Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression

“Congressman C. Wright Patman”

A congressman from Texas for more than forty years, Patman recalls his efforts on behalf of the World War I veterans who made the Bonus March on Washington in 1932. He bemoans the fact that the federal government welcomes lobbyists with open arms, but “[w]hen the poor come to town, they’re trouble makers” (283).

Patman describes the impeachment of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon in January 1932. Patman claims that documents related to the impeachment vanished from his office, most likely stolen and destroyed by Treasury officials and/or the FBI. Patman believes that moneyed interests control the federal government, the elected elements of which are virtually meaningless.

“Colonel Hamilton Fish”

Fish served in World War I and then in Congress. In the early 1930s, he chaired a committee that investigated communism in America. He loves his fellow veterans but believes that Communists had infiltrated the Bonus March of 1932. He does not think President Roosevelt was a Communist, but he does think Roosevelt hurt the country.

Fish recalls that Roosevelt’s original program was fiscally conservative, but the president’s advisors, the so-called “Brain Trust,” turned things in a radical direction. Fish notes that unemployment remained very high throughout Roosevelt’s first two terms and that this was why, in Fish’s view, Roosevelt wanted the US to get into the Second World War. Fish also denounces Roosevelt for seeking a third term in 1940. Fish concludes by contending that socialism could work only if people were angels, which they are not.

“William L. Patterson”

Patterson studied law, became a Communist, went to the Soviet Union for three years, and returned to America in 1930. He organized hunger marches in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area and recalls that President Roosevelt “save[d] capitalism from itself.”

Patterson describes at length the infamous 1931 Scottsboro case, in which nine Black men riding a freight train from Tennessee to Alabama were accused of raping two young white girls. One of the girls, Ruby Bates, explained that she had been forced into prostitution at thirteen and pressured, on threat of imprisonment, into making the accusation against the Black men. She later cooperated with the defense. When the US Supreme Court refused to release the men who had been falsely accused, Patterson began “to see the role of the American Government in the persecution of the Negro people” (296).

“Max Shachtman”

A member of the American Socialist Party in the 1960s, Shachtman describes the history of the American Communists and of leftist radicalism in general during the Depression. He recalls that in the first half of the 1930s, it was easy to interest unemployed workers in protesting and marching for jobs, but it was difficult to interest them in communism.

Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, coupled with the fusion of New Deal and labor politics, gave Communists their opening in the second half of the decade, when radicals and liberals alike were united against fascism. Soon the Communists began working inside and influencing the Democratic Party, but the Communist Party in the US collapsed when it endorsed the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact, for this proved that the American Communist Party took its direction from Moscow. Shachtman sees the New Deal coalition between labor and ethnic minorities as a permanent feature in American politics, though he is saddened by the state of intellectual Leftism in the 1960s.  

“Dorothy Day”

Terkel interviews Day at the New York City headquarters of The Catholic Worker. Day, nearly 70, describes herself paradoxically as a Socialist, Communist, and Christian. First and foremost, she believes in pacifism and anarchism. She recalls the Nazi–Communist conflicts of the 1930s, as well as wars in Asia and Africa, and insists that “the teachings of Christ, the Sermon on the Mount” (303) are the only answers to such strife. She recognizes the need for the federal government, but she supported neither the New Deal nor Social Security because she believes that concentrated power is an evil. She credits the Communists for their successes in unionization and in pressing for immediate relief, but she denounces them for trying to achieve their broader agenda by force. She concludes that another Depression might be a relief because everyone knows that the affluent society of the 1960s is fueled by war.

“Fred Thompson”

In 1922, Thompson joined the International Workers of the World (IWW), a labor union that welcomed every kind of worker. He describes the IWW as less dogmatic than the Communists, who were beholden to Moscow. He recalls talk of revolution, although it was never concrete. He blames President Roosevelt and the New Deal for softening the labor movement, enabling “Unionism by permit—the NLRB, things of that sort,” and thus creating a situation in which “you don’t have to be a hero anymore” because your union leaders will handle grievances and everything operates with government oversight (309). This is how capitalism survived the 1930s. Unlike most of Terkel’s interviewees, Thompson derives hope from the attitudes of young people in the 1960s.

“Saul Alinsky”

Longtime Chicago-based community organizer, Alinsky describes his Depression-era efforts in Back of the Yards, a heavily-Catholic and badly-depressed area of the city. After three months spent “organizing, agitating, making trouble,” Alinsky “had the Catholic Church, the CIO, and the Communist Party working together” (312). He declined job offers from both John L. Lewis and President Roosevelt because, even though he supported the CIO and the New Deal, he wanted to preserve the autonomy of his local, community-based organizations.

“George Murray”

Editor and general manager of a Chicago newspaper from 1938 to 1945, Murray recalls his support for Dr. Francis Townsend and the radical plan for old-age pensions and other forms of relief that helped produce Social Security. Murray notes that Townsend did not possess a great economic mind, but Townsend took an interest in the plight of the elderly, which no one else did. Murray also contends that President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act in 1935 to prevent the enactment of Townsend’s more radical (i.e., fiscally generous) plan.

