Hard Times (2 page)

Who do I shoot? cried out Muley Graves, Steinbeck’s near-crazed Okie, as he was being bulldozed off the land. God, I don’t know, replied the town’s bank officer, who was going sort of crazy himself.

Muley was a small farmer of the Thirties. The Iowan was a small farmer of the Eighties. Though a half-century separates them, their tether’s end was commonly caused: neither could meet the payments.

Never since the Great Depression has the family farmer experienced such hardship, such despair. Scores of thousands are, with a growing sullenness, sampling the grapes of wrath. If help is not forthcoming one way—say, from Big Guv’mint—they will seek another. It’s a natural for the nearest con artist at hand.

There was farm anger and militancy in the Thirties too, but with a difference. The Posse Comitatus and the Aryan Nation would have been hooted off the wheatlands as clownish and diversionary. There was some awareness of root causes, an awareness that has diminished considerably during a half-century of amnesia. The farmers of the Thirties drew a bead on Washington.

Emil Loriks of South Dakota remembers: “The situation was tense in ten or eleven states. You could almost smell the powder. When Governor Herring
of Iowa called out the militia, Milo Reno
⁴
said, ‘Hold off. I’ll not have the blood of innocent people on my hands.’ We had a heck of a time getting the farmers off Highway 75. There were probably a thousand of them out there. Reno called a meeting at Sioux City. About thirty thousand farmers showed up. We decided to go to Washington and settle for a farm program. If Roosevelt hadn’t come in in ‘32, we’d a’ been in real trouble.”

Then and Now. In the Thirties, an Administration recognized a need and lent a hand. Today, an Administration recognizes an image and lends a smile. Larry Humphreys recognizes a bitter fruit, ripe for the picking.

The latest communique from Chicago’s Far South Side informs us that the Southworks of U.S. Steel is laying off six thousand. That leaves a thousand on the job—for the time being. It had not been unexpected. The community had known it was coming: merely a few more thousand swelling the roster of idle hands in heavy industry.

Recently, Ed Sadlowski, a union officer, whose grandfather, father, and himself were steelworkers, drove me around the plant area. Like Leslie Howard, the dreamy hero of the film
Berkeley Square
, I was transported into another time. The Englishman found himself a subject of George IV. I found myself reliving the last days of Herbert Hoover’s Presidency.

Smokeless chimneys. No orange flashes in the sky. Empty parking lots. Not a Chevy or a Ford to be seen, not even for those with 20–20 vision. An occasional abandoned jalopy, yes, evoking another image of the Thirties. Ours was the only moving vehicle for miles around. A stray dog; no humans. And it wasn’t that cold a day. In fact, the weather was unseasonably mild, accentuating the landscape’s bleakness.

The business end of the neighborhood wasn’t all that busy either. A boarded-up store or two or three. Ed pointed at a men’s clothing store: Open For Business. “He’s closing next month.”

South Chicago has joined Youngstown, Johnstown, and Gary. Steel Town circa Eighties has become Ghost Town circa Thirties. Recently, at an art-film house, I saw Willard Van Dyke’s 1938 documentary,
Valley Town
. It was Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a steel city of the Great Depression, stone cold dead. It was an experience of
déjà vu
in reverse. I saw Ed Sadlowski’s South Chicago

Where to? What next? At the time Carl Sandburg raised those questions in his celebrated long poem, he was assuming a tribal remembrance, generations hence. He did not count on a generation’s amnesia. Would he have today renamed his work
The People
,
Maybe?

As newspapers gather in my living room, in the manner of an old bum’s bundle, last week’s and the week’s before, I’m able to make out headlines about bullish markets. A stray item in the same week-old edition catches my eye. Dateline, Waterloo, Iowa: “Another 200 employees will be laid off at
Deere and Co., bringing to more than 1,000 the number of workers idled at the plant since October.” Don Page of UAW Local 838 is quoted: “You keep saying it can’t get worse, but it does.”

