P.S. (19 page)

 

TAD, 20: It’s something that’s been filtered through my parents. I don’t know much about it and I think that they don’t mind my not knowing much about it; they’d rather sort of control this one source of information. Sort of like, I don’t know, the high priests and you can’t approach the altar too closely or you’ll be struck dead. Because they weren’t so much aware of the Depression at the time, but since then, this Purple Heart in their background has become such a justification for their present affluence that, you know . . . that if we got the idea that they didn’t have it so bad, well then that would be that one less sort of psychological control they’d have over us.

 

CHRISTINE: For my father, I know, he talks about having gone through the Depression meant that he needed things for security, because he always felt that since like there was a big
black hole out there somewhere you might fall into. And he defends himself to me a lot of times by saying, “I need these things around me, ’cause if I don’t have them, that might happen again.” At the same time, I know for some people it meant that they found out that you’re still human even if you don’t have money, and what the hell.

 

TOM BAIRD, 21: My father talks about it didactically, you know, and tries to draw little lessons from it, and he has anecdotes which come up every time the Depression comes up. It’s sort of this heroic past for them.

 

STEVE, 21: So many times, people—people like us, young people—are told that idealism is fine for youth, but that there’s a point one reaches when he must face up to the practicalities, the realities of existence. I think that lesson was learned during the Depression, at least to my parents that what actually happened to America was that they were forced at a point, at a period of time, to give up their idealism; forced to face up to the hard realities of making a buck and staying alive, surviving.

 

MARSHALL, 13: You know, I was thinking of one other issue. We talked about the value of the dollar being one difference. The other is the word “fear.” America’s always had a lot of fear: xenophobia, anticommunism, something or other, Red Scare after World War II. Fear, fear, fear, fear, fear. Fear, I think, is the thing that people learned in the Depression.

 

FRAN ANSLEY: The things that they teach you about the Depression in school are quite different from how it is. You knew that for some reason, society didn’t get along so well during those years, you know. And then you found out that everybody
worked very hard, and so everything somehow just got better. You never hear about any struggles that went on. A lot of young people feel angry about that. Wanting to protect you from . . . from your own history in a way.

 

[strains of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” playing]

 

JIM SHERIDAN: These fellas that come with their families, and by themselves, some of them with their wives, they came mostly by boxcar! Can you imagine women and children riding boxcars? Well, this is actually what happened.

 

 

JIM SHERIDAN: They took their family because after all, many of these bonus marchers had been evicted from their flats or their houses because they hadn’t the rent to pay. Probably they owed the landlord three or fourth months’ rent, maybe sometimes more. And some of them were evicted, and some of them just left, and left their furniture behind them. Sometimes there’d be maybe fifty or sixty people in a boxcar. That many.

We had leased a place in Virginia. It was a very hot day, and I noticed that in this jungle there was a man, a very tall man, about six feet tall. . . . He had a woman with him who was his wife, and several children, and an infant. The infant I don’t think was a year old yet. And we invited them over to have something to eat with us, and they refused. Well, I could see that the baby . . . the baby was crying from hunger. Finally, I—me and some others—went down to bum the center of town, and I figured probably that they didn’t have any bottle to feed the baby with, or any milk. And I remember going into a drugstore
and seeing the druggist and bumming a baby bottle with a nipple. Now, can you imagine a guy bumming a baby bottle and a nipple? Then I went and bummed the milk.

When I got back to the jungle camp it was kind of dark. I addressed myself to the man’s wife, and I told her here was a baby bottle and here was some milk. We had even warmed up the milk. But she looked at the husband, and the husband said he didn’t want it. And what could I do about it but just feel blue that . . . The pride of this fella fascinated me, but here he was subjecting his wife and his children to unnecessary hardships because of his extreme pride. And going through the tunnel, the baby died, probably one of the unreported tragedies of that bonus march.

