Hard Times (34 page)

 

 

Oh listen, we had no little bastards dressed as they are today, putting on acts these days. The children were slapped down by their parents. I think they’re encouraged by their parents today. I think our country is in a very dangerous and precarious position, and I would predict, if I dared, that within twenty or thirty years, we’re gonna have a complete revolution here in America. Probably a dictatorship.

I feel the signs. The portents are going that way. Look what happened at Columbia. Why, they should have turned the fire hoses on those little bastards and get them out right away. Instead of tolerating them.

 

 

The Thirties was a glamorous, glittering moment.

 

YOU GET THE IMPRESSION there was this crash, this big explosion, and everything goes down. And all of a sudden one day, the sun comes up, and there’s a war. There’s all kinds of people making planes and napalm and this kind of thing. Affluence is equated with war. I hate it, I hate everything about it.

If another Depression came, the first ones out of work would be people
like me. There’s a whole sub-society of people like me. We’re the ones who open doors and give a bit of polish to things. We’re a luxury. We’re not really functional. And there are many of us. Except for teachers and nurses, most female college graduates are in this dispensable category. There are lots of women doing this agency kind of thing—ad agencies, social agencies, being somebody’s secretary and not working very hard. There certainly couldn’t be anything like us if there weren’t an affluent society.

 

IN THOSE DAYS, psychiatry was quite removed from social problems. Almost ivory tower. For one thing, the really poor didn’t go to psychiatrists. It was not in any way concerned with poverty and reform. There was no connection between social health and mental health. There was social service for the poor, but hardly psychiatric care. Very few good clinics.

People who came for treatment were preoccupied with internal suffering. They were unaware of the external living conditions, as causes. The issues were specific. For the poor and the jobless, relief. The anxieties we treated were seemingly of internal origin. The doctor’s business was the patient’s internal distress, not the living conditions. We were all in the same boat, so the emotional pinch was not that great. Nobody growled much about it. Although among young people, there was ferment, a dream of a better way of life. Social ideals.

The complaints were specific. Familiar symptoms. A young man can’t drive to a hospital without going into a panic, or drive by a cemetery. A phobia, an obsession.

 

No, it was internal distress. Remember the practice was entirely middle-class.

I did a little field work among the unemployed miners in Pennsylvania. Just observing. What the lack of a job two, three, four, five years did to their families and to them. They hung around street corners and in groups. They gave each other solace. They were loath to go home because they were indicted, as if it were their fault for being unemployed. A jobless man was a lazy good-for-nothing. The women punished the men for not bringing home the bacon, by withholding themselves sexually. By belittling and emasculating the men, undermining their paternal authority, turning to the eldest son. Making the eldest son the man of the family. These men suffered from depression. They felt despised, they were ashamed of themselves. They cringed, they comforted one another. They avoided home.

Many complaints today are pitched to the level of social actions. We have a great ideal of acting out. Instead of patients coming with a constrained neurosis, today they are less prone to choke up their distress. They live out their emotions in conflict. They get into difficulty with other people. They create social tensions. They act out: drinking, drug-taking, stealing, promiscuity … In place of complaining, they explode. They live out some of their urges. They don’t contain the disturbance within their own skin.

Thirty, forty years ago, people felt burdened by an excess of conscience. An excess of guilt and wrongdoing. Today there’s no such guilt. In those days, regardless of impoverishment, there was more constraint of behavior. I cannot imagine looting thirty-five years ago. Despite want, the patterns of authority prevailed. Today, those standards have exploded. Looting and rioting have become sanctioned behavior in many communities.

 

 

That’s right. The way of life was an established one. It did not explode in a chaotic fashion. Despite deprivations, there was predictability. You could make long-term plans. If you were willing to work your ass off, you could look forward to reward ten years hence. Even during the Depression, there was more continuity in the way of life. Today there’s no such conviction. People can’t predict five years hence.

In the Depression, most people knew where they stood. Whether they were haves or have-nots. Despite the want, there was a greater degree of organization. The violence was more contained. Today it is anarchic.

The complaints then were more concrete. The poor wanted food, clothing,
the sheer necessities of life. Today the demand is for egalitarian status.

During the Depression, I saw a young Negro lad, seventeen. He came to my office. He had been a leader of a very violent gang of kids in Harlem. He had shifted roles from being a gang leader to a community leader, making peace between black gangs and neighboring white gangs. He was going through an emotional crisis. I tried to treat him, but he bolted. It was the anxiety of being treated by a white doctor in an office near Madison Avenue. The surroundings were too comfortable; the office was too comfortable; the couch was too comfortable. He took flight. It was a silent color barrier. Today, it is no longer silent. It is open; it is vocal. Today, consideration from a doctor or a teacher is not viewed as privilege but as a right.

Thirty years ago, the patients’ complaint was familiar. Today, the common complaint is much more vague: they’re unhappy, anguish in their aloneness. They don’t know where they belong…. Feeling lonely, unappreciated and alienated was no basis for going to a psychiatrist in those days.

 

 

Not at all. They complain of feelings of disorientation. They are afraid of close relationships. They are not happy with their wives. They fail utterly in controlling their children. They are bewildered, they are lost.

