AMERICAN VOICES - Program 3

00.00	Titles
00.14	RAYMOND TARVER: I worked for the First National Bank. I’d started as a book-keeper, worked my way up. I hadn’t accumulated a great deal at the time of the panic, but I had some savings, I had a good job. That was the trouble: my savings and my job disappeared at much the same time.
00.41	COMMENTARY: In the early 1930s, the United States experienced the worst Depression in her history; an economic slump which turned on its head the prosperity of the 1920s. A slump in which 15 million Americans lost their jobs. But what was it like, to live through this Great Depression?
01.07	This program reconstructs the testimonies of four Americans who experienced those ‘Hard Times’. Their words survive because, at the end of the decade, 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’.
01.52	This is Wall Street, in the heart of New York’s financial district. This is where the Great Depression began. In the good times, in the 1920s, the stock exchange had marked the beating pulse of American capitalism, confidence reflected in soaring share prices, investors buying stock, banking on future prosperity. People thought the boom times were here to stay. The President, Herbert Hoover spoke of "an end to poverty", of "unlimited plenty for all". But then, October 25^th, 1929, the bubble of confidence burst. Stock traders watched in horror as prices began to drop, and then plunge into free-fall. Fortunes evaporated overnight. 30 billion dollars blown away in just a few weeks. The shock waves of the Wall Street Crash were felt across the country. Small banks found themselves besieged by anxious investors desperate to withdraw their savings before they lost it all. Raymond Tarver was a bank clerk. He described to the Federal Writers Project the collapse of one small town bank.
03.35	RAYMOND TARVER: We were having breakfast one morning, my wife Louise and I, when the telephone rang. It was one of the fellows I worked with. He said, "Tarver, have you heard the news?" I said, "What news? What's it all about?" "Well," he said, "hurry on down and see." And sure enough, in front of the bank, there stood a crowd of employees. The bank was closed and there was a notice to that effect on the door. I had all my savings in that bank. My job hung in the balance. Even so, at first I didn't worry so much about my losses, I was more concerned about our customers. The saddest part was to see the widows who’d probably been left just a little insurance; they’d put it in the bank. I mean, what were they going to live off now?
04.35 06.08	COMMENTARY: Herbert Hoover, meanwhile, faced the crisis with an optimistic smile. He said there’d been recessions before. He tried to persuade America the economy was fundamentally sound, that recovery was just around the corner. But the economy depended on people buying things. And with confidence shot to pieces, people held onto their money, they stopped spending. The economy just ground to a halt. All over the America, towns found themselves devastated by this crisis of confidence. This, for example, is Lowell, Massachusetts, in the North Eastern United States. To some extent it never recovered from the tragedy that hit it then. Lowell was a mill town, dependant on one main industry, textiles. Here, demand was slowing down even before the Crash: Lowell was losing out to mills in the south where labour costs were cheaper. But after the Crash, orders halved, the mills were forced to make cutbacks, many closed their doors for good. Within a year, three out of every seven mill-hands here were unemployed, on the streets, no money in their pockets. The effect on the local economy was devastating.
06.22	MARY O’KEEFE: My store was in the Wrightsboro Road. Been a thriving concern from the start. It was nothing for my husband and me to go on a party and spend one to two hundred dollars in a single evening. But then the plants closed, one by one. People were out of work, they had nothing to eat, they had no money to spend. The only plant that stayed open was the Buckeye Oil Mill but even they laid off a number of men, and the rest of them worked only three days a weeks. I mean, some of these folks had spent their money with me for years; I couldn't refuse to help them now that they needed me. We all thought the trouble was only temporary, that the plants would open again in a few weeks or months. So I let them take goods on credit. I had $6,000 in diamonds; one ring alone was worth $3000. I sold them all with the exception of my engagement and wedding rings. Just kept restocking my shelves. Until one day I found myself with empty shelves and my last dollar gone.