And when we got to Washington, there were quite a few ex-servicemen there before us. There was no arrangement for housing, and most of the men that had their wives and children were living in what they called Hoovervilles at the time, across the Potomac River. And they had set up housing there made out of cardboard and tin of all kinds. Most other contingents—it was along Pennsylvania Avenue; they were tearing down a lot of buildings, and a lot of the ex-servicemen just sort of turned them into barracks; they sort of bunked there. Garages that were to be torn down that were vacant—they took over these garages, had no respect for private property, didn’t even ask permission of the owners—they didn’t know who the hell the owners were. They would march; they would hold midnight vigils around the White House . . . they would march around the White House practically in shifts. They were ordered out of Washington four or five times, and they refused. The one that they did get to shove these bedraggled ex-servicemen out of Washington was none other than the great Douglas MacArthur. But when these ex-soldiers
wouldn’t move, they poked them with their bayonets, or hit them on the head with the butt of the rifle. As night fell, they were given orders to get out, and they refused, and they crossed there, and the soldiers set those shanties that these people were living in on fire. So the bonus marchers straggled back to the various places they came from without their bonus.

 

KITTY MCCULLOCH: There were many beggars and people that would come to your back door, and they’d say they were hungry. Well, I wouldn’t give them money because I didn’t have it. But I did take them in and put ’em in my kitchen and give them something to eat. Well, this one man came; it was right before Christmas. And my husband had had a suit tailored . . . and it was a very nice suit, so he put it to one side; he didn’t wear it for ordinary. And I thought he didn’t like the suit, because it had hung there, you know. So this man . . . I said, “Well, your clothes are all ragged. I think I have a nice suit for you.” So I gave him this suit, and the following Sunday, my husband wanted to go to a wake . . . And it was a black suit with a little fine, white stripe in it, and he said, “Where’s my good suit?” And I said, “Well, Daddy, you never wore it so I . . . I . . . Well, it’s gone.” He says, “Where is it gone?” And I said, “Well, I gave it to a man that had such shabby clothes, and he didn’t have any. Anyway you’ve got three other suits, and I think that he didn’t have any, so I gave it to him.” He said, “You’re the limit, Mother.” He said, “I . . . I . . . I just can’t understand you.”

 

EMMA TILLER: The whites in the South is like they is I guess most other places. They will not give and help. Especially the ones who has turned out to be tramps and hobos. They come to their door for food, they will drive them away. White
tramps, they will drive them away. But, if a Negro come, they will feed him. They always go and get something or other and give him something to eat . . . and they’ll even give them a little money. They’ll ask ’em and say, you know, “Do you smoke, or do you dip snuff, or do you use anything like that?” “Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am.” Well they would give ’em a quarter or fifty cents, you know, and give him a little sack of food and a bar of soap or somethin’ like that. Well, but they own color, they wouldn’t do that for ’em. And then the Negro woman would say, you know, “Well, we got some cold food in there we can give ’em.” She’d say, “Oh, no, don’t give ’em nothin’; he’ll be back tomorrow,” you know. So they won’t bestow—

 

 

EMMA TILLER: Yes, yes, yes. She would take food and put it in a bag and sometimes wrap it in newspaper, and would hurry out, and sometimes would have to run down the alley because he’d be gone down the alley, and holler at him, “Hey, mister!” And he would stop, you know, and said, “Come here.” And he’d come back, and said, “Look, you come back by after a while, and I’ll put some food out there in a bag and I’ll set it downside the can so that you don’t see it.” If we could see soap, we’d swipe a bar of soap and a face rag or somethin’ or other, you know, and stick it in there for ’im. Negroes
always
was feeding these tramps. Even sometimes we would see them on the railroad tracks picking up stuff, and we would tell ’em, you know, to come to our house, and give them the address, and tell them to come by; that we would give them an old shirt or a pair of pants or some old shoes . . . and some food. We always would give them food.

