[The third section contains notes on the content of the book, organized within a copy of the table of contents. Material in quotation marks is reproduced exactly as it appears in the original book.

p3	A Personal Memoir (and parenthetical comment)
BOOK ONE
THE MARCH
	Jim Sheridan	p13
p13	Sheridan was too young to be a WWI veteran, but he participated in the Bonus March on Washington.
	A. Everette Mclntyre	p17
p17	McIntyre became a Federal Trade Commissioner. He described how the 12th Infantry (US Army) dislodged the Bonus Marchers from Washington DC on or about June 26, 1932.
	Edward C. Schalk	p18
p18	Schalk was a WWI veteran who was part of the Bonus March.
THE SONG
	E. Y. (Yip) Harburg	p19
p19	Harburg wrote "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" whose lyrics are: "Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell, full of that Yankee-Doodle-de-dum. Half a million boots went sloggin' through Hell, I was the kid with the drum. Say, don't you remember, they called me Al -- It was Al all the time. Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal -- Brother, can you spare a dime. [Copyright 1932 by Harms, Inc. Owned by Warner Bros. Seven Arts Music.]
p20	The author had been trying to make a living by writing poetry before the Depression.
p20	"There was nothing else to do. I was doing light verse at the time, writing a poem here and there for ten bucks a crack. It was an era when kids at college were interested in light verse and ballads and sonnets. This is the early Thirties."
p20	"I was relieved when the Crash came. I was released. Being in business was something I detested. When I found that I could sell a song or a poem, I became me, I became alive. Other people didn't see it that way. They were throwing themselves out of windows."
p20	"Someone who lost money found that his life was gone. When I lost my possessions, I found my creativity. I felt I was being born for the first time. So for me the world became beautiful."
p20	"With the Crash, I realized that the greatest fantasy of all was business. The only realistic way of making a living was versifying. Living off your imagination."
p20	"We thought American business was the Rock of Gibraltar. We were the prosperous nation, and nothing could stop us now. A brownstone house was forever. You gave it to your kids and they put marble fronts on it. There was a feeling of continuity. If you made it, it was there forever. Suddenly the big dream exploded. The impact was unbelievable."
p20	"I was walking along the street at that time, and you'd see the bread lines. The biggest one in New York City was owned by William Randolph Hearst. He had a big truck with several people on it, and big cauldrons of hot soup, bread. Fellows with burlap on their shoes were lined up all around Columbus Circle, and went for blocks and blocks around the park, waiting."
p20	"There was a skit in one of the first shows I did, Americana. This was 1930. In the sketch, Mrs. Ogden Reid of the Herald Tribune was very jealous of Hearst's beautiful bread line. It was bigger than her bread line. It was a satiric, volatile show. We needed a song for it."
p20	"On stage, we had men in old soldiers' uniforms, dilapidated, waiting around. And then into the song. We had to have a title. And how do you do a song so it isn't maudlin? Not to say: my wife is sick, I've got six children, the Crash put me out of business, hand me a dime. I hate songs of that kind. I hate songs that are on the nose. I don't like songs that describe a historic moment pitifully."
p20	"The prevailing greeting at that time, on every block you passed, by some poor guy coming up, was: "Can you spare a dime?" Or: "Can you spare something for a cup of coffee?" . . . "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" finally hit on every block, on every street. I thought that could be a beautiful title. If I could only work it out by telling people, through the song, it isn't just a man asking for a dime."
p20	"This is the man who says: I built the railroads. I built that tower. I fought your wars. I was the kid with the drum. Why the hell should I be standing in line now? What happened to all this wealth I created?"
p21	"I think that's what made the song. Of course, together with the idea and meaning, a song must have poetry. It must have the phrase that rings a bell. The art of song writing is a craft. Yet, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" opens up a political question. Why should this man be penniless at any time in his life, due to some fantastic thing called a Depression or sickness or whatever it is that makes him so insecure?"
p21	"In the song the man is really saying: I made an investment in this country. Where the hell are my dividends? Is it a dividend to say: "Can you spare a dime?" What the hell is wrong? Let's examine this thing. It's more than just a bit of pathos. It doesn't reduce him to a beggar. It makes him a dignified human, asking questions -- and a bit outraged, too, as he should be."
p21	"Everybody picked the song up in '30 and '31. Bands were playing it and records were made. When Roosevelt was a candidate for President, the Republicans got pretty worried about it. Some of the network radio people were told to lay low on the song. In some cases, they tried to ban it from the air. But it was too late. The song had already done its damage."
SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
	[Various baby boomers complain that their parents use stories from the Depression to make them feel guilty about their affluence. I did not take notes on it because it said more about the 1960s "Generation Gap" (a secondary theme of Terkel's book) than it did about the Depression.]
	Lily, Roy and Bucky	p22
	Diane	p24
	Andy	p25
	Michael	p25
	Tad	p25
	Nancy	p26
	Marshall and Steve	p26
HARD TRAVELIN'
	Ed Paulsen	p29
p29	He was from South Dakota, but at age 14, he started "ridin' the freights" in 1926. ...
p30	... He ended up in San Francisco by 1931.
p32	The American Legion organized the resistance to hoboes and other people traveling to look for work. They represented the interests of "Main Street."
p34	Hoboes acquired a "coyote mentality" which led them to scavenge everything that they could.
	Pauline Kael	p35
p35	Kael was a film critic who grew up in San Francisco. Her mother got in trouble with the neighbors for feeding hoboes during the Depression.
	Frank Czerwonka	p35
p35	Czewonka worked as a garbage man for the city of Chicago. ...
p36	... He was laid off in 1928 and went to work for his stepfather, who operated a speakeasy. "In our neighborhood, we wouldn't drink moonshine, just refined alcohol. My stepfather would peddle the moonshine on the South Side."
p36	The gas company men helped by hooking up an unmetered gas line for a price. Everyone in the neighborhood cooperated in order to defraud the utility company.
p36	"Our speakeasy had a candy- front store. That was the come-on. The fuzz wasn't botherin' us. They were just shakin' down the syndicate. They were trying to get money from them because it was a big operation. They'd take out two truckloads of this moonshine. In five-gallon cans that were always a quart short. Even the one-gallon cans were about four ounces short. They never gave you a full measure. That was the standard practice in those days. They were gyppers."
	Kitty McCulloch	p39
p39	McCulloch was a homemaker during the Depression and remembered hoboes coming to her house to ask for food and work. She described some as smelling of liquor and others as deserving. ["deserving poor" and "undeserving poor"]
	Dawn, Kitty's Daughter	p40
p40	Dawn was a young girl during the Depression. She described the marks that hoboes left on houses so others would know where to ask for food.
	Louis Banks	p40
p40	He was born on a small family cotton farm near McGehee, Arkansas during the Depression. He came to Chicago as a young boy and by the end of his teen years, he was a prize fighter, worked as a chef, and hopped trains all over the country.
p42	Local employers benefitted from the Depression because the migrants provided nearly free labor and they could be disciplined easily because there were always more people waiting to take their jobs. In many ways, the Depression increased the ability of the rich to exploit the poor.
p43	Banks, a poor black man, said he learned that he could expect no kindness except from other hoboes.
p43	To escape the Depression, Banks joined the army. Other forms of escape included alcohol and jumping a train.
	Emma Tiller	p44
p44	Tiller was a black woman who worked as a cook in western Texas during the Depression.
p44	"Negroes would always feed these tramps."
p45	"It's very important to see people as people and not to try and see them through a book. Experience and age give you this. There's an awful lot of people that has outstanding educations, but when it comes down to common sense, especially about people, they don't really don't know."
	Peggy Terry and Her Mother, Mary Owsley	p45
p45	Owsley was born in Kentucky and married a boy from Oklahoma after World War I. They moved quite a bit, but lived in Oklahoma from 1929 to 1936.
p45	[Owsley] The oil boom started in Oklahoma in 1929 and it attracted people from all over.
p46	[Owsley] Oklahoma dust storms stained everything because they consisted of a mixture of sand and oil.
p47	[Terry] "But among the people that I knew, we all had an understanding that it wasn't are fault. It was something that had happened to the machinery. Most people blamed Hoover ..."
p48	According to the speaker, a white woman from west Texas, most people no longer help each other out (in 1970) like they did back in the Depression.
p48	The speaker hates Negroes ...
p49	... and doesn't like Mexicans either.
p50	A "Hooverville" was a shanty town constructed by homeless wanderers wherever they could find a place. People lived in "old, rusted-out car bodies, ... shacks made of orange crates, ... a piano box. This wasn't just a little section, this was maybe ten-miles wide and ten-miles long. People living in whatever they could junk together."
p50	"When I read the Grapes of Wrath ... that was like reliving my life. Particularly the part where they lived in this Government camp. ... And when I was reading Grapes of Wrath this was just like my life. I was never so proud of poor people before, as I was after I read that book."
p50	"I think that's the worst thing that our system does to people, it is to take away heir pride. It prevents them from being a human being. And wondering why the Harlem and why the Detroit. ... You get law and order in this country when people are allowed to be decent human beings. ..."
p50	"I don't think people were put on earth to suffer. I think that's a lot of nonsense. I think we are the highest development on the earth, and I think we were put here to live and be happy and to enjoy everything that's here. I don't think its right for a handful of people to get ahold of all the things that make living a joy instead of a sorrow. You wake up in the morning, and it consciously hits you -- it's just like a big hand that takes your heart and squeezes it -- because you don't know what the day is going to bring: hunger or you don't know."
