2 1 FALL 1970 history.The other volume is T. Terkel's book is the second published in the past year to make such thorough and dramatic use of tape-recorded interviews of participants and eye-witnesses to THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. In an extraordinary tour de force which is at once a volume of primary sources and a work of art, Studs Terkel, a Chicago broadcaster and a socialhistorian of no mean accomplishment, has compiled an oral history of the Great Depression, calling it Hard Times. Comes now, at long last, the vox populi, 150 Americans ready and quite willing to tell of the Depression years, to tell of the pain and the frustration and the terror, to bear witness, and finally, in a curious way, to celebrate. The motion of their jerking, lurching deaths merged into the manic shuffle of the marathon dancers in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Grotesques, one and all, but they made it clear that we in the audience might be just as grotesque. Two motion pictures found the mark for us: Bonnie and Clyde featured and then mythologized a pair of scruffy killers who established for a later generation something of the value of, if not the style of, shall we say, dissent. The historians and biographers and critics have just about had their day: Leuchtenburg, and Aaron, and Bird, and Schlesinger. It may be that urenewal" is what the two eras have most in common for if we sloughed off the post-Great War recklessness as we lined up for soup and bread, so have we more recently denounced "middletown." Great and strange things came of the Depression but we have no way yet of knowing what will come of the Sixties. Probably because Americans could not make sense of the Sixties, they turned to the Thirties, a time when many of us came of age, a time, it now seems, when America started over again. VICTOR HOAR Harold Clurman called them "The Fervent Years." Leo Gurko, "The Angry Decade." Louis Filler, nThe Anxious Years." Isabel Leighton, "The Aspirin Age." Edmund Wilson, 11 American Jitters." For Studs Terkel, the years of the Great Depression were, quite simply, "Hard Times." The discovery of the Great Depression was one of the minor spectacles of the past decade. Hard Times Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression By Studs Terkel.
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