Hard Times (14 page)

 

We had Billie Holiday in the show. She used to sing “Strange Fruit.” Oh, beautiful. We got along great together, Billie and I. And I used to read in the back room sometimes to Art Tatum. He played intermission piano. ’Cause he couldn’t see, you know. I used to bring books. He always talked about it: “Remember how you used to read to me, Jimmy?” He’d sit there and drink beer, and I’d read to him.

I never had this black and white feeling. Jesus, if you could sing or play, jeez, that was it. I never knew it was that bad till I went down to New Orleans in ’34. Where we played, they had a gambling joint, Club Forest. They had a bunch of sheriffs around there because it could be held up. They even had a machine gun in an enclosed cage up above. They all carried guns.

One time, late at night, we were out drinking. There were three or four of these sheriffs. One of the guys said, “Hey there’s that nigger son of a bitch. I’m gonna get him and blast his brains.” They started towards him. He was really gonna shoot him. I pushed his hand away and I said, “Don’t shoot him. I don’t want to see you kill a guy.” It was just a minor, simple little thing. I saved the guy’s life just by pushin’ this sheriff’s hand away. They were gonna beat my brains out, the sheriffs. Oh, they started gettin’ the pistol, one guy was gonna hit me. Another guy stopped them. Then I realized: Holy jeez, these guys are murder. They’re gonna kill a guy for nothing. Just because—… wow, boy.

There was more camaraderie. It didn’t make any difference if you were colored or white. If you were a good musician, that’s all that counted. Now the colored guys say we can’t play real jazz, soul music. What the hell else we play with but our soul? Every guy’s soul is not the same.
Know what I mean? Miles Davis thinks I’m great—he likes me, and I like him. But so many others say: the white guy can’t play. He hasn’t got the soul. Who they kiddin’? There’s nobody with a lock-up on soul. If I let myself go and play just the way I feel, that’s my soul, isn’t it? Whether it be white or black, you gotta play the way you want to.

The music of the Thirties
was good
. I don’t mean you stand still. I haven’t. But I must play the way I feel. If my style is any good, it will endure, Thirties or Sixties. Or Seventies.

I think everybody should have a job, and the Government should see that they get a job. That WPA deal, that was a darn good idea. I was one of the lucky guys that didn’t need it, but this is what I believe. Everybody should work, but do what they want. I don’t mean this as a communist thing, maybe it’s socialism, I don’t know. Like I’m a musician. Just pay me to do concerts for nothin’. Let people listen for nothing.

The Government should work something out so people have something to do. There are so many things to be done in these cities. You feel much better if you’re workin’ instead of gettin’ a handout. You’ll get self-respect, which is number one. Drama, dancing schools, musicians…. You could give guys like me jobs as teachers, to teach jazz. So you perpetuate what I’ve learned in my lifetime. You could give that to some younger person and let them carry on, make their own choice, but at least they’d have the background. It’s like studying history. It’s like being part of history… .

 

OCTOBER 29, 1929—I remember that day very intimately. I stayed in the office a week without going home. The tape was running, I’ve forgotten how long that night. It must have been ten, eleven o’clock before we got the final reports. It was like a thunder clap. Everybody was stunned. Nobody knew what it was all about. The Street had general confusion. They didn’t understand it any more than anybody else. They thought something would be announced.

Prominent people were making statements. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., announced on the steps of J. P. Morgan, I think, that he and his sons were buying common stock. Immediately, the market went down again. Pools
combined to support the market, to no avail. The public got scared and sold. It was a very trying period for me. Our investment company went up to two, three hundred, and then went down to practically nothing. As all investment companies did.

Over-speculation was the cause, a reckless disregard of economics. There was a group ruthlessly selling short. You could sell anything and depress the market unduly. The more you depressed it, the more you created panic. Today we have protections against it. Call money went up—was it twenty percent?

No one was so sage that he saw this thing coming. You can be a Sunday morning quarterback. A lot of people have said afterwards, “I saw it coming, I sold all my securities.” There’s a credibility gap there. There are always some people who are conservative, who did sell out. I didn’t know any of these.

I don’t know anybody that jumped out of the window. But I know many who threatened to jump. They ended up in nursing homes and insane asylums and things like that. These were people who were trading in the market or in banking houses. They broke down physically, as well as financially.

Roosevelt saved the system. It’s trite to say the system would have gone out the window. But certainly a lot of institutions would have changed. We were on the verge of something. You could have had a rebellion; you could have had a civil war.

The Street was against Roosevelt. Only me and Joe Kennedy, of those I know, were for Roosevelt in 1932. I was Assistant Treasurer of the Democratic National Committee. I did not support him after the first two terms. I had a great argument with him. I didn’t think any man should serve any more than two terms. I was getting a little tired, too, of all the New Deal things. When I was asked to work with the War Production Board in 1940, he delayed initialing my employment paper. Later on, we had a rapprochement and were friendly again.

Confidence ended the Depression in 1934. We had a recession in 1937. People got a little too gay on the way up, and you had to have a little leveling off. The war had a great deal of stimulus in 1939.

A Depression could not happen again, not to the extent of the one in’29. Unless inflation went out of hand and values went beyond true worth. A deep stock market reaction could bring a Depression, yes. There would be immediate Government action, of course. A moratorium. But in panic, people sell regardless of worth. Today you’ve got twenty-odd million stockholders owning stock. At that time you had probably a million and a half. You could have a sharper decline now than you had in 1929.

Most of the net worth of people today is in values. They haven’t got it in cash. In a panic, values go down regardless of worth. A house worth $30,000, the minute you have a panic, isn’t worth anything. Everybody
feels good because the stock they bought at fifty is now selling at eighty. So they have a good feeling. But it’s all on paper.

