Throughline - Lives Of The Great Depression

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

The Great Depression was a revolutionary spark for all kinds of things — health insurance, social safety nets, big government — all of which were in response to a national crisis. Through the personal accounts of four people who lived during the Great Depression, we look back at what life was like back then and what those stories can teach us about the last time the U.S. went through a national economic cataclysm.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. I'm sitting in the City Free Employment Bureau. It's the women's section. We've been sitting here now for four hours. We sit here every day waiting for a job.

There are no jobs. Most of us have had no breakfast. Some have had scant rations for over a year. Hunger makes a human being lapse into a state of lethargy. Especially city hunger. Is there any place else in the world where a human being is supposed to go hungry amidst plenty, without an outcry, without protest? Where only the boldest steal or kill for bread.

And the timid crawl the streets. Hunger, like the beak of a terrible bird at the vitals. We sit looking at the floor. No one dares think of the coming winter. There are only a few more days of summer. Everyone is anxious to get work, to lay up something, for that long siege of bitter cold. But there is no work.

Sitting in the room, we all know it. That's why we don't talk much. We look at the floor, dreading to see that knowledge in each other's eyes. There's a kind of humiliation in it. We look away from each other, we look at the floor. It's too terrible to see this animal terror in each other's eyes. The Great Depression started in 1929 and lasted through the next decade. It was marked by massive unemployment, hunger, homelessness,

and a general sense that the country's future was in peril. Grim new economic numbers tonight affecting millions of Americans. Unemployment now soaring to 14.7%. In just the last month, 20.5 million Americans losing their jobs. The worst global economic fallout since the Great Depression almost a century ago. That was the warning today from the head of the... And that got us thinking. What many Americans are experiencing today might not be that far from what people experienced back then. Families and food lines who never thought they would need this help. Americans out of work and now in need. Tales of extreme poverty.

Families and food lines who never thought they would need this help. And there's no telling how much worse it's going to get as COVID-19 continues to impact businesses and local economies everywhere. So we're going to do something a little different in this episode. We're going to hear the stories of people in their own words who lived through the Great Depression. Four people, four vastly different experiences who come from all over the United States. My name is Henry Wright. I never missed a meal, but I postponed a few. Henry Wright went looking for adventure in the Great Depression. Riding the rails from coast to coast, he learned things about himself and the world. With a certain amount of pride, he called himself a hobo.

Bouncing from city to city, seeking his fortune. Is this thing on? Oh, hello. This is Maridel Lasur. She was a writer, born and raised in the Midwest. I've lived in cities for many months. Broke. Without help. Too timid to get in the bread lines.

Maridel spent the Depression in unemployment offices and soup kitchens, talking to people, mostly women, documenting what she saw and heard. I was so broke. Quite often, I was with no money in my pocket. The most I ever had was maybe one or two dollars. The least was, well, normally I got 10, 15 cents. You can call me Fong.

Fong spent the Great Depression in San Francisco's Chinatown. He experienced the era at the street level and the everyday minutia of economic struggle. Hello, I'm Dorothy Haidt. In a strange way, everybody had a feeling of common suffering. There was a kind of sense that everybody's having a hard time. Dorothy Haidt grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania. And when the Great Depression hit home, she was eager to escape to the big city for college. She moved to Harlem in New York.

But as luck would have it, the Depression would follow her there. Henry, Maridel, Fong, and Dorothy's stories, captured in oral histories, diaries, and essays, give us a window into what it was like to live through this time, a moment that often gets reduced to one archetype of American suffering. Their stories, their voices, are the ones we don't generally hear. And we hope that their stories can teach us something about ourselves and what we're going through today. So with that, we give you Four Lives of the Great Depression. Hi, this is Morgan Brown from Buffalo, New York,

and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Thanks, I love the show. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. The tremendous crowds which you see gathered outside the Stock Exchange are due to the greatest crash in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. The speculation had become crazy. Like an appendix operation, it's a good thing to have it over with. Men are sitting in the parks all day long, out of work, muttering to themselves.