“Senator Russell Long”

Son of the famous Louisiana populist Governor Huey Long, who was shot and killed in 1935, Senator Russell Long describes his late father’s philosophy and legacy. In the Depression era, Huey Long believed that elected officials and others in Washington, DC were fleecing the public, so he called for programs that would distribute wealth more evenly. Senator Long also speculates that his father, if not for the assassination, would have run for president as a third-party candidate in 1936, which would have split the Democratic Party vote and perhaps even cost Roosevelt the election. Finally, Senator Long identifies Dr. Francis Townsend and Father Charles Coughlin as his father’s kindred political spirits. 

“Evelyn Finn”

Finn, who lived in Baton Rouge in 1935, describes hearing the news on the radio that Huey Long had been shot. Her brother was in attendance at the Louisiana state capitol on the day of the assassination. She also recalls that many of the men in Long’s political machine across Louisiana were extremely corrupt and would do nearly anything to secure votes.

“Gerald L.K. Smith

Smith, 71, was a pastor in Shreveport, Louisiana, when the Depression began. He was also an associate and admirer of Huey Long. Smith felt moved by his parishioners' plight and even used his friendship with Long to pressure local banks into canceling foreclosure notices. Smith hails Long as “the only man of this century who knew how to think like a statesman and campaign like a demagogue” (321).

Smith recalls that Long was alternately courted and hated by Communists and reactionaries alike. Smith complains that when he, Long, and other populists railed against the moneyed interests, they had to contend with false charges of anti-Semitism. Smith wrote Long’s eulogy. Smith then fought the corrupt men of Long’s political machine who, after Long’s death, made common cause with Roosevelt in hopes of enjoying New Deal largesse. Smith concludes by describing political collaborations with Henry Ford, Dr. Francis Townsend, and Father Charles Coughlin. 

“Claude Williams”

A Presbyterian evangelist in the Depression-era American South, Williams preached to congregations composed of laborers, Black and white alike. He “used the Bible as a workingman’s book,” (330) and in so doing he ran afoul of many traditional Presbyterians. Accused of being a Communist due to his support for organized labor, Williams lost his position in a number of churches and was even subjected to violence on account of his ministry to Southern Black people.

“Alf M. Landon”

Landon, 82, twice served as Governor of Kansas and in 1936 won the Republican presidential nomination. Landon describes the hard times of the early 1930s, which in Kansas were compounded by drought. Landon did not know what to do about the situation and explains that he always got along well with Roosevelt, that he never seriously disagreed with the New Deal, and that he “didn’t feel too bad” when he lost (336). Landon has no idea why the Republicans nominated him. On the way to the interview, Terkel spoke with a 30-year-old cab driver who confused Franklin Roosevelt with Teddy Roosevelt. On his way out of Topeka, Terkel met a 48-year-old cab driver who predicted another Depression.

“Christopher Lasch”

A historian and author in the late 1960s, Lasch offers an academic radical’s professional view of the Depression and New Deal. While there was some talk of revolution and a few pockets of revolutionary action, particularly in 1934, the New Deal was driven in large part by “industrialists descending on Washington” (338) hoping to preserve their own interests and prop up prices through “cartel-like arrangements” (339).

Lasch views the New Deal as a hodge-podge of ideas inside a framework that everyone agreed must remain capitalist. He blames the American Left of the 1930s for its failure to present viable alternatives to capitalism in the same way that early-20th-century Socialists did, and he applies the same criticism to the American Left of the 1960s.   

“Robert A. Baird”

Terkel describes Baird as “president of a large conglomerate” in the Northwest and among “the most powerful men in the region” (341). Baird describes his father’s post-Crash bankruptcy and his own post-college experience working in an auto plant in Detroit. Having worked alongside the men on the assembly line, Baird learned the value of unions and the importance of treating working men with respect.

“Tom, His Younger Son”

Tom, 21, is somewhere in Canada avoiding the draft. He sees his father as a Depression-era extremist who thinks the purpose of life is to make money, a salesman who has “become a king in welfare capitalism” in part by learning how to manage “company-minded unions” (344).

“Peter, His Older Son”

Peter, 24, is a full-time SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) organizer and spokesman for Weatherman, the SDS’s violent faction. He believes that his father is a “good person” who “plays a bad role in this society” (344). Peter wants to destroy capitalism, though he thinks his father still has hope that Peter might succeed him as president of the conglomerate. 

“Pauline Kael”

Kael recalls that at Berkeley in 1936, many of the students’ fathers had either abandoned their families in shame or died by suicide. She also remembers significant class divisions in the student body, including sorority girls who flaunted their wealth and fraternity boys who disrupted student demonstrations.

“Robert Gard”

At the University of Kansas in the 1930s, Gard has a friend who lived and slept inside a 1919 Model T Ford. Gard remembers “many breakdowns” and some “students actually starving,” though he also recalls “feverish intellectual discussion” of ideas to which he had never been exposed (348).

“Chance Stoner”

At the University of Virginia in the 1930s, Stoner promoted leftist radicalism, organized the undergraduates so as to retake the student government from the fraternities, and defied the racist dean by bringing a Black speaker to campus for the first time in decades. The university president also chastised him. Stoner concludes: “I was a troublemaker then. (Laughs.) I wish I still were” (349). In the late 1960s, Stoner worked on Wall Street.