Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression

Hard Times features interviews with more than two-dozen young people, all in their teens or twenties at the time of the book’s original publication. Their inclusion in the book allows readers to see the Depression in a new context: Studs Terkel’s interviews suggest that there is a large and persistent generational gap between those who lived through the Depression era and those who grew up in a more affluent era.

Terkel conducted these interviews in the late 1960s, when disenchantment with the Vietnam War and other perceived injustices reached its apex. At times, many of the young people who protested the war seemed also to be protesting their own society’s affluence, which they viewed not as a product of a just system, but as a consequence of war and oppression. Their parents, who lived through the Depression and in many cases experienced the most severe privations, could not understand this about their children.

Meanwhile, the children of those who endured the Depression often felt disconnected from their parents’ experiences not by ideology, but by simple ignorance and bewilderment. Some of the younger interviewees lament the fact that their parents tried to protect them from the Depression by depriving them of knowledge.