The great big spree, the jazz age is over, all over. The close of an era. I looked with great anticipation into going to New York and just thought it was the most beautiful of cities and so great. And so I got there and I had the feeling, at last, I've reached New York. And then when I got down to New York University, where I was going to college in Washington Square, I found there were so many men there and they were all selling apples. Little man, what now? Well, you can always sell surplus apples, five cents apiece on the street corner. They were five cents, but no one had five cents to buy one.

And I found that all through the Bowery, which surrounded it, I was almost intimidated by seeing the numbers of grown men just standing with a handout and bread lines all around. Sons who have lost their grip on life are gratefully happy for the bite of hot food. around. And of course, in Harlem, the churches, everywhere you looked, people were serving soup kitchens, and people were really trying to get some kind of job, some kind of way, to make a decent living. Rolling out of Kansas City July 26, 1930, with the whole West before me to be seen and explored, was next to elation. About 12 others were also seeking their fortunes from the same side door Pullman train. We traveled all morning in a spirit of geniality. A couple of steeplejacks headed to Denver to ply their trade there, if conditions permitted, kept us entertained with their volubility until we left Topeka behind and discovered we were on a drag.

Every day, they used to have that foghorn out there, blowing. Boo, boo. You know, all day long, all night long. During the daytime, it probably stops somewhere in the afternoon. But sometimes, it continues all along through the evening. It never stops. Why? Because it's always foggy, see? And once in a while, you see the sun shine somewhere around half past three, up to half past four, and that's all.

One day, finish. What we know about Fong comes from oral history interviews that he gave in San Francisco's Chinatown when he was 67, decades after the Depression ended. He was a big man. He wore a windbreaker and an old woolen sailor's cap, navy blue. He didn't say where he lived or his name. He just said, Call me Fong.

Some such story is written on the faces of all these women. There are young girls, too, fresh from the country. Some are made brazen too soon by the city. There's a great exodus of girls from the farms into the city now. Thousands of farms have been vacated completely in Minnesota. These pictures of the Minneapolis truck drivers strike, typical of disorders flaring up in various cities, show a spirit of lawlessness which has no place in America. The girls are trying to get work. House and home spread through the conservative farmlands. The girls are trying to get work.

The prettier ones can get jobs in the stores, when there are any, or waiting on tables. But these jobs are only for the attractive and the adroit. The others, the real peasants, have a more difficult time. I realized there was such pain in Harlem because you had whole families that were being evicted at any time. You could go down the street and there would be a whole family sitting, seated,

whose every possession was placed on the street just because they didn't have the money to pay the rent. And the marshals would stand there in a merciless way. You'd see little babies and little children and their parents trying to deal with what was an impossible situation. It was nothing to see three or four evictions in any given week. You wonder how I lived? That's a different question.

We got a room. There's five or six of us. Sometimes we pay rent. Sometimes we don't. We got a sack of rice for a couple of dollars and we all cook every day and we eat there. Sometime one night you see 40 or 50 guys come in and out. The old guys go to each other's place, sit down, talk all night long before they go to sleep the next day. But as I said, you eat Chinese food. It's very cheap. At the restaurant that's famous for rice porridge, Sam Wo's, they used to cook pig stomach called the juto, where they take the crunchy part from the middle and then sell all the leftover parts of jho right outside Samwo's. It's just only a nickel. The American doesn't know how to eat it.

You can see how bad it is. But those days, we used to buy a lot. And every few days, one guy would go up to Samwo's and come back with all those geetos in an old-fashioned rice sack made out of mat, like, that's come from China. 50 pounds of rice sack. And he brings those Cheetos back, and I clean them, get a great big pot, and we stew it up. Oh, hell, we eat for a whole goddamn half a week.

All we want to eat. So we got our food, one way or the other. Lots of vegetables, real cheap at the time. And that's how I passed by. After eating an early breakfast, we hit the trail to the scene of action, which was about a four-mile hike. Most of us got our first glimpse of a forest fire. With axes, shovels, picks, and cross-cut saws, we built fire trail, working always in the heat of the fire and smoke.

