The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  He’s burning underneath with this energy and ambition. He outworks the U.S. busboys and eventually becomes the waiter. Where he can maneuver, he tries to become the owner and gives a lot of competition to the locals. Restaurant owners tell me, if they have a choice, they’ll always hire foreign nationals first. They’re so eager and grateful. There’s a little greed here, too. [Laughs.] They pay’em so little.

  We’ve got horrible cases of exploitation. In San Diego and in Arizona, we discovered people who live in holes in the ground, live under trees, no sanitation, no housing, nothing. A lot of them live in chicken coops.

  They suffer from coyotes, too, who exploit them and sometimes beat’em. Coyotes advertise. If the immigrant arrives in San Diego, the word is very quick: where to go and who’s looking. He’ll even be approached. If he’s got a lot of money, the coyote will manage to bring him from Tijuana all the way to Chicago and guarantee him a job. He’ll get all the papers: Social Security, birth certificate, driver’s license. The coyote reads the papers and finds which U.S. citizens have died and gets copies of all their vital statistics. In effect, the immigrant carries the identity of a dead person.

  Often the employer says he doesn’t know anything about it. He plays hands off. He makes his bucks hiring cheap labor. The coyote makes his off the workers.

  Coyotes come from the border with these pickup trucks full of people. They may put twenty in a truck. They bring’em in all sorts of bad weather, when they’re less likely to be stopped. They might be going twenty, twenty-eight hours, with one or two pit stops. They don’t let the people out. There’s no urinal, no bathroom. They sit or they stand there in this little cramped space for the whole trip.

  A truck broke down outside Chicago. It was a snowstorm. The driver left. People were frostbitten, lost their toes. In Laredo, the truck was in an accident. Everybody ran off because the police were coming. The truck caught fire. No one remembered the two fellows in the trunk. It was locked and no keys. Of course, they burned to death. The border patrol found thirty-three people dying in the deserts of Arizona. They were saved at the last minute and deported. I’ll bet you a dollar every one of them, as soon as they are well enough, will try again.

  At least a quarter of a million apprehensions were made last year. If we apprehend them at the border, we turn ’em around and ask them to depart voluntarily. They turn around and go back to Mexico. A few hours later, they try again. In El Paso, we deported one fellow six times in one day. There’s a restaurant in Hollywood run by a fellow we deported thirty-seven times. We’ve deported some people more than a hundred times. They always want to come back. There’s a job and there’s desperation.

  In World War Two, we recruited Mexicans to work here. As soon as the war ended and our young men came back, we deported them. In 1954, the deportation problem was so big that the general in charge of immigration ordered Operation Wetback. That one year, we had a million apprehensions. It was similar to what we did during the depression. We rounded everybody up, put ’em on buses, and sent them back to Mexico. Sometimes they were people who merely looked Mexican. The violations of civil liberties were terrible.

  Half the people here without papers are not Mexicans. They’re from all over the world. They came legally, with papers, as tourists ten years ago. They’re much harder to deal with. We’re discussing a program that would allow people to have permanent residence, who have been here seven years or more, have not broken any laws, have paid taxes and not been on welfare. You can’t be here and become a public charge. All too often, the public gets the impression that all immigrants are on welfare. It’s the exact opposite. Very few go on welfare.

  A lot of people who are humanitarian, who believe they should be hospitable toward the stranger, are very restrictive when it comes to their jobs. [Laughs.] We’ve had protests from mariachis and soccer players. The mariachis are upset because the Mexicans were coming in and playing for less. The manager of soccer teams would rather hire the foreign nationals because often they’re better players.

  We get people coming in from Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere. They come over by boat and land in Florida. The Floridians raised hell about this. I’ve even had Cuban-Americans tell me that Haitians were going to destroy their culture. There’s a weird pecking order now.

  We make three thousand apprehensions at the border every weekend. It’s just a little fourteen-mile stretch. Our border patrol knows this little fellow comin’ across is hungry. He just wants to work. They know he’s no security threat. They say: “It’s my job.” Many of them come to have a great deal of respect for the people they’re deporting. What do you think of a person you deport three, four times, who just keeps coming back? You would never want to get in the same ring with that person.

