David M. Kennedy and Studs Terkel provided an interesting contrast in how to record an historical event or time. Their respective styles reflected their backgrounds: Terkel, the former radio talk-show host, and Kennedy, the Stanford history professor. Terkel has made it a lifetime quest to listen to as many people as he could, either in his radio interviews or his growing collection of oral histories. As stated in Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, “This is a memory book, rather than one of hard fact and precise statistic.... Are they telling the truth?... [T]heir rememberings are their truths. The precise fact or the precise date is of small consequence”[1] (emphasis added). This provided the pervading philosophy of Terkel’s craft as an historian. Terkel’s subjects occasionally made some outrageous comments, such as Doc Graham, a former mobster, who asserted, “The youth today [1969] are feminized, embryo homosexuals.”[2] Terkel provided little editorializing or conclusions to these comments. He simply allowed the reader to draw his own conclusions, as he eavesdropped on these conversations.

Kennedy, on the other hand, attempted to analyze motivations behind the words and acts of the people of the time, and constructed many theories and conclusions. In Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, Kennedy effectively transported the reader to his classroom, where he gave the reader a brilliant lecture by a knowledgeable professor. Whereas Terkel’s book was a loose collection of memories from a somewhat random assortment of people, Kennedy’s professorial treatise was an astute analysis of primary documents of leading political figures, all meticulously researched and footnoted. Possibly due not only to background and education, but also to respective ages, as Terkel lived through the Depression while Kennedy did not, Terkel asked, “What did the Depression feel like?” while Kennedy examined the somewhat more detached question, “How did the Depression happen?” The answers to both questions were fascinating, and provided wonderful reading.

Kennedy opened his book with a nine page prologue about November 11, 1918, Armistice Day. Thus began one of the great ironies of history. The War to End All Wars did nothing but plant the seeds for the worst economic crisis, as well as the most severe war, the world had ever known. It also set the stage for a social, economic, and governmental revolution within the United States.

Perhaps the most gripping quality of Kennedy’s book was how he offered unique but very convincing arguments against what he termed common misconceptions. For example, he explained how the Crash of 1929 did not cause the Great Depression.[3] One statistic offered that supported this argument was that in 1929, 97.5% of the American population did not own stock.[4] Rather, it was a combination of international elements, such as Germany's harsh war debts, and domestic bugs in the United States system, such as the Jacksonian banking system.[5]

Kennedy shattered another misconception when he defended Herbert Hoover. Hoover did not cause the Great Depression, nor was he a do-nothing president when it happened. Kennedy credited Hoover with many bright ideas and illustrated Hoover’s overriding philosophy of relying on volunteerism rather than direct governmental intervention. Kennedy also made a point to trace many New Deal programs back to Hoover’s ideas, and showed how Franklin Roosevelt would gladly receive the credit.[6] In fact, if Kennedy displayed any bias in his writing at all, it was to show Hoover in a more favorable light than he was usually portrayed, and also show Roosevelt as something of a political opportunist. As Kennedy described the interregnum between the 1932 election and inauguration, Roosevelt was portrayed as a man totally unwilling to help a drowning Hoover or country, just to increase the dramatic impact of his entrance.[7]

Kennedy tried to battle several misconceptions about the New Deal: its effectiveness and overriding philosophy (or as it is commonly perceived, lack thereof). On page 184, he criticized the “poverty of the New Deal's imagination and meagerness of methods,” as they tried to popularize the Blue Eagle Symbol with the words, “We Do Our Part.” He wrote, “Reduced to the kind of incantation for which they had flayed Hoover, the New Deal stood revealed in late 1933 as something less than the bold innovators that legend later portrayed.” On the other hand, Kennedy countered the argument that the New Deal was nothing but a hodgepodge of scattered brainstorming, with no defining philosophy. Certainly it may have been that way in the beginning, as many of the original New Deal policies contradicted each other. But Kennedy was careful to make a distinction between the “First New Deal” of 1933, with its emphasis on recovery, and the “Second New Deal” of 1935, with its emphasis on reform. He felt that for the Second New Deal, as well as possibly the First, the keyword was security. “Security for vulnerable individuals, to be sure,... but [also] for capitalists and consumers, for workers and employers, for corporations, and farms, and homeowners, and bankers, and builders as well. Job security, life cycle security, financial security, [and] market security... [were] the leitmotif of virtually everything the New Deal attempted.”[8]

An interesting thought presented by Kennedy was that Roosevelt needed a crisis, such as the Great Depression, to execute his grand designs of reform and governmental expansion. If the Depression had been solved by the First New Deal, Roosevelt would have lacked the political clout to push through Social Security or some of the other later great reforms of his administration. In a way, this was similar to the common belief that Roosevelt allowed the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor, as an excuse to get an isolationist country involved in an important war, (which is a theory that Kennedy refuted).[9] Roosevelt warned, “Symptoms of prosperity may become portents of disaster! Prosperity already tests the persistence of our progressive purpose.”[10]

Kennedy was not afraid to try to explain the economic principles that applied to the time period, although the reading got a little drier at those times. Nevertheless, he did an admirable job explaining the gold standard, Keynes’ theories, or the advantages of inflationary tactics. However, these pages could be confusing reading to those who had no prior knowledge of these principles. This was a minor criticism, to be sure, as Kennedy's narrative was usually quite flowing, which reflected his literary background.[11]

Kennedy's research was meticulously footnoted with an impressive array of sources. His bibliography was thirteen pages long. However, there were a few sources that stood out as ones he repeatedly used for information. The book opened with the story behind the study Recent Social Trends in the United States, which was the result of President Hoover assigning a research committee to examine the subject. This was an effective opening for Kennedy’s book. Although the study was soon outdated and useless for President Hoover’s purposes, it was a valuable snapshot of an America soon to pass away and never to be seen again, due to some violent convulsions. This was the America of laissez faire economics and a minuscule federal government. This study was also valuable at countering another misconception. Kennedy found that the 1920’s were really not all that Roaring for most Americans, particularly for farm workers and Southern Blacks.

