AMERICAN VOICES - Program 2

00:00	Titles
00.14	MINNIE STONESTREET: I’d enrolled in a business college when I was in my late teens. I wasn’t even a high school graduate, but I completed the course - shorthand, typing - and I got my first job in 1917. Fifty dollars a month and all of it mine!
00.35	COMMENTARY: These pictures show the cliché of the ‘Roaring Twenties’, the ‘Jazz Age’. A time of release after the horrors of the First World War, a boom-time of prosperity and pleasure. But how real was that prosperity for most Americans? And why, in 1929, did the good times Crash?
01.13	This program reconstructs the testimonies of four American women who witnessed those years of boom and bust. Their words survive because in the late 1930s, they were each interviewed by the Federal Writers Project, an oral history project paid for by the US Government. Ten thousand Americans were interviewed in all - their lives, their experiences written down, filed away in the Library of Congress. Ten thousand American Voices.
01.58	This is Augusta, in Georgia, in the Deep South of the United States. It’s a typical American town. Nowadays it’s pretty quiet – most of the shops have moved to out-of-town malls, the credit sharks have moved in.
02.27	Back in the twenties though, towns like Augusta were bustling with life, a magnet for people keen to prosper, new businesses opening every week. One such firm was based here, in the downtown business quarter, on the corner of Greene and 8^th. It was a laundry. And the Federal Writers Project came here to interview its owner. Her name was Sarah Harman.
03.03	SARAH HARMAN: I was born near Stapleton, Georgia; I was brought up on a two-horse farm. My sister and I took the whole burden of the place, ploughing, building fences. Anyway, when my father got old, we moved to the city; I got work at a laundry. And then - this was 1910 - I decided to go into business myself. I rented a small store, seventeen dollars fifty a month, I bought a 16 pound iron. Just scrubbing, spotting; it wasn’t dry-cleaning then. But I put a bit of money aside. And all the time I had this mental picture of the kind of place I wanted, fully equipped for dry cleaning, rug cleaning, dyeing. And in 1921, I bought it all, at a cost of $25,000.
03.56	COMMENTARY: Sarah’s is the classic American success story. Moving from the countryside to the town, building a business, making good. It’s a story of confidence, typical of many from those days. Down by the old canal, since dried-up, Augusta’s factories stand proud. They specialised in textiles and paper, and, since the First World War, production had been booming. Inside, new equipment was transforming the production process, this was the age of mechanisation; and a new industrial idea - the assembly line - was changing the look of factory floors across America. All kinds of goods rolled off the production lines, products old and new, all kinds of labour-saving devices, all kinds of desirable consumer goods, mass-produced to tempt the dollar from America’s purse. For businesspeople like Sarah Harman, these were the good times.
05.08	SARAH HARMAN: You should have seen that place! - The Augusta French Dry Cleaning Company. Just inside the entrance we had this leather-upholstered merry-go-round. We had built-in cases all equipped with mirrored doors, and the counters and racks were painted white; and on the outside, an electric sign operated with flasher sockets, displaying a life-sized, beautifully dressed woman; it was visible blocks away. And pretty soon I had five girls and two men to wait on the trade, and I worked 2 tailors, beside 15 other men to work the plant. And the business averaged $150 a day - I never saw so much money as poured into our place then.
05.52	COMMENTARY: Sarah’s was an urban world – a world of shops and offices – a town-based economy that created opportunities for women as well as men. Women like Minnie Stonestreet. She worked as a clerk in a land registry office; ideally placed to witness the prosperity all around.
06.23	MINNIE STONESTREET: I remember my first assignment. I had to record a deed of sale on an Elliot-Fisher book machine such as I had never seen - I never knew such a contraption was manufactured. My employer placed me on a high stool, my arms reaching their full length (and then some) over to the keys at the very tip-top of the page. I was so excited. In those days money was so easy. Everyone was buying automobiles on credit. I even tried out a car myself, once, figured on buying it. Land prices were soaring. People throwing all discretion to the wind, buying the most ordinary land and extraordinary prices. I recorded all those papers. I must have had more than 500 papers on my desk at one time, they streamed in faster than I could put them, on record. I’d always wanted a home of my own, and one day the lot next to where I lived was put up for sale. Well, I had a job with a sure salary, I had two Liberty bonds and a savings account. So I bought the lot, and I started to build a home on the unit plan.
