Oral History Program David J. Wilson Interviewed by Mack S. Taft circa 1960s Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah David J. Wilson Interviewed by Mack S. Taft circa 1960s Copyright © 2016 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Great Depression in Weber County, Utah, is an Oral History Project by Mack S. Taft for completion of his Master’s Thesis at Utah State University during the summer of 1969. The forty-five interviews address the Great Depression through the eyes of individuals in several different occupations including: Bankers, Laborers, Railroad Workers, Attorneys, Farmers, Educators, Businessmen, Community and Church Leaders, Housewives, Children and Physicians. All of these individuals lived in Weber County from 1929 to 1941. The interviews were based on what they remembered about the depression, how they felt about those events and how it affected their life then and now. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Wilson, David J., an oral history by Mack S. Taft, circa 1960s, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with David J. Wilson. Mr. Wilson discusses his experiences practicing law in Weber County during WWII, and the Depression. The interviewer is Mack Taft. MT: This is informal, and we’ll just not worry about anything at all. About the only formal thing I need on it is your name. What is your full name? DW: David J. MT: When did you start practicing law in Weber County? DW: 1919, fifty-two years ago. MT: When were you married? DW: 1916, fifty-five years ago. MT: How many children did you have? DW: We had five. MT: Now, in the years from 1929 to 1939, you were practicing law in Weber County? DW: That’s right. MT: What do you remember about those years as being the most significant things pertaining to your law practice and to people in general? DW: Well, of course there were many unemployed people working on various federal projects. Prices were extremely low. I could buy all the groceries I could carry for two, three dollars, and it costs me fifty dollars now. That perhaps is an 2 exaggeration, but they were extremely low as compared to present prices. The legal practice perhaps didn’t suffer as much as some other people did. There were many foreclosures, and I represented the financial institution and made some money, unfortunately, that way. I had as good a practice as most any other men. My income was adequate, so I sent three children to college and one on a mission during that period. So we got along. Some attorneys who didn’t have connections which, in retainers, enable them to avail themselves of a particular practice, which would then bring money, didn’t do very well. They were living low on the hog, as well as the others. So it was a time of need – yet, I think on the whole I went through poverty just as bad. My people owned a homestead in the early days of my life. I have often said that I felt the so-called Depression was getting along without things that my Pa and Ma had never heard of. They didn’t have it, they got along without it. They couldn’t buy clothes, they got along without clothes. Once they had the period of high living during the twenties, it was difficult to change their practices. Once you have enjoyed a high standard of living and many of the luxuries of life, if you lose even the luxuries, you think you’re in poverty. So many people who claimed to be hard out, still were able to live. They could eat, they had shelter. The man who was dependent upon a day’s work, and who had to rent his home, who had no income except as he derived from his daily labor really, in some instances, was hard up, and it was a godsend for him to get any kind of relief. MT: Do you remember anywhere near, say, what a man would have been earning at that time, say a laborer? 3 DW: No, I really don’t know what the scale of wages was at that time. Of course, it was very, very much more than it is now. It was an employer’s market – the man was mad to get anything he could find. Not a question of strikes, it was a question of finding something to do. So right now we have so many strikes prevalent, one is reminded of those days when men were delighted to work and get what they could for their labor. It was very much an employer’s market. Of course, the farmers were in bad circumstances. In the end, a farmer can always feed his family because he had his crops growing, and he had his cows and his hogs and his chickens and his sheep; he could live. He had his shelter and his food. Got along somehow. So you can’t always take the gripes that people engage in as indicative of what their true condition is. But the man that was really badly off was the man who was wholly dependent upon his day’s labor, and who had no savings. He, of course, had to go to some source to supplement his income or to get some income. In many, many instances they had no income. That, of course, prevailed for quite a few years. There was no substantial improvement until we got into World War One, and then of course we got into our preparedness program, and all the slack was taken up. MT: World War II started about ’41, didn’t it? DW: Started – yes, Pearl Harbor was December ’41. MT: The war in Europe we supplied was a little earlier than that. DW: Yes. 4 MT: Would you describe to me as near as you can, the situation that a young attorney coming into practice at that particular time, what would be his problems? DW: Well, of course, finding something to do, even in 1919, when I started. I took employment at Weber College part-time, teaching English and commercial law in order to make a living until I could get something coming to my offices. A young attorney in these twenties, thirties, you don’t really have any real unemployment begin until after 1930. We had the stock market crash in ’29; the unemployment situation really became noticeable and substantial in the ‘30s. The early ‘30s. Of course, that’s what led to the oust of Hoover in 1932, because the Depression was then rather deep. So a young attorney who started at that period had to supplement his income, had to get an income in some way other than through his laurels. If he was able to establish connections with some attorney already in the business, then of course… MT: When did Jay start in the business? Do you remember? DW: 1946. MT: ’46 – after the war. DW: Yes. I’d been practicing twenty-five years. MT: He has a fine practice up there now. DW: They do all right. 