Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression

Studs Terkel shares his personal memories of the Great Depression. While narrating his own story, he intersperses italicized, paragraph-length commentaries on the broader Depression experience. Terkel recalls his mother’s anxiety as the number of guests in her Chicago rooming house began to dwindle, rooms remained vacant, and debts mounted. After the end of Prohibition in 1933, the guests who did remain preferred drinking and gambling.

On the radio, the guests heard President Franklin Roosevelt’s “fireside chats,” as well as weekly broadcasts from Father Charles E. Coughlin, a fiery populist who railed against banks and financial interests. Terkel’s mother lost most of her savings to a failed investment scheme. Terkel attended the University of Chicago’s Law School but opted for a career in radio, starting with the Illinois Writers’ Project in 1936. In his italicized, parenthetical commentaries, Terkel notes that on a grand scale, the Depression produced fear, misplaced guilt, confusion about its origins, and an eagerness in some to adopt revolutionary solutions. It was also a time when “the white man was ‘lowdown’,” and “the black was below whatever that was” (7).