condemned to repeat it

Good old Studs Terkel. Owner of the best name I’ve ever heard, and the man dedicated to recording the oral history of our country. I always admired him, but, until today, I can’t say I ever read or heard anything produced by him.

This American Life played some excerpts from his 1971 radio project “A Gathering of Survivors: Voices of the Great American Depression,” which became his book Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression.

It was riveting. I can’t get them out of my mind, these people, mostly ghosts now. And I can’t help but think about how uncomfortable I feel, how familiar it all seems, and how much we have to learn from these voices.

From a woman who, during the Depression, was a schoolteacher in her 20s:

I thought [the Depression] was the way it was going to be forever and ever and ever  — that people would have trouble getting jobs, that they would be living in fear of losing their jobs. … When you were poor, you weren’t looking around and saying “here’s a society in which everyone has something except me.” … that was the difference. In the Depression it wasn’t only not me but it was not you and it was not my friends and everybody else … your neighbor was losing his house, somebody else was having their furniture taken away, and everybody was in the same boat.

From a woman who was married at 15 and traveled the country as a migrant worker:

Most people blamed Hoover [for the Depression] … I’m not saying he’s blameless, but I’m not saying either that it was all his fault. Because our system doesn’t run just by one man, and it doesn’t fall by one man, either.

It seems like the minute the war [WWII] ended, the propaganda started in making people hate each other — not just to hate Russians and Chinese and Germans, it was to make us hate each other, I think.

I think that’s the worst thing that our system does to people is to take away their pride. And it prevents them from being a human being. And they’re wondering “why the Harlem” and “why  Detroit” and they’re talking about troops and law and order. You’ll get law and order in this country when people are allowed to be decent human beings and be able to walk in dignity.

I went directly to the library and checked out Working (Hard Times is checked out.) Now, I’m listening to other recordings from the Hard Times project at the Studs Terkel website. I highly recommend it. There’s something about hearing these voices: so clear, so close — and so far away.

3 Comments

  1. cloudy on November 12, 2008 at 9:38 am

    RIP Studs.

    My Grandma still hordes food and toilet paper just in case. Living through that era was incredible.



  2. regina on November 12, 2008 at 6:26 pm

    “…our system doesn’t run just by one man, and it doesn’t fall by one man, either.”

    Wow. Amen.

    Thanks for sharing that. If I hadn’t just (finally) picked up Blink today, I’d be grabbing Studs. Totally going to check out the website.



  3. hambox on November 12, 2008 at 6:39 pm

    Both my parents and stepparents were Depression kids. My stepdad is pretty warped from it and has incredible difficulty throwing away anything, especially food. My mom developed a weird fixation on butter, since it was so rare growing up.

    Some of the other interviews on the Studs website are simply incredible — I went through a whole bunch last night.

    “Working” is one of the biggest books I’ve ever attempted to read. I hope I can “hear” the voices when they’re on the printed page.