Hard Times

Hard Times Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression By Studs Terkel. Random House. 1970. $8.95. 462 pp. VICTOR HOAR Harold Clurman called them "The Fervent Years." Leo Gurko, "The Angry Decade." Louis Filler, nThe Anxious Years." Isabel Leighton, "The Aspirin Age." Edmund Wilson, 11 American Jitters." For Studs Terkel, the years of the Great Depression were, quite simply, "Hard Times." The discovery of the Great Depression was one of the minor spectacles of the past decade. Probably because Americans could not make sense of the Sixties, they turned to the Thirties, a time when many of us came of age, a time, it now seems, when America started over again. It may be that urenewal" is what the two eras have most in common for if we sloughed off the post-Great War recklessness as we lined up for soup and bread, so have we more recently denounced "middletown." Great and strange things came of the Depression but we have no way yet of knowing what will come of the Sixties. The historians and biographers and critics have just about had their day: Leuchtenburg, and Aaron, and Bird, and Schlesinger. Two motion pictures found the mark for us: Bonnie and Clyde featured and then mythologized a pair of scruffy killers who established for a later generation something of the value of, if not the style of, shall we say, dissent. The motion of their jerking, lurching deaths merged into the manic shuffle of the marathon dancers in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Grotesques, one and all, but they made it clear that we in the audience might be just as grotesque. Comes now, at long last, the vox populi, 150 Americans ready and quite willing to tell of the Depression years, to tell of the pain and the frustration and the terror, to bear witness, and finally, in a curious way, to celebrate. In an extraordinary tour de force which is at once a volume of primary sources and a work of art, Studs Terkel, a Chicago broadcaster and a socialhistorian of no mean accomplishment, has compiled an oral history of the Great Depression, calling it Hard Times. Terkel's book is the second published in the past year to make such thorough and dramatic use of tape-recorded interviews of participants and eye-witnesses to THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. 1, NO. 2 1 FALL 1970 history.The other volume is T. Harry Williams' Huey Long for which, in the absence of any significant collection of documents, the author interviewedthree hundred of Long's associates, relatives, friends and enemies.Professor Williams' study is the finished academic product so faras oral history is concerned: the interviews are used as sources of information and for colorful anecdote. Terkel's account, on the other hand,is essentially the raw material, a source-book, only edited for the sakeof dramatic effect and space. Organized around a series of familiar eventsand experiences, both singular and typical: the Bonus March, the NewDeal, strikes, farmers, the arts, Hard Times is the autobiography ofan age. FromNew York then, comes Yip Harburg who wrote "Brother, Can YouSpare a Dime" and who, by losing his money, found his particular genius.And William Benton who put Pepsodent on "Amos and Andy" andwho once owned MUZAK. And Jerome Zerbe, society photographer, whosetwo favorite people of that time were Mr. and Mrs. William Vanderbilt."Rose and Bill." From Chicago comes Dr. Lewis Andreas, the hero of the Republic SteelMassacre in 1937 and the protagonist of Meyer Levin's Citizens. AndLawyer Max Naiman who appears in Richard Wright's Native Son. AndHarry Hartman of the Cook County Bailiff's Office who served repossessionpapers on the poor: "It was a real tough time, but we tried tomakeit along with a smile." And Charles Stewart Mott, multi-millionaire philanthropist from FlL1t, Michigan. Question: .l'IDo you remember seeing lines of unemployed men?" Answer: "I recollect there were such things." And Gardiner Means, Raymond Moley, Beanie Baldwin, Jim Farley and Burton K. Wheeler who were concerned with or about the New Deal. Hamilton Fishis there too though he believes that Roosevelt "had all this fanatical, radical legislation introduced. They...