The Great Depression Interviews
These interviews are part of the Henry Hampton Collection housed at the Film & Media Archive at Washington University Libraries. Each video and transcript represents the entire interview conducted by Blackside, Inc.. The interviews are conducted with those who lived during the Great Depression and can reveal their experiences and hardships.
http://digital.wustl.edu/greatdepression/browse.html
Great. OK, so then nobody could help each other out anymore, because nobody has anything. So your family has to go accept relief. What was that like for your family? What were you feeling?
Well, there did come a time when, when, when the, the things got so rock-bottom, my father was ill at the time and, and, and it, that, that, Mother and my father had to, in effect, accept welfare. And that time it was, it was more or less considered charity, it was, it was no institutionalized welfare program or such. The, the, the people, people accepted this. And all I can say to you is that, in my parents' lifetime, and in mine, there was nothing more dreadful than that moment. It, it absolutely almost destroyed my mother and father that they'd have to go and, and stand in line to get some help. And, at the time, the help came in the form of, of packages of flour, maybe shoes and socks, and so on. And it, it, it was a devastating thing, just devastating. And, and, and, and, it's, it's hard to, you know, to map it, because this was, this was ripping at, at this whole sense that they had of pride in what they were doing, in, of, of, of doing on their own, and so on, a terrible invasion of their privacy. And it, and it, it was just devastating. And fortunately it didn't last very long. It was a very, very brief period in my family's thing, because things began to get better and, as soon as they did, Mother, for example, got a job. She was working at, at the Briggs Manufacturing, sewing cushions for automobiles.
This is the final question. Did FDR's New Deal programs, I'm talking about the New Deal, not the, the stuff that happened after '35, I mean after '36, after the second election. I'm talking about the New Deal. CWA, PWA, NRA, those kinds of things. Did they represent any significant change in terms of the government's relationship to people, particularly in terms of the government's responsibility to the people?
When FDR's actions to get us out of The Depression created jobs, it also brought about what I always called the beginnings of the social revolution. And this did have an effect, I believe, on the Negro community, because it brought about certain changes, opened certain doors that had never been opened before. But it only opened the doors. It was something that could only continue if the Negro community itself was willing to take further action and keep pushing, because I frankly am unwilling to say that FDR was necessarily going to lead a charge through the doors. All he did was open them. It was up to us as people to get through and keep things going.
You had mentioned to me also that, how it affected your family, that your family lost their home and, and your father, you had...actually, it's a very sad story. They say you felt that your father may have, that he died of a broken heart after.
Yes. My father and mother had a small business. My mother worked with him. He wasn't a good business man to begin with. She was better than him at it. And when the economic times were better and they had more customers, they would sell new furniture. During the Depression, that switched to used furniture. It brought very little income. When they had purchased our home, which was near Central Avenue and Jefferson Boulevard, in those days a blue-collar worker area which was already becoming mixed, black and white, and they had to have not only a first mortgage but a second mortgage. That amounted to two hundred, two thousand dollars. When the Depression hit, and people stopped buying from my parents' store, there was no money to pay that mortgage. So after a couple of years, they made the last payment that they could. The mortgage was two thousand dollars. The second mortgage was held by a woman who pleaded with them to not default on it, that she wouldn't, that she would have to lose the property anyway because she didn't have the two thousand dollars either. But there was nothing they could do, and so our home was gone. My father was nearing his 60s and becoming ill. He had a very hard life. And I had been, as the years wore on, I was in Los Angeles. Towards the end of 1934, I decided at that time to go to Los Angeles and go to New York, where there was a lot of social activity going on that I wanted to be part of. So I said goodbye to my parents and left. And the following year my father died. And I always felt that he had been defeated by the Depression, and that the loss of our home was the last straw for him.
You mentioned the Depression. How did the Depression, because that's our period, how did the Depression especially sort of fan the flames, or fuel anti, anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic—
In the 30s, there were two causes for the rise of anti-Semitism. The growth of Nazism in Germany, with the movement of propaganda into this country. The Depression, which gave the average American the need to find out who was the fault for his not working, for his having to sell apples on the street.
You had a Klan, you had a Black Legion movement, was a kind of Klu Klux Klan. You had fellows in this country who had German connections, and were listening to what was coming out of Germany, out of Ehrfurt, which was the central focus of the disseminated anti-Semitism, and so it became a natural process to begin to blame the Jews for the Depression, for the no jobs, for the problems that Hitler was creating in Europe. It was a movement that insinuated itself into the higher economic establishment, and so you had organizations that looked to Wall Street for its financing or to big business, Joe Camp's Constitutional Education League, Merwin K. Hart's Economic Council, National Economic Council, very fine, high-sounding names. They weren't—they were propagandists, who were frightening Wall Street that the Jews would take over Wall Street or Washington, and they'd better give them big bucks, while the Klu Klux Klan was frightening the fellow on the lower level, and telling him that Jews were creating Communism and Socialism, and taking their jobs away. So you saw the growth of, as I recall it, we counted in the 30s some several hundred anti-Semitic organizations. There was one book that came out that frightened the lives out of us, to this day we never troubled to document it—a man named Stone did a rather respectable study, and he said there were approximately eight hundred bigoted organizations in the United States which were targeting primarily on Jews, secondarily on the other minorities. It didn't, it didn't get that high in my judgment, but to say that there were perhaps two hundred anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic organizations in the United States, is more likely accurate. There were seventy-five periodicals in the United States in those years which were blatantly anti-Semitic, whether it was a Klan publication, or some other kind of nationalist house organ.
So how did people survive there, no jobs, no food, how did people survive?
OK. Well, the other thing about the Great Depression, I forgot to mention, that, my God, people jumping off roofs no matter what they did, people just lost their fortune come the Depression, and I remember at 23rd Street, flatiron building, walking along the street and some guy jumps out a window, [ gap: ;reason: unintelligible ] blood. Very common way of people committing suicide in the 30s, just unbelievable, it happened to so many people that the papers wouldn't even want to report it. In fact, they had a song, "Gloomy Sunday," and it made people kill themselves, and finally it wasn't allowed on the radio, took it off the air, "Gloomy Sundays." Just, you know, made you so blue you couldn't stand it. And then the other thing I think people kind of forget—where is it, it's west of that highway now in Riverside Drive, Hooverville, shanty town, they had old shanties along there, people got tinderbox and they made, and everybody want[sic] along the waterfront. The other thing you saw if you went into the Armories and the big public buildings, lines of hundreds of people lined up waiting for a cup of coffee, a cup of coffee. So really the whole period was so depressing, you know, you went downtown and you looked, you saw a line, you know, an employment guy's getting a cup of coffee. Anytime you got near a public building people'd form lines. There was a kind of unrest about it, an unrest about it. There were—you know, the American people at that time, especially in New York City were immigrants, were never quite sure, can we say anything against the city, the state? I remember, for European people to look at this government of theirs who have no social consciousness. They looked at the government of the cities and Washington, like, they were like the kings, oh [ gap: ;reason: unintelligible ] , so they didn't say anything, but you got this little radical group that began to say, listen we got to get some people, we got to march to City Hall. I [ gap: ;reason: unintelligible ] been fortunate, fortunate, that's the way I am, I got in on one of the early marches to City Hall. Went there for jobs and welfare, we demanded jobs and we wanted welfare. So the whole, that was the whole thing of the 30s.