For Henry Wright, the Great Depression was a journey. Born in Missouri in the early 20th century, Henry grew up in an orphanage. At age 16, he got kicked out with just $20 and a change of clothes. So with few options, he set out to find adventure. It was a hard five days. We built a fire trail, and then on the second night, we patrolled a hot spot till dawn, after a very strenuous day. Sandwiches and coffee were sent to us around midnight, when it was clear we'd be working through the night. Huge trees needed to be sawed down. They were five feet in diameter, with fire streaming from every knot hole.

The heat was almost unbearable. We worked in minute-long shifts of four men, pulling the saw back and forth with the pitch running out on the saw and sizzling. With eyebrows singed and our clothes burned full of holes, the great trees finally went crashing to the earth. By the beginning of the 1930s, it was clear that the economic crash was no temporary thing. Thousands of banks had closed. Close to 13 million Americans were unemployed, 25% of the labor force at the time. When we come back, the federal government tries to stop the economic freefall. Hi, this is Pete Mullen calling from Albuquerque, New Mexico,

and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Love the show. Keep up the great work. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. piano plays softly In a strange way, everybody had a feeling of common suffering. There was a kind of sense that everybody's having a hard time.

You didn't have a feeling that some people were making it and some were suffering. But at the same time, everybody had to compete with everybody for the scarce things that there were. My fellow citizens, this broadcast tonight marks the beginning of the mobilization of the whole nation for a great undertaking to provide security for those of our citizens and their families who, through no fault of their own, face unemployment and privation during the coming winter. In the shadow of the elevated, a nickel is still a piece of money, and everything can be bought from a 10-cent necktie to a 30-cent flop, which means a place to sleep. The very fact that the young men and women of today have nothing easy to look forward to is a good thing for them, because the very thing that is a stumbling block to one man is a springboard to another. The very thing that crushes one man elevates another. Many have lost the savings of a lifetime.

Many are unemployed. All know the misgivings of doubt and the grave concern for the future. On church steps after dusk are sprawled unfortunates who must be up at the crack of dawn for a front spot in the bread line of Mr. Zero,

who somehow manages to obtain food for men who don't seem able to get it for themselves. It's one of the great mysteries of the city. Where women go when they are out of work and hungry. There are not many women in the bread lines. There are no flop houses for women, as there are for men, where a bed can be had for a quarter or less. You don't see women lying on the floor at the mission in these free flops. They obviously don't sleep in the jungle or under newspapers in the park.

There is no law, I suppose, against their being in these places. But the fact is, they rarely are. Yet, there must be as many women out of jobs in cities and suffering poverty as there are men. What happens to them? Where do they go? Try to get into the YW without any money or looking down at the heel. Charities take care of very few

and only those that are called deserving. The lone girl is under suspicion by the virgin women who dispense charity. I've lived in cities for many months. Broke. Without help. Too timid to get in bread lines. I've known many women to live like this. Until they simply faint on the street from privations.

Without saying a word to anyone. A woman will shut herself up in a room until it's taken away from her, and eat a cracker a day, and be as quiet as a mouse, so that there are no social statistics concerning her. You have guys going around from building to building selling meat. They sell pork for 25 cents, 35 cents, a pound. Cheaper than the butcher shop. And you don't have to walk around.

They come to you. Now, during the Depression, I was so broke. Quite often, I was with no money in my pocket. The most I ever had is maybe one or two dollars. The least was, well, normally I got 10, 15 cents. I never missed a meal, but I postponed a few. We went to Oakland on the Chili Pepper and crossed the bay on the Hobo's Ferry to San Francisco. The skid row was full of bums.

