Studs Terkel's oral history of the Great Depression
Talking with economists, then and now.
My professor in in Rotterdam, Arjo Klamer, had his first big success with Conversations with Economists. I think he struck gold for two reasons. First, the book came out in 1983, a moment when macro-economics was in a state of flux, with various schools of thought like the monetarists, the new classicals, and the new- and post-Keynesians all vying for intellectual dominance. One of the major attractions of the book is having the two Bob’s, Solow and Lucas, discuss strategy in intellectual debate. Take for instance, Solow on his refusal to engage Lucas in technical discussions: “Suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now and announces to me that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. The last thing I want to do with him is to get involved in a technical discussion of cavalry tactics at the battle of Austerlitz.”
But the other reason was much simpler, Arjo decided to do what was both obvious and original: he decided to talk to economists about their craft and practice. By now there is a solid stream of books that have utilized the same approach (I particularly like this one on the edges of the mainstream, and my friend Catherine Herfeld has one coming out soon about rational choice which I am excited to read). But in 1983, this approach was new and Arjo certainly had the advantage that many of his interviewees were not too self-aware about how they would come across.
But it turns out that more than a decade earlier, Studs Terkel, the Chicago radio personality and oral historian, had already used the same approach with much success. His book about the Great Depression, Hard Times, consists mostly of conversations with those who experienced it: the farmers, the Okies, the bankers, the miners, the old money folks, the evicted. But Studs was equally interested in those who somehow tried to control or influence it, those who were able to profit from the Depression, those who worked in relief programs, those who covered it in newspapers, those who resisted and organized. And so, he devotes a whole chapter to interviews with those who worked in the New Deal administration.
It starts off with Gardiner Means (famous for his book on corporate governance with Adolf Berle), who like many of the others emphasizes how much of the New Deal was improvised, and how conservative the views of FDR were when he came in. But his most interesting observation is about the experts like himself who were attracted to work for the administration:
A surprising number, we discovered, were sons of ministers, rabbis, missionaries. Yes, there was an evangelical quality, though it was non-religious. People who were personally concerned about a better world, came to Washington, were drawn to it. Even though where we were going was still being worked out. There was an élan, an optimism … an evangelism … it was an adventure.
The economist Joe Marcus confirms this spirit and as an outsider he was happy with the opportunities for advancement it provided: “Unthinkable for someone like me, of lower middle-class, close to ghetto, Jewish life.”
Raymond Moley, an early speechwriter of FDR is convinced, like Means, that the major contribution of the New Deal was that it brought back confidence and hope (a recurring theme in many of the everyday memories in the book too!). But what is striking in his and many other memories of those who worked in the administration is that he had very little good to say about anything past 1936. On some level one might say that the improvisation continued, but according to Moley without any particular sense of direction after 1936, and he concludes: “It was the war that saved the economy and saved Roosevelt.”
Beanie Baldwin provides an excellent recollection of the competing interests within the Agricultural Department which was headed by Rexford Tugwell: the big farmers and the little farmers. Unsurprisingly the little guys, tenant farmers and sharecroppers, lost, they received hardly any of the money which flowed predominantly to the landowners. Baldwin also fondly remembers one particular improvisation: paying the wages of migrant worker Collins so that John Steinbeck had a companion with whom he could work in the fields for eight weeks in preparation for The Grapes of Wrath.
David Kennedy, who started at the Federal Reserve Board, recounts the fights between Mariner Eccles and Carter Glass about pump-priming (Eccles, yes, Glass, no) and the Banking Act of 1934. As well as some of the internal debates about the extent to which monetary policy was the reason for worsening situation in 1937. Kennedy, too, remembers the disenchantment with FDR: “He was a dramatic leader. He had charm, personality, poise and so on. He could inspire people. But to me, he lacked the stick-to-it-iveness to carry a program through.”
The similarity between Arjo Klamer’s approach and Studs Terkel’s is that they are primarily interested in conversation, rather than interviews. They want to talk, as casually and open as possible and see where the conversation goes. As Terkel puts it in the introduction to his first oral history Division Street:
The question-and-answer technique may be of value in determining favored detergents, toothpaste, and deodorants, but not in the discovery of men and women. It was simply a case of making conversation. And listening.
There is, however, also a big difference. With the exception of Gardiner Means, the people that Studs Terkel talked to are probably not the people we immediately think of when we say economists, or policy experts. But that is exactly the strength of Studs Terkel’s approach in oral history, he is never primarily interested in elites, but about the people who lived through hard and interesting times. His books are not written for the elites, but rather to give voice to the disparate experiences of everyday people. This is, I believe, a distinct characteristic of mid-twentieth-century Chicago literature. Maybe, someday we will start doing this too, in our conversations with economists.
Studs Terkel during the promotion for Hard Times, Source: Wikimedia Commons
