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Food rotted in the fields of a starving nation. Farmers could not make enough money from their crops to make harvesting worthwhile. With so many people out of work and without income, shops sold even less, dropped their prices lower still, and then shed still more workers, creating a vicious downward cycle.įour years after the crash, the Great Depression reached its lowest point: nearly one in four Americans who wanted a job could not find one and, of those who could, more than half had to settle for part-time work. Retailers lowered prices and, when that did not attract enough buyers to turn profits, they laid off workers to lower labor costs. Industries built on debt-fueled purchases sold fewer goods. People suddenly stopped borrowing and buying. After nearly a decade of supposed prosperity, the economy crashed to a halt. Hard times had hit the United States before, but never had an economic crisis lasted so long or inflicted as much harm as the slump that followed the 1929 crash. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the “First” New Deal The Lived Experience of the Great Depression Herbert Hoover and the Politics of the Depression

The book ultimately serves as a huge anthem in praise of the American spirit (Saturday Review).Hard Times is an impressive accounting of our past as well as a penetrating exploration of what we remember and how this continues to inform our lives. It vividly illustrates the Depression's effect on those who lived through it, and shows how bitter memories can transform into a surprising nostalgia. The book is a gold mine of information-much of it hitherto unknown-combined with a fascinating interplay of fact and memory. Arthur MillerInHard Times, Studs Terkel captures the Depression in all its vast complexity, assembling a mosaic of memories as told by those who faced destitution as well as those who stayed rich. Anybody who wants to know where we were and how we got to where we are now has got to read this book. Studs Terkel's classic history of the Great Depression, now a New Press paperback.Hard Times doesn't'render' the time of the Depression or historicize about it-it is that time, its lingo, mood, its tragic and hilarious stories.