Hard Times (6 page)

I’ve never understood a society of want. We don’t have a society of want—not on a general level. We have a society of total surplus: unwanted goods and unwanted people.

The society I was raised in … you got into a car and you were driven to a high school, where you didn’t do a lot of work and you got A’s. I thought white gloves was the total protection. It was the ultimate armor.

To me, the Depression is old newsreels and the term, “soup line,” and
Grapes of Wrath
with Henry Fonda looking sincere and downcast. I can identify with the Industrial Revolution sooner than I can with the Depression, because that was an instance of men being thrown out of work by things beyond their control.

I never could understand why the Depression occurred. Perhaps that’s why I’ve not been as sympathetic as I’m expected to be. You’re supposed to admire them because they’ve been in the “Flaring Twenties”—is that what it was called?
¹⁸
—where they danced a lot and drank gin in automobiles, hail F. Scott Fitzgerald! The connection is not made economically, but socially.

It runs from the morally errant generation of the Twenties, with the too-short skirts and the bathtub gin, the rise of the stock market and bad poetry. It’s all confused in my mind. Prohibition comes in somewhere. I’m not quite certain whether it preceded or came after the Depression. And then there’s Al Capone and people on film in wonderfully wide-shouldered suits, with machine guns, gunning down other people. It’s an incredible, historical jungle. It’s cinematically very mixed up, terribly fluid.

WHEN I WAS at Cornell, a documentary film group showed
The River
, the Pare Lorentz thing, a fantastic movie.
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So much of it is this sentimental, renaissance-type feeling, which they got out of the TVA, which I’m sure sprung up out of the Depression, sort of regeneration and so on. The poem that Lorentz wrote, with all the names of the rivers, so, so derivative, but sort of nice when you listen to it—the great thing about the river.

And people were
laughing
, all through the movie. Laughing at all the corny lines. I was so horrified. It sort of hurt me. I said to the faculty guy, “What’s the matter with these people?” He said, “It doesn’t mean anything to them.” So, I suppose that’s the way it goes… .

WHAT DOES the Depression mean to me? I don’t know. I’m not depressed. I can pot out any time I want. A Depression is to me when I can’t sit down on my chaise lounge and have a beer and this boob tube right in my face.

IT’S SOMETHING that has been filtered through by my parents. I didn’t know much about it, and they don’t mind my not knowing much about it. They control the source of information—sort of like the high priest: you can’t approach the altar too closely, or you’ll be struck dead. This purple heart in their background has become a justification for their present affluence. If we got the idea they didn’t have it so bad, they’d have less psychological control over us. That’s why they don’t approve of the hippies. These people are saying: our parents told us it was this way. Now we’re doin’ it, and it’s not so bad. Our parents don’t like that. They want to keep
it a secret. They try to control the information that filters down to us. They’re screwed up and they don’t want people to find out about it.

They say, “You have it soft now.” The point is,
they
have it soft now. They sort of feel guilty about it. If they make other people feel guilty about it, it won’t be so noticeable in their own instance.

MONEY is one of my father’s big values. He wishes he was a millionaire. I don’t think of money in that way. I think of it as a sideline, as something you have to have. But I don’t think day and night about it….

 

MARSHALL: I never really thought much about the Depression until last year when I was at Resurrection City. I guess the first time there was a march of the poor, soldiers cleared the people off and there was a lot of fighting. The Depression is something I don’t think about. I guess I should. It’s been no part of my experience.

STEVE: It means something very personal to me. My mother graduated high school when she was young and had a chance to go to college. But she had to go to work, her parents were starving. Her life since has been one unremitting struggle to make do. I think of dreams people had, they were forced to give up in order to stay in American society. To make a buck. Like my mother did. Crushed hope.

It gets across to me that there were a great many Americans who were ashamed of the Depression. I remember the McCarthy period. People were recanting what they had done during the Depression. And publicly proving they were ashamed of what they had done.

MARSHALL: The Depression is an embarrassing thing. It is a shame to the system: the American Way that seemed so successful. All of a sudden,
things broke down and didn’t work. It’s a difficult thing to understand today. To imagine this system, all of a sudden—for reasons having to do with paper, money, abstract things—breaking down.

In a lot of young people’s minds today, it’s proof of the irrationality of this kind of economic system. After all, there were all those factories, and all those people who wanted to work. There was the equipment. Yet nothing was being worked. Today, if we had great storehouses of grain, if they wouldn’t be opened up immediately to feed people who are starving, people would take guns and see that they were opened up. People are not imprisoned by the idea that you don’t have a right to food. Why should people starve to death when there is food?

