Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression

Studs Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970) features interviews with 160 people, the vast majority of whom lived through the Depression. Some interviews consist of only a few paragraphs, others two or three pages. Each interviewee shares Depression-era recollections. Terkel selects interviewees who together represent a cross-section of American society, including migratory workers, union organizers, evicted tenants, jazz musicians, actresses, teachers, writers, stockbrokers, coal miners, farmers, and members of President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. 

Hard Times also features comments from more than two dozen young people, all in their teens or twenties at the time of the interview, who did not live through the Depression. Their inclusion serves one of Terkel’s primary purposes, which is to bring authentic Depression-era experiences to a generation born and raised in affluence.

From 1952 to 1997, Terkel hosted a weekday radio show in Chicago. This platform allowed him to speak with prominent figures on a regular basis. It also gave him substantial interviewing experience, which he showcases in Hard Times by pausing to ask questions but otherwise allowing interviewees to speak for themselves. On the strength of this book, Terkel acquired a reputation for exemplary oral historical research. He later won a Pulitzer Prize for The Good War: An Oral History of World War II (1984).

This guide refers to The New Press 1986 edition of Hard Times.        

Content Warning: The source material features frequent depictions of suicide, mental illness, and extreme stress.

Summary

Hard Times is divided into five “books,” each of which includes multiple chapters, and each chapter is subdivided into sections. The five books have numbers but no titles. Chapters and sections have titles but no numbers. Terkel groups interviews into chapters according to various unifying themes and then names individual sections for the interviewee(s) whose recollections appear there. For instance, the first chapter of Book 1 is called “The March,” and the first of this chapter’s three sections has the title “Jim Sheridan,” a veteran of World War I who, in that section, shares his memories of the 1932 Bonus March on Washington, DC. For clarity’s sake, this guide applies numbers to chapters and sections.  

The shortest interviews are only a few sentences long and are all from young people who are ignorant or indifferent about the Depression. Terkel uses these, along with more thoughtful answers from other young people of the 1960s, to illustrate The Generational Gap between parents who experienced the Depression and children who did not. While Terkel does not assign blame for this generational gap, he does suggest that older people have buried their memories of the Depression and have thus deprived their children of important truths about America’s worst economic collapse.

No single interview occupies more than eight pages of text. This allows Terkel to explore important questions while at the same time presenting many different perspectives. From these unique memories, shared experiences and patterns of thought emerge. This is why, for instance, one interviewee who spent the Depression years as a migratory worker, could read John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath and feel that it “was like reliving [their] life” (50).

Hard Times opens with “A Personal Memoir” from Terkel himself, who reached adulthood during the Depression’s worst years. Terkel describes his mother’s struggles to maintain a once-prosperous Chicago rooming house that, in the 1930s, began to suffer from mounting debts and a diminishing number of nightly guests. He also hints at several major themes on which his interviewees focus.

Book 1, the lengthiest of the five books, consists of nine chapters. It opens with recollections of the 1932 Bonus March and concludes with multiple chapters on labor strife in the 1930s. The largest chapters include recollections from itinerants, stockbrokers, union organizers, and people who were children in the 1930s. Book 1 also includes comments from twelve young people of the 1960s. As it unfolds, Book 1 illustrates Aspects of “Race” During the Depression. On one hand, the Depression had a leveling effect because nearly everyone suffered. On the other hand, the experiences of Louis Banks, Emma Tiller, Kiko Konagamitsu, Cesar Chavez, Clifford Burke, Robin Langston, Jose Yglesias, and E.D. Nixon show that “race” remained a destructive concept in the lives of Depression-era Americans.

Book 2 features seven chapters. The first three chapters present the Depression-era memories of people who hailed from old families with established wealth, as well as people engaged in cultural pursuits. Remaining chapters focus on coal miners, farmers, and journalists. By organizing Book 2 in this manner, Terkel allows readers to experience Depression-era memories first from among the most privileged, and then from among the less fortunate. The miners and farmers at the end of Book 2 also share perspectives similar to those of the industrial workers and union organizers who appear at the end of Book 1.

Book 3 presents nine chapters consisting of interviews focused on Political Turmoil and the Prospect of Revolution during the 1930s. Four of the nine chapters feature only a single interview, but these include recollections from established political figures such as Congressman C. Wright Patman, the Texas populist who served twenty-four terms in the US House of Representatives, and Alf. M. Landon of Kansas, the Republican nominee for president in 1936. The first chapter, “Concerning the New Deal,” consists of policy- and philosophy-themed interviews with eight men who occupied positions inside the US government during the 1930s, nearly all of them in the Roosevelt Administration. Subsequent chapters highlight two of the era’s formidable alternatives to establishment-driven, two-party politics: populism, which garnered considerable sympathy among middle- and lower-class Americans, and communism, a global movement that attracted intellectuals and labor leaders but repelled the majority of workers. Most of Book 3’s interviewees downplay the possibility of revolution during the 1930s. Nearly all conclude that the Second World War, not the New Deal, brought an end to the Depression.

At six pages in length, Book 4 acts as an interlude consisting of five interviews that do not fit easily into any other book or chapter. Each, however, adds something unique to the Hard Times story, from recollections of Depression-era prison life to comments on foreign affairs.

Finally, Book 5 consists of six chapters. Interviewees include performing artists, municipal officials, lawyers, judges, and others caught up in the legal system. The two middle chapters in particular, “Evictions, Arrests, and Other Running Sores” and “Honor and Humiliation,” amplify a major theme introduced and developed in earlier books: The Depression as a Psychological and Familial Catastrophe. Throughout Hard Times, many interviewees recall that the Depression’s miseries caused people they knew to die by suicide. In Book 5, interviewees share reasons why they considered taking their own lives. The despair goes well beyond its most extreme manifestation: A social worker weeps as she describes the humiliation she observed on the face and in the voice of one unemployed client. A teacher and a stockbroker explain that the Depression prevented many people from getting married and left them feeling isolated in their despondency. Broken men abandoned their families or were abandoned by them. Terkel includes a pair of two-page interviews in Book 5’s “Epilogue.” Each highlights the Depression’s devastating psychological impact on those who endured it.