Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression

The Great Depression refers to a prolonged period of economic misery that plagued millions worldwide and lasted throughout the 1930s. Studs Terkel’s interviewees refer to it as simply “The Depression" because nothing like it had ever occurred before the 1930s, and nothing of its kind has happened since.

Economic historians use many indices to help quantify the suffering. The most revealing statistics involve joblessness. At its peak in 1933, the US nationwide unemployment rate hit 25%. Small, steady declines in joblessness ensued for the next five years before the unemployment rate spiked again in 1938, reaching nearly 20%. Not until World War II did the US return to full employment. Other disasters coincided with, or in some cases triggered, mass unemployment. In the early 1930s, thousands of banks failed, costing many Americans their life’s savings. Prices plummeted, prompting farmers to destroy crops and kill livestock in hopes of raising prices through diminished supply, even as extreme poverty and hunger spread.

The question of what caused the Depression remains a matter of debate. The US stock-market crash of October 1929, what Terkel’s interviewees remember as simply “The Crash,” lingered in popular memory for many decades thereafter as the one dramatic event associated with the Depression’s onset. The Crash itself, however, did not immediately plunge the US into economic catastrophe. A brief period of recovery ensued before cascading bank failures and falling prices brought the US economy to a near standstill. Since the Depression hit all Western industrialized countries at the same time, policymakers erected tariff barriers designed to protect their home markets from foreign competition, resulting in fewer exports. President Herbert Hoover, who presided over the Depression’s worst years (1929-33), always insisted that the problem stemmed from Europe’s post–World War I system of reparations payments. While there is truth in Hoover’s assertion, it is also likely that no single factor can account for a catastrophe of the Depression’s magnitude.

Readers of Hard Times will note that the vast majority of Terkel’s interviewees have only the vaguest conception of what might have caused their miseries in the first place, and few seem inclined to speculate about it. What emerges from Terkel’s book is an overwhelming sense that something went very wrong in America in the 1930s.

While it does not rise to the level of an organizing theme, perhaps the most important analytical thread that runs through Hard Times from beginning to end involves the question of how and why the Depression ended. President Franklin Roosevelt entered office in 1933 promising Americans a “New Deal,” and he delivered on this promise with an unprecedented array of federal programs aimed at relief and recovery. There is no question that the New Deal rescued the US banking system, put many people back to work, and provided a measure of relief that had never existed previously. Nor is there any doubt that Roosevelt’s personal appeal, conveyed through his “fireside chat” radio addresses, restored a degree of confidence in the political system. For all its innovations, however, the New Deal never succeeded alone in generating the economic activity required to lift Americans out of Depression conditions. Terkel’s interviewees are nearly unanimous in concluding that it was the Second World War, not the New Deal, that finally ended the Depression.

From the perspective of the late 1960s, this conclusion has momentous consequences. It means that whatever plagued the US economy at the beginning of the 1930s continued to plague it by the decade’s end, that the best efforts of policymakers had a modest effect, and that it took a war to help millions of Americans escape the Depression. Several of Terkel’s interviewees, including a few young people, note with disapproval this apparent connection between war and prosperity. Furthermore, from this view the Depression appears not as a routine downturn in a familiar boom-and-bust cycle but as a total systemic collapse. Had it not been for the war, it is impossible to know how long the Depression would have lasted. In the affluent America of the late 1960s, therefore, many young people suspected that not only their present prosperity but their entire economic system depended on war.