	Kiko Konagamitsu	p51
p51	He was Japanese-American whose family had a farm in southern California before WWII.
	Country Joe McDonald	p52
p52	McDonald was the lead singer of a rock band, Country Joe and the Fish. He described what his father told him about the Depression.
	Cesar Chavez	p53
p53	His father was a farmer in the California Central Valley north of Yuma. They were forced out of their home in 1934.
p53	The local bank had to approve loans for farmers or else they would lose their land. If the local banker was crooked, he would foreclose on farmers whose land he wanted to acquire. He did that to Chavez' father and took their land.
p54	After the family lost their land, they became migrants. The kids went to school when they could, but they had to move often to "follow the crops."
p55	Once an employer promised to pay them to pick grapes, then kept coming up with excuses why he could not pay, until they got frustrated and left.
p55	"Labor strikes were everywhere. We were one of the strikingest families, I guess. My dad didn't like the conditions, and he began to agitate. ... [Did these strikes ever win?] Never."
p55	In Indio, California, they were refused service in a restaurant because they were Mexican.
p56	"In those days anybody asked questions, you became suspicious. Either a cop or a social worker."
	Fran	p57
p57	Fran was from an affluent Atlanta family in the 1960s.
	Blackie Gold	p57
p58	Gold was orphaned during the Depression and wound up serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps and the US Navy.
THE BIG MONEY
	William Benton	p60
p61	Benton was a US Senator from Connecticut and held important cabinet positions. In 1929, he was the assistant general manager in an advertising agency, Lord and Thomas. He left to form his own agency with Chester Bowles in 1929.
p61	"As the stock market plummeted into oblivion, Benton & Bowles went up into stardom. When I sold the agency in 1935, it was the single biggest office in the world. And the most profitable office."
	Arthur A. Robertson	p65
p65	He was a businessman who made himself into a millionaire by the time he was 24, before the Depression. He described how the stock market was "strictly a gambling casino with loaded dice" by 1929.
	Jimmy McPartland	p69
p69	McPartland was a jazz musician who was considered the heir to Bix Beiderbecke.
	Sidney J. Weinberg	p72
p72	He was a businessman at the time of the stock market crash who went on to become a senior partner with Goldman-Sachs Company.
	Martin DeVries	p74
p74	DeVries must have been a Chicago businessman, but the book doesn't say.
p74	The author discusses the blame for the Depression. Many of the people on bread lines "hadn't lived properly when hey were making it. They hadn't saved anything. ... People were wearing $20 silk shirts and throwing their money around like crazy. If they had been buying Arrow $2 shirts and putting the other eighteen in the bank, when the trouble came, they wouldn't have been in the condition they were in. ..."
p74	After Terkel asked if he thought the New Deal was responsible for people in the 1960s being unwilling to take low-paid work, DeVries answered "Certainly. This huge relief program they began. What do you think brings all of the colored people to Chicago and New York?" Terkel began to say "So when I say F.D.R. ..." and DeVries interrupted him with "... my blood begins to boil. The New Deal immediately attacked Wall Street. As far as the country was concerned, Wall Street was responsible for the upheavals. They set up the Securities and Exchanges Commission. That was all right. I know there were some evils. But these fellas Roosevelt put in the SEC were a bunch of young Harvard theorists. ...
p75	... Except for old Joe Kennedy. He was a robber baron. These New Dealers felt they had a mission to perform. Roosevelt attacked people -- with some reason. But without justice. All people on Wall Street are not crooks."
p75	"My friends and I often spoke about it. Especially after his hammy fireside chats. Here we were paying taxes and not asking for anything. Everybody else was asking for relief, for our money to help them out. . . . A certain amount of that is O.K., but when they strip you clean and still don't accomplish much, it's unfair."
p75	"They were do-gooders, trying to accomplish something. I give them credit for that. But they didn't listen to anybody who had any sense."
p75	"Hoover happened to be in a bad spot. The Depression came on, and there he was. If Jesus Christ had been there, he'd have had the same problem. It's just too bad for poor old Herbie that he happened to be there. This was a world-wide Depression. It wasn't Hoover's fault. In 1932, a Chinaman or a monkey could have been elected against him, no question about it."
	John Hersch	p75
p75	Hersch was a "senior partner in a large brokerage firm in Chicago" from 1924 to 1968.
p77	"The Bank Holiday of 1933 brought a certain kind of joyous devil-may-care mood. People were just gettin' along somehow. It was based on the theory: Good grief, it couldn't get much worse. They bartered things for things. ..."
p77	"Another remarkable thing about the Depression -- it never resulted in revolution. I remember that out in Iowa some place, there was a fellow named Reno [Milo Reno, leader of the Farm Holiday Association] who led a small following. There were some trucks turned over, and sheriffs weren't allowed to foreclose. But when you consider what was going on in the country -- the whole country was orderly: they just sat there and took it. In retrospect, it's amazing, just amazing. Either they were in shock or they thought something would come along and turn it around ... My wife has often discussed this with me. She thinks it's astonishing, the lack of violent protest, especially in 1932 and 1933."
	Anna Ramsey	p78
p78	Her father was a barber who bought an investment property before the Depression. He didn't lose it, but he was humiliated by the mortgage company. As a result, Anna grew up hating being in debt.
	Dr. David J. Rossman	p78
p78	Rossman was a psychiatrist from the upper middle class who had studied with Freud. He described the effect of the Depression on his clients and his own investments.
MAN AND BOY
	Alonso Mosely	p82
p82	He was a VISTA volunteer in a black community in the 1960s. He knew little about the Depression.
	Clifford Burke	p82
p82	Burke is "a pensioner" who spends most of his days volunteering in the "black ghetto" on the West Side of Chicago.
p82	"The Negro was born in depression. It didn't mean too much to him, The Great American Depression, as you call it. There was no such thing. The best he could be is a janitor or a porter or a shoeshine boy. It only became official when it hit the white man. If you can tell me the difference between the depression today and the Depression of 1932 for a black man, I'd like to know it."
p82	"We had one big advantage. Our wives, they could go to the store and get a bag of beans or a sack of flour and a piece of fat meat, and they could cook this. And we could eat it. Steak? A steak would kick in my stomach like a mule in a tin stable. Now you take the white fella, he ...
p83	... couldn't do this. His wife would tell him: Look, if you can't do any better than this, I'm gonna leave you. I seen it happen. He couldn't stand bringing home beans instead of steak and capon. And he couldn't stand the idea of going on relief like a Negro." . . .
p83	"Why did these big wheels kill themselves? They weren't able to live up to the standards they were accustomed to, and they got ashamed in front of their women. . . . "
p83	Burke worked as a teamster in a lumberyard for forty cents an hour, but the work was very uneven. "So I had another little hustle. I used to play pool pretty good. And I'd ride from poolroom to poolroom on this bicycle. ... Sometimes I'd come home with a dollar and a half extra. hat was a whole lot of money. Everybody was out trying to beat the other guy, so he could make it. It was pathetic."
p83	"I never applied for FWA or WPA, `cause as long as I could hustle, there was no point in beating the other guy out of a job, cuttin' some other guy out."
GOD BLESS' THE CHILD
	Jane Yoder	p84
p84	Yoder described herself as "middle, middle class" from Evanston, Illinois and said "I am terribly afraid of debt." ...
p85	... She and her husband got married in 1940. ...
p86	... She remembered owning only one coat and being very cold. They still spoke Croatian at home. She and her family were preoccupied with what things cost. "Karo syrup was such a treat. ... [I remember] 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."
p87	After she began nurse training, she was angry when other students described the people on WPA as "these lazy people, the shovel leaners." Yoder realized that they all came from privileged backgrounds so they didn't know what it was like to be poor.
	Tom Yoder, Jane's Son	p87
p87	He gave his ideas about the stories his mother told.