STEVE: Many times, young people are told idealism is fine for youth, but there comes a point when one must face up to the realities of existence. That lesson was learned during the Depression. At least by my parents. They were forced to give up their idealism, forced to face the hard realities of making a buck to stay alive. This lesson was so hard learned, they felt it necessary to transmit it to us. These experiences have come to me second hand. I see its effects.

I repudiate it. I have repudiated the kind of life my parents were forced into. I repudiate the lessons that they seem to have learned.

MARSHALL: The issue between the generations is what is known as value. The value of the dollar. What it means to your generation is blood, sweat and tears … what you had to do to make a buck.

When a group of young people burnt money at the stock exchange and threw the bills down from the balcony, it caused pandemonium. There was a scramble for the dollar bills on the floor of the exchange. They were trying to say something about the value of money. A Vietnamese person can be burned with napalm. Animals are slaughtered. But a dollar is sacred. A dollar is not to be burned. In fact, it’s a federal crime. This worship of the dollar is inherently an alienated idea. The people who killed themselves in 1929 were victims of it.

STEVE: Our quality of life, character and tone since the Thirties has been determined by the Depression: the buck is almighty. Which side are you on? Most people—and that includes the young—would choose the buck.

 

 

MARSHALL: Fear. It unsettled the securities, apparently false securities that people had. People haven’t felt unfearful since. Fear of Communists, fear of people living in sin, fear of the hippies—fear, fear, fear. I think people learned it from the Depression.

Money brings security, that was the idea. But it turned out to be just the opposite. If you have a great big house, that meant you had to be fearful
again: somebody might rob you. If you had a great big store, you had to be fearful now that there’s gonna be a riot—and everything in your store would be stolen. See, money brings more fear than security.

STEVE: Fear is an emotion people don’t talk about. But it’s one they reflect in their lives. My parents have managed to overcome a good deal of it. When I resisted the draft, they were with me every step of the way. But at the beginning, when I was joining the demonstrations, they were afraid my father would lose his job. Fear was so obvious you could taste it. That you were going to do something which might wreck your chance of achieving the economic success they never had. I can’t imagine that fear without the Depression. It shaped their lives and consciences.

I got the feeling it was a time of utter chaos, in which there were no road signs. The moral and social guideposts had been wiped out. Why wasn’t there more violence in that period? What shape did that violence take? What happened? Was it government pump-priming or was it the Second World War that pulled us out of the Depression? I don’t know enough of this period from the cold, printed page.

 

POSTSCRIPT:
Marshall committed suicide, November 1, 1969.

 

I’D GET UP at five in the morning and head for the waterfront. Outside the Spreckles Sugar Refinery, outside the gates, there would be a thousand men. You know dang well there’s only three or four jobs. The guy 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. I was too young a punk.

So you’d drift up to Skid Row. There’d be thousands of men there. Guys on baskets, making weird speeches, phony theories on economics. About eleven-thirty, the real leaders would take over. They’d say: O.K., we’re going to City Hall. The Mayor was Angelo Rossi, a dapper little guy. He wore expensive boots and a tight vest. We’d shout around the steps. Finally, he’d come out and tell us nothing.

I remember the demands: We demand work, we demand shelter for our families, we demand groceries, this kind of thing… . Half the guys up there making the demands were Negroes. Now there wasn’t a big black colony in San Francisco in those days. But they were pretty cagey, the leaders—they always kept a mixture of black and white.

I remember as a kid how courageous this seemed to me, the demands, because you knew that society wasn’t going to give it to you. They’d demand that they open up unrented houses and give decent shelters for their families.
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But you just knew society wasn’t yielding. There was nothing coming.

This parade would be four blocks long, curb to curb. Nobody had a dime. There were guys on the corner trying to sell apples to this moneyless wonder. (Laughs.)

The guys’d start to yell and there come some horses. They used to have cops on horseback in those days. Then there’d be some fighting. Finally it got to killing. I think they killed three people there that day, besides the wounded. It really got rough because the guys had brought a bunch of marbles and threw them on the street, and the horses were slipping and sliding around. This made the cops mad and they got rough.

There’d be this kind of futile struggle, because somehow you never expected to win. We had a built-in losing complex. That’s the way those crowds felt. A lot of them would drift back into the Sally.
²²
By now it’s one o’clock, and everybody’s hungry. We were a gentle crowd. These were fathers, eighty percent of them. They had held jobs and didn’t want to kick society to pieces. They just wanted to go to work and they just couldn’t understand. There was a mysterious thing. You watched the papers, you listened to rumors, you’d get word somebody’s gonna build a building.

So the next morning you get up at five o’clock and you dash over there. You got a big tip. There’s three thousand men there, carpenters, cement men, guys who knew machinery and everything else. These fellas always had faith that the job was gonna mature, somehow. More and more men were after fewer and fewer jobs. So San Francisco just ground to a halt. Nothing was moving.