Studs Terkel’s Legacy: A Vivid Window on the Great Depression

ADAM COHEN
NYT, November 8, 2008

After the great crash of 1929, the Wells-Grand Hotel in Chicago began losing guests. The ones who remained had more time for idle pastimes. “The decks of cards were wearing out more quickly” and “the black and red squares of the checkerboard were becoming indistinguishable.”

Those are the recollections of Studs Terkel, from his classic oral history of the Great Depression, “Hard Times.” I found myself re-reading the book this week because of the confluence of two unhappy events: the economic downturn and the death of Mr. Terkel on Oct. 31. He was 96.

I knew Mr. Terkel a bit — enough to appreciate his gentle nature, his deep interest in people of all sorts and his drive to reform the world. As I turned the pages of “Hard Times,” I was struck by the remarkable fit between historian and subject.

In Mr. Terkel’s wide-ranging interviews, the horrors of the Depression come through vividly. A manual laborer on the San Francisco waterfront recalled that when a sugar refinery offered four jobs to a crowd massed at the gates, “a thousand men would fight like a pack of Alaskan dogs” over them.

Dorothy Day, the Catholic social activist, told Mr. Terkel that in 1933 and 1934, “there were so many evictions on the East Side, you couldn’t walk down the streets without seeing furniture on the sidewalk.” An African-American hobo, Louis Banks, said that when he rode on top of boxcars, there was a railroad policeman who wouldn’t ask him to get off the train; he would just shoot.

Rich people also suffered in the Depression, and though they generally had more resources to fall back on, Mr. Terkel documented their woes with the same care he devoted to the hardest hit. Diana Morgan, a young woman from a wealthy Southern family, spoke of returning home from college and finding no cook or cleaning woman. The telephone had been disconnected. “And this was when I realized that the world was falling apart,” Ms. Morgan said.

Mr. Terkel noted the heavy psychological toll the Depression took on Americans. “The suddenly idle hands blamed themselves, rather than society,” he recalled. “No matter that others suffered the same fate, the inner voice whispered, ‘I’m a failure.’ ”

Radicalism swept the land, several of Mr. Terkel’s interview subjects recalled. “People were talkin’ revolution all over the place,” Joe Morrison, a steel worker, said. “You met guys ridin’ the freight trains and so forth, talkin’ about what they’d like to do with a machine gun.” In the Farm Belt, farmers frequently resorted to violence, including the near-lynching of an Iowa judge considered too willing to grant foreclosures.

Mr. Terkel, who worked for the Work Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project, was highly sympathetic to the New Deal. The book contains a whole section of New Dealers reminiscing, including the economist Joe Marcus, who recalled the satisfaction of being part of Roosevelt’s crusade. “Laws could be changed,” Mr. Marcus said. “So could the conditions of people.”

Jane Yoder of Evanston, Ill., told Mr. Terkel how miraculous it was when her father, an unemployed blacksmith, found a W.P.A. job. “This was a godsend,” she said. “It meant food, you know. Survival, just survival.”

“Hard Times” does not romanticize the Depression, but at least a few of Mr. Terkel’s subjects managed to find silver linings. E.Y. Harburg was a young businessman whose company went bust after the crash. His friend Ira Gershwin told him to get a pencil and a rhyming dictionary and get to work. “When I lost my possessions, I found my creativity,” Mr. Harburg said. “I felt I was being born for the first time.”

He later wrote “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” the Depression victim’s anthem, and the lyrics to songs in “The Wizard of Oz.”

“Hard Times” ends with an interview with Virginia Durr, a grand old Alabama woman I knew years ago when I lived in the state. Mrs. Durr, who fought the poll tax and bailed out Rosa Parks when she was arrested before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, was raised in genteel, sheltered circumstances. The Depression transported her.

“It was the first time I had seen the other side of the tracks,” Mrs. Durr told her good friend Mr. Terkel. “The rickets, the pellagra — it shook me up. I saw the world as it really was.”

She seems to have been speaking for Mr. Terkel, who also came of age in the 1930s. His lifelong empathy for the disenfranchised was rooted in the troubled era recalled so vividly in “Hard Times.”