Many times I have gone in my house and taken my husband’s old shoes and his coat, and some of them, he needed them himself, but I didn’t feel he needed them as bad as that man needed them, because that man, to me, was in a worse shape than he was in. Regardless of whether it was Negro or white, I would give ’em to him.

 

[strains of “Hard Travelin’ ” playing]

 

SIDNEY WEINBERG: October twenty-ninth, nineteen hundred and twenty-nine [the day of the crash]. I was down all night long, and I think I stayed in the office a week without going home. The tape was running, I’ve forgotten how long at night. I think the New York Stock Exchange ticker tape—it was ten or eleven o’clock at night before we got the final reports of what was done.

 

 

SIDNEY WEINBERG: Well, by that time they were so stunned they were thinking anything. They didn’t know what it was all about. ’Cause it came out like a thunderclap out of the air.

You had general confusion all throughout the street, because they didn’t understand it any more than anybody else. They thought something would be announced. It got so serious that very prominent people were making statements. Like Mr. John D. Rockefeller Jr., who was making a statement on the steps, I think it was, of J. P. Morgan & Co., that he and his sons were buying common stocks, which . . . immediately the market went down again.

A lot of people were hurt. Why, people were literally jumping out the window. Franklin D. Roosevelt showed real leadership
and courage. And we were on the verge of having the change of our whole system if he hadn’t done what he did.

FDR saved the system, in my opinion. You’d have had . . . The Depression would have been much deeper and it . . . it’s trite to say that the system would go out the window. Certainly a lot of the institutions of the system were changed anyway in the normal course of it. But it could be much worse. You could have had rebellion.

 

CLIFFORD BURKE: Listen, truthfully, the average Negro don’t know such a thing as Depression. Because from the day he was born, he was born in depression . . . so naturally, he don’t know no more than the word “depression.” As far as a job was concerned, the best he could get would be a job, like I say, driving team, or working in a coal yard, working in some factory. If he was in a factory, he was the janitor or the porter, which didn’t pay much. So you can understand very clearly why no such thing as the Depression really meant too much to him.

Then another thing, if you figure it up this way, the advantage that we had as Negroes was this: our wives and our mothers, they could go to the store and get a bag of beans, and maybe a bag of potatoes, and a big sack of flour, and a big piece of fat meat. And they could cook this up and we could eat it. You take the other fella—I’m referring now to the white fella. He couldn’t afford . . . he couldn’t do this . . . for the simple reason was this here: He’d always been in a position where he could get something good to eat. His wife would tell him, “Look if you can’t do better than this here, I’m gonna leave you.” I mean, this is real; I seen it happen, see. You take a fella had a job, say, paying him sixty dollars a week, and here I’m making twenty. Now, if I go home and take some beans or anything home to my wife, she’ll fix that, we’ll sit down, and
we’ll eat it. It isn’t exactly what we want, but we’ll eat it. But this white fella that’s been making this big money, and he go bring this home, and his wife isn’t going to accept this. [Chuckles]

Why did these fellas—all these big wheels—why did they kill themselves? They weren’t able to really live up to the standards that they’d been living up to before. The American white man has been superior so long, until it’s just something that he can’t figure out why he should come back and come down . . . He can’t understand this. He couldn’t stand the idea of being defeated, see. And when I say defeated, he couldn’t stand the idea of having to go on relief like the Negro had to go. He couldn’t stand to think that he had to work for a small salary, and as I said before, bring home the beans instead of bringing home a steak.

I can remember very distinctly a friend of mine who just before the Depression was pretty well set. And by them not knowing that he was a Negro, he got tied up downtown in stocks . . . and he came back home and drank poison and it killed him. I think he had about twenty thousand dollars that he blew in the stock market. It was a rarity, though, to hear tell of a Negro killing himself over a financial situation. Well, I can understand very clearly why he didn’t do it, because there were so few that had anything that had to do it, see. [Laughs]