Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One

If my grandmother Blanche were around to read the headlines today, I know just what story she would tell: in the mid-1920s, at the height of the Florida land rush, she was working in a real-estate office in Palm Beach. Times were flush and sales were booming. This exuberance was on display in a showy mosaic map of Florida embedded in the office floor.

To highlight Palm Beach, the artist had cemented in a shiny silver dollar. Before long, the speculative bubble burst, helped along by a hurricane. One morning my grandmother and her colleagues arrived at the office to discover that someone had chiseled the silver dollar right out of the floor. Times were that hard.

Blanche ended up losing her house, her car and all the money she had saved for my father's education. Those things, though, she seldom mentioned. Instead, she told me about the stolen silver dollar. It comforted my grandmother, I believe, by reminding her that in her misfortune she was far from alone.

I was raised on Depression stories; this was only one of many told around our dinner table. Hearing them again and again, I became fascinated by the role that stories play during hard times—the way they seem to strengthen people, offering a bulwark against loneliness and feelings of personal failure. That is how I came to find myself spending a year in a dimly lit storage room in the Library of Congress, sorting through thousands of interviews with ordinary Americans telling of how they survived the Great Depression.

The stories were collected in the late 1930s by the Federal Writers' Project, a unit of the Works Progress Administration that employed out-of-work writers. But before the intended series of anthologies could be published, the Writers' Project was Red-baited out of existence. The oral histories—of tobacco farmers, smugglers, midwives, jazz musicians, oil roustabouts and others—ended up crammed in rickety filing cabinets in a remote storage room in the library stacks.

When I learned of these forgotten stories, I decided to try to finish what the project had started by editing an anthology of the material. Sifting through the 150,000 pages in the dusty storage room, I was looking to fall in love. And I did—with a collection of people who were by turns scared, determined, funny and brave, and whose clamorous vitality seemed to burst from the pages. I fell in love with Marie Haggerty, a Massachusetts housemaid who talked about how, when her employer left a $5 bill on the floor, "my face burnt like fire, for I knowed I was gettin' tested." With Irving Fajins, who while trying to organize his fellow workers at Macy's hit upon the idea of secretly distributing the union literature via the toilet-paper dispensers. With Lloyd Green, a Pullman porter who lamented his move north to the big city: "I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me."