It appears that Don Page and the President are on different wave lengths; certainly not on the same planet. Today’s Murdoch headline positively glows:
THE GREAT COMEBACK
. Subheadline:
U.S. Grows Stronger Every Day
—
Reagan.
Though the
Wall Street Journal and the New York Times
are less flamboyant, they are equally euphoric.

Back to the bundle. Dateline, Schenectady, N.Y.: “At least 1,500 jobs will be eliminated this year at General Electric’s turbine division… .” In 1974, 29,000 were employed at the plant. By 1980, it was under 17,000.

As the comics page is turned—barely discernible, pentimento-esque, are the outlines of
Bloom County
—there’s a serious message from Eastern Airlines: 1,700 attendants will be fired and the pay of the survivors will be cut 20 percent. The Transport Workers Union explains elsewhere that it’s a 32 percent cut in real wages.

AT&T, as well, has an announcement. It does not appear in its TV messages. There is no need for actor Cliff Robertson here. Its Aurora plant roster will be cut from 4,000 to 1,500. As Kurt Vonnegut would say, So it goes.

Last week, near my building of work, a line of young people was snaking all around the block. At first I thought they were hopefuls awaiting Chicago Bears tickets. There was one such line a block away. This file was overwhelmingly black, about two hundred. One of these hopefuls, age nineteen, told me he and the others were job applicants. Later that day, an acquaintance in the personnel department let me know there were about five openings.

Ed Paulsen was nineteen in 1931. He was a job applicant, too. San Francisco. “I’d get up at five in the morning and head for the waterfront. Outside the Spreckels Sugar Refinery, outside the gates, there would be a thousand men. You know dang well there’s only three or four jobs. The guys would come out with two little Pinkerton cops: ‘I need two guys for the bull gang. Two guys to go into the hole.’ A thousand men would fight like a pack of Alaskan dogs to get through there. Only four of us would get through.”

Young Paulsen took to the road, along with millions of others. He rode the freights. Half the time, the boxcar, standing room only, was his home. Somewhere out there, in Kansas or Nebraska or who knows where, there might be a job of some sort.

A black World War Two vet, Louis Banks, shares the memory. “Black and white, it didn’t make any difference who you were, ‘cause everybody was poor. All friendly, sleep in a jungle. Sometimes we sent one hobo to walk, to see if there were any jobs open. He’d come back and say: Detroit, no jobs. He’d say: they’re hirin’ in New York City. Sometimes, fifteen, twenty guys were in that one boxcar. More. Women even, quite a few tryin’ to disguise themselves. Oh, everybody was ridin’, hopin’.”

Fifty years later, the
Sacramento Bee
sent a couple of young journalists,
Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, out on the road. They rode the freights for several months. Their elders had told them of the Thirties. They had studied the photographs of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, the others. They saw the same faces. “When people are down and out,” said Williamson, “they always look the same.”

They too found boxcars, with hardly room to move. The new nomads have come from the rust belt, the abandoned farm, small failed businesses; many of them had voted for Reagan because “he made us feel good.” Now they don’t feel so good, but few blame the President. They resent being called losers, though that
is
what they are called these days. In the Thirties (at least in retrospect), they were called victims. If there is a core difference between Then and Now, it is in language. Then, the words of the winners reflected discomfort in the presence of losers. Now, they reflect a mild contempt.

“I didn’t know it was illegal to be poor in America,” says one of the travelers. Did you know it was illegal to sleep in a car in Louisiana? And that it’s illegal to sleep under an overpass in Portland? And illegal to eat out of a dumpster in Fort Lauderdale? Maharidge and Williamson were told that rat poison is often added to these trash cans.

This is not quite as astonishing as it might seem. In the Thirties, vagrancy was the most frequent charge in arrest and detention. Burglary ran a close second. Today, the FBI reports that burglaries and robberies have doubled in cities where plant closings have become the norm.

A Vietnam veteran, on the move with his wife, two small children, and a tent, is thinking the unthinkable. “I’m trying my damndest to be an upright citizen. I’ve never committed any crimes before, but I’m thinking of hitting that 7-11. I’m not gonna shoot anyone, just food for the kids.”

