The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  I ask directions. They are friendly, though somewhat bewildered. “An old man?” They are eager to help. One points north; another, south; the third, west. Each is certain “an old man” lives somewhere in the vicinity.

  Along the gravel road, with a stop at each of three farmhouses; no sign, no knowledge of “an old man,” nor awareness of his name. At each is a tree bearing the identical sticker: “Beware The Dog.” One trots forth, pauses warily and eyes the stranger in the manner of Bull Connor and a black militant. The young farmers are friendly enough, but innocent of Oscar Heline’s existence.

  At the fourth farm, an elderly woman, taken away from the telecast of of the Tigers-Cardinals World Series game, knows.... Several gravel roads back I find him.

  The struggles people had to go through are almost unbelievable. A man lived all his life on a given farm, it was taken away from him. One after the other. After the foreclosure, they got a deficiency judgment. Not only did he lose the farm, but it was impossible for him to get out of debt.

  He recounts the first farm depression of the twenties: “We give the land back to the mortgage holder and then we’re sued for the remainder—the deficiency judgment—which we have to pay.” After the land boom of the early twenties, the values declined constantly. until the last years of the decade. “In ‘28, ’29, when it looked like we could see a little blue sky again, we’re just getting caught up with the back interest, the thirties Depression hit....”

  The farmers became desperate. It got so a neighbor wouldn’t buy from a neighbor, because the farmer didn’t get any of it. It went to the creditors. And it wasn’t enough to satisfy them. What’s the use of having a farm sale? Why do we permit them to go on? It doesn’t cover the debts, it doesn’t liquidate the obligation. He’s out of business, and it’s still hung over him. First, they’d take your farm, then they took your livestock, then your farm machinery. Even your household goods. And they’d move you off. The farmers were almost united. We had penny auction sales. Some neighbor would bid a penny and give it back to the owner.

  Grain was being burned. It was cheaper than coal. Corn was being burned. A county just east of here, they burned corn in their courthouse all winter. ‘32, ’33. You couldn’t hardly buy groceries for corn. It couldn’t pay the transportation. In South Dakota, the county elevator listed corn as minus three cents. Minus three cents a bushel. If you wanted to sell ’em a bushel of corn, you had to bring in three cents. They couldn’t afford to handle it. Just think what happens when you can’t get out from under....

  We had lots of trouble on the highway. People were determined to withhold produce from the market—livestock, cream, butter, eggs, what not. If they would dump the produce, they would force the market to a higher level. The farmers would man the highways, and cream cans were emptied in ditches and eggs dumped out. They burned the trestle bridge, so the trains wouldn’t be able to haul grain. Conservatives don’t like this kind of rebel attitude and aren’t very sympathetic. But something had to be done.

  I spent most of my time in Des Moines as a lobbyist for the state cooperatives. Trying to get some legislation. I wasn’t out on the highway fighting this battle. Some of the farmers probably didn’t think I was friendly to their cause. They were so desperate. If you weren’t out there with them, you weren’t a friend, you must be a foe. I didn’t know from day to day whether somebody might come along and cause harm to my family. When you have bridges burned, accidents, violence, there may have been killings, I don’t know.

  There were some pretty conservative ones, wouldn’t join this group. I didn’t want to particularly, because it wasn’t the answer. It took that kind of action, but what I mean is it took more than that to solve it. You had to do constructive things at the same time. But I never spoke harshly about those who were on the highway.

  Some of the farmers with teams of horses, sometimes in trucks, tried to get through. He was trying to feed his family, trying to trade a few dozen eggs and a few pounds of cream for some groceries to feed his babies. He was desperate, too. One group tried to sell so they could live and the other group tried to keep you from selling so they could live.

  The farmer is a pretty independent individual. He wants to be a conservative individual. He wants to be an honorable individual. He wants to pay his debts. But it was hard. The rank-and-file people of this state—who were brought up as conservatives, which most of us were—would never act like this. Except in desperation.

  There were a few who had a little more credit than the others. They were willing to go on as usual. They were mostly the ones who tried to break the picket lines. They were the ones who gained at the expense of the poor. They had the money to buy when things were cheap. There are always a few who make money out of other people’s poverty. This was a struggle between the haves and the have-nots.

  The original bankers who came to this state, for instance. When my father would borrow $100, he’d get $80. And when it was due, he’d pay back the $100 and a premium besides that. Most of his early borrowings were on this basis. That’s where we made some wealthy families in this country.

  We did pass some legislation. The first thing we did was stop the power of the judges to issue deficiency judgments. The theory was: the property would come back to you someday.

  The next law we passed provided for committees in every county: adjudication committees. They’d get the person’s debts all together and sit down with his creditors. They gave people a chance. People got time. The land banks and insurance companies started out hard-boiled. They got the farm, they got the judgment and then found out it didn’t do them any good. They had to have somebody to run it. So they’d turn around and rent it to the fella who lost it. He wasn’t a good renter. The poor fella lost all his capacity for fairness, because he couldn’t be fair. He had to live. All the renters would go in cahoots. So the banks and companies got smart and stopped foreclosing.