	Daisy Singer	p88
p88	Singer was six when the Depression started. She was the daughter of a self-made, second- generation, American-born, upper-middle-class, Jewish businessman from New York City.
	Robin Langston	p89
p89	Langston was a black social worker and jazz musician who grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
p90	"There was a unique thing about this black community. I wasn't like Chicago. There were Caucasians in the community. The police chief lived right in the heart of it. I guess there must have been ten white families within fifty feet of us. I remember feeding snotty-nosed white kids. It was the Depression because no whites and no blacks were working. The whites not working made it official."
p91	"Hot Springs was a unique place. It was a health resort. It depended on rich people coming in. They came to the race track with heir women. ... They came down [to the black neighborhood] and shot dice. They'd come down looking for women, too. The red-light district was always in the black area. The only white prostitutes you'd find would be in the hotels. They would be the high-priced ones. They would go with the Negro bellhop. Say, if the bellhop caught a politician, maybe she'd make a couple of hundred bucks. She'd give him some money, plus she'd go to bed with him."
p91	"The church I knew was controlled by City Hall. `Every Christmas we'll get these niggers some turkeys. We'll send somebody from the white school board to talk to them. We might let one of you come to our church, sing.' To keep us quiet like that. It was easy to control the black community in Hot Springs, because everything was geared towards money. O.K., you don't give us any problems, we'll let your gambling houses stay. We'll let you play policy. We'll let the black racketeer who's in charge of everything, we'll let him get the nigger out of jail on Saturday night. You can fight and whip your woman on Saturday night, just don't bother us over here. We'll give you a break, a suspended thirty- day sentence. We'll let you go home and be a good boy.'"
p91	"We'd get the Chicago Defender. hey had one edition or the North an another for the South. That's how we heard about the Scottsboro case. ... The Defender was read openly. It was brought down on a white railroad and thrown off a white boxcar. It was sold in the black community on the newsstands." ...
p92	"Roosevelt touched the temper of the black community. You did not look upon him as being white, black, blue or green. He was President Roosevelt. He had tremendous support through his wife. Yet the immediate image is `Great White Father.'"
p92	"The WPA and other projects introduced black people to handicrafts and trades. It gave Negroes a chance to have an office to work out of with a typewriter. It made us feel like there was something we could do in the scheme of things. I don't remember any serious black opposition to Roosevelt. When you see a blithe spirit, naturally you're attracted to it."
p92	"I think the powers-that-be missed the boat, during the Depression. There was a kind of integration of poverty. But even though everybody was poor, we still had this stiff-collar, white-shirted Puritanical Wilson thing going. So even though we were all in the same boat, I'm still white and you're still black, and so we don't need to get together." . . .
	Dynamite Garland	p92
p92	Garland was from a working class family in Cleveland who was very young during the Depression. Her father worked for the railroad until he lost his job during the Depression.
p93	"I remember all of a sudden we had to move. My father lost his job and we moved into a double-garage. The landlord didn't charge us rent for seven years. We had a coal stove, and we had to each take turns, the three of us kids, to warm our legs. It was awfully cold when you opened those garage doors. We would sleep with rugs and blankets over the top of us. Dress under the sheets."
p93	"In the morning, we'd get out and get some snow and put it on the stove and melt it and wash our faces. ..."
p93	On Sundays, the family used to go house-hunting. "hat was a recreation during the Depression. You'd get in the Model A with the family and go look at the houses. They were all for sale or rent. You'd go look and see where you could put this and where you could put that, and this is gonna be my room."
p94	"My father did the best he could. He used to stuff in the mailboxes those little sheets, `Pink Sheets for Pale Purses.' I think it was a left-wingish organization. My father disagreed with whatever philosophy was on there. He got $3 a week for this."
p94	"'Cause he got a job in Akron, delivering carry-out food, we moved there. That was a dandy place: dirt, smoke, my mother scrubbing all the time. We lived right on the railroad tracks. They used to throw us watermelons and things like that. When the trains slowed down, he used to jump on and have us kids pick up the coal."
p94	"I was about fourteen when I joined the NYA [National Youth Administration]. I used to get $12.50 every two weeks. Making footlockers. I gave half to my mother. This was the first time I could buy some clothes. After I bought some nice clothes, I decided I didn't want to be a nun. [Laughs]"
p94	"My girlfriend's father was in a new movement, Technocracy. I used to wear a badge with her 'cause it was my girlfriend. I remember the circular sort of thing on the badge."
p94	A footnote explains that Technocracy, which was popular before Roosevelt was elected, "was based upon a price system measured in units of energy rather than dollars and cents. The society envisioned was to be run by engineers and scientists. Founded by Howard Scott, a young engineer, it was the subject of much discussion. With the election of Roosevelt, it fell out of public grace and memory."
p95	When she got married, her husband earned $14 a week and spent half to pay of the debt from the wedding. "From $14 a week, we jumped to $65 a week, working in a defense plant. I sort of went to my head. Wow! Boy we were rich. First thing I did was to get me one of those red fur chubbies. I had to have a fur with that amount of money. ..."
p95	"They say if you're raised poor, you'll know how to handle money. We were raised poor as church mice. But when I get it, I blow it. It's a personality thing. I don't regret any of it. But still ... "
	Slim Collier	p95
p95	Collier, a bartender, was born in Waterloo, southern Iowa, in 1925, in a house without running water or electricity. His father was a farmer and a tool-and-die maker ...
p96	... at the John Deere tractor plant until he was laid off in 1931. That had a 160-acre farm planted mostly with corn.
p96	After his father went back to work part-time in 1933, Collier got a dime each week. He could buy a bag of popcorn and a movie ticket on Saturday. But "Cash was extremely rare. I remember having found a dollar and my ...
p97	... father gravely taking charge of it and doling it out to me a dime at a time."
	Dorothe Bernstein	p99
p99	Bernstein, a waitress, went into an orphan home in 1933 when she was about ten. She described how people who had no money could still get foods at stores because the storekeeper would rite down their purchases in an account book and accept payment whenever they got some money.
p99	She also mentioned that unlike today, there was no fear of strangers back then. "Then we didn't have any fear. You'd never think that if you'd walk by people, even strangers: gee, that person I got to be careful of. Nobody was really your enemy. these were guys who didn't have work. Who'd probably work if there was work. I don't know how they got where hey were going or where they ended up. They were nice men. You would never think they would do you bodily harm. they weren't bums. They were hard luck guys."
p99	She also mentioned eating so many sardines during that period that she can no longer stand the smell of them.
	Dawn, Kitty McCulloch's Daughter	p100
p100	McCulloch was the daughter of a white-collar family during the Depression. Her mother was a homemaker and her father worked "seventy-two hours, he worked so hard, and he couldn't see that it was necessary for people to strike." She also wrote about the importance of radio broadcasts during the Depression, and how her father agreed with Father Coughlin.
	Phyllis Lorimer	p101
p101	Lorimer grew up "in Greenwich, Connecticut, a lovely house. My family was extremely well off, but I always thought I was poor. All my cousins, everybody's father was a millionaire. My best friends had their own island. They each had their boat, and all had their jumping horses."
p101	She was in boarding school at Glendora, California, when the Depression started and had to withdraw. She had to live with her stepfather whom she disliked.
p101	"It was rough on me, the Thirties. I wasn't aware of it being with everyone else. I thought it was just personal. I was in no way aware that it was a national thing. Having grown up in some affluence, I was suddenly in a small court in Hollywood with a stepfather who was drunk and ghastly. My brother was still at Dartmouth, where he was fortunate enough not to know what was going on at home. Whatever money there was went to keep brother at Dartmouth. We were living on a form of relief. We had cans of tinned bully beef. And we had the gas turned off. My mother was an engaging lady who made everything a picnic. We cooked everything on an electric corn popper, so it was gay in certain aspects. (Laughs.) My ...
p102	... mother had humor and charm, so I didn't know it was a desperate situation."
p102	"My brother was socially oriented, a tremendous snob. Why we were eating bully beef, he was living extremely well at Dartmouth. Nobody told him how bad things were. He lived magnificently, with a socialite friend, in a house with a manservant. He came back and found the truth, and the truth was ghastly."
p102	When Lorimer finally decided that she needed to get a job, "Having gone to a proper lady's finishing school, I didn't know how to do anything. I spoke a little bad French, and I knew enough to stand up when an older person came into the room. As far as anything else was concerned, I was unequipped."
p103	She got a job at Warner Brothers film studio as a swimmer, diver and stunt actor in the first of the Busby Berkeley aquacade motion pictures. She earned $7.50 a day for risking her life.
p103	"Always having felt slightly rejected by Westhampton society, Greenwich society, Great Neck society, I had the feeling we weren't `it,' whatever `it' was. ... All of a sudden I found another group with whom I belonged. The ex-Olympic stars who were diving an swimming and the chorus girls who were working like mad. Suddenly I didn't care about my brother's friends, the socially important. He kept saying, `When they ask what you're doing, don't say you're a chorus girl.' I said, `I'm proud to be a chorus girl.' that used to destroy him."