  I’m torn. I saw it in the Peace Corps, when I was in the Philippines. A mother offered you her infant. You’re just a twenty-one-year-old kid and she says: “Take my child, take him with you to the States.” When you see this multiplied by thousands, it tears you up.

  It’s clear to me that the undocumented, even more than the immigrant, is a contributor to our society and to our standard of living. It’s one of the few groups that has no parasites. They walk the tightrope and try not to fall off. If you’re a citizen and you fall, we have a net that catches you: welfare, food stamps, unemployment, social services. If you’re undocumented and fall off that tightrope, you can’t go to any of the agencies because you may end up bein’ deported. He can’t draw welfare, he can’t use public services. He’s not gonna call a policeman even when he’s beat up. If he’s in a street fight and somebody whips him bad, assaults him, robs him, rapes her there’s no complaint. In Baltimore, an employer raped two girls. The person who complained wouldn’t give us the names of the victims because she was afraid we’d deport’em. We end up in this country with enormous abuse against four million people.

  The only thing that helps me is remembering the history of this country. We’ve always managed, despite our worst, unbelievably nativist actions to rejuvenate ourselves, to bring in new people. Every new group comes in believing more firmly in the American Dream than the one that came a few years before. Every new group is scared of being in the welfare line or in the unemployment office. They go to night school, they learn about America. We’d be lost without them.

  The old dream is still dreamt. The old neighborhood Ma-Pa stores are still around. They are not Italian or Jewish or Eastern European anymore. Ma and Pa are now Korean, Vietnamese, Iraqi, Jordanian, Latin American. They live in the store. They work seven days a week. Their kids are doing well in school. They’re making it. Sound familiar?

  Near our office in Los Angeles is a little café with a sign: KOSHER BURRITOS. [Laughs.] A burrito is a Mexican tortilla with meat inside. Most of the customers are black. The owner is Korean. [Laughs.] The banker, I imagine, is WASP. [Laughs.] This is what’s happening in the United States today. It is not a melting pot, but in one way or another, there is a melding of cultures.

  I see all kinds of new immigrants starting out all over again, trying to work their way into the system. They’re going through new battles, yet they’re old battles. They want to share in the American Dream. The stream never ends.

  Hard Times:

  An Oral History of the great Depression (1970)

  INTRODUCTION: A PERSONAL MEMOIR

  (AND PARENTHETICAL COMMENT)

  This is a memory book, rather than one of hard fact and precise statistic. In recalling an epoch, some thirty, forty, years ago, my colleagues experienced pain, in some instances; exhilaration, in others. Often it was a fusing of both. A hesitancy, at first, was followed by a flow of memories: long-ago hurts and small triumphs. Honors and humiliations. There was laughter, too.

  Are they telling the truth? The question is as academic as the day Pilate asked it, his philosophy not quite washing out his guilt. It’s the question Pa Joad asked of Preacher Casy, when the ragged man, in a transient camp, poured out h
is California agony.

  “Pa said, ‘S’pose he’s tellin’ the truth—that fella?’ The preacher answered. ‘He’s tellin’ the truth, awright. The truth for him. He wasn’t makin’ nothin’ up.’‘ How about us?’ Tom demanded. ‘Is that the truth for us?’ ‘I don’ know,’ said Casy.”11

  I suspect the preacher spoke for the people in this book, too. In their rememberings are their truths. The precise fact or the precise date is of small consequence. This is not a lawyer’s brief nor an annotated sociological treatise. It is simply an attempt to get the story of the holocaust known as The Great Depression from an improvised battalion of survivors.

  That there are some who were untouched or, indeed, did rather well isn’t exactly news. This has been true of all disasters. The great many were wounded, in one manner or another. It left upon them an “invisible scar,” as Caroline Bird put it.12

  There are young people in this book, too. They did not experience the Great Depression. In many instances, they are bewildered, wholly ignorant of it. It is no sign of their immaturity, but of ours. It’s time they knew. And it’s time we knew, too—what it did to us. And, thus, to them.