PEOPLE WERE speculating. Now who are they gonna blame aside from themselves? It’s their fault. See my point? If you gamble and make a mistake, why pick on somebody else? It’s your fault, don’t you see?

It’s like many people on the bread lines. I certainly felt sorry for them. But many of them hadn’t lived properly when they were making it. They hadn’t saved anything. Many of them wouldn’t have been in the shape they were in, if they had been living in a reasonable way. Way back in the’29s, people were wearing $20 silk shirts and throwing their money around like crazy. If they had been buying Arrow $2 shirts and putting the other eighteen in the bank, when the trouble came, they wouldn’t have been in the condition they were in.

In 1929, I had a friend who speculated. He’d say, “What’s good?” I’d say, “We’re selling high-grade first mortgage bonds on Commonwealth Edison.” “Oh, hell,” he’d say, “five percent. I make ten percent on the stock market.” He was buying on margin. He thought he was rich. Know what happened to him? He blew his brains out. The Government had nothing to do with that. It’s people.

Most people today are living beyond their means. They don’t give a damn. The Government’ll take care of them. People today don’t want to work. We had a nice colored woman that worked for us fifteen years. She had a grandson. We offered to pay him $2 an hour to take the paper off our bedroom wall. Nothing to it. One coat of paper. We’d provide the bucket and sponge and the ladder. Do you think he’d do it? No. We couldn’t get anybody to do it. So I did it myself. Nothing to it.

 

 

Certainly. This huge relief program they began. What do you think brings all the colored people to Chicago and New York?

 

 

—my blood begins to boil. The New Deal immediately attacked Wall Street. As far as the country was concerned, Wall Street was responsible for all the upheavals. They set up the Securities and Exchange Commission. That was all right. I know there were some evils. But these fellas Roosevelt put in the SEC were a bunch of young Harvard theorists. Except
for old Joe Kennedy. He was a robber baron. These New Dealers felt they had a mission to perform. Roosevelt attacked people—with some reason. But without justice. All people on Wall Street are not crooks.

My friends and I often spoke about it. Especially after his hammy fireside chats. Here we were paying taxes and not asking for anything. Everybody else was asking for relief, for our money to help them out… . A certain amount of that is O.K., but when they strip you clean and still don’t accomplish much, it’s unfair.

They were do-gooders, trying to accomplish something. I give them credit for that. But they didn’t listen to anybody who had any sense.

Hoover happened to be in a bad spot. The Depression came on, and there he was. If Jesus Christ had been there, he’d have had the same problem. It’s too bad for poor old Herbie that he happened to be there. This was a world-wide Depression. It wasn’t Hoover’s fault. In 1932, a Chinaman or a monkey could have been elected against him, no question about it.

 

I CAME into the business, out of the University of Chicago, about Christmas, 1924. I had about $3,000 in the stock market, which was all the money I had. On Black Friday—Thursday, was it?—that margin account went out of the window. I may have had about $62 left.

My wife had a colossal $125 a week job with a Shakespearean theater company. That night, she came home to our little apartment, and she said, “Guess what happened today?” I said, “What?” She said, “I quit.” I was making about $60 a week and she was making $125. Two-thirds of our income and all of our savings disappeared that day.

I was a margin clerk. He’s a man who keeps the figures on individual accounts, if they’re carrying stocks on margin—that is, if they’re carrying stocks without paying for them.

When the break started, you had a deluge of selling, from weakened margin accounts. We had to stay up all night figuring. We’d work till one o‘clock and go to the LaSalle Hotel and get up about five and get some breakfast and continue figuring margin accounts. ’Cause everybody was in trouble. But everybody.

The guy I worked for was sitting in the wire room, watching the tape. The tape was something to see, because Radio Corporation, let’s say, would be ninety-five on the tape … they’d flash you sixty on the floor. The floor was a madhouse. I said to him: “Are we solvent?” He says, “I won’t know till about twelve tonight.” He was half-serious. It was brutal.

The Crash—it didn’t happen in one day. There were a great many warnings. The country was crazy. Everybody was in the stock market, whether he could afford it or not. Shoeshine boys and waiters and capitalists… . A great many holding company pyramids were unsound, really fictitious values. Mr. Insull was a case in point. It was a mad dream of get-rich-quick.

It wasn’t only brokers involved in margin accounts. It was banks. They had a lot of stinking loans. The banks worked in as casual a way as the brokers did. And when they folded… .

I had a friend in Cincinnati who was young and attractive. He had a wife and children and he was insured for $100,000. Life was over as far as he was concerned. He took a dive, to take care of his wife and kids. There was a number who took the dive, to collect on insurance policies. It’s unthinkable now, when you know how many people have been able to come back.

There were others that impress me. I kept hearing about town that their businesses were in trouble. But they never lowered their standard of living a bit. They lived like kings, right through the Depression. I’ve never been able to figure this out. I knew some people who maintained their Lake Shore Drive apartments and cars, and everybody knew they were in trouble. I never knew how they did it, and I didn’t care particularly. My friends and I were all broke, and we had no pretensions.

You had no governmental control of margins, so people could buy on a shoestring. And when they began pulling the plug … you had a deluge of weakness. You also had short-selling and a lack of rules.
³⁷
There were many cases of staid, reputable bankers making securities available on special deals—below the market price—for their friends. Anything went, and everything did go.

Today, there are very few bankers of any repute who have objected to the Securities Exchange Commission. They believe that the regulation in 1933 was a very, very sound thing for our business.