Hard Times Read online

  Table of Contents

  OTHER BOOKS BY STUDS TERKEL

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  NOTE

  A Personal Memoir

  BOOK ONE

  The March

  Jim Sheridan

  A. Everette McIntyre

  Edward C. Schalk

  The Song

  E. Y. (Yip) Harburg

  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

  Lily, Roy and Bucky

  Diane

  Andy, 19

  Michael, 19

  Tad, 20

  Nancy, 21

  Marshall and Steve

  Hard Travelin’

  Ed Paulsen

  Pauline Kael

  Frank Czerwonka

  Kitty McCulloch

  Dawn, Kitty’s Daughter

  Louis Banks

  Emma Tiller

  Peggy Terry and Her Mother, Mary Owsley

  Kiko Konagamitsu

  Country Joe McDonald

  Cesar Chavez

  Fran

  Blackie Gold

  The Big Money

  William Benton

  Arthur A. Robertson

  Jimmy McPartland

  Sidney J. Weinberg

  Martin DeVries

  John Hersch

  Anna Ramsey

  Dr. David J. Rossman

  Man and Boy

  Alonso Mosely, 20

  Clifford Burke, 68

  God Bless’ the Child

  Jane Yoder

  Tom Yoder, Jane’s Son

  Daisy Singer

  Robin Langston

  Dynamite Garland

  Slim Collier

  Dorothe Bernstein

  Dawn, Kitty McCulloch’s Daughter

  Phyllis Lorimer

  Bob Leary

  Bonnie Laboring Boy

  Larry Van Dusen

  Jose Yglesias

  Evelyn Finn

  Hank Oettinger

  E. D. Nixon

  Joe Morrison

  Mary, 22

  Gordon Baxter

  Three Strikers

  Bob Stinson

  Gregory

  Charles Stewart Mott

  Scott Farwell

  Mike Widman

  Howard

  Dr. Lewis Andreas

  BOOK TWO

  Old Families

  Edward A. Ryerson

  Diana Morgan

  Mrs. Winston Roberts

  Noni Saarinen, Mrs. Roberts’ Maid

  Julia Walther

  Member of the Chorus

  Win Stracke

  High Life

  Sally Rand

  Tony Soma

  Alec Wilder

  Carl Stockholm

  Doc Graham

  Jerome Zerbe

  Judy

  At the Clinic

  Dr. Nathan Ackerman

  Sixteen Ton

  Buddy Blankenship

  Mary Owsley

  Aaron Barkham

  Edward Santander

  Roger

  The Farmer Is the Man

  Harry Terrell

  Oscar Heline

  Frank and Rome Hentges

  Orrin Kelly

  Emil Loriks

  Ruth Loriks, His Wife

  Clyde T. Ellis

  Emma Tiller

  Sumio Nichi

  Editor and Publisher

  Fred Sweet

  W. D. (Don) Maxwell

  Carey McWilliams

  BOOK THREE

  Concerning the New Deal

  Gardiner C. Means

  Raymond Moley

  C. B. (Beanie) Baldwin

  James A. Farley

  Joe Marcus

  Burton K. Wheeler

  David Kennedy

  John Beecher

  An Unreconstructed Populist

  Congressman C. Wright Patman

  Peroration

  Colonel Hamilton Fish

  Scarlet Banners and Novenas

  William L. Patterson

  Max Shachtman

  Dorothy Day

  Fred Thompson

  Saul Alinsky

  The Doctor, Huey and Mr. Smith

  George Murray

  Senator Russell Long

  Evelyn Finn

  Gerald L. K. Smith

  The Circuit Rider

  Claude Williams

  The Gentleman from Kansas

  Alf M. Landon

  A View of the Wood

  Christopher Lasch

  Robert A. Baird

  Tom, His Younger Son

  Peter, His Older Son

  Campus Life

  Pauline Kael

  Robert Gard

  Chance Stoner

  BOOK FOUR

  Merely Passing Through

  Edward Burgess

  Billy Green

  Scoop Lankford

  Three o‘Clock in the Morning

  Wilbur Kane

  A Cable

  Myrna Loy

  BOOK FIVE

  The Fine and Lively Arts

  Hiram (Chub) Sherman

  Neil Schaffner

  Paul Draper

  Robert Gwathmey

  Knud Andersen

  Little Brother Montgomery and Red Saunders

  Jack Kirkland

  Herman Shumlin

  Public Servant—The City

  Elizabeth Wood

  Mick Shufro

  Elsa Ponselle

  Sergeant Vincent Murray

  Earl B. Dickerson

  Dr. Martin Bickham

  Evictions, Arrests and Other Running Sores

  Mrs. Willye Jeffries

  Harry Hartman

  Max R. Naiman

  Judge Samuel A. Heller

  A Young Man From Detroit and Two Girl Companions

  Honor and Humiliation