07.52	COMMENTARY: The collapse of the economy cut across American society. It affected not just those on the factory floor but office workers, clerks, secretaries, travelling salesmen. This footage shows scenes one year after the Crash, at a labour exchange. News of a hundred jobs had drawn crowds five thousand strong. And with every passing month, the lines of the unemployed grew longer. 7 million by 1931; 12 million by 1932.
08.35	RAYMOND TARVER: I thought I’d get another job. I was young enough, I had experience and standing in the town. I was wrong. When I saw there were no jobs to be had locally I started looking elsewhere. I got a temporary job in the ice plant. But then I came to realise they were only keeping me on out of sympathy, and I couldn’t stand that, so I quit. I tell you, we learnt to count out nickels.
09.14	COMMENTARY: Meanwhile, what of Hoover? Was he – as some historians have said – a do-nothing President? The truth is, he worked hard, persuading Big Business to fix wages and end the lay-offs. He thought Big Business, not the government, would be the force behind recovery. The trouble was, he still thought of Americans as ‘rugged individualists’, thriving best on their own, self-reliant, free of government interference – a proud philosophy well-suited to the boom-times: but hardly helpful in the face of such hardship.
09.54	In 1930 a journalist called Louis Adamic visited Lowell and reported on the conditions there. He described the main street – how every third store was closed. How the butchers had stopped ordering turkeys for Thanksgiving. How the barbershops were under threat; people were cutting their hair at home. The only places doing well were the thrift shops, the ‘five-and-ten-cent-stores’. But what struck him most was the sight of men and women (mostly men), aimless, hopeless; their dignity as breadwinners, as husbands, as fathers, eroded. What follows are the words of a man interviewed on the streets of New York, his testimony an insight into the mood of despair.
10.53	OLD BRONX JEW: What will you do? What will you do? What will you do? Go hang yourself with your own necktie. When I'm fifty years, an old man, I'm strolling around with my hands in my pockets. I'm suddenly a vagabond. I got specks in my eyes. I'm screaming in my sleep, I ain't human no more. I mean, what’s human nature? Clothing, food, shelter, recreation. The moment you wake up, your belly starts to talk, you know? You gotta eat. You get tired out, you gotta lay down. But where’s the bed? We ain't animals, they can sleep in a hole in the ground, nature gave them their own clothing. What shall I do? I ain't a tub of wisdom. I'm a plain old man. Like they say around here, I ain't a thoroughbred. I got an American spine, but a heart from the old world. The only thing is: it's a good God. A wise God. He won't let me live long - that's all.
12.44	COMMENTARY: This is Trinity Church in Manhattan, New York City. It stands directly opposite Wall Street, surrounded by some of America’s oldest financial institutions. In the years after the Crash, Trinity Church was one of those places in New York where the homeless could come for shelter, where the hungry could get a piece of bread or a bowl of soup.
13.17	Traditionally, private charity was considered shameful; ‘rugged individualists’ don’t want help. But they had little choice. Unlike in Britain, where the government gave pay called the ‘dole’ to those out of work, in America there was no safety net. The ‘American Way’ was sink or swim. And charity, though shameful, was better than starvation. But already many Americans were asking: why should people be subjected to this degree of shame? Was it their fault the system had collapsed? If not, whose responsibility was it to fix the system? Hoover’s.
14.12	Meanwhile, what about life beyond the cities? Here, government inaction was an old, old story. For ten years even before the Crash farmers had suffered hard times; the establishment had turned a blind eye. The files of the Federal Writers Project are chock full of farmers describing the bad times. Too much cotton leading to falling prices, then too little cotton when the boll weevil set to work, destroying crops throughout the South. What follows is the testimony of Moses Austen. He worked for white farmers taking a share of the crop. He tells of a decade of depression on one Southern Farm.