	Bob Leary	p104
p104	Leary was a part-time cab driver and student in Manhattan who described what he knew of his father's experience during the Depression. "My father spent two years painting his father's house. He painted it twice. It gave him something to do. It prevented him from losing all of his -- well, I wouldn't say self-respect, because there were many, many people who were out of work. He wasn't alone."
p104	"He belonged to the Steamfitters' Union. They were putting up the old Equitable Building at the time. But I guess they ran out of steam, just around '29."
p104	"He never forgot it. I guess it does something to somebody to be out of work so long. It can affect your confidence. Not that it destroyed my father's self-confidence. But I could see how it affected his outlook on life, his reaction towards success. He was inordinately impressed by men who had made it in business. It's my feeling the Depression had something to do with this."
BONNIE LABORING BOY
	Larry Van Dusen	p105
p105	Van Dusen was a labor organizer most of his life. He left home at age 19 and hitchhiked and rode the rails around Colorado and Texas. By the 1930s, he was a social worker in Kansas City, where he "organized unemployed councils, participated in strikes, was arrested several times . . ."
p106	He described "brutality in the jails, the treatment of the unemployed, especially the Negroes" that led in one case to the death of a Negro prisoner.
p106	The "unemployed councils" laid the basis for much of the New Deal.
	Jose Yglesias	p109
p109	Yglesias is an author who grew up speaking Spanish in Ybor City, a Cuban neighborhood in Tampa, Florida that was home to cigar makers. The people in the neighborhood were radically pro-labor and often went on strike, so it was no surprise to him that there were strikes during the Depression.
p109	The 1931 cigar workers strike started when management tried to end the practice of have "readers" provide entertainment to handworkers.
p110	"... hours a day. He would read from newspapers and magazines and a book would be read as a serial. The choice of the book was democratically decided. Some of the readers were marvelous natural actors. They wouldn't just read a book. They'd act out the scenes. Consequently, many cigar makers, who were illiterate, knew the novels of Zola and Dickens and Cervantes and Tolstoy. And the works of the anarchist, Kropotkin. Among the newspapers read were The Daily Worker and the Socialist Call."
p110	"The factory owners decided to put an end to this, though it didn't cost them a penny. Everyone went on strike when they arrived one morning and found the lecture platform torn down. The strike was lost. Every strike in my home town was always lost. The readers never came back."
p110	"The Depression began in 1930, with seasonal unemployment. Factories would close down before Christmas, after having worked very hard to fill orders throughout late summer and fall. Only the cheaper grade cigars would be made. They cut off the more expensive type. Regalia.
[ ... ]
p110	"It was a Latin town. Men didn't sit at home. They went to cafes, on street corners, at the Labor Temple, which they built themselves. It was ...
p111	... very radical talk. The factory owners acted out of fright. ... During the strike, the KKK would come into the Labor Temple with guns, and break up meetings. Very frequently, they were police in hoods. Though they were called the Citizens' Committee, everybody would call them Los Cuckoo Klan. (Laughs.) The picket lines would hold hands, and the KKK would beat them and cart them off."
[ ... ]
p111	"When the strike was lost, the Tampa paper published a full page, in large type: the names of all the members of the strike committee. They were indicted for conspiracy and spent a year in jail. None of them got their jobs back."
[ ... ]
p111	"There were attempts to organize the CIO. I remember one of my older cousins going around in a very secretive manner. You'd think he was planning the assassination of the czar. He was trying to sign people up for the CIO. The AF of L International was very conservative and always considered as an enemy. They never gave the strike any support. It was considered the work of agitators."
p111	"People began to go off to New York to look for jobs. Almost all my family were in New York by 1937. You'd take that bus far to New York. There, we all stayed together. The only place people didn't sleep in was the kitchen. A bed was even in the foyer. People would show up from Tampa, and you'd put them up. We were the Puerto Rican immigrants of that time. In any cafeteria, in the kitchen, the busboys, the dishwashers, you were bound to find at least two from Ybor City."
p111	"Some would drift back as jobs would open up again in Tampa. Some went on the WPA. People would put off governmental aid as long as ...
p112	"... possible. Aunt Lila and her husband were the first in our family, and the last, to go on WPA. This was considered a terrible tragedy, because it was charity. You did not mention it to them."
p112	"That didn't mean you didn't accept another thing. There was no payday in any cigar factory that there wasn't a collection for anyone in trouble. If a father died, there was a collection for the funeral. When my father went to Havana for an operation, there was a collection. That was all right. You yourself didn't ask. Someone said: `Listen, so and so's in trouble.' When Havana cigar makers would go on strike, it was a matter of honor: you sent money to them. It has to do with the Spanish-Cuban tradition."
p112	"Neighbors have always helped one another. The community has always been that way. There was a solidarity. There was just something very nice. . . ."
[ ... ]
p112	"POSTSCRIPT: My family thought very highly of Roosevelt, except my grandfather ... who thought Roosevelt and Hoover were both bad compared the Jose Marti of Cuba."
	Evelyn Finn	p112
p112	Terkel wrote, "She has worked as a seamstress. It was St. Louis in the early years of the Depression. . . ."
p112	"You could upset the shop quite a bit. Even when there was no union. You'd get the girls on your side, one by one, until you had a majority. I remember this one straw boss. He wanted us to speed up. In the morning, the girls'd be tired. He'd go through the shop: `Is everybody happy today?' I'd say: `I'm not happy.' He says, `What's the matter with you?' I'd tell him: `I come here to fight.'"
[ ... ]
p113	"He just kept after me, this one. Nagged me and nagged me to go out with him. So all right, I said. Boy, he was so excited. We got in his car. He said, `Where we going? Your house?' `No,' I said, `we're goin' to your house. For supper.' You should've seen the look on his face. (Laughs.) I knew his wife, a sweet little woman. I used to sew and fix her clothes. I made him do just that. His wife was glad to see me. (Laughs.) He never asked me again. And he was an old gray-haired man with two grown sons."
p113	"One time I was on piecework. You get paid for the amount you do. But the boss wanted us to ring the time clock. If you're a pieceworker and you're very fast and very apt, which I was, you don't want him to know this, that or the other. I refused to ring the clock. Did they have a time with me! They didn't want to lose me. I was skilled."
[ ... ]
p113	"One day I took out the whole shop. There never was a shop yet I couldn't take out. This is when we had the union. I was the chairlady. They didn't get us what we wanted. I think they were playin' sweethearts with the boss. So we had a sit-in. I said to the girls: Just sit, don't do nothin'. We sat and joked about a lot of things and had a lotta fun. The boss was goin' crazy. The union officials came down. They went crazy, too. It was a hilarious day. They called us a bunch of Communists. The girls didn't know what it meant. I knew what it meant, but I wasn't. So, if that's the way they behave, I said, `Girls, it's a nice day. Let's all go for a walk.' So we did, the whole shop. They got us what we wanted."
[ ... ]
	Hank Oettinger	p114
p114	Terkel wrote, "A linotype operator. Much of his spare time is devoted to writing `Letters to the Editor.' ... `I go to work late in the afternoon, get through at midnight. See my friends at the taverns. Agitate. Get my sleep. I wake up, and it's nice and warm and it's light. I go down and maybe have a couple of arguments before I go to work.'"
p114	"I came from a very small town in northern Wisconsin. It had been ravaged by the lumber barons. It was cut-over land, a term you hear very often up there. It was a one industry town: tourist business. During the winter, there was nothing."
p114	"A lot of people who suffered from the Depression -- it was new to them. It wasn't new to me. I was number ten in a family of eleven. ... We could have gone on relief, but my father refused. Foolish pride. He would not accept medical care, even.... He was a great admirer of Bob La Follette. He liked the idea of Bob's fighting the railroads and being against our entering the First World War."
[ ... ]
p115	"I was laid off in '31. I was out of work for over two years. I'd get up at six o'clock every morning and make the rounds. I'd go around looking for work until about eight thirty. The library would open at nine. I'd spend maybe five hours in the library."