  I myself don’t remember the bleak October day, 1929. Nor do I recall with anything like a camera eye the events that shaped the thirties. Rather, a blur of images comes to mind. Faces, voices and, occasionally, a rueful remembrance or a delightful flash. Or the astonishing innocence of a time past. Yet a feeling persists....

  Even now, when on the highway, seeing in faint neon, VACANCY, outside a modest motel, I am reminded of my mother’s enterprise, The Wells-Grand. I ask myself, with unreasonable anxiety, perhaps, “Will it survive? Will this place be here next year?”

  Fear of losing things, of property, is one legacy of the thirties, as a young colleague pointed out. An elderly civil servant in Washington buys a piece of land as often as she can afford. “If it comes again, I’ll have something to live off.” She remembers the rotten bananas, near the wharves of New Orleans: her daily fare.

  That, thanks to technology, things today can make things, in abundance, is a point psychically difficult for Depression survivors to understand. And thus, in severe cases, they will fight, even kill, to protect their things (read: property). Many of the young fail to diagnose this illness because of their innocence concerning the Great Depression. Its occasional invocation, for scolding purposes, tells them little of its truth.

  In the mid-twenties, all fifty rooms of The Wells-Grand were occupied. There was often a waiting list. Our guests were men of varied skills and some sense of permanence. The only transients were the wayward couple who couldn’t afford a more de luxe rendezvous. Mysteriously, there was always room at the inn, even for sinners. Ours were the winking Gospels.

  On Saturdays, most of our guests paid their weekly rent. On those evenings, I walked at a certain pace to the deposit window of the neighborhood bank. All the guests, with the exception of a few retired boomers and an ancient coppersmith (made idle by the Volstead Act), had steady jobs. It was a euphoric time.

  The weekly magazines, Judge and Life (pre-Luce), were exciting with George Jean Nathan and Pare Lorentz critiques and Jefferson Machamer girls. Liberty carried sports pieces by Westbrook Pegler—the most memorable, a tribute to Battling Siki, the childlike, noble savage destroyed by civilization. Literary Digest was still around and solvent, having not yet forecast Alf Landon’s triumph some years later. On the high school debating team, we resolved that the United States should or should not grant independence to the Philippines, should or should not join the World Court, should or should not recognize the Soviet Union. We took either side. It was a casual time.

  Perhaps it was the best of times. Or was it the worst? Scott Nearing inveighed against dollar diplomacy. Bob La Follette and George Norris took to the hustings as well as the Senate floor in Horatio-like stands against the Big Money. Yet two faces appear and reappear in my mind’s eye: Vice Presidents Charles G. Dawes and Charles Curtis; the first, of the responsible banker’s jaw, clamped determinedly to an underslung pipe; the other, a genial ex-jockey, of the Throttlebottom look. There was an innocence, perhaps. But it was not quite Eden’s.

  As for the Crash itself, there is nothing I personally remember, other than the gradual, at first, hardly noticeable, diminishing in the roster of our guests. It was as though they were carted away, unprotesting and unseen, unlike Edward Albee’s grandma. At the entrance, we posted a placard: VACANCY.

  The presence of our remaining guests was felt more and more, daily, in the lobby. Hitherto, we had seen them only evenings and on weekends. The decks of cards were wearing out more quickly. The black and red squares of the checkerboard were becoming indistinguishable. Cribbage pegs were being more frequently lost.... Tempers were getting shorter. Sudden fights broke out for seemingly unaccountable reasons.

  The suddenly-idle hands blamed themselves, rather than society. True, there were hunger marches and protestations to City Hall and Washington, but the millions experienced a private kind of shame when the pink slip came. No matter that others suffered the same fate, the inner voice whispered, “I’m a failure.”