  Through a federal program we got a farm loan. A committee of twenty-five of us drafted the first farm legislation of this kind thirty-five years ago. We drew it up with Henry Wallace. New money was put in the farmers’ hands. The Federal Government changed the whole marketing program from burning 10-cent corn to 45-cent corn. People could now see daylight and hope. It was a whole transformation of attitude. You can just imagine... (He weeps.)

  It was Wallace who saved us, put us back on our feet. He understood our problems. When we went to visit him, after he was appointed Secretary, he made it clear to us he didn’t want to write the law. He wanted the farmers themselves to write it. “I will work with you,” he said, “but you’re the people who are suffering. It must be your program.” He would always give his counsel, but he never directed us. The program came from the farmers themselves, you betcha.

  Another thing happened: we had twice too many hogs because corn’d been so cheap. And we set up what people called Wallace’s Folly: killing the little pigs. Another farmer and I helped develop this. We couldn’t afford to feed 45-cents corn to a $3 hog. So we had to figure a way of getting rid of the surplus pigs. We went out and bought ’em and killed ’em. This is how desperate it was. It was the only way to raise the price of pigs. Most of ’em were dumped down the river.

  The hard times put farmers’ families closer together. My wife was working for the county Farm Bureau. We had lessons in home economics, how to make underwear out of gunny sacks, out of flour sacks. It was cooperative labor. So some good things came out of this. Sympathy toward one another was manifest. There were personal values as well as terrible hardships.

  Mrs. Heline interjects: “They even took seat covers out of automobiles and re-used them for clothing or old chairs. We taught them how to make mattresses from surplus cotton. We had our freedom gardens and did much canning. We canned our own meat or cured it in some way. There was work to do and busy people are happy people,”

  The real boost came when we got into the Second World War. Everybody was paying on old debts and mortgages, but the land valu
es were going down. It’s gone up now more than ever in the history of the country. The war.... [A long pause. ]

  It does something to your country. It’s what’s making employment. It does something to the individual. I had a neighbor just as the war was beginning. We had a boy ready to go to service. This neighbor one day told me what we needed was a damn good war, and we’d solve our agricultural problems. And I said, “Yes, but I’d hate to pay with the price of my son.” Which we did. [He weeps.] It’s too much of a price to pay....

  In ’28 I was chairman of the farm delegation which met with Hoover. My family had always been Republican, and I supported him. To my disappointment. I don’t think the Depression was all his fault. He tried. But all his plans failed, because he didn’t have the Government involved. He depended on individual organizations.

  It’s a strange thing. This is only thirty-five years ago—Roosevelt, Wallace. We have a new generation in business today. Successful. It’s surprising how quickly they forget the assistance their fathers got from the Government. The Farm Bureau, which I helped organize in this state, didn’t help us in ’35. They take the same position today: we don’t need the Government. I’m just as sure as I’m sitting here, we can’t do it ourselves. Individuals have too many different interests. Who baled out the land banks when they were busted in the thirties? It was the Federal Government.

  What I remember most of those times is that poverty creates desperation, and desperation creates violence. In Plymouth County—Le Mars—just west of us, a group met one morning and decided they were going to stop the judge from issuing any more deficiency judgments. This judge had a habit of very quickly O.K.’ing foreclosure sales. These farmers couldn’t stand it any more. They’d see their neighbors sold out.

  There were a few judges who would refuse to take the cases. They’d postpone it or turn it over to somebody else. But this one was pretty gruff and arrogant: “You do this, you do that, it’s my court.” When a bunch of farmers are going broke every day and the judge sits there very proudly and says: “This is my court...”; they say: “Who the hell are you?” He was just a fellow human being, same as they were.

  These farmers gathered this one particular day. I suppose some of ’em decided to have a little drink, and so they developed a little courage. They decided: we’ll go down and teach that judge a lesson. They marched into the courtroom, hats on, demanded to visit with him. He decided he would teach them a lesson. So he says: “Gentlemen, this is my court. Remove your hats and address the court properly.”

  They just laughed at him. They said, “We’re not concerned whose court this is. We came here to get redress from your actions. The things you’re doing, we can’t stand to have done to us any more.” The argument kept on, and got rougher. He wouldn’t listen. He threatened them. So they drug him from his chair, pulled him down the steps of the courthouse, and shook a rope in front of his face. Then, tarred and feathered him.

  The Governor called out the National Guard. And put these farmers behind barbed wire. Just imagine... [he weeps]...in this state. You don’t forget these things.

  JANE YODER

  A house in Evanston. The green grass grows all around. “We’re middle middle class. Not upper and not lower, either.” Her husband is a junior executive in a large corporation. They have two sons: the elder, a lieutenant in the air force; the other, soon to be married, a graduate of Notre Dame.

  “I love the trees. This house represents his struggle and mine. We bought this house on a shoestring. I’m terribly afraid of debt. If I have one fear, it’s the rich get richer when you buy on time. All these things that are hidden costs—like with this house, we had to buy it up quickly through a friend of my husband’s father. So it was bought without the real estate commission.

