Amazing interviews with real people

beksbks

These interviews were done in 1971. I've only listened to three or four now, but they are intense. I can't seem to stop crying. You have to go to the site and choose an interview, and it takes Real Player to listen.

http://www.studsterkel.org/htimes.php

Terkel interviewed hundreds of people across the United States for his book on the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1973, he selected several interviews that were included in his book to be broadcast in eleven parts on the Studs Terkel Program on WFMT radio (Chicago, IL). This gallery includes the interviews in those programs.
Terkel questions people about their recollections of employment problems, the crash of 1929, organized labor issues, “farm holidays” where crops were destroyed, and U.S. President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. He asks them how they managed financially and personally through the economic slump and what personal qualities surfaced as a result. In particular he seems interested in exploring the relationship between their personal plight and values and their awareness of national issues and society’s values.

Quotes from “A Personal Memoir (and parenthetical comment)” to Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression:

“This is a memory book rather than one of hard fact and precise statistic….The precise fact or the precise date is of small consequence. This is not a lawyer’s brief nor an annotated sociological treatise. It is simply an attempt to get the story of the holocaust known as The Great Depression from an improvised battallion of survivors.”

“That there are some who were untouched or, indeed, did rather well isn’t exactly news. This has been true of all disasters. The great many were wounded, in one manner or another. It left upon them an ‘invisible scar’….The suddenly-idle hands blamed themselves, rather than society. True, there were hunger marches and protestations to City Hall and Washington, but the millions experienced a private kind of shame when the pink slip came. No matter that others suffered the same fate, the inner voice whispered, ‘I’m a failure.’”

“True there was a sharing among many of the dispossessed, but, at close quarters, frustration became, at times, violence, and violence turned inward. Thus, sons and fathers fell away, one from the other. And the mother, seeking work, said nothing. Outside forces, except to the more articulate and political rebels, were in some vague way responsible, but not really. It was a personal guilt.”

BurnTheShips

Too bad we are repeating many of the mistakes of the Great Depression. The new policies being put in place are going to cause some real tear-jerking interviews in 50 years.

BTS

hamilcarr

The new policies being put in place are going to cause some real tear-jerking interviews in 50 years.

Read the tarot cards?

In the long run, we're all dead --- Keynes.

BurnTheShips

The consequences of our actions often manifest sooner.

BTS

beksbks

Did you bother to listen to any of the interviews?

oompa

i would check them out but i HATE getting wet face...........oompa

BurnTheShips

No thanks, I don't need to hear the gloom and doom right now. Seriously. Nothing is inevitable, and if enough of us act now, we can perhaps change this self-induced doom that seems to yawn before us.

BTS

beksbks

Burn I've been meaning to ask you something. I know you believe we are headed for disaster, and none of the measures being taken are going to help. But you are hoping against hope they do work aren't you? Does your hatred run so deep, that you would rather be proved right than have the country recover under this administration?

beksbks

Much of the interviews are not doom and gloom, I cry at the spirit, hope and victory of people too. These people are remembering back on the Great Depression from 1971.

Oompa, I urge both you and Burn to at least listen to the first one. Oscar Heleen.

beksbks

No thanks, I don't need to hear the gloom and doom right now.

Burn are you kidding? You've been spreading doom, gloom, and hate for the last month.

Amazing interviews with real people

Share this