by Studs Terkel
Yes, I remember going without food. I can think of . . . We’d have bread . . . and no money anywhere. No money anywhere. And, oh, when I . . . It just overwhelms me sometimes when I think of those two younger brothers who would work to get some food and maybe go to the store. But they would see this nine-hundred-dollar grocery bill, you know [Chuckles] . . . and just couldn’t do it . . . until that youngest brother . . . We all laugh now because we all say, “Remember Frankie?” Frankie’s “Tu costa puno.” Anything you brought in the house that was food, tu costa puno. Tu costa puno is “Did it cost a lot?” [A Croation phrase] No matter what you brought in, you know . . . if you brought bread and eggs and Karo syrup. I don’t remember so much my going to the store and buying food. I must have been terribly proud and, and felt . . . I can’t do it. But how early we all stayed away from going to the store. Because we sensed that my father didn’t have the money and so we stayed hungry.
And then I can think of when the WPA—Works Progress Administration—came in. And my father immediately got employed on the WPA. And I remember how stark it was for me to come into training and have girls, one of them who lived across the hall from me at Patton Memorial, whose father was a doctor in Michigan . . . I can think of the people and how it struck me of their . . . their impression of the WPA. Because without, before I could ever say my father was employed on the WPA, discussions and bull sessions in our rooms, immediately it was, “These lazy people that don’t do a thing, the shovel leaners,” and . . . and, and I’d just sit there and listen to them. And then I’d look around, and I realized, sure, her father’s a doctor in Saint Joe, Michigan. Well, how nice. In my family there was no respectable employment, there was no . . . until I thought: You don’t know what it’s like.
My father survived the Depression. The war came along and he went to work in a defense plant in Seneca, Illinois. And my father was always happy to have a job and start making money. Oh, I don’t think of anything that stood out for my father like, you know, “Yemen dillo” . . . I have work. This man was really happy to be working.
ROBIN LANGSTON: My father had a restaurant. This was in Arkansas. And when I knew the Depression had really hit with full impact . . . the electric lights went off. My parents could no longer pay the one-dollar electric bill, which it amounted to maybe for a month or two months. A dollar-eighty at the most. And kerosene lamps went up in the home and in the business. Over each individual table in the restaurant there was a kerosene lamp. This did something to me. Because it let me know that my father wasn’t the greatest cat in the world, and I had always thought he was, you know. But it also let me know that he could adjust to any situation, and he taught us how to adjust to situations.
Now, we were fortunate compared to the situations of other people. We always had food. There was never any money, but who needed money then? The restaurant went right through the Depression; we were selling hamburgers for a nickel. My father would sell a meal ticket. You could get a full-course meal—that is meat and three vegetables—for twenty-five cents. I remember distinctly feeding little snottynosed white kids. My father and mother just did this out of the goodness of their hearts. There were . . . I guess there must have been ten white families within fifty feet of us. I remember feeding them. I remember my parents feeding little black kids. I remember when the times got so hard the sheriff pawned a radio to my father for ten dollars. This was a white sheriff, a white official, who had to come to a black man to get ten dollars. The reason he needed the ten dollars, he had some people out of town, he wanted to bring them there to eat some chicken. And this was during the time when a lot of the black young people wanted to venture out and go places, and they were afraid to hobo then, because they didn’t want to be caught up in a Scottsboro thing. They knew about the Scottsboro case and about the lynching. They knew they had a lynching in Mississippi and the lynchings in Alabama. We also knew in school that Tuskegee Institute or Fisk Library—one used to keep a report on all lynchings. One year there were about two thousand lynchings, and they documented each lynching. Yeah, we knew all about that.
I think a Depression could come again, but I think it would behoove the federal government not to let it come, because you’re dealing with a different breed of cattle now. See, now, if they really want anarchy, let a Depression come now. My sixteen-year-old son is not the person I was when I was sixteen. He’s an adult at sixteen. He’s working in a department store and going to school, too. And he has manly responsibilities and he doesn’t want any shit. These kids now do not want it. When I was sixteen, I wasn’t afraid to die, but the kid sixteen now is not afraid to kill.
[Strains of “God Bless the Child” playing]
JEROME ZERBE: From 1935 to 1939, I worked at El Morocco, and I invented a thing which has become a pain in the neck to most people. I took photographs of the fashionable people and sent them to the papers. They were really the top, top social. And what do you mean by society? That’s difficult to define. These were the people whose houses one knew were filled with treasures. These were the women who dressed the best. These were the women who had the most beautiful of all jewels. These were the dream people that we all looked up to and hoped that we, or our friends, could sometimes know and be like.
Did you ever talk about what happened outside? There were breadlines. There were various other things occurring. Not too nice, you know.
JEROME ZERBE: As I remember, I don’t think they ever mentioned them . . . never socially. Because I’ve always had a theory: When you’re out with friends, out socially, everything must be charming . . . and you don’t allow the ugly. We don’t even discuss the Negro question.
What was happening around the city? Do you remember the . . . people talking of breadlines, or Hoovervilles, or apple sellers?