About noon we passed the St. Francis Church. There were about 2,000 depression stiffs lined up. The priest was giving each a nickel as they filed by one at a time, some going around the block to line up again. It's not a very fast way of getting rich. We celebrated Christmas in Oakland. It was on the main drag on New Year's Eve in Oakland

that I got in another inevitable fight. It lasted nearly a block past a swell theater and ended up when a voice behind me said, Beat it, the cops! I escaped down a side street and down an alley. Dorothy Height was living in Harlem, New York at this time. She was a college student, and she knew she was lucky. She had food to eat, a roof over her head. So she wanted to find a way to do something, to help where she could.

Well, there were all kinds of organizing efforts in the churches. One of the most significant ones, I think, was at the time that we realized that we were spending what little money we had and were getting nothing. And Adam Powell came into the picture, and he organized a people's committee. And what he called for was that we learn to spend no money where we could not work. And he taught us that no matter how little you had, your power was in what you did with it. And that to me was an indelible lesson. Dorothy had also seen the Depression destroy her hometown. But it was in Harlem that she saw how resilient people could be in the face of utter desperation.

When Adam Powell called this group together, he said to us, you can take your own condition in your own hands. And that was the time that he started the movement to get jobs on 125th Street. In June 1933, Washington became the spawning ground for what was perhaps the most startling egg ever hatched by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the National Recovery Act. Aim of the NRA was government control of major American industries through codes of fair dealing. These fixed maximum hours and minimum wages. Roosevelt come out and he created the word NRA. Gave work to people, a lot of guys. But later on, it got so sour. Like they got jobs. For instance, I went in on one of them, a railroad job inside Elko. They paid $72, I think. And they gave you jobs like that so you can make a living.

And I worked there a few months. It was awfully hot. Hot like everything. In fact, you could see the blaze in the afternoon. When the sun shines so blazing, you can actually see the atmosphere of it. Just the blaze moving around hotly. And people come back working in the railroad. They come back for dinner. They practically stink because their clothing been in the sunlight so damn long.

And that's the way it is. In the working out of a great national program that seeks the primary good of the greater number. It is true that the toes of some people are being stepped on and are going to be stepped on. But these toes belong to the comparative few who seek to retain or to gain position or riches or both by some shortcut that is harmful to the greater good. I lived out there. You don't go nowhere. It's right out in the middle of the desert, see? That's the way it is.

I did almost any kind of work, but nevertheless at that time, I was nothing but a helper, a waiter, dishwasher, and all that. See, they're always trying to push you down to these jobs, no matter how much or how good you are. Like that NRA was like all the other things. At first you don't realize, but nevertheless, in due time and in the long run,

you find out it will never have any advantage toward the Chinese. I met a fellow on the corner of Wall Street who, from casual observance, would have been taken for an office worker or a dapper salesman with his Panama hat, his nice suit, and his sports shoes. After I introduced myself, he said he wasn't having much luck. I've been bumming them right and left since the morning rush and I've only made $2.90.

I thought that seemed like a good day's work at 50 cents an hour. Trouble with me is that they know me too well and when they see me coming they cross the street. It does give me pleasure though to bum some of those big financiers. But it seems to break their heart to jar loose a dime. It is appalling to think that these women, sitting so listless in the room, may work as hard as it is possible for a human being to work, may labor night and day, wash streetcars from midnight to dawn, and offices in the early evening, scrubbing for 14 and 15 hours a day,

sleeping only five hours or so, doing this their whole lives, and never earn one day of security, having always before them the pit of the future. The endless labor, the bending back, the water-soaked hands, earning never more than a week's wages, never having in their hands more life than that. By the mid-1930s, more people were returning to work. But this didn't mean life was getting easier. When we come back, the bittersweet path to recovery. This is Noman Khan from Salt Lake City, Utah. And I just want to say that I sometimes get goosebumps listening to NPR through lines.

I'm addicted to it. Thank you. She rubbed the twig legs of the child, the thin chest, and held the tiny feet in one palm. She lifted one foot and put it in her mouth, put the cold toes in her mouth and blew on them. She leaned over and blew her breath on the child, and she knew that despite everything, the child had no resistance. It had not had enough to eat. She opened her shawl and laid the child inside close to her body.