[ ... ]
p115	"I can remember the first week of the CWA checks [FOOTNOTE: Civil Works Administration. It presaged the WPA.]. It was on a Friday. That night everybody had gotten his check. The first check a lot of them had in three years. Everybody was out celebrating. It was like a festival in some old European city. Prohibition had been repealed, of course. You'd walk from tavern to tavern and see people buying ponies of beer and sharing it. They had the whole family out. It was a warm night as I remember. Everybody was so happy, you'd think they got a big dividend from Xerox."
p115	"I never saw such a change of attitude. Instead of walking around feeling dreary and looking sorrowful, everybody was joyous. Like a feast day. They were toasting each other. They had money in their pockets for the first time. If Roosevelt had run for President the next day, he'd have gone in by a hundred percent."
p115	"I had it drilled in me: there are no such things as classes in America. I awoke one day. [I saw a newspaper with] a picture of this farm woman, standing in the window of her home and the dust had completely covered everything, and there was a dead cow. And here, at the bottom of the same page, they had a picture of Bernard Baruch on somebody's yacht. I looked at one picture and then the other. No classes in America."
[ ... ]
p116	"During the Depression, the La Follette movement grew, with Bob, Junior, and Phil. When the New Deal came in, they worked with Roosevelt. By this time, my father was getting pretty old and bitter. Being an extreme strict Catholic, he fell for Coughlinism. ... Even in the Depression, he wasn't able to accept the idea that there were different classes in America. The same as I couldn't when I was a child. And he was violently anti-Red. He objected to a lot that was going on: that's why he liked La Follette. But it was still the Great America. So there had to be some other reason for all the injustice."
p116	"He had great respect for the priestly collar [but] I think it was his anti-Communism more than his rigid Catholicism that was the cause."
p116	"When Father Coughlin's silver market manipulations were uncovered, my father felt it was another plot. He just couldn't bring himself to believe that Coughlin was in it for anything except to help the poor people who were at the mercy of Roosevelt and the Jews. He was about eighty-two at the time and never gave up his belief. He followed Coughlin until the end."
p116	"When Coughlin was on, Sunday afternoons, everything in the house had to be absolutely quiet, not a whisper. You could walk down the street and every single Catholic house -- it was Coughlin. To hell with the ball game or going out for a ride. . . ."
p116	"Every time Coughlin would mention the name of a movie actor who ...
p117	... was of Jewish extraction, and add his real name after his stage name, my father would gloat. And yet, my father was a good and kind man, and suffered along with his neighbors."
[ ... ]
	E. D. Nixon	p117
p117	Terkel wrote, "For twenty-five years, he had been president of the Montgomery (Alabama) branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters."
p117	According to Nixon, "`A Pullman porter can always get into a conversation anywhere. He walked into a barber shop, somebody'd say, I didn't see you around here,' or maybe they'd notice his pants with the stripe. Everybody listened because they knowd the porter been everywhere and they never been anywhere themselves. In cafes where they ate or hotels where they stayed, they'd bring in papers they picked up, white papers, Negro papers. He'd put 'em in his locker and distribute 'em to black communities all over the country. Along the road, where a whole lot of people couldn't get to town, we used to roll up the papers and tie a string around 'em. We'd throw these papers off to these people. We were able to let people know what was happening. He did know a whole lot of things.'
p117	"I worked for the Pullman Company from 1928 to 1964. It was a hard job. We had a rest period: 10 P.M. to 2, for one porter, and 2 to 6, for the other. During that time, one man guarded two cars. From 6 in the morning to 10 at night, he was plenty busy with his one car: touch it up all the time, clean up, call a man at a certain time. You get that man off, you run back and tidy up the place, you run back and bring a new man in. ... "
	Joe Morrison	p122
p122	Terkel wrote, "Half his working life was spent in the coal mines of southwestern Indiana -- `as poor a part of the country as we could afford.' He was born there. The remainder of his work days were in steel mills. He quit school at fourteen for his first job `in the fields.'"
p122	Morrison said, "`My father was a farmer and a coal miner, ten kids and I'm the oldest. He wanted me to do something else. Every parent worried about their kids gettin' killed in mine explosions. Just a few miles away, they had gas, where mines exploded and we had one in 1927, killed thirty-seven men. The coal industry was hit in '26 and never did fully recover. Coal and lumber, they was the two things hit pretty hard. There was a dip in 1919, it picked up some. But in '26, there was another one. Coal and lumber never did recover. 1929 is when it hit banking and big business. But we had suffering and starvation long before that. In the early Twenties, mines shut down, nothin' for people to live on. Children fainted in school from hunger. Long before the stock market crash.'"
[ ... ]
p122	"In '30 and '31, you'd see freight trains, you'd see hundreds of kids, young kids, lots of 'em, just wandering all over the country. Looking for jobs, looking for excitement. . . . The one thing that was unique was to see women riding freight trains. That was unheard of, never had been thought of before. But it happened during the Depression. Women gettin' places by ridin' freight trains. Dressed in slacks or dressed like men, you could hardly tell 'em. Sometimes some man and his wife would get on, no money for fare."
p122	"You'd find political discussions going on in a boxcar. Ridin' a hundred miles or so, guys were all strangers, maybe two or three knew each other, ...
p123	... pairs. There might be twenty men involved. They would discuss politics, what was happening. What should be done about this, that and so forth ... they was ready for revolution. A lot of businessmen expected it. The Government sent out monitors. They had 'em in these Hoovervilles, outside the town, along the railroads, along the highways. ... You met guys ridin' the freight trains and so forth, talkin' about what they'd like to do with a machine gun."
[ ... ]
p123	"In '34 I got discharged over a hassle we had with the mine company. I was on the union's grievance committee. They had me blacklisted in the fields there. I never got a job until I went to work in the steel mills in '36.1 bummed around a little in some temporary jobs, anything I could get. Had ..."
	Mary	p124
p124	Mary's father, a farmer, went to New York City to look for work during the Depression. Naively, he became a strikebreaker, but he quickly quit after being threatened by people with guns.
	Gordon Baxter	p124
p124	Baxter was an attorney who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1932. He described his youth as "insulated" and preoccupied with wealth as a measure of success.
THREE STRIKES
	Bob Stinson, "The Sit-down"	p129
p129	A General Motors worker tells how the Depression brought the union to his company in 1933 following sit-down strikes that prevented the company from bringing in scabs.
	Gregory	p134
p134	Terkel wrote, "He was born in Flint in 1946 and has lived in its environs most of his life."
p134	"THE SIT-IN strikes? No, it doesn't ring a bell with me. What were they?"
p134	"My grandfather worked for the GM plant in Flint. I had an uncle working for Body by Fisher, another one for Buick. He used to talk about his work, my grandfather. About standing in line, waiting for a job. He did auto work for forty-five years. But he never mentioned the sit-in strikes."
	Charles Stewart Mott	p134
p134	Terkel wrote, "A vigorous ninety-four, he's the oldest member of the board of General Motors. In the early part of the century, he served as three-time mayor of Flint. As head of the Mott Foundation, he is responsible for many philanthropies.
p134	"Alfred P. Sloan came to GM in 1932 and was made president. He was a master of corporate procedure. He brought order out of chaos. For every one share of stock in 1913, we had 562Y2 shares in 1935. Since that time, it's gone up and up and up."
p134	"I never became involved in the labor matters. Even in companies where I own all the stock, I leave those matters to those better able to handle it. ... At board meetings, labor matters were described but not discussed. We had a vice president in charge of labor relations, a very able chap. ... Sometimes, he'd appear to tell us what the situation was. We'd merely approve."
p135	"I knew Frank Murphy. ... He was Governor during the sit-down strikes, and he didn't do his job. He didn't enforce the law. He kept his hands off. He didn't protect our property. ... They had no right to sit-down there. They were illegally occupying it. The owners had the right to demand from the Governor to get those people out."
[ ... ]
p135	"Someone said to me: Did you see the picture on those new dimes? It's our new destroyer. It was a picture of Roosevelt. He was the great destroyer. He was the beginner of our downhill slide. Boy, what he did to this country. I don't think we'll ever get over it. Terrible."
[ ... ]
	Scott Farwell	p136
p126	Farrell was born wealthy and only had it "somewhat rough" during the Depression. "I came from a WASP upper-middle class suburb and was raised on the myth that everybody can make it. In reality, everybody can't make it. If a guy makes a million dollars, he can do so only because another thousand people are making $3,000 a year."
	Mike Widman, "The Battle of Detroit, A Preface"	p137
p137	This describes tense labor relations in Ford factories in Michigan in 1940. Mike Widman was "a long-time associate of John L. Lewis ... appointed director of the campaign to organize the Ford Motor Company, the automobile industry's last holdout against the UAWU."
	Howard	p141
p141	Howard was born in Detroit in 1947 but never heard of the Ford autoworkers strike. He explained this was because his grandfather was "anti-union" and only accepted the union because it kept Negroes from working in the factories.