  Eileen Barth

  Ward James

  Ben Isaacs

  Howard Worthington

  Stanley Kell

  Horace Cayton

  W. L. Gleason

  Strive and Succeed

  Harry Norgard

  General Robert E. Wood

  A. A. Fraser

  Tom Sutton

  Emma Tiller

  W. Clement Stone

  Ray Wax

  Epilogue

  Copyright Page

  OTHER BOOKS BY STUDS TERKEL

  American Dreams

  Lost and Found

  Division Street

  America

  Giants of Jazz

  “The Good War”

  An Oral History of World War II

  Hope Dies Last

  Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times

  My American Century

  Race

  How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel

  About the American Obsession

  The Spectator

  Talk About Movies and Plays

  with the People Who Make Them

  Talking to Myself

  A Memoir of My Times

  Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

  Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith

  Working

  People Talk About What They Do All Day and

  How They Feel About What They Do

  For my wife, my son, and my editor

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FRIENDS, acquaintances and, in astonishing number, strangers were gracious in offering suggestions. Without their hunches and tips, this work may not have been possible. Among these casual scouts: Richard Lamparski, Robert Cromie, Herman Kogan, Mike Royko, Lew Frank, Jr., Lucy Fairbank, Robert Sherrill, Phyllis Jackson, James Patton, Clifford and Virginia Durr, John Dierkes, Lou Gilbert, Phil McMartin, Sanka Bristow, Harry Boura
s, King Solomon, Brendan McMahon, Earl Doty, Lou Abraham, Elizabeth Cooper, Jesse Prosten and Leon Beverly.

  As in a previous work, Division Street: America, it was Cathy Zmuda, who did more than transcribe the hundreds of thousands of spoken words onto pages. She offered gratuitous editorial comments and thus provided me with a perspective that might otherwise have been missing.

  My colleagues at radio station WFMT, notably Norm Pellegrini, Ray Nordstrand and Lois Baum, were remarkably understanding and ingenious during my leaves of absence. My daily programs, re-broadcasts, had an air of contemporaneity, thanks to them. My gratitude, too, to Jim Unrath for beyond-the-call-of-duty chores as my companion and chauffeur, during a memorable trip through Arkansas.

  Especially am I grateful to my editor, André Schiffrin, whose idea this was. His insistence and quiet encouragement are evident in all these pages. And to his perceptive associates, Verne Moberg and Linda Faulhaber, for their bright-eyed look at what was becoming burdensome matter—a salute.

  Foreword

  (January-February 1986)

  Hard times come again no more …

  As these words are being written, the Stephen Foster lyric rolls around in my head like a loose cannonball.

  It is early in 1986, yet the Dirty Thirties come to mind. The bleak decade was so defined by a long-gone Congressman, whose remembrances you will find in these pages.

  How come this foreboding reflection? The Six O’clock News and the financial sections of our most respected journals inform us, via Administration handouts, that things have seldom looked better. Even the phrase BOOM YEAR is occasionally headlined in a spirit of cheery prophecy.

  True, there is the casual caveat, solemnly offered: something to do with “deficits.” But aside from the warnings of the usual Cassandras, it’s nothing to cause sleepless nights. It’s too arcane a word anyway, an accountant’s term. It’s nothing like “hunger” or “homeless.” These shadow words appear back in the feature pages, as “human interest” stories, adjacent to the gossip columns and theatrical news.

