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page from a magazine pasted on the back of a letter whose writing shows through the page TIME, JULY 20, 1970

photograph of a man standing beside a cart with apples DEPRESSION ERA APPLE SELLER Begging for a deep stir. CULVER PICTURES

Down But Not Out HARD TIMES by Studs Terkel. 462 pages. Pantheon. $8.95

   The Great Depression!  In these troubled times, how could more words about those troubled times become a national bestseller?   The answer is that Studs Terkel's omnifaceted study of the last major societal breakdown in the U.S. seems remarkably relevant to 1970.  For those who despair fo the system, there is the sobering view of what ensues when the system collapses.  For those who cannot understand why the system inspires so much dissent, there is a harrowing display of America's ingrown inequities.
  A celebrated Chicago radio journalist, Terkel has put the Depression back together from the fragmentary impressions and memories of more than 150 farmers, philanthropists, hobos, hoodlums, New Dealers and even a nude dancer whom he interviewed Each one tells a story in a series of snippets that together miraculously re-create the age--at once petrified and alive--on paper.  The views are often contradictory and thus all the more real.  "We all had an understanding that it wasn't our fault.  Nobody made us feel ashamed," recalls one poor white Southern girl.  In another passage, a Chicago door-to-door salesman remembers it differently:  "Shame?  You tellin' me?  I would bend my head low so nobody would recognize me.  The only scar it left on me is my pride, my pride."
   Accurate Jumps.  The use of many voices also provides great breadth.  Sally Rand gives some flavor of the times, and herself, when she notes:  "Friends of mine who had been to Harvard, Yale and Princeton jumped out of windows.  With accuracy."   The insularity of the rich sometimes speaks in the person of a psychiatrist.  The most wonderful  kind of servants could be had for a pittance, he recalls.  "That's when people were peddling apples and breadlines were forming.  But on the whole, don't forget, the highest unemployment was less than 20%."  A Chicago M.D. with many patients among laboring men remembers things differently.  "People starved on the street.  Every day somebody would faint on a streetcar.  I remember an ominous march down Michigan Avenue one day.  It was about '34.  A very silent, scraggly march of the unemployed.  Nobody said anything.  Just a mass of people flowing down that street.  In their minds, I think a point was reached:  We're not gonna take it any more."
   Most piercing and illuminating are the small details still perfectly recollected.  People who were once children at the head of a soup line remember that they learned to beg the ladler for a deep stir so they would not get only flavored water.  Women began appearing on that once all-male mode of transport, the freight car.  A petty thief, lacking a gun for a sudden job, knew that corruption was so rampant that he could borrow the needed weapon from a cop on patrol.  At farm foreclosure sales, friends would gather, bid 10c for every item, scare others out of bidding more, then give everything back to he farmer.   And in his mother's hotel, Terkel, then in his teens, sensed that the Depression had set in for keeps when he noticed the increased wear on the cards and checkerboards available to guests sitting around the lobby.
 A Sense of Time.  Like any good interviewer, Terkel lets his subjects talk for themselves:  the book is his by virtue of the editing, organizing and selection that he has done with obvious intelligence and careful restraint.  As history, the book may be weak on the why, but Terkel's many-voiced chronicle can hardly be matched by any scholarly work in giving a sense of what it was all like at the time.

José M. Ferrer III