Depression there than they ever did at any other time.
It wasn’t starvation. They called it malnutrition. It woulda been starvation if they died quick from malnutrition. They just barely gave you enough to keep you alive. You lost weight. They made you lose weight until the doctor got after them and said they have to get at least one meal a day. A thousand men woulda died if it hadn’t been for that doctor.
Did the guards ever talk to you about the Depression?
They were as bad for it as we were. A lot of them was eating in there on the sly. I’ve even actually given to them a piece of corn bread to take out. Nearly all of ’em were family men.
You wouldn’t know there was a Depression as far as the talk was concerned. There was nothing to say. We at least had a place to eat and sleep. The prison itself was a protection from the outside. The people outside, they had to hustle. We were just down almost as low as we could get. We had to dig a hole in low to get any lower than we was. (Laughs.)
We fared lots better when the war was on. Food and more food, during the war. Yeah, the fellas talked about it. They said, “Long live the war!” That was our attitude: Long live the war. ’Cause we were eating pretty good.
Three o‘Clock in the Morning
Wilbur Kane
He is a thirty-nine-year-old journalist. It is at his home, out East. The time: about three o’clock in the morning. We have been drinking rather heavily… .
I WAS seven, eight. My mother was holding up the New York World Telegram . It had to be like 1937. With this huge headline across the front: Shanghai Falls. I remember the bitterness of my mother. I remember her bitterness about Ethiopia, too. Bubble gum cards about the Ethiopian War, I remember them. You had Ethiopians in ghost suits, sheets. And the Italian soldiers, they were always stabbing these guys in their ghost sheets.
I stayed with my grandmother that summer. She lived in a small town in Pennsylvania. It was suburban Allentown, if you could believe it. She was one of the two people in town who subscribed to The New York Times. She was considered a Socialist—which she was.
We had relatives, Peter and Millie Gore. Millie was a wonderful fat lady, and she’d sit on the front porch and she gave everybody food and beer all summer long. Uncle Peter would talk about World War I. He told this story about the black guy in his company, and he ran away from the Germans. He said he shot the nigger, killed the nigger. I was just absolutely petrified. I mean, I was really smashed! It was the first time I had ever heard that word. But I knew what it meant. And I never liked Uncle Peter again.
And this family, the Stahls, they moved next door. And they were really Nazis. They had this little girl who I hated. Who was a little female Nazi. And the second Joe Louis fight….
He beat Schmeling …
Yeah, but they didn’t know that, see? They invited us over to listen to it, my grandmother and me. On the radio. And they had all this stuff, they’d gone over to Bethlehem to get it, the knackwurst and bratwurst and all the other kind of wursts you can get. And they had it on big plates. And we’re all gonna sit around and we’re gonna eat liverwurst and watch this kraut beat the shit out of this black man, see? And they were gonna rejoice. All I can remember was praying to God that somehow Joe Louis would win. Somehow he would win. (Laughs.)
I can remember the faces, how they looked when Joe Louis came out and just creamed him. I mean, like in forty-five seconds.150 They couldn’t get the knackwurst in their fat faces, that’s how they looked. They couldn’t even swallow beer. I was screaming and jumping up and down and my grandmother was whispering to me: “I know how you feel, but you shouldn’t show it. You’ve got to be polite.” (Laughs.)
She dragged me out that night, saying, “You’re rude, you’re rude.” She pulled me out of that place, because I was jumping up and down screaming, “It serves you Nazis right, it serves you Nazis right.” She said, “You’re right, but you can’t talk that way.” And I said, “If I’m right, why can’t I talk that way?”
Oh God, I remember a couple of other things. I remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I remember his voice. It was a great voice. And I loved it. But some of us have learned that he was full of shit, too. That he was a fucking liar, that he was no good.
Why do you say that … ?
Because he just didn’t deliver. Let’s face it, let’s talk about Munich. Let’s talk about all those things that were just words when I was a little kid. And he and Churchill and Daladier and Laval, they built up the Nazis so they could kill the Communists. And that’s what they really did at Munich, that’s what Munich really meant. And all this appeasement myth is just a myth.
It’s just that they thought they could use the Nazis against the Communists, and that�
��s what it really got down to. And they killed forty million people to find out how fucking wrong they were. And they have plunged us all, my whole life, my whole generation into an endless, terrible misery. And they were all stinking, fucking, no good shits.
They put us into that God damn war which they could have stopped in the 1930s. They could have walked in, they could have killed that Hitler. But they preferred that Hitler, they really did, they preferred him to the Communists. And no matter how rotten the Communists were, at least, in some vague, triply removed sense they represented the principle of life. No matter how distorted. As opposed to these other bastards, who represented nothing ever but death. And promised nothing but death. And my whole life has been cursed by these men.
I’m slightly drunk, but I don’t retract anything I’ve said, because I would say it when I’m sober…. I can’t make any distinction between the war and the Depression and the Thirties. It all kind of merged, and you were growing up and all that….
A Cable
Myrna Loy
Film and stage actress.
MUNICH, that was ‘38, wasn’t it? I was at Malibu, down at the beach. I heard Jan Masaryk on the radio, speaking from London. It was about four o’clock in the morning there. I was so moved by this man. I was upset by the sell-out of Czechoslovakia. On an impulse, I sent him a cable. It was the first one he had received from anyone in the world.
Later on, he came to this country and he looked me up. It had meant so much to him. He said it cheered him in the darkest hour of his life. That was Munich. He said one of the reasons he broadcast to his country was that if he could reach me out on the Malibu coast six thousand miles away….
My wire was published in the London Times. Then it got to Prague. And then to Berlin. As a result, my pictures were banned in Germany. I didn’t know that until 1939. In Amsterdam, I met a man who had fled Germany. He said I was on Mr. Hitler’s blacklist. (Laughs.) “You’re on the second page,” he said. (Laughs.) I said, “My God, I didn’t know that.”