Ed Paulsen would understand. “Hell, in the Thirties, everybody was a criminal. You were getting by, survival. Stole clothes off lines, stole milk off back porches, you stole bread. I remember going through Tucumcari, New Mexico, on a freight. We made a brief stop. There was a grocery store, a supermarket kind of thing for those days. I beat it off the train and came back with rolls and crackers. This guy is standing in the window shaking his fist at you. It wasn’t a big thing, but it created a coyote mentality. You were a predator. You had to be.”

Today’s paper reports another record-breaking day in the stock market. The financial columnist is euphoric: “The economy will turn in a performance superior to anything that could be dismissed as ‘mediocre.’ The year will be much better than lots of economists, including a number who operate in Wall Street, are willing to concede.”

Business Week
is singularly less sanguine. A cover story is called “The Casino Society.” In a stunning piece, at considerable variance with other established journals, it explodes: “No, it’s not Las Vegas or Atlantic City. It’s the U.S. financial system. The volume of transactions has boomed far beyond anything needed to support the economy. Borrowing—politely called leverage—is
getting out of hand. And futures enable people to play the market without owning a share of stock. The result: the system is tilting from investment to speculation.”
⁵

It rings a distant bell. Were Arthur A. Robertson still around, he’d recognize the tolling sound—at least, the alarm. He was an industrialist, “a scavenger. I used to buy broken-down businesses that banks took over.” He was a millionaire at twenty-four. He knew all the legendary figures of the market, who’d “run up a stock to ridiculous prices and unload it on the unsuspecting public.”

“In 1929, it was strictly a gambling casino with loaded dice. The few sharks taking advantage of the multitude of suckers. It was exchanging expensive dogs for expensive cats. Frenzied finance that made Ponzi
⁶
look like an amateur. Everything was bought on hope.”

Sidney J. Weinberg whistled in amazement as he remembered October 29, 1929. “It was like a thunder clap. Everybody was stunned. The Street had general confusion. They didn’t understand it any more than anybody else. They thought something would be announced.” I hadn’t the heart to ask him by whom. Emile Coué? God? Roger Babson? Weinberg was senior partner of Goldman-Sachs and an adviser to Presidents.

“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 reaction, of course. A moratorium. But in panic, people will sell regardless of worth. Today, you’ve got twenty-odd million stockholders owning stock. At that time you probably had a million and a half. You could have a sharper decline now than you had in 1929.”

There is a sort of government action today, but not what Weinberg had in mind. Regulations that came into being after the Crash of ’29 have been loosened more than somewhat. Especially for our banks.

In Banks We Trust
is Penny Lernoux’s chilling account in chapter and verse. The 1982 collapse of the Penn Square Bank in Oklahoma, Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields in style, may be the metaphor. This small fish, in its wild pursuit of high-interest debtors, attracted schools of much bigger fish. How close the call was for Chase Manhattan, Continental Illinois, and Citibank, we’ll never quite know. Much too close for comfort. Big Guv’mint saved their hides, just as in a wholly different way it bailed out the Depression-stunned banks.

With New Deal regulatory agencies gutted by the Reagan Revolution, aggressive banking—a phrase dear to free-marketeers—has become the order of the day. Free translation: speculation in money. In the go-go climate
created, banks are Brewsters profligately handing out their (our) millions in the wild expectation of even wilder returns. Not a penny may come back.

Latin American countries, the biggest debtors, owe $350 billion to a few American banks. If one or two of them default—say, Brazil, Argentina, or Mexico—it could wipe out the capital of our nine largest banks. Talk about panic. Talk about a run on two or three. Or nine.

“In ‘29 and ’30, bank closings got into thousands.” David Kennedy, years before he was appointed by Richard Nixon as Secretary of the Treasury, had served in the early Thirties on the Federal Reserve Board. “There was one bank in New York, the Bank of the United States—in the wake of that closing, two hundred smaller banks closed. Because of the deposits in that bank from the others.”