  Up front are IMPORTANT developments. Look at the market. “Stocks jump another 12 … boosting the Dow-Jones industrial average to a record and proving that optimism over economic growth and corporate earnings remains high.”1 Look at Dow-Jones. Look at the corporate ads, offered with an air of Responsibility. Look at the bright and morning faces of Business Administration School graduates, attaché cases responsibly in hand, as they commute to the bustling office and the even more bustling Floor.

  Unavoidably, you look at the face of the farmer as he is caught by the TV camera. You know the one: the desperate Iowan, who killed his neighbor and himself. I believe a minor bank official got it, too. It wasn’t his fault either. He was as distraught as the man who killed him. It was bigger than both of them.

  Last month, in Union County, which has the richest land in South Dakota, a young Farmers Home Administration supervisor killed his wife, daughter, son and dog while they slept, then went down to his office and shot himself dead. He left a note: “The job has got pressure on my mind, pain on left side.” … Because he was an out-of-stater, the F.H.A. moved him about the state, apparently figuring he would be more willing to get tough with local farmers who were behind on their loan payments than would a native South Dakotan.2

  Who do I shoot? cried out Muley Graves, Steinbeck’s near-crazed Okie, as he was being bulldozed off the land. God, I don’t know, replied the town’s bank officer, who was going sort of crazy himself.

  Muley was a small farmer of the Thirties. The Iowan was a small farmer of the Eighties. Though a half-century separates them, their tether’s end was commonly caused: neither could meet the payments.

  Never since the Great Depression has the family farmer experienced such hardship, such despair. Scores of thousands are, with a growing sullenness, sampling the grapes of wrath. If help is not forthcoming one way—say, from Big Guv’mint—they will seek another. It’s a natural for the nearest con artist at hand.

  Kearney, Nebraska—Huddled under blankets last weekend in a cold, dark grain-storage shed, 200 men and women from around the Midwest listened intently to a tall man in a dark business suit pledge to take up arms in defense of dispossessed farmers. “Christ told us he didn’t come to bring peace but to bring us a sword,” said the boyishly handsome 32-year-old Larry Humphreys. “When the banking system collapses, the logical thing to do is to come out bearing arms… . It’s pretty much common knowledge that most of the international banks are Jewish… .”3

  There was farm anger and militancy in the Thirties too, but with a difference. The Posse Comitatus and the Aryan Nation would have been hooted off the wheatlands as clownish and diversionary. There was some awareness of root causes, an awareness that has diminished considerably during a half-century of amnesia. The farmers of the Thirties drew a bead on Washington.

  Emil Loriks of South Dakota remembers: “The situation was tense in ten or eleven states. You could almost smell the powder. When Governor Herring of Iowa called out the militia, Milo Reno4 said, ‘Hold off. I’ll not have the blood of innocent people on my hands.’ We had a heck of a time getting the farmers off Highway 75. There were probably a thousand of them out there. Reno called a meeting at Sioux City. About thirty thousand farmers showed up. We decided to go to Washington and settle for a farm program. If Roosevelt hadn’t come in in ‘32, we’d a’ been in real trouble.”

  Then and Now. In the Thirties, an Administration recognized a need and lent a hand. Today, an Administration recognizes an image and lends a smile. Larry Humphreys recognizes a bitter fruit, ripe for the picking.

  The latest communique from Chicago’s Far South Side informs us that the Southworks of U.S. Steel is laying off six thousand. That leaves a thousand on the job—for the time being. It had not been unexpected. The community had known it was coming: merely a few more thousand swelling the roster of idle hands in heavy industry.

  Recently, Ed Sadlowski, a union officer, whose grandfather, father, and himself were steelworkers, drove me around the plant area. Like Leslie Howard, the dreamy hero of the film Berkeley Square, I was transported into another time. The Englishman found himself a subject of George IV. I found myself reliving the last days of Herbert Hoover’s Presidency.