	Dr. Lewis Andreas, "Memorial Day, 1937"	p142
p142	Andreas founded the first low-cost clinic in Chicago in 1932. He was sympathetic to labor and became involved. He was an eyewitness to the Memorial Day 1937 Republic Steel strike in Gary, Indiana, that resulted in fifty shot by police, of whom ten died. Most were shot in the back.
p144	Andreas describes other organizing efforts in the 1930s and the problems that resulted when the AMA declared them subversive.
BOOK TWO
OLD FAMILIES
	Edward A. Ryerson	p151
p151	Retired chairman of the board of the Inland Steel Company in Chicago.
	Diana Morgan	p153
p153	A "southern belle" from North Carolina whose family lost their home during the Depression.
	Mrs. Winston Roberts	p159
p159	A Chicago socialite who came from the South in 1906 by marrying a wealthy industrialist.
	Noni Saarinen, Mrs. Roberts' Maid	p161
p161	Came from Finland and worked for Mrs. Roberts for 32 years. Her husband, a painter, lost his job in 1930.
	Julia Walther	p162
p163	Walther's husband lost a great deal of money in the Depression after making a fortune by building up a lumber company in the 1920s. [NOTE: Page number is correct. There is no personal information about Walther until the second page.]
p162	Samuel Insull, a wealthy businessman from Chicago, "represented all that was most unattractive about the period that preceded the crash."
p163	Insull built the new Chicago Opera house and was president of Commonwealth Edison, the electric company. He was vulgar, and when he lost everything, people were happy.
MEMBER OF THE CHORUS
	Win Stracke	p165
p165	Terkel described Stracke as: "A Chicago balladeer. Founder of the Old Town School of Folk Music."
HIGH LIFE
	Sally Rand	p168
p168	A dancer who turned 26 in 1930. She was born "in the last naive moment America was ever going to enjoy . . . between ...
p169	... the Spanish-American War and the First World War. Things were S. S. & G. -- Sweet, Simple and Girlish." She was born in rural Missouri, grew up in Kansas City and eventually worked in Hollywood with Mack Sennett and Cecil B. De Mille.
p173	She gained publicity by appearing nude as Lady Godiva at the 1933-24 Chicago World's Fair, and being arrested by the police who were trying to turn attention away from a scandal involving Mayor Kelly.
	Tony Soma	p174
p174	Soma was a New York restaurateur who emigrated from Italy to Cincinnati before 1908. He was called a "wop" in 1908 by a "tall red American" and was Tony Caruso's waiter in New York. He also ran a speakeasy that catered to literary and theater people in the late'20s and early 1930s, when he was known as "Broadway Tony."
	Alec Wilder	p176
p176	Wilder is the composer who wrote "The Winter of My Discontent" among many others. He has lived in the Algonquin Hotel in New York off and on since before the Depression.
p177	After losing about $150,000 worth of stock in the Depression, Wilder would say, "`Don't talk to me about the market.' I would have nothing to do with it. I didn't even take money to a bank. I kept it all in my pocket. I didn't have a bank account for years. The money was driftin' in. Taxes weren't as bad in those days, so you didn't have to keep track of what you spent. So I just kept the money in my pockets. It was crazy. To walk around with three or four thousand dollars and not be able to pay any bills by check. Just crazy. I carried thousand dollar bonds around in my pocket, and whenever I would run out of money, I would cash one." . . .
p177	"I loved speakeasies. If you knew the right ones, you never worried about being poisoned by bad whiskey. I'd kept hearing about a friend of a friend who had been blinded by bad gin. I guess I was lucky. The speaks were so romantic. A pretty girl in a speakeasy was the prettiest girl in the world. As soon as you walked in the door, you were a special person, you belonged to a special society. When I'd bring a person in, it was like dispensing largesse. I was a big man. You ...
p178	... had to know somebody. It was that marvelous movie-like quality, unreality. And the food was great. Although some pretty dreadful things did occur in them. I saw a man at the door pay off a gentleman in thousand dollar bills to keep from being raided."
p178	"I recall the exact day that Prohibition ended. I went into a restaurant that started selling booze. It was a strange feeling `cause I started drinking in speaks. I didn't know about open drinking ... I'd gotten used to being disreputable. A friend of mine took me up to some dump in Rochester and gave me my first glass of beer. I don't think I'd have drunk it if it had been legal." . . .
p178	"Roosevelt came in and that was a cheery moment. ... I'm so sick of hearing how devious he was politically. So was Abraham Lincoln, for heaven's sake. To be a politician in a country like this, you've got to be devious."
	Carl Stockholm	p178
p179	Stockholm supported himself on the professional bicycle racing circuit in the 1920s, riding for days at a time with a teammate or solo. He describes how the profession died out in the Depression and also writes about gangsters.
	Doc Graham	p180
p180	Graham was a career criminal -- con man, heist man, etc. -- who described the Depression: "It was a jungle. Survival was the law of the land." His father was a gambler and his mother was a missionary. Both were unsuccessful.
[ ... ]
	[The rest of this chapter discusses Prohibition, police coruption, guns and life in Chicago's crime world, which was divided between the Irish and Italian factions.]
	Jerome Zerbe	p188
[ ... ]
p188	"The thirties? My own poverty. My father allowed me an allowance of $300 a month. On that I went to Paris and started painting. Suddenly he wrote and said: no more money. And what does a painter do in the Depression without money? I came back to America and was offered a job in Cleveland. Doing the menial task -- but at the time I was grateful -- of art-directing a magazine called Parade. $35 a week. It was 1931."
[ ... ]
p189	"After my father died, and no money, I sold my library books to the Cleveland Museum and the Cleveland Art Library. With that money, I came to New York and started out. Town and Country had guaranteed me $150, which seemed a lot. This is '33."
[ ... ]
p190	"My father was president of the Ohio and Pennsylvania Coal Company. It was on the West Virginia border -- Cadiz, Ohio. Where Clark Gable was born. I went down there, because at the time he offered me the presidency at $12,000 a year. It was an incredibly large amount of money. I'm talking about 1932 or 1933. I went down there and spent two weeks in the town. The mine was 897 feet, the shaft, underground, and the working ...
p191	... surface was three and a half miles. I spent two weeks down there and came back and said: `Mother, forgive me, to hell with it.'"
p191	"The men loathed their slovenly wives, and every night they go and play pool or whatever it was. The houses were drab beyond belief. You'd think a woman would at least put up a plant -- a flower or something. And suddenly I flew into town with two or three friends for several weekends. We disrupted the place like nobody's business. (Laughs.) We'd go to the bars, and these guys would say: `Jesus, where did you get your shirts?' Where did you get this or that? and I'd say: `Why don't you go to your houses and make them more attractive?' And they said: `Our wives are so goddam slovenly. We don't even want to go to bed with them.' I'm talking about the miners. They came out at five o'clock at night absolutely filthy. I've got a photograph of myself, I can show you, as a miner. I can show you how filthy I was."
p191	"And they all went through this common shower, got clean. Would they go home? Hah! For food, yes. And their squawling brats. And take right off to a bar. They loathed their life. The manager once said to me, `I never knew what it was to have fun with people until I heard your laughter. . . .'"
p191	"We all had such fun, of course, and he joined in the fun."
[ ... ]
p191	"Listen, dear boy, Franklin Roosevelt in those days we didn't even talk about. [His sons] John Roosevelt and the young Franklin were great friends of mine. I photographed them in my apartment. We never did discuss the old man, ever. Well, I never liked politics. I think all politicians are s**. Franklin -- I admired him very much. I thought the American public was so frightfully gullible to allow this man, he was a dying man, to be elected for that last term. Oh, that voice!"
[ ... ]
p192	Terkels asked "Did the people you knew in the Thirties ever talk about what happened outside? You know . . . those on relief . . . ?"
p192	"I don't think we ever mentioned them. They did in private at the breakfast table or the tea table or at cocktail time. But never socially. Because I've always had a theory: when you're out with friends, out socially, everything must be charming, and you don't allow the ugly."
p192	"We don't even discuss the Negro question. Let's forget they're only one-tenth of this country, and what they're putting on, this act - someday they're going to be stepped on like vermin. There's too much. I'm starting a thing: equal rights for whites. I think they've allowed themselves, with their necklaces and their long hair and nonsense, to go too far."
p192	"Now I've had the same manservant, who's Negro, for thirty-three years, which is quite a record. I suppose he's my closest friend in the world. He's a great guy, Joseph."
[ ... ]
p193	Terkels asked, "You don't recall bread lines or stuff like that?"
p193	"I never saw one. Never in New York. If they were, they were in Harlem or down in the Village. They were never in this section of town. There was never any sign of poverty."
p193	Terkels asked, "What does the phrase `New Deal' mean to you?"
p193	"It meant absolutely nothing except higher taxation. And that he did. He obviously didn't help the poverty situation in the country, although, I suppose ... I don't know - New Deal! God! Look at the crap he brought into our country, Jesus!"
