It’s a spoken word thing #4 (Hard Times)

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• Monday 2nd August 2010

One of the most affecting books I’ve ever read is Hard Times, by the recently-deceased Studs Terkel. It’s an oral history of the United States during the Great Depression of the 30′s. Terkel interviewed every sort of person that lived in the US at that time; both the destitute and the people who were so wealthy they doubted the existence of the “so-called” depression, and fought Social Security and Unemployment Insurance because the very ideas were “un-American.”

After I discovered the book, I read it several times. Much of the content was amazing to me, both because I didn’t pay a lot of attention in history or social studies classes in school, and because – if I remember correctly – the Depression was something that was covered in about 40 minutes in school, as the period between the Roaring 20′s and WWII, when some people had to stand on breadlines for a little while.

The book brought home to me that the United States had been on the brink of true revolution in the early 30′s; not because people with bellbottoms and long hair and flowers envisioned a world of peace and love, but because so many people were starving, jobless, homeless and disenfranchised – that when Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated and he rode with Herbert Hoover (the outgoing president [Republican] and the architect of the disaster) along Pennsylvania Avenue, their route was lined with army troops who mannned machine guns, aimed at the crowd in order to keep Hoover from being lynched.

Terkel was responsible for a host of other wonderful oral histories, covering work, WWII, race, the American Dream, and a few other topics. My familiarity with audio interviews always made me curious about what the actual tapes sounded like that Terkel’s staff transcribed for the books.

One day, while going through a crate of spoken-word records in a shop, I ran across the heart-stopper: a 2-LP set of interviews from Hard Times (apropos of nothing, I currently own 3 copies of the set).

It’s exactly as revelatory as I’d hoped when I was dreaming about the tapes. There’s no doubting that the printed transcriptions in the book are heart-wrenching, but there’s also no doubting that listening to people speak about their experiences carries an emotional vibe and a quality that print can only hint at.

I’ve edited together 3 people speaking about their experiences:

The first voice is Pauline Kael, an author, and film critic at The New Yorker when it was an exceptional magazine. Kael grew up in San Francisco, and reminisces about the atmosphere in her neighborhood as the homeless and hungry appeared at the door.

The second voice on the tape is Emma Tiller, an African-American woman who cooked for white families in the Deep South during the depression. Her recollections of who was charitable to who when there was a knock on the back door certainly give one pause. Her voice is like music.

The last voice in this excerpt is Terkel’s wife’s. She became one of the first social workers for the first poverty agencies in the Midwest. Simple dignity was the first thing that went out the window when dealing with impoverished families. After all, if you couldn’t find a job and feed your family, and you had the nerve to ask for charity so your kids could eat, you must not deserve to be treated like an adult. She speaks here of the inspection people had to endure in order to qualify for the meager benefits.

Studs Terkel  Hard Times  The original tapes on which the book was based. 6 meg download

Caedmon TC 2048 (2 LP set)

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