JEROME ZERBE: No, there were none of those. Not in New York. Never. Never. There were a few beggars.
New Deal?
JEROME ZERBE: New Deal. Well that was an invention of Franklin Roosevelt’s. And it meant absolutely nothing except higher taxation . . . and that he did.
The thirties . . . society . . . our last images . . .
JEROME ZERBE: It was a glamorous, glittering moment.
WARD JAMES: I, well, I lived off friends. I had one very good friend who cashed in all his bonus bonds to pay his rent, and he had an extra bed, so he let me sleep there. I finally went on relief, which was an experience I wouldn’t want anybody else ever to go through in New York City. A single man going on relief at that particular time was just . . . Well, it comes as close to crucifixion as you can do it without actual mechanical details. Well, it was ’thirty-five or ’thirty-six, in that area. It was after I lost my job with the publishing house, and I needed whatever money I could get anywhere. The interview was to me utterly ridiculous and mortifying. Well, in the middle of it, a more dramatic guy than I was plunged down the stairways—’cause we were on the second floor—head first, to demonstrate that he was going to get on relief if he had to go to a hospital to do it. [Chuckles]
It was questions like: “Well, what have you been living on?”
“Well, I borrowed some money.”
“Who’d you borrow it from?”
“Friends.”
“Who are your friends? Where have you been living?”
“I’ve been living with friends.”
“Well . . .”
I wish I could recall the whole thing. This went on for a half an hour or something. I finally turned to the young man who was interviewing me and said, “I’ve been talking about friends. Do you happen to know what a friend is?” And a little after that I got my . . . at least the interview was over. I did get certified sometime later. I’ve been trying to remember how much they paid. It seems to me it was nine dollars a month. I suppose there’s some reason back of it. I’m a single man. . . . Why, why didn’t I have a family? I took my family west to Ohio, where they could live simply.
I came away feeling like I hadn’t any business even living any lon
ger. I was imposing on somebody’s great society, or something like that. [Chuckles]
EILEEN BARTH: I remember one of the first families I visited. This was a family from somewhere in Illinois, who had come to Chicago because I think this man was a railroad man. He was a Scotsman. I’m not sure I remember all the details, but I do have a picture of this man because of something that happened.
I was told by my supervisor that when I went out to the home to investigate that I really had to see the poverty, that I had to know exactly what this family needed, and what they lacked. So I was told that I should investigate to see how much clothing they had on hand if they asked for clothing. Well, I looked in this man’s closet because I . . . this was what I was told to do, that I should look in the closets. And this man was tall, well built. . . . I don’t know why I think he had gray hair because he wasn’t terribly old. But this is what I remember about him. And I think he’d been a railroad man and had always worked. Lost his job on the railroad, came to Chicago with his family to get work. I don’t think he found work . . . so they were stranded here.
They lived in another county so they didn’t qualify for permanent relief here, but only for temporary assistance until we could verify their residence . . . somewhere in central Illinois, I believe. And, ah [Sighs] . . . he let me look in the closet . . . [Holding back sobs] . . . and . . . I’m just crying to think about it. But he was so insulted . . . he was so insulted to think that I would do this. . . . I’m trying to remember. I remember this feeling of . . . of . . . of humiliation. I sensed this terrible humiliation. I think he said, “Well, do you really have to look in the closet? I really haven’t anything to hide.” I think that’s what he said. But I could see that he was very proud. He was deeply humiliated . . . and I was, too.
VIRGINIA DURR: In Jefferson County about four-fifths of the people were on relief. And there was no government relief. So this meant that they had this—just this two dollars and a half a week that the Red Cross provided them, and that they could beg, borrow, or steal.
But the thing that also struck me as being so terrible was that, just the way my mother and father had this terrible feeling of shame and guilt, and it was their failure they’d lost all their property, these people had the same feeling of shame and guilt who had lost their jobs. They didn’t blame the United States still; they’d didn’t blame the capitalist system; they just blamed themselves. And they thought . . . Well, you know, they would say in the most apologetic way, “Well, you know, if we hadn’t bought that radio . . . or if we hadn’t bought that old secondhand car . . . or if we’d saved our money and . . .” You know, they really blamed themselves. And it was just this terrible feeling they had of shame because they were on relief.
PEGGY TERRY: When we’d come home from school in the evening, my mother would send us to the soup line . . . and we were never allowed to cut. But after we’d been going to the soup line for about a month, we’d go down there, and if you happened to be one of the first ones in line, you didn’t get anything but the water that was on top. So we’d ask the guy that was ladling out the soup into the bucket . . . everybody had to bring their own bucket to get the soup . . . and he’d dip the greasy watery stuff off the top, and so we’d ask him to please dip down so we could get some meat and potatoes from the bottom of the kettle. And he wouldn’t do it. So then we learned to cuss and we’d say, “Dip down, God damn it!” And then we’d go across the street, and one place had bread, large loaves of bread, and then down the road just a little piece was a big shed, and they gave milk. And my sister and me would take two buckets each, and we’d bring one back full of soup and one back full of milk and two loaves of bread each . . . and that’s what we lived on for the longest time.