[ ... ]
	Judy	p193
p193	Terkel wrote, "She is twenty-five years old and does public relations work."
p193	"You get the impression there was this crash, this big explosion, and everything goes down. And all of a sudden one day, the sun comes up, and there's a war. There's all kinds of people making planes and napalm and this kind of thing. Affluence is equated with war. I hate it, I hate everything about it."
p193	"If another Depression came, the first ones out of work would be people...
p194	... like me. There's a whole sub-society of people like me. We're the ones who open doors and give a little polish on things. We're a luxury. We are not really functional." . . .
AT THE CLINIC
	Dr. Nathan Ackerman	p195
p195	This man was a psychiatrist at a time when the profession was new. He started working for $2.50 an hour and hoped to work his way up to $10/hour. The most successful psychiatrists earned $25/hour from their wealthy clients.
p196	All of his customers were middle class, so he heard little about psychological problems that resulted from poverty. He did visit a community of Pennsylvania coal miners once and was disturbed by their poverty. He noted that men who lost jobs for years at a time felt guilty and stayed away from home because they couldn't "bring home the bacon." their wives punished them by withholding sex and by treating their eldest sons like the "man of the family."
SIXTEEN TON
	Buddy Blankenship	p198
p198	Blankenship moved from West Virginia to Chicago, but he has never done well economically. "I've been in a Depression ever since I've been in the world. Still, it's better and worse. '31, '32, that's about the worst we've ever seen."
p199	Miners in West Virginia earned $1.75 per sixteen-hour day.
	Mary Owsley	p201
p201	Owsley's husband was "a dynamite man" in Kentucky mines before they went to Oklahoma for the 1929 oil boom.
	Aaron Barkham	p202
p202	Barkham was a miner from West Virginia.
p204	After describing how bad the lives of miners were, and how corrupt the union (United Mine Workers) was, Barkham says that the Ku Klux Klan was the only group that stood up for ordinary people. He said it was not racist, it included some black members.
p206	Mingo County, W. Virginia, (near Logan) got is first radio receiver in 1934. There was no electricity so they had to use two car batteries.
	Edward Santander	p207
p207	Santander was a coal miner from near Centralia, Pennsylvania.
p207	The people of Pennsylvania coal country were all Republican, but FDR won them over with his programs.
p209	The coal industry was furthered weakened in the 1930s because cities began to pass laws against coal burning in an effort to reduce pollution.
p209	The Centralia mine disaster of 1947 resulted in 111 dead miners after Mine #5 blew up.
p210	Many pigs were killed to reduce the supply so that the price for pork would rise.
p211	POSTSCRIPT: Santander added, "We used to talk a great deal about keeping solvent and the morality of not going into debt. I was almost thirty years old before I went into debt."
	Roger	p211
p211	Roger is a young boy whose parents came from West Virginia to Chicago. He lives with his sister-in-law but runs on the streets. He talks about the stories his parents told him about why they moved to Chicago.
THE FARMER IS THE MAN
	Harry Terrell	p213
p213	Terrell's Quaker ancestors worked heir way west in the 19th century. He became the secretary of the YMCA in Des Moines but his main occupation was as a farmer during the Depression.
p214	There was unrest among the farmers in Iowa. Banks would give loans to people who had jobs, but not to farmers who had only equipment, land and crops to put up for collateral. At 8 cents a bushel, corn was cheaper than coal to burn for heat.
p214	To stop the banks from foreclosing, neighbors collaborated at sheriff's sales to purchase a neighbor's farm cheaply and then sell it back to him. On one occasion, a group of farmers nearly lynched a judge for his willingness to foreclose. They also held protest marches.
p215	Farmers called a "Farm Holiday" to keep goods from reaching market in order to force prices up.
p215	"The nearer to the ground you get, the nearer you are to conservative." [farmer politics]
p216	During the Depressions, farmers could get by because they grew their own food, but nowadays, that is no longer true. Small farmers are disappearing.
	Oscar Heline	p217
p217	Heline lived his entire life -- seventy-five years -- on a farm in northwestern Iowa near the South Dakota border.
p219	"There were a few who had more credit than others ... [and they] gained at the expense of the poor ... struggle between the haves and the have-nots."
p219	"We did pass some legislation." One measure ended "Deficiency judgements" which made farmers liable for the balance of their mortgages even after their property had been foreclosed upon. Another created "adjudication committees" to stop mortgage foreclosures by working out a repayment schedule. Henry Wallace got the federal government to provide money to raise corn prices from 10 cents to 45 cents. Together, they "saved us, put us back on our feet."
p220	Another action, which the farmers called "Wallace's Folly," required them to kill pigs because once corn prices went up, there was no profit in selling corn-fed pigs at the low pork prices which prevailed in the market. By killing pigs, they intended to drive up the price of pork.
p220	During the Depressions, farmers made underwear from gunny sacks, canned their own food and recycled everything. The federal government had to bail out farmers because they could not do it themselves.
p220	"Poverty creates desperation, and desperation creates violence.
p220	A group of local farmers tared and feathered a judge from Le Mars. [see also page 214]
	Frank and Rome Hentges	p221
p221	They owned clothing stores in Le Mars, Iowa, before the Depression.
p221	The local farmers threatened Judge Bradley of Le Mars, Iowa. This account does not mention anything about tar and feathers, but confirms that a rope noose was placed around his neck.
	Orrin Kelly	p223
p223	He was a farmer near Le Mars, Iowa in the Depression. He went on to become a salesman for the Plymouth Co-Op in 1940.
p223	Farmers threatened to lynch Judge Bradley, so the state militia was called out. Since Kelly was the "Chairman of the Council for Defense," he was arrested even though he was in Des Moines on the day of the lynching threat.
	Emil Loriks	p226
p226	Loriks was a South Dakota state senator from Arlington from 1927 to 1934.
p226	The grain elevator in Arlington, South Dakota, went broke in 1924.
p226	After Loriks' brother lost his job at the Minneapolis-Moline tractor factory, he brought his family to live on the farm in South Dakota.
p226	Farmers formed cooperatives as a means to resist the "powers" during the Depression.
	Ruth Loriks, His Wife	p229
p229	She was a state senator's wife during the Depression. She mentioned the "grasshopper days" when waves of grasshoppers came to South Dakota, darkened the sky and ate the grain.
	Clyde T. Ellis	p230
p231	Ellis was an Arkansas farmer who ran for Congress in 1932 and defeated the party's machine candidate.
p231	The arrival of electricity to rural areas was like a miracle. "I wanted to be at my parents' house when electricity came. It was in 1940. We'd all go around flipping the switch, to make sure it hadn't come on yet. We didn't want to miss it. When they finally came on, the lights ...
p232	... just barely glowed. I remember my mother smiling. When they came on full, tears started to run down her cheeks. After a while she said, `Oh, if we only had it when you children were growing up.' We had lots of illness, Anybody who's never been in a family without electricity -- with illness -- can't imagine the difference."
p232	"From there, I went to my grandmother's house. It was a day of celebration. They had all kinds of parties -- mountain people getting light for the first time."
p232	"There are still areas without electricity. Coal oil lamps are used, with the always dirty chimneys. But there are more and more electric co-ops, which first sprang out of the New Deal. And the power companies are still fighting us . . ."
	Emma Tiller	p232
p232	Tiller's father had a small farm in west Texas. She recalled a depression that started in 1914 when worms ate most of the cotton crop. By 1929, she and her husband were sharecroppers, but that year the landowner took all of their crop.
p232	She picked cotton for 35 cents per hundred. That was not enough to live, so she, like other Negroes, supplemented that by cleaning people's houses and getting gifts of shoes and clothes from their employers.
p233	In a town in west Texas in 1934, local farmers wondered why people who waited on long lines for government relief food failed to get any. Eventually, three of them brought guns to the distribution center and forced the officials to reveal what was going on. Three local officials were selling the meat provided by the government on the black market.
p234	Tiller didn't like seeing farmers plough up cotton when there were people who didn't have enough clothes. She was especially disgusted by the sight of cattle killing which she compared to seeing humans slaughtered in battle.
	Sumio Nichi	p234
p235	Nichi's family were truck farmers in California in the 1920s, and during the Depression, they were able to buy used trucks. When WWII started, they were forced of their farm and forced to sell $80,000 worth of equipment for $6,000. They got none of it back after the war.