If she'll live till spring, she promised, it will be all right. There will be food. Carrots, tomatoes. I'll plant them myself. She knew Jim wouldn't say why he was going to town, but she had read a letter. Something about a meeting, about seed loans at the fire hall. And she knew that must be where he was going, especially as they began to pass other farmers going to town. She knew everything, he thought. I believe in the Constitution. I believe in America. She looked at him with new eyes.

When he said that he believed in America, the blood flushed into his face. He was a good speaker. You're a man. You got the parts of a man. You got rights, too. You and your childrens. We want to do what's right. We want to pay our debts.

We always pay our debts. It ain't us who don't pay our debts, brothers. It ain't that we want to get away from the seed loans. That ain't the ticket. Not by a long shot. No, sir. We can't pay, brothers. We can't pay.

We've taken the food right out of our children's mouths to pay what we already paid. And that's a fact nobody can't get around. It is for the new generation to participate in the decision and to give strength and spirit and continuity to our government and to our national life. Chinatown, the largest oriental city in the occident. In its little park stands the new steel statue of Sun Yat-sen, the father of new China. Frequent fantastic ceremonies celebrate holidays of old China in the traditional manner. But then, around the middle of the depression, the change come along and everything goes zoom. The whole place begins to look different because they start building it up.

Now, the first thing they change is they change the names. Before that, not that there wasn't any bars in Chinatown, but they weren't noticeable nowhere. They were just down, beat up places, the bars for low down people and drunks and all that. But during the depression, a bar changed names to some kind of a club and then all those fancy names comes. Then the same thing happens with the restaurants. Used to be only Chinese people comes in there and eat. Very few foreigners comes around. I mean, people did come in one of them.

Hang An, the most famous one on Clay Street. But the little restaurants in Chinatown, they used to look down as very low. Nothing. But then the change came and these new restaurants sprang up too. In fact, maybe Chinatown is the place that start everything rumbling during the depression. Such as, like these dance halls, the bars, I like to stroll down to the Hudson at the upper end of Battery Park and listen to the orchestras on the upriver dance boats. Andy Cannelli's original Lucky Strike Orchestra played to the people on the landing

and always had an appreciative audience. After taking in Coney Island, I pulled out of New York after having spent over a month there. Only a few bums know it, but the JCPenney stores, which are located all over the country, are allowed to give away some article of clothing to some needy person. My buddy Slim gave the manager a pitiful story of sleeping in cold boxcars at night, nearly freezing to death without any winter underwear to keep him warm. He got the overalls by convincing him of his willingness to work. What farmer would hire a fellow in a suit that made him look like he was from the city? Besides, after he got a job and made some money, he would pay him back.

Slim bummed two or three other stores and finally succeeded in getting a flannel shirt. And at another store, he got a bow tie to go with it. The undertakers are usually good for a pair of shoes, but none of the deceased patrons of that town had anticipated Slim's wants and left any of the right size. And he failed to get a pair at any of the stores, so he bummed the houses until he got a pair. It would have been fewer houses if his feet weren't unusually large. He then had a complete new wardrobe, except for a hat. He even went into a barbershop

and came out with a haircut. All gratis. That night, we took in another holy roller meeting in Fort Fairfield, Maine. One of the bums got saved just for the fun of it. Of course, as a student just trying to get through college, and since I only had a four-year scholarship to college, I tried and I did make that four years give me both my bachelor's and master's. I didn't have much time to get into the nightclubs, but I did have the experience that was so rich in Harlem of little supper clubs where artists who performed downtown would come uptown. And there they would serve as waiters and sing or you could walk into any of the places, Sticky Wells, I forget all their names, malls. And there were those who would entertain.

There would be good food. And there was just a happy kind of climate. And it had a reality base because everybody was aware of the fact that we needed work. But there was also that sense that we had so much still among us as people to celebrate. I'll never forget that. I'm explain to you. During the Depression, there's three walks of life.