I remember it was fun. It was fun going to the soup line because we all went down the road and we laughed and we played. And the only thing that we felt was we were hungry and we were going to get food. And nobody made us feel ashamed . . . there just wasn’t any of that back then. I’m not sure how the rich felt. I think the rich were as contemptuous of the poor then as they are now. But at least among the people that I knew and came in contact with, we all had a sense of understanding that it wasn’t our fault . . . that it was something that had happened to the machinery. And in fact most people blamed Hoover. I mean they cussed him up one side and down the other. It was all his fault. I’m not saying he’s blameless, but I’m not saying either that it was all his fault, because our system doesn’t run just by one man, and it doesn’t fall just by one man, either.
How much schooling do you have?
PEGGY TERRY: Sixth grade.
And what’d you do after sixth grade? You got married at fifteen.
PEGGY TERRY: Yes. Well, my husband and me started traveling around. That was just kind of our background, and we just kind of continued it. We went down in the valley of Texas, where it’s very beautiful. . . . We were migrant workers down there. We picked oranges and grapefruits and lemons and limes in the Rio Grande Valley.
I was pregnant when we first started hitchhiking, and people were really very nice to us. Sometimes they would feed us, and then sometimes we would . . . I remember the one time we slept in a haystack and the lady of the house came out and found us, and she says, “Well, this is really very bad for you because you’re going to have a baby.” And she says, “You need a lot of milk.” So she took us up to the house and she had a lot of rugs hanging on the clothesline because she was doing her housecleaning. And we told her we’d beat the rugs, you know, for her giving us the food. And she said no, she didn’t expect that; that she just wanted to feed us. And we said no, that we couldn’t take it unless we worked for it. So she let us beat her rugs, and I think that she had a million rugs, and we cleaned them. And then we went in and she had a beautiful table just all full of all kind of food and milk. And then when we left, she filled a gallon bucket full of milk and we took it with us. And you don’t find that now. I think maybe if you did that now you’d get arrested. I think somebody’d call the police.
I think maybe the atmosphere since the end of the second war . . . Because all kind of propaganda has been going on . . . It just seems like the minute the war ended the propaganda started, and making people hate each other . . . not just hate Russians and Chinese and Germans, it was to make us hate each other, I think.
I think during the Depression, if the government had tried to do to a country what we’re doing now to Vietnam, I think the people would have marched right up there and snatched Roosevelt out by the hair of his head, and shook him around. And I think maybe the whole atmosphere was created to separate people and make them suspicious of each other, and just stir a hatred of one human for another.
This may sound impossible, but do you know, if there’s one thing that started me thinking, it was President Roosevelt’s cuff links. I read in the paper about how many pairs of cuff links he had, and it told that some of them were rubies and all precious stones . . . these were his cuff links. And I just wondered . . . I’ll never forget, I was sitting on an old tire out in the front yard, and we were hungry and so poor. And I was sitting out there in the hot sun—there weren’t any trees—and I was wondering why it was that one man could have all those cuff links when we couldn’t even have enough to eat. When we lived on gravy and biscuits. And I think maybe that was my first thought of wondering why . . . That’s the first thing I remember ever wondering why.
But one thing I did want to say about when my father finally got his bonus, he bought a secondhand car for us to come back to Kentucky in. And my dad said to us kids, “All of you get in the car. I want to take you and show you something.” And on the way over there, he talked about how rough life had been for us. And he said, “If you think it’s been rough for us,” he said, “I want you to see people that really had it rough.” This was in Oklahoma City. And he took us to one of the Hoovervilles . . . and that was the most incredible thing. Here were all these people living in old rusted-out car bodies. I mean, that was
their home. There were people living in shacks made out of orange crates. One family, with a whole lot of kids, were living in a piano box. And here this—this wasn’t just a little section; this was an area maybe ten miles wide and ten miles long. People living in whatever they could, jammed together.
And when I read Grapes of Wrath, that was like reliving my life. And particularly the part in there about where they lived in this government camp. Because when we were picking fruit in Texas, we lived in a government place like that, a government-owned place, in Robstown, Texas. And they came around and they helped the women make mattresses. See, we didn’t have anything. And they showed us how to sew and make dresses. And every Saturday night we’d have a dance. And when I was reading Grapes of Wrath, this was just like my life. And . . . and I never was so proud of poor people before as I was after I read that book.
VIRGINIA DURR: The Depression affected people in two different ways. One was—and I think this is the overwhelming majority—and that was that having faced the terror of the lack of a job, and the shame of having lived on relief, and the panic of not knowing whether you were going to be able to get work or not. . . . I think the great majority of the people reacted by, you know, thinking that money was the most important thing in the world. And that the most important thing to do was to get—get yours . . . and get it for your children . . . and be sure that you had it and your children had it. And nothing else mattered but getting you some money and some property, and not having this terror ever come on you again of not being able to feed your family.