07.39	COMENTARY: Minnie’s testimony doesn’t record exactly where she built her home. Sarah Harman’s does. It was here, on the Hickman Road, built for $7000, with space out front to park her chevvy. It speaks of opportunities made good. And for many, that’s what the 1920s were about, opportunity. Especially for women. Because with jobs came spending power. Financial independence. The means to take control of your own life.
08.34	MINNIE STONETREET: I used to dance. I loved to dance. And cards. And I’d take a drink, too. Never more than two cocktails; that was my limit. My brother Dick, he liked to step. His girl friend had a car, they’d go off to the lake most weekends in summer. I never had a man - never much liked them petting parties. My one dissipation was the movies; still is. Every Saturday, rain or shine, I’d go to the pictures.
09.30	COMMENTARY: But how much were the good times available for all? These are the ruins of a factory built in Augusta in the ‘20s. Here, once, America’s new class, the industrial workers, manned the assembly lines. According to legend, everyone could succeed in America. This was the American Dream. America’s heroes were self-made men like Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, the tyre mogul, seen here together on a camping trip with the President, Warren Harding. The job of Government was to ride alongside Big Business, not interfering, rather defending the right of the individual to prosper. But for the workers, this American Dream had a flip side, because it allowed some individuals to prosper at the expense of others. There was no regulation of industry in these years, safety standards were poor, you could lose your job without compensation. The workers were on their own, taking the good with the bad, no one to fight in their corner. What follows is the testimony of a paper-mill worker. We don’t know her full name, she’s referred to as just ‘Mrs B’.
10.50	MRS B.: I went to work when I was fourteen. I got $25 a month. I thought that was pretty good pay for a child. My brother went down the mines, he was twelve, he worked alongside my father. My other brother worked in the steel works; he got as high as $45 a week when he was only sixteen years old. Anyway, I was in the mills, thank the Lord. I worked in a paper bag factory; I operated a press that printed the bags. I used to feed the machine. Nine hours a day, seven to nine, until the gong rang, and it’s over till the next day. Once I got my hand caught in the machine; it was so smashed that my fingers were all flat; the skin didn't break, but the blood was coming through the pores. It felt like a thousand pins and needles. It healed all right. I worked there until I was twenty, then I got married.
12.19	COMMENTARY: This promotional film was made by the Ford Motor Company in 1924. It shows a car worker who’s saving to buy a car of his own. It suggests American prosperity was within reach of all, if you just set your mind to it. Mother skimps on the groceries, Little Johnny starts a paper round. But how much were such dreams realistic on the salaries manual workers could expect?
13.02	MRS B: It’s tough to get married and not have enough to get along with. It’s a struggle. Sometimes I only have five dollars a week for groceries. It’s pretty slim. The milk comes to two dollars. I get two quarts a day - I have to get vitamin D for the baby, because she’s undernourished. Oh, well, once in a great while, sometimes, I get out to the movies; not down town, right here in the south quarter. It’s not so nice inside, but you just go to see the movie anyhow. I’d like to go down to the Warners’, downtown. Everybody’s hollering about it. It must be nice.
14.06	COMMENTARY: Clearly the good times weren’t for everyone. And meanwhile, beyond the cities, there were many who didn’t approve of the new opportunities on offer. This is Branchville, South Carolina, not far from the two-horse farm where Sarah Harman grew up. Despite the pull of the big city, over half of all Americans in these years still lived on the land. They’d benefited too from the great changes in society – mechanisation had increased production; the motorcar had reduced their isolation. But sometimes, isolation is a state of mind. What follows is the testimony of Alice Fairweather, a poor farmer’s wife.
15.07	ALICE FAIRWEATHER: My husband Ed and I, we knew each other from the time we was chillens. We got married about twenty-two years ago, I believe hit is but I aint real sure, I kind of forgets the time. I'm thirty-nine now. I look older don't I? Folks say that's because I’ve had so many chillens in so short a time but I'm proud of my family even if I do look old. No ma'am, I wouldn't want to live in a city or a town, I think I’d be kinder scared o' livin' there, with all them autos a screechin' and horns a blowin', hit sure aint no fitten place to live in those cities aint. Everybody in such a awful hurry. I don't see no use in such a hurryin', we all maybe is a tryin' to get to the same place when we go from this here world and there be plenty room Up Yonder for all o' us, I reckon.
