The revolution that shoulda, coulda been

books:


	• Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression Studs Terkel Pantheon, 1986 - 462 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Listening to people's stories

Studs Terkel discovered the great value of talking and listening to people, having them tell him their stories. In this way he developed a technique for gathering together a tremendously rich picture of life in the Depression. And these accounts generally have an authenticity and power of their own.
This is social history which is highly readable.

Informative. But It Dragged.

There is undeniable value in recording the memories and perspectives of people who have lived through something as remarkable as the Great Depression. The Internet of the future may provide the best possible compilation of such raw materials: only then may we see video and hear audio of the actual event, culled from tape recordings and home movies of the 1970s and before, and from film reels of the 1920s and after. Compared to resources like those, the relatively brief excerpts that Studs Terkel offers in this book cannot help but feel tailored, managed, and limiting.

I say the Internet of the future may be the ultimate resource. But in an important sense, that is exactly wrong. The ultimate resource would have been to have lived during those times -- to have experienced the event firsthand, and to have interviewed people and recorded information as it was unfolding. Do we, indeed, obtain a more compelling, a more visceral impression of the Great Depression by reading these timeworn memories, from the 1960s, of events that had taken place some 30 years earlier?

In some ways, no decade in the 20th century could have been farther away from the 1930s than were the 1960s. We had newfound suburban materialism; the race to the Moon; John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Great Society; LSD; rebellious youth and college as one's real home; American global supremacy; Vietnam and the Cold War. We were *so* far removed from the 1930s, by then. When Americans looked back from the later decade to the earlier one, they could not help but do so through very colored lenses. The values of the 1960s -- the things that people would tend to speak about, in the 1960s -- did visibly flavor the way that Terkel's interviewees spoke about their distant past.

Terkel's work is not history. It is a compilation of raw materials that a historian could use for some purposes. No doubt the historian would have to work through heaps of old material that might frequently repeat itself or express the same general impressions, just as Terkel's increasingly tedious interviews tend to do, as one progresses through the book. But a good historian would find a way to condense that material, to extract its most telling points, and to organize and present them in an intriguing and highly thought-provoking manner. This would be true even of the historian whose written work rested heavily upon verbatim quotations from primary sources. You have to make a point. You have to say something provocative if you expect people to get excited about your work.

I do recommend skimming this book, dipping occasionally into its anecdotes and observations. There is much to be learned here. But I don't believe it is going to give many people just what they want for the Depression. Instead, consider reading a novel about the 1930s, or one written in the 1930s; browse old magazines and, particularly, old newspapers, including both the big ones (e.g., the New York Times) and the small, local ones -- if you can find any of the latter that have been preserved in your area.

Gather your own data from these sources and elsewhere, and don't restrict yourself, as much of Terkel's book does, to one city. The 1930s was a world unto itself. This book does not do it justice.

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The revolution that shoulda, coulda been

This is the first book I've read on America's experience of the Great Depression of the 1930s. My parents and other relatives and some of my older friends went through it. One man whom I knew, frequently brought it up and with great bitterness and anger, often directing that anger to others around him - especially those who were younger and didn't go through it - while others had little or nothing to say and seemed to brush it aside. Most though, seem to just want to forget it.

One fine elderly woman - my grandmother - was incredibly generous and loving to others the rest of her life, because of living through it. It still stuns me to see how these people with similar experiences could react so differently so many years later.

The author, being a Chicago man, places a lot of emphasis on the Depression as it hit that city and its citizens. Also he has a definite Left-oriented sort of outlook - and after reading this book it becomes entirely understandable. He frequently brings up the possibilities of revolution during the 1930s when so many ordinary and poor people lost just about everything. But the message comes through clearly that the Americans of those years firstly still had respect for law and order and the government, and secondly they had a kind of optimism or set of positive 'it will pass' illusions that kept them going.

Reading how people were treated back then, it is nonetheless a wonder that they really didn't rise up and overthrow the entire capitalist system. If a similar Depression occurred today, it would happen. And that is also the reflection of many voices in this book.

I highly recommend this book to everyone. More than anything else, it taught me to understand more clearly how and why different generational values and perceptions were formed from that period - and how they have come to impact succeeding generations.

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Not great, but still very good.

This is the second book by Terkel I've read, the other being his superlative "The Good War". Like that book, it is a joy to read, and it was often hard to put down. He usually opens his interviews with just enough exposition to set up a scene, and then lets his subjects talk. And, do they! The personalities of each come through such that you feel as if you're sharing the room with them, an experience that is the more poignant for the realization that most of the people in this book are long-dead, taking their stories with them.

Nonetheless, the book has its weaknesses. Though the Great Depression is by definition an extremely broad subject, I never felt quite like I was getting a good "slice of life" of the times. For instance, there seem to be a disproportionate number of interviews with former Communists and socalists; though their movement was powerful during the Thirties, one may get the idea that they were more common than they actually were--especially since, as one reviewer noted, much of the book is set in and around Chicago. On the whole, it's a less gripping text than "The Good War"; reading that book felt like an awakening, while this one will reveal little to those with a working knowledge of the Depression-era U.S.

All that said, I'm glad I read it, and still recommend it for anyone interested in this complex and unsettling period of American history.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

A reissue of Terkel's classic work, with a new introduction by the author. "HARD TIMES doesn't render the time of the Depression or historicize about it - it is that time, its lingo, mood, its tragic and hilarious stories..." - Arthur Miller.

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