  “We’ve always paid our bills along the way. I have a real fear of being trapped into more than I need. I just turn away from it. Security to me is not what we have, but what we can do without. I don’t want anything so badly that I can’t wait for it. I think a second television set in our bedroom. might be kind of nice. But I can dismiss it. We have one. How many can you watch?

  “We got married in July of 1940. This cocktail table is an early decision in those days. And that end table. So my brothers come in, and they say, ‘It’s amazing. Same stuff is here, and you’ve added to it. By God, how did you do it?’ ”

  Her father was a blacksmith in a small central Illinois mining town. There were seven children. The mines closed “early, about ‘28 or ’30.” The men, among them her father, went to other towns, seeking jobs.

  During the Depression, my father took a great deal of psychological abuse. Oh, tremendous. This brother-in-law that was superintendent of the mine... I look at these two men.... I really think my father had a marvelous mind. I wonder what he had the potential to become....

  He’s like something out of Dostoyevsky. My father was, I think, terribly intelligent. He learned to speak English, a couple of languages, and prided himself on not being like the rest in our neighborhood. He was constantly giving us things from either the paper or some fiction and being dramatic about it... “down with these people that didn’t want to think.” Just as proud of his kids...but he was schizophrenic. He could look at himself a little bit, and then just run like hell. Because what he saw was painful.

  We were struggling, just desperate to be warm. No blankets, no coats. At this time I was in fourth grade. Katie28 went to Chicago and bought an Indian blanket coat. I remember this incident of that Indian blanket coat. [Gasps.] Oh, because Katie came home with it and had it in her clothes closet for quite a while. And I didn’t have a coat. I can remember putting on that coat in Sue Pond’s house. I thought, oh, this is marvelous, gee. I took that coat home, and I waited till Sunday and wore it to church. And then everybody laughed. I looked horrid. Here was this black-haired kid, with a tendency to be overweight. My God, when I think of that.... But I wore that coat, laugh or not. And I can remember thinking: the hell with it. I don’t care what...it doesn’t mean a thing. Laugh hard, you’ll get it out of your system. I was warm.

  Before that I had one coat. It must have been a terrible lightweight coat or what, but I can remember being cold, just shivering. And came home, and nothing to do but go to bed, because if you went to bed, then you put the coat on the bed and you got warm.

  The cold that I’ve known. I never had boots. I think when I got married, I had my first set of boots. In rainy weather, you just ran for it, you ran between the raindrops or whatever. This was luxuriating to have boots. You simply wore your old shoes if it was raining. Save the others. You always polished them and put shoe trees in them. You didn’t have unlimited shoe trees, either. When the shoes are worn out, they’re used around the house. And of the high heels, you cut the heels down and they’re more comfortable.

  We tell our boys: you have a black sweater, a white sweater, and a blue sweater. You can’t wear ten sweaters at once, you can only wear one. What is this thing? ... some of the people that I know have thirty blouses. Oh, my God, I have no desire to think where I’d hang them. For what? I can’t even grasp it.

  If we had a cold or we threw up, nobody ever took your temperature. We had no thermometer. But if you threw up and you were hot, my mother felt your head. She somehow felt that by bringing you oranges and bananas and these things you never had—there’s nothing wrong with you, this is what she’d always say in Croatian; you’ll be all right. Then she gave you all these good things. Oh, gee, you almost looked forward to the day you could throw up. I could remember dreaming about oranges and bananas, dreaming about them.

  My oldest brother, terribly bright, wanted to go on to school to help pay those grocery bills that were back there. But my youngest brother, Frankie, didn’t know. Oh, it just overwhelms me sometimes when I think of those two younger brothers, who would want to get some food and maybe go to the store. But they would see this $900 grocery bill, and they just couldn’t do it.

  We all laugh now, b
ecause Frankie is now down in New Mexico, and superintendent of two mines. And we all say, “Remember, Frankie?” Frankie’s “To košta puno?” That’s “Did it cost a lot?” Everything that came into the house, he’d say, “To košta puno?”

  Did it cost much? No matter what you brought in: bread and eggs and Karo syrup. Oh, Karo syrup was such a treat. I don’t remember so much my going to the store and buying food. I must have been terribly proud and felt: I can’t do it. How early we all stayed away from going to the store, because we sensed my father didn’t have the money. So we stayed hungry. And we talked about it.

  I can think of the WPA...my father immediately got employed in this WPA. This was a godsend. This was the greatest thing. It meant food, you know. Survival, just survival.

  How stark it was for me to come into nurses’ training and have the girls—one of them, Susan Stewart, lived across the hall from me, her father was a doctor—their impressions of the WPA. How it struck me. Before I could ever say that my father was employed in the WPA, discussions in the bull sessions in our rooms immediately was: these lazy people, the shovel leaners. I’d just sit there and listen to them. I’d look around and realize: sure, Susan Stewart was talking this way, but her father was a doctor, and her mother was a nurse. Well, how nice. They had respectable employment. In my family, there was no respectable employment. I thought, you don’t know what it’s like.

  How can I defend him? I was never a person who could control this. It just had to come out or I think I’d just blow up. So I would say, “I wonder how much we know until we go through it. Just like the patients we take care of. None of them are in that hospital by choice.” I would relate it in abstractions. I think it saved me from just blowing up.