16.22	COMMENTARY: For women like Alice Fairweather, the 1920s weren’t boom-times, they were years of increasing hardship. And poverty fed feelings of powerlessness. Farm incomes had fallen since the war, because, ironically, the countryside was over-producing – too much produce flooding the market. It was a problem that, later, would affect industries all over America – but America didn’t know that yet, and so, in the great tradition of rugged American individualism, they ignored the suffering farmers. When country folk looked to the cities, they saw a world with values very different to their own. A world of decadence, of license, of gangsterism. The prohibition against alcohol – a law passed with country votes – they saw openly flouted. Country folk saw themselves fighting a rear-guard action against a society increasingly out of control.
17.36	ALICE FAIRWEATHER: I don't believe in dancin'. And our preacher, he don’t think the picture shows is right neither. I guess the chillen might like the shows but I wouldn't want 'em to go even if we had plenty o' money for they’d just learn mischief. We sends them to Sunday School, but I ain’t a goin’ to make my chillen take more’n they want to o’ schoolin. They is teachin’ as many queer things in school these days ‘sides just a education. If they just learn my chillen to read and write good that's all I want and all they need to know. They might not even need that much, specially the girls.
18.33	COMMENTARY: The truth was, in the 1920s, America was a nation divided. But those in power couldn’t see it. At his inauguration in 1929, the incoming President Herbert Hoover summed up the mood of complacency, declaring: ‘We are a happy people - the statistics prove it. We have more cars, more bathtubs, silk stockings, bank accounts than any other people on earth’. Eight months later, the economy crashed.
19.12	MINNIE STONESTREET: It was just after I bought that lot. I was working at the Carrington Insurance Agency, I had a very nice salary. I’d talked with Mr Carrington, he’d told me glowing stories of his prospects, and foolishly I believed it all. The banks at that time, they were just awash with surplus capital. You could be practically unknown and get $50 from a bank, by putting up a hog or two or a bony old cow as collateral, never mind it would die long before the paper was due. So I went and bought that lot. But that was just about the time of the first bank failure. And everything began to go to pieces.
20.05	COMMENTARY: What had gone wrong? The trouble was, throughout the ‘20s the divisions in society had grown more and more acute. Big Business had re-invested profits to increase production, rather than raising workers pay; so fewer and fewer people could afford the glut of goods rolling off the assembly lines. If Big Business had cut prices, maybe the boom-times would’ve continued. Instead they’d advertised credit plans: buy now, pay later. They’d tempted people to spend money they’d not yet even earned. On paper, profits continued to soar. And those with money had bought into this bubble of confidence, buying shares on the stock market, inflating the paper value of Big Business still further. But it was just a bubble. And when it burst, investors lost billions.
21.21	SARAH HARMAN: For a while my business was fair, but it was one heck of a fight to make a dollar. Then the bottom fell completely out, it seemed to me that nobody was having any cleaning done. I needed money to stay in business, I couldn’t just close. So I was forced to mortgage my home. But let me tell you, don’t ever do that, it’s much better to sell it outright. That cursed mortgage has really kept me awake nights. Almost every night I see thirty five hundred dollars and interest in my sleep. Don’t mortgage anything! It’s better to give it away, if necessary, for your peace of mind.
22.05	MINNIE STONESTREET: The first bank to fail near us, it just had to be the Exchange Bank, the one where my money was deposited. After about ten years I got back just $12 from the $300 I had there. My employer got behind with my salary. Times were so hard. The bills were due on the house and I paid out as far as we could, until there was no money to go any farther, but still creditors were urging payment. The plumbing man was most especially insistent and ugly. I was in debt something like $2,000 with nothing to meet it, and I was so panicky I almost collapsed when I heard the sheriff's voice in the building. I tell you, I could neither eat nor sleep from worry and dread.
23.09	SARAH HARMAN: When I look back... . I mean, we were living too high, we had too much money to spend. People just didn't realize a pay day was coming. I had five trucks and a nice Buick car for my own use. Now, I have a piece of a truck and I think that damn thing will have to be junked.