  True, there was a sharing among many of the dispossessed, but, at close quarters, frustration became, at times, violence, and violence turned inward. Thus sons and fathers fell away, one from the other. And the mother, seeking work, said nothing. Outside forces, except to the more articulate and political rebels, were in some vague way responsible, but not really. It was a personal guilt.

  We were carrying the regulars on the books, but the fate of others was daily debated as my mother, my brother and I scanned the more and more indecipherable ledger. At times, the issue was joined, with a great deal of heat, as my brother and I sought to convince our mother that somehow we and our guests shall overcome. In reply, her finger pointed to the undeniable scrawl: the debts were mounting.

  With more frequency, we visited our landlord. (We had signed a long-term lease in happier days.) He was a turn-of-the-century man, who had no telephone and signed all his documents longhand. His was a bold and flowing penmanship. There was no mistaking the terms. His adjustments, in view of this strange turn of events, were eminently fair. A man of absolute certainties, who had voted the straight ticket from McKinley to Hoover, he seemed more at sea than I had imagined possible. I was astonished by his sudden fumbling, his bewilderment.

  A highly respected Wall Street financier recalled: “The Street had general confusion. They didn’t understand it any more than anybody else. They thought something would be announced.” (My emphasis.) In 1930, Andrew Mellon, Secretary of Treasury, predicted, “ ...during the coming year the country will make steady progress.” A speculator remembers, with awe, “Men like Pierpont Morgan and John Rockefeller lost immense amounts of money. Nobody was immune.”

  Carey McWilliams suggests a study of the Washington hearings dealing with the cause of the Depression: “They make the finest comic reading. The leading industrialists and bankers testified. They hadn’t the foggiest notion....”

  As for our guests, who now half-occupied the hotel, many proferred relief checks as rent rather than the accustomed cash. It was no longer a high-spirited Saturday night moment.

  There was less talk of the girls in the Orleans street cribs and a marked increase in daily drinking. There was, interestingly enough, an upswing in playing the horses: half dollar bets, six bits; a more desperate examination of The Racing Form. Bert E. Collyer’s Eye, and a scratch sheet, passed from hand to hand. While lost blacks played the numbers, lost whites played the nags.

  Of my three years at the University of Chicago Law School, little need be said. I remember hardly anything, other than the presence of one black in my class, an African prince, whose land was a British—or was it a French?—possession. Only one case do I remember: it concerned statutory rape. The fault lay not in the professors, who were good and learned men, but in my studied somnolence. Why, I don’t know. Even to this day. Was it a feeling, without m
y being aware, at the time, of the irrelevance of standard procedure to the circumstances of the day? Or is this a rationalization, ex post facto, of a lazy student? It was a hard case all around.

  Yet those years, ‘31 to ’34, at the University, did lead to an education of sorts. On my way from The Wells-Grand to the campus, I traveled through the Black Belt. Was it to escape Torts and Real Property that I sought out the blues? I don’t know.

  I do know that in those gallimaufry shops I discovered treasures: ² “race records,” they were called by men with dollar signs for eyes. The artists, Big Bill, Memphis Minnie, Tampa Red, Big Maceo, among those I remember, informed me there was more to the stuff of life—and Battling Siki and Senegal, for that matter—than even Westbrook Pegler imagined. Or my professors.

  Survival. The marrow of the black man’s blues, then and now, has been poverty. Though the articulated theme, the lyric, is often woman, fickle or constant, or the prowess of John the Conqueror, its felt truth is his “lowdown” condition. “The Negro was born in depression,” murmurs the elderly black. “If you can tell me the difference between the depression today and the Depression of 1932 for the black man, I’d like to know.”

  It accounts for the bite of his laughter, as he recalls those “hard times”: “Why did these big wheels kill themselves? He couldn’t stand bringing home beans to his woman, instead of steak and capon. It was a rarity to hear a Negro kill himself over money. There are so few who had any.”

  And yet, even during the Great Depression, when the white man was “lowdown,” the black was below whatever that was. This hard fact was constantly sung around, about, under, and over in his blues.

  I’m just like Job’s turkey,

  I can’t do nothing but gobble,