EDITOR AND PUBLISHER
	Fred Sweet	p236
p237	Sweet was a Democrat who edited a newspaper in a small town (Mt. Gilead, Ohio) and supported union efforts to organize the town's single factory. The local judge was a Republican, so he refused to place any legal advertisements in Sweet's newspaper, and Sweet's largest advertiser, a department store owner, pulled his ads too. Meanwhile, members of the American Legion used violence to intimidate the union organizers, but the union was successful anyhow. Afterwards, when factory workers got higher salaries and were able to buy more in town, the department store owner apologized to Sweet and resumed advertising.
	W. D. (Don) Maxwell	p238
p238	Maxwell retired as the editor of the Chicago Tribune in the late 1960s. In this interview, he comments on the paper's publisher, Colonel Robert R. McCormick (a good friend of Douglas MacArthur) and his reaction to the Depression.
p239	McCormick "hated Roosevelt's hypocrisy" and used his paper to criticize FDR. Although he was a powerful figure in Illinois politics, and supported Landon, Wilkie and Taft against FDR, he did not have much success against the President.
p240	He criticized the WPA incessantly because he thought it was a boondoggle. He was not opposed to relief itself.
p240	Terkel prodded: "And those cartoons portraying New Deal professors in mortarboard hats . . . "
p240	"There's nothing that proved him more right. A lot of people agree with him today. If he was against professors, it was the kind that today join these rebels in destroying these universities. It's about as silly as joining with the rebels in the Civil War when you wanted to protect the north. ... He was against Tugwell, ... Wallace, ... Ickes. Ickes hated him, and he hated Ickes."
p240	Maxwell said that McCormick was not too bothered by the protest marches. Then the interview concluded "All of the Colonel's behavior fits in with the pattern of the patrician. I gave him the title, `the Duke of Chicago.' As a duke, he was kind to the peasants and fought for their rights. You might say he treated his subjects very well."
	Carey McWilliams	p240
p240	McWilliams was an author who became editor of The Nation. His interview mentions the bigger economic picture, the role of university professors, the poor conditions in labor camps, California prejudice against "Arkies and Okies," Robert Lafollette's investigation into the exploitation of farm workers. He concluded that the New Deal's best years were 1934 to 1938.
[ ... ]
p241	"After the stock market crash, some New York editors suggested that hearings be held: what had really caused the Depression? They were held in Washington. In retrospect, they make the finest comic reading. The leading industrialists and bankers testified. They hadn't the foggiest notion what had gone bad. You read a transcript of that record today with amazement: that they could be so unaware. This was their business, yet they didn't understand the operation of the economy. The only good witnesses were the college professors, who enjoyed a bad reputation in those years. No professor was supposed to know anything practical about the economy."
[ ... ]
p241	"As a result of my father's experience in Colorado in 1919, and my own during the Great Depression, my confidence was destroyed in the operation of this economy. I've tried -- unsuccessfully -- not to acquire any property. I didn't have confidence in stocks and bonds. The whole thing was put together in a way that didn't inspire my confidence. And it doesn't now. This may be an unreasonable attitude on my part, nonetheless. . . ."
p241	"There was a delayed reaction to the events of October, 1929. I was practicing law in Los Angeles. In a year or two, I saw the impact on clients -- the kind of widows who are legion in southern California. Who had brought money out from the Middle West and had invested it in fly-by-night real estate promotions. They began to lose their property. I was bugged when I saw what was happening."
p242	"When I got out of law school in 1927, I was not a political person. ... My interests became increasingly social and political as the Thirties began to unfold."
p242	"My first reaction to Roosevelt was very adverse. I remember particularly my great disappointment in a 1932 speech he made at the Hollywood Bowl. ... He didn't have a ghost of an idea... He, too, was an innocent. He had no program. He was pressured into doing the fine things he did."
p242	"The labor movement, the sit-ins, were responsible for the labor legislation. The Farm Holiday movement was responsible for the farm program. Dr. Townsend, Coughlin, Huey Long and company were responsible for the pressures that brought about social security. Roosevelt was responsive, sympathetic. In later years, I became a great admirer."
[ ... ]
p242	"Going around the state in those years, you saw California as synonymous with abundance. It's so enormously rich, especially in agriculture. Yet you saw all kinds of crops being destroyed. There were dumps in southern California, where they would throw citrus fruits and spray them ...
p243	"... with tar and chemicals. At a time when thousands of people were in real distress. [FOOTNOTE: Dorothy Comingore, a former film actress (Citizen Kane), recalls, `I saw heaps of oranges covered with gasoline and set on fire and men who tried to take one orange shot to death.']
p243	"You could easily romanticize the Thirties. The racial attitudes were not very good. I was intimately involved with these issues, and the attitudes were incredible. Though there was no categorization of the poor as there is today -- the former doctor, the man who lost his law practice, the businessman, everybody was in on it -- there was no feeling that there was a national race problem."
[ ... ]
p243	"In the second half of the Thirties, about 350,000 Dust Bowl refugees flooded the state. They were promptly stereotyped, exactly like a racial minority. They were called Okies and Arkies: they were shiftless and lazy and irresponsible and had too many children, and if we improve the labor camps and put a table in, they would chop it up and use it for kindling. Once I went into the foyer of this third-rate motion picture house in Bakersfield and I saw a sign: Negroes and Okies upstairs."
[ ... ]
p243	"I inspected labor camps. The conditions were not to be believed. There were no programs of aid for these people. The camps were filthy. We had a labor camp population of 175,000 in August and September, the harvest season. In the spring, they'd force people off relief rolls to take jobs at twenty cents an hour. I induced Governor Olson to let me hold some hearings. We recommended they not be cut off relief unless they were paid ...
p244	"... twenty-seven and a half cents an hour. The reaction [from farmowners] could hardly have been more violent had we bombed San Joaquin Valley. Outrageous, that they should pay twenty-seven and a half cents an hour."
[ ... ]
p244	"I think the New Deal saved American capitalism. It was a bridge. But it never really solved the problems."
BOOK THREE
CONCERNING THE NEW DEAL
	Gardiner C. Means	p247
p247	Means was a coauthor with A. A. Berle of The Modern Corporation and Private Property.
p247	At the beginning of the New Deal, [its critics] called it a "revolution." But it wasn't really a revolution. It turned out to be a "revolution in point of view." The US economy fit not classical theories because it consisted of a number of large corporations which provided highly centralized control. "What Roosevelt and the New Deal did was to turn about and face the realities. ... People agreed that ...
p248	... old things didn't work. What ran through the whole New Deal was finding a way to make things work."
p248	During the New Deal, the author worked in the White House, answering mail for Henry Wallace (among other duties).
p249	"The NRA [National Recovery Act] was one of the most successful things the New Deal did. It was killed when it should have been killed. But when it was created, American business was completely demoralized. Violent price cutting and wage cutting . . . nobody could make any plans for tomorrow." ... "More important, laissez faire in the Nineteenth Century manner was ended. The Government had a role to play in industrial society. We didn't move into a fascist kind of governmental control, because we continued to use the market mechanism. In the two years of the NRA, the index of industrial productivity went up remarkably."
p249	"Had the NRA continued, it would have meant dangerously diminishing the role of the market in limiting prices. You see, there was little Governmental regulation of the NRA. The Government handed industry over to industry to run, and offered some minor protection to others in the form of the Labor and Consumer Advisory Boards. ... You might say, NRA's greatest contribution to our society is that it proved self-regulation by industry doesn't work."
	Raymond Moley	p250
p250	Moley was "one of Roosevelt's original Brain Trust" whose focus was on restoring American confidence.
p250	"The bank rescue" of 1933 was probably the turning point of the Depression." After they got over the shock of seeing the banks all closed, they were reassured when the banks reopened one by one, with their deposits intact and insured. ...
p251	... it revived hope.
p251	Tugwell [Rex Tugwell, head of the Farm Security Administration] thought the government should have gone further in taking over the economy, but Moley was satisfied.
p251	The "First New Deal" was a radical change that put more power in the hands of the central government. That was necessary, especially in the farm economy. He disagreed with the "Second New Deal" in 1936 and resigned after that. It brought about economic decline that continued until 1940.
p251	"We had a slight recession in 1937, which was occasioned by his [Roosevelt's] attack on copper prices, specifically, and on business, generally." The attempt to pack the Supreme Court shocked people, and FDR failed to defeat his congressional opponents in 1938 by supporting their challengers. ...
p252	... But if it had not been for World War II, FDR would not have been reelected in 1940.
p252	Moley came to disagree with FDR in 1935 over on unemployment insurance, which Moley felt was not funded on a sound basis. "Welfare is a narcotic, because it will never end."
	C. B. (Beanie) Baldwin	p254
p254	Baldwin arrived in Washington before 1933 as an assistant to Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace. He remained in the federal government until FDR died in 1945.