 

 

Yeah. Rootlessness. The miners felt that, even if for a different reason. They felt they were outside society. There is something similar in the lost-ness of middle-class people today. But this has nothing to do with money. It has to do with the social community.

I think a depression today would have a paradoxical effect, at least temporarily. Political upheaval, on one hand—and bringing people closer together, on the other. Greater consideration for one another. Something like the quality of caring in London during the blitz. Everybody’s suffering was everybody’s concern. They drew together and gave each other solace.

 

I’VE BEEN in a depression ever since I’ve been in the world. Still, it’s better and worse. ’31, ’32, that’s about the worst we ever been through.

I told my dad I wasn’t going to school any more. He said: Why, you just come on and go work with me. I went in the mines, and I went to work. From ‘31 to about the last of ’32. The Depression got so bad, we went to farming, raising our own stuff. He worked in the mines fifty-one years. He was sixty-three when he got killed. A boy shot him.

We lived eight miles from the mine, and we had to ride it horseback. I was riding behind my dad. Many times I’d have to git off and hammer his
feet out of the stirrups. They’d be froze in the stirrups. It was cold, you know. When you come out of the mines, your feet would be wet of sweat and wet where you’re walking on the bottom. And get up on those steel stirrups, while you’re riding by eight miles, your feet’d be frozen and you couldn’t git ‘em out of the stirrups. I’d have to hammer ’em out. His feet were numb, and they wouldn’t hurt till they started to get warm, and then they would get to hurtin’.

We got up at five in the mornin’, start at six. We got out at ten that night. We’d work about sixteen hours a day, seventeen hours. The boss said we had to clean up. We didn’t clean it up, the next morning there’d be another man in the mine to clean it up. The motor man would say: How many cars you got? Five more. Well, hurry up, we want to get out of here.

They was gettin’ a dollar seventy-five a day. We’d get sixty to sixty-five ton a day—that is, both us, me and Dad. Then they changed me off and let me get a dollar and a half a day. I was trappin’.

Trappin’? The trap door was shut so the air would circulate through the mine. Then the motor come along, I’d open it up. I had to stay there till everybody quit. Then we’d walk about two miles and a half till we got outside. We walked about a mile before we got to where we could get our horses. We got down to the horses, why we rode about eight miles before we got to home. Summertimes it wasn’t too bad. But in wintertime, boy, it was rough. You’d get snowbound and it would get so you couldn’t get in and out. Ice’d be so bad … an’ dangerous. Of course, we had to go to work. We didn’t eat if we didn’t go.

They had what they called safety devices, but it wasn’t real safety. They had an axe and a saw and you cut your own timbers. You brought ‘em in, strapped on your back. You went out on the mountain with your one-man saw. You sawed down a bush or whatever size prop you wanted and you tuck ’em in on your back. On Sunday, I packed timbers on my back, about two miles to the place … to set ‘em on Monday. Company furnished the timber but you had to cut ’em. You had to lay your own track….

I’ve seen several accidents. I’ve had to take four out of the mines dead. I didn’t think about nothin’ like that, though. I packed one for seven miles, and he got up and walked better’n I could. I was gonna give out, and he wasn’t hurtin’ any bit. There was some rock on him, and I took a jack and lifted it up and pulled ‘im out. Just his breath knocked out of’im… .

About ’32, it got so they wouldn’t let us work but two days a week. We saved $20 in the office. They laid us off two weeks till we traded that $20 in the store. We had to trade it out in the store, or we didn’t get to work no more. It was a company store. What we made, we had to go next evening and trade it off. If we didn’t, they’d lay us off. They didn’t let you draw no money at all. It was scrip. They had a man top of the hill who took your
tonnage down, how many tons you loaded, and it was sent up to the scrip office. If you made $20 over your expenses—for house, rent, lights and all—why, then they laid you off till you spent that $20.

 

 

It was a cave, a coal cave. Thirty-two families lived in the caves. It was nice buildings, built up inside, but they was just rough lumber. The company was the landlord, too. They owned it all. They still got company houses yet.

I worked about two years on the mines, then we went back to the farm from ‘32 to ’37. It seemed like you lived a lot better on the farm than today. The works was bad, but you didn’t have to pay some big price for the stuff. You raised your own hogs, you could have your own cattle. And you had your own meat, your own bacon, lard. You didn’t have to buy nothin’ but flour and meal. You raised your own potatoes. You never had money because you didn’t make it to have it. It was a pretty bad time. It seemed just like a dream to me, the Depression did. I was young and didn’t pay no attention to it. I didn’t get the clothes or the underwear or stuff like that, but the eatin’ part was good. I’d rather be back on the farm than anything I ever done.

Then we went to camp—minin‘—in ’37. The same mines. Roosevelt brought the mines arolling again. Things got to moving, and money got to circulating through. I worked the mine from ‘37 up to ’57. Then it was a lot different. They had the union there and we worked just seven hours and fifteen minutes. We didn’t work as hard as when the Depression was on. And they wouldn’t let us stay no overtime, ‘cause they didn’t want to pay the overtime. I guess. We made some good money, me and my dad, both. He worked up to ’41 and they cut him out. Age. He never did get a pension. He never worked long enough in the union to get a pension.