Daytime, there's the business. Throughout Grant Avenue, you see people moving around with their products and open up for business. After dinner, there's another walk of life, and that's our kind, who bums around the street doing nothing just to pass the time away because there's no work nowhere. The students don't got no work because they don't know how to do dishes or hard work or anything. They rather hire our kind for that. But even us, we don't get no work. Everything was so dead.

There was hardly anything going on. So in the evening, we come out and walk around the street and pass. It was nice summer times, you know. And we seemed to enjoy it very much. After eight or nine o'clock, we go back, as I said, and then we got all kinds of visitors comes around, talk all night long. Everything, anything that comes to our mind,

we make a story out of it and chat. After riding the rails for almost a year, Henry Wright got off the train in Bangor, Maine. He knocked on the door of a big house and he asked for any kind of work. They employed him for a day, then two, and as they got to know him, they took him in. He would eventually consider them his adopted parents, though it was never legal, and he had a relationship with them for the rest of his life. A few years after arriving in Bangor, he went to a YWCA dance and met the woman who would become his wife. They had six kids, the fifth of which, Marjorie Wright, was my mother. Dorothy Height graduated from New York University in 1932 and went on to spend her

life fighting for the rights of both women and African Americans. She was one of the most influential people in the civil rights movement. Dorothy had an instrumental role in organizing the 1963 March on Washington, but unfortunately, because of her gender, her role was largely ignored by the press. However, she did eventually get her due, receiving both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Congressional Gold Medal, as well as being featured on a postage stamp.

President Obama called her the godmother of the civil rights movement. She died in 2010. Maridel LeSueur went on to write about working people, especially women, in the Midwest for decades. She wrote her first novel, titled The Girl, in 1939 about the experiences of women during the Depression. Because of her leftist politics, she came under FBI surveillance during the Cold War and struggled to publish her work. She turned to writing children's books

and continued publishing in lesser-known places. The women's liberation movement in the 1970s brought new appreciation to Marigold's writing, which had long explored the themes of gender and sexuality. The Girl was finally published in 1978, and other novels and anthologies would follow in the 1980s. Meridel would continue to write poetry, fiction, and essays until her death in 1996.

Fong was interviewed by oral historians in San Francisco in 1970. They wrote, quote, You might want to think of Fong as one of the old bachelors who gathered every day on Portsmouth Square. They never learned his full name. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randabdib Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine. This episode was produced by me. And me, and our amazing cast.

I'm Jamie York. I was the voice of Henry Wright, my grandfather. I'm Lawrence Wu, and I play Fong. I'm Natalie Barton. I read the writings of Henry Wright, my grandfather. I'm Lawrence Wu, and I play Fong. I'm Natalie Barton. I read the writings of Maridel Le Sur. My name is Kia Miakanatis, and I was the voice of Dorothy Height. The soundtrack for this episode was composed and performed by one of our favorite artists, Hania Rani, that's spelled H-A-N-I-A-R-A-N-I. She has a new album that just came out called Home on Gondwana Records. That's spelled H-A-N-I-A-R-A-N-I.

She has a new album that just came out called Home on Gondwana Records. You should check it out to hear more of her amazing work. And a shout out to the rest of the ThruLine team, which includes... Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Thank you to Jason Fuller and Steve Tyson for their voiceover work. Thanks also to Camille Smiley and Anya Grunman. And a special thanks to Victor Nee, author of Longtime California,

and to the Henry Hampton Collection, Washington University Libraries. And for the Maridal Lasur story excerpted from Salutation to Spring by Maridal Lasur from Prairie Schooner, Volume 12, Number 3, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1938 by the University of Nebraska Press. If you have an idea or like something on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or find us on Twitter at ThruLineNPR. And one last thing. We'd love to hear from you. Leave us a message with your name, where you're from, and the line you're listening to ThruLine from NPR at 872-588-8805. That's 872-588-8805 You might end up on a future episode. Thanks for listening.