Other primary and secondary sources that Kennedy relied on were Hoover's personal memoirs about the Great Depression, Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a great secondary source, Arthur Schlesinger's History of Presidential Elections, 1789-1968. These citations appeared throughout the book, as sources to various stories. Other sources that seemed particularly effective to tell certain elements of the story were Raymond Morley’s After Seven Years, about the brain trust, and One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickock Reports on the Great Depression, edited by Lowitt and Beasley. The latter was a study that Harry Hopkins asked reporter Lorena Hickock to complete, to describe the face of the Depression as she traveled the country and met people in the midst of it. Another great snapshot of the time, used by Kennedy to illustrate the surprising submissiveness of the American population to their situation.

Thirty years later, Terkel in many ways followed Hickock’s footsteps. He searched for the human face of the Depression, now encapsulated in thirty-year-old memories. His philosophy for choosing subjects could be summed up in his remark about one of his other oral history books, “It’s history from the bottom up rather than history written by generals.”[12] There were some names that readers would recognize, such as Cesar Chavez or Alf Landon. But Terkel aimed at keeping the demographic proportion of famous: not-so-famous as representative of the total population. In other words, most of these people have not been heard from before. That is not to say that they don't have interesting stories to tell. Quite the contrary. Terkel was a master at getting subjects to tell their stories. This book was a model for any aspiring oral historian.

Unlike Kennedy’s book, which should be read sequentially, Hard Times could be flipped open to any page and offer something of interest. There was no real advantage to reading the book cover to cover. Even the individual chapters could have some randomness of subject. For example, the chapter “Merely Passing Through” contained interviews with a former printer, bookmaker, and prisoner. It was not evident from their stories why they were grouped together, and even less apparent what the title of the chapter meant. Not all the chapters were like that, however. The book opened with an impressive chapter about the Bonus Marchers, and the chorus of their voices helped paint the picture of that event. However, an index would have been helpful. If there were some way to catalogue people’s random thoughts about various famous figures or events, one would have gotten more out of the book in searching for generalities. For example, the reader could have looked up the CCC or the Federal Arts Project, and have explored how these programs affected a wide range of people.

In many ways, Hard Times revealed what life was like in the late 1960’s, when these interviews took place, as well as the 1930’s. There were many references to the then current political agitation of the youth, which provided a strong contrast to the submissiveness that Hickock had found so alarming. For the older interviewees, there was a lack of understanding about the current disrespect for law and order. Even Doc Graham, a former mobster, complained how kids didn't respect the law like the young people of the Depression had. He reminisced, “If they'd steal, they tried to do it with dignity.”[13]

Terkel included several interviews with those who only knew the Depression from history books, or from various lectures from their grandmothers about how the kids today didn't know the value of money. The youth’s lack of empathy and understanding for the older people who had lived through the Depression was striking. Diane, a twenty-seven-year-old journalist, revealed a particularly repugnant lack of understanding,[14] but did perceptively see the Depression as a cause for the generation gap that was so characteristic of the late 1960’s. She had utterly no sympathy for older people, who seemed to bring the Depression upon themselves because of all their dancing and gin drinking during the “Flaring Twenties” [sic]. Terkel did not offer comment on the fact that this was an adult in the journalism profession. The reader was left to ponder that fact.

Terkel interviewed people who could have been classified as the one-third of the nation that Roosevelt spoke of and was the subject of Hopkins' and Hitchcock's study. These were people who were the “old poor,” to whom the Depression really didn't mean anything because they had always lived in poverty. In many cases, their story hadn't changed, thirty years after the Depression. A thread throughout some of these dialogues was the racial issue, and the fact that being black was a serious disadvantage. Typical of these stories was Clifford Black, who recalled, “The Negro was born in depression. It didn't mean too much to him, the Great American Depression, as you call it. There was no such thing.... It only became official when it hit the white man.”[15] Clifford at the time still struggled with poverty, even concluding that things were worse for him than in the 1930’s, because of the higher prices.

Conversely, there were also comments of those who seemed untouched by the Depression, or even enjoyed it. E.Y. (Yip) Harburg revealed, “I was relieved when the Crash came. I was released. Being in business was something I detested.”[16] Harburg went on to pen the words to “Brother Can You Spare a Dime,” apparently about other people's misfortunes. William Benton was an advertising agent who found that the Depression was good for his business. “We didn’t know the Depression was going on. Except that our clients’ products were plummeting, and they were willing to talk to us about new ideas. They wouldn’t have let us in the door if times were good. So the Depression benefited me. My income doubled every year.”[17] Benton went on to retire as a millionaire at the age of thirty-six, and later served as a U.S. Senator from Connecticut.

Unlike Kennedy, Terkel offered no conclusion or final analysis, except for his brief prologue about his own blurry memories about the Depression. (The second printing of this book contained a foreword written in 1986, offering a glimpse of the Reagan era). There was no bibliography; his sources for information were the roughly 250 people that he interviewed for this book, of whom 149 found their thoughts recorded here. Hard Times contained many of the popular misconceptions that Kennedy tried to dispel (such as many references to the Crash), as well as some wilder comments. But it recorded the voice of a very unique generation, before that voice faded from the earth. In many ways, Freedom from Fear and Hard Times were complimentary, as they fulfilled different roles for the historical record. It would be recommended that one read Kennedy's volume first, for the general overview of the time and to grasp New Deal programs, etc. Then the reader could read Hard Times to find the specifics of what it was like to live in that time.