  Smokeless chimneys. No orange flashes in the sky. Empty parking lots. Not a Chevy or a Ford to be seen, not even for those with 20–20 vision. An occasional abandoned jalopy, yes, evoking another image of the Thirties. Ours was the only moving vehicle for miles around. A stray dog; no humans. And it wasn’t that cold a day. In fact, the weather was unseasonably mild, accentuating the landscape’s bleakness.

  The business end of the neighborhood wasn’t all that busy either. A boarded-up store or two or three. Ed pointed at a men’s clothing store: Open For Business. “He’s closing next month.”

  South Chicago has joined Youngstown, Johnstown, and Gary. Steel Town circa Eighties has become Ghost Town circa Thirties. Recently, at an art-film house, I saw Willard Van Dyke’s 1938 documentary, Valley Town. It was Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a steel city of the Great Depression, stone cold dead. It was an experience of déjà vu in reverse. I saw Ed Sadlowski’s South Chicago

  Where to? What next? At the time Carl Sandburg raised those questions in his celebrated long poem, he was assuming a tribal remembrance, generations hence. He did not count on a generation’s amnesia. Would he have today renamed his work The People, Maybe?

  As newspapers gather in my living room, in the manner of an old bum’s bundle, last week’s and the week’s before, I’m able to make out headlines about bullish markets. A stray item in the same week-old edition catches my eye. Dateline, Waterloo, Iowa: “Another 200 employees will be laid off at Deere and Co., bringing to more than 1,000 the number of workers idled at the plant since October.” Don Page of UAW Local 838 is quoted: “You keep saying it can’t get worse, but it does.”

  It appears that Don Page and the President are on different wave lengths; certainly
not on the same planet. Today’s Murdoch headline positively glows: THE GREAT COMEBACK. Subheadline: U.S. Grows Stronger Every Day —Reagan. Though the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are less flamboyant, they are equally euphoric.

  Back to the bundle. Dateline, Schenectady, N.Y.: “At least 1,500 jobs will be eliminated this year at General Electric’s turbine division… .” In 1974, 29,000 were employed at the plant. By 1980, it was under 17,000.

  As the comics page is turned—barely discernible, pentimento-esque, are the outlines of Bloom County—there’s a serious message from Eastern Airlines: 1,700 attendants will be fired and the pay of the survivors will be cut 20 percent. The Transport Workers Union explains elsewhere that it’s a 32 percent cut in real wages.

  AT&T, as well, has an announcement. It does not appear in its TV messages. There is no need for actor Cliff Robertson here. Its Aurora plant roster will be cut from 4,000 to 1,500. As Kurt Vonnegut would say, So it goes.

  Last week, near my building of work, a line of young people was snaking all around the block. At first I thought they were hopefuls awaiting Chicago Bears tickets. There was one such line a block away. This file was overwhelmingly black, about two hundred. One of these hopefuls, age nineteen, told me he and the others were job applicants. Later that day, an acquaintance in the personnel department let me know there were about five openings.

  Ed Paulsen was nineteen in 1931. He was a job applicant, too. San Francisco. “I’d get up at five in the morning and head for the waterfront. Outside the Spreckels Sugar Refinery, outside the gates, there would be a thousand men. You know dang well there’s only three or four jobs. The guys would come out with two little Pinkerton cops: ‘I need two guys for the bull gang. Two guys to go into the hole.’ A thousand men would fight like a pack of Alaskan dogs to get through there. Only four of us would get through.”

  Young Paulsen took to the road, along with millions of others. He rode the freights. Half the time, the boxcar, standing room only, was his home. Somewhere out there, in Kansas or Nebraska or who knows where, there might be a job of some sort.

  A black World War Two vet, Louis Banks, shares the memory. “Black and white, it didn’t make any difference who you were, ‘cause everybody was poor. All friendly, sleep in a jungle. Sometimes we sent one hobo to walk, to see if there were any jobs open. He’d come back and say: Detroit, no jobs. He’d say: they’re hirin’ in New York City. Sometimes, fifteen, twenty guys were in that one boxcar. More. Women even, quite a few tryin’ to disguise themselves. Oh, everybody was ridin’, hopin’.”