15.10	MOSES AUSTEN: It started ‘bout war time. War gets over, soldiers come home, everything goes wrong on this place. Mister Oscar, he held and held all our cotton, but the price goes down to nothing; then he sells. We all went hungry that year. Next year, 'long 'bout July, them thunder clouds come out the west, I says to Miss Jane, it’s a bad sign. And sure enough, 'long 'bout Augus', the boll weevil came. And bless your life, that bug sure romped home that fall. Miss Jane says, 'This ain't gonna do; we'll have to plant us some peas’. But Mister Oscar says, 'un-uh', he don't want nothing but cotton planted on his farm; he’s in debt, he has to raise cotton to get the money to pay with. Goes down to Columby, and gave a mortgage on the place and bought more guano than ever before. Before the middle of May I saw the boll weevil sitting in the top of them little cotton stalks, waiting for the squares to form. So all that guano I hauled made nothing but another crop of boll weevils. The next few years, we had a crop sometimes. But Mister Oscar, he held and held, always waiting for the better price. Summer of ‘31, he has to sell – we got no food, you can’t eat cotton – but cotton’s just six cents a pound. Mister Oscar went broke as a convict. Stood by the garbage can and declared the mess he’d made of his life. Miss Jane, she’d had enough of boll weevils, cotton fields, and gullies, and failure. Bundled her things aboard a Southern Railway train, went West to California. This was once the finest farm in the Dutch Fork. Now when I sit here and looks across at these gullies, and weeds, and briars, and that muddy water in the river, I says to myself, 'Moses, that muddy water is the blood of this land’.
17.48	COMMENTARY: These are some of the most famous Depression photographs ever taken. They show migrant farmers driven from their land; some from the South, others from further West, where drought had turned fertile soil into a Dust Bowl.
18.08	No testimonies were taken of these migrants. But their memories are preserved in their music.
18.17	SONG: I’m going down this road feelin’ bad, Lord I’m going down this road feelin’ bad. I’m going down this road feelin’ bad; And I aint gonna be treated this way. I’m gonig where that chill wind never blows, Lord I’m going were that chill wind never blows. I’m going where that chill wind never blows; And I aint gonna be treated this way. I’m going where the climate suits my clothes, Lord I’m going where the climate suits my clothes. I’m going where the climate suits my clothes; And I aint gonna be treated this way.
19.50	COMMENTARY: In 1932, Herbert Hoover was up for re-election. He returned to his home state of Iowa to begin campaigning - but public opinion had turned against him. Crowds two thousand strong picketed the streets. Meanwhile, in the Capital, veterans from the First World War had come seeking an advance on a bonus they were due. They’d marched on Washington, joined by farmers, and the ranks of the unemployed. These weren’t revolutionaries - they were patriotic Americans. But they’d realised what Hoover had not - that in exceptional circumstances even ‘rugged individualists’ needed help. Hoover’s response shocked the nation.
20.43	NEWSREEL (SYNC): It’s war! The greatest concentration of fighting troops in Washington since 1865! All assembled with a single purpose, to rout the Bonus Army from government property, which they have been occupying without permission. And so they’re being forced out of their shacks by smoke bombs and tear gas, hurled by the troops who have been called out by the President of the United States. It’s a spectacle unparalleled in the history of the country.
	COMMENTARY: In late 1932, the American people removed Herbert Hoover from office. It was time for a new style of government.
21.27	RAYMOND TARVER: I mean, we were lucky. I know that. Even when times were at their worst, we survived, we counted out nickels. My wife Louise had a cabbage patch, it saved out life. So many people lost everything. It made us realise how fortunate we were. But it also made us realise how we all have to look out for each other, sometimes. How you can’t always make it on your own.
22.01	MARY O’KEEFE: I mean, back when there was money around, we all thought everything was well with the world, you know? But since the Crash – things just going backwards, never knowing when the axe’ll fall – you see the injustice, the inequality. You begin to think, how long’s it going to take for the old birds in Washington to realise, it's government help, or else? How long do people have to suffer, before they’re convinced we’re not just throwing about a load of old heffer-dust here…
22.37	ANONYMOUS: As for me… back I can't go. It's too late. Like, yesterday, I was standing on the breadline. Was it yesterday? What is it today? Tuesday? That's right. I was standing on the breadline, and suddenly a cop hollers: "Back up". Two hundred people on the line, he says to them, "Back up". So he starts to shove; two minutes, there’s a fight with three broken heads. You know, sometimes, you just can't back up no more.