5 MT: Fine young man. Did you have problems at that time with, say, did people have problems paying you for your work when you would complete cases and so forth? DW: Oh, yes. I think everybody had a question of collections. Of course, if people didn’t have the money, they couldn’t pay you, so many of us carried a great many unpaid fees on our books – fees that never were paid. Matter of fact, I learned early that if you don’t get your fee by the time the work is done, you have a hard time ever collecting it, in most instances, thereafter. Some men are so honest, they’ll pay you no matter how long it takes. That’s not the general rule. Fortunately, the question of foreclosures were paid by the institutions that employed us; there was no difficulty on that score. Generally speaking, attorneys, like others, had difficulty collecting fees. MT: What do you remember about the Ogden State Bank and its closure? What did that do to our economy? DW: That was a very severe blow financially to Weber County. Incidentally, it never should have been closed. The assets were adequate so that the bank could have been kept open if it had had the proper cooperation from sources it had the right to expect help from. But they were closed, and it was very severe blow to many people. I was not banking there at the time – I banked there for many years, but I was not banking there at the time – however, I did have clients that had money there, and of course for some time everything to do with the bank was tied up. No distribution was made of assets for a long period. Many of them had all their 6 money they had tied up. Their savings, their checking accounts; many people suffered. I can remember one man who was a grocer and who had everything there, who was so completely shocked by it he committed suicide. That’s unusual, but many people were left in very strained circumstances, and it was a great shock to them, because they had great faith in that bank, and there was no dishonesty there of any kind. It was just a question of overextended credit; many good people couldn’t meet their obligations. It was a very severe blow to Weber County and to Northern Utah. It not only hit Weber County, but some of Box Elder County, Northern Davis County and Morgan County, and it served a wide area there. MT: Is it kind of considered the rural man’s bank? DW: Yes, they had financed a lot of the livestock and agricultural interests, and of course the livestock market was so it couldn’t pay, many men who were feeding cattle lost everything they had. MT: I have been told by some other people who should be knowledgeable on this that they finally paid out somewhere around sixty-eight percent of their… DW: Sixty-some odd percent. Some settlements were made that never should have been made; reduced payments for people who could have paid in full. MT: Well, that’s an almost unheard-of figure for a bank being closed, to come up that high, isn’t it? 7 DW: Oh, yes. When you consider that they had to sacrifice their assets, and that they had to accept compromise payments all the way down the line, even instances where people could have paid in full. So that’s why I say the bank never should have been closed, and had it had half a chance, it could have worked the situation out. MT: I’ve been told this by other people who have substantial knowledge on this subject. DW: Yes, I know all that, I knew the people there very well. I know Archie Bigelow very well, and the principal employees there, such men as Walter Farr and Dave Davis. MT: Now, Dave Davis, I understand is here in Salt Lake someplace now, is that correct? DW: Still living, yes, in his nineties. MT: Would he still be so that he could be interviewed, do you feel? DW: Yes. He’s very rational. I talk to him every year – I don’t know, I don’t think he’s deteriorated, he has a son-in-law in Ogden, a Bud Lund who’s in the Food King, I think it is, he could tell you about him. He has his phone number in the Salt Lake phone book. MT: I’m going to try and get a hold of him. DW: I guess he’s the only officer of the bank who still survives, as far as I know. Other minor employees, but the principal men have all gone except Dave. 8 MT: Frank Francis was there with the bank, but I think he was an assistant cashier or something like this. He’s the highest official up to now that I’ve been able to find. DW: Dave was over him; Dave was cashier. MT: Right. Frank told me of him; he just didn’t know exactly where he was. DW: He’s right here in Salt Lake County. You can get him – D E Davis. Yes, I think that was a catastrophe for the county. The effects of that and from the angle of its being thrown into liquidation when it shouldn’t have been. MT: Now, the effects of this thing as I’ve gone around and talked to people in various vocations, occupations, and other bankers; they seem to all be in agreement of the catastrophe of the thing. Most of the other bankers that I’ve talked to indicate that it was a sad blow to all the banking in Weber County. DW: Candidly, I think the other banks could have assisted the Ogden State Bank in such a way as to save it without sacrificing themselves. MT: That’s an interesting idea. DW: Yes. See, at that time the – many of the men in banking then are gone, Sam Dye and Hemingway, H.E. Hemingway with Commercial Security. They had a severe run on them. They had a run then; I can remember seeing Hemingway standing up there, shouting to the people, sweating, white foam under his arms and perspiration. Jim Dubine, the attorney, standing there trying to calm the people. They were bringing money in from the Federal Reserve, in the back door to satisfy the people and withstood the run. 9 MT: I talked with Walter Budge up there just a short time ago – yes, William Arthur, thank you. He told me about the same thing that you’ve mentioned here. He said that to show the people and to try to calm them down, they even stayed over late at night, stayed on beyond closing time, to assure people that they were solvent and could pay off their bills DW: Yes. I stood in the lobby of the bank and watched that. I was banking there at that time; I didn’t have fear. The worst thing in the world to do was to start a run on them. That was idiotic on the part of the depositors, because only a part of them could get their money out before they’d be forced to stop paying out. MT: Mob psychology is a mighty dangerous thing in many ways, particularly for bankers. DW: I don’t know what else I could do. MT: Do you recall – what were you doing in the church at that time, Brother Wilson? DW: Oh, I was Bishop of one of the largest wards in the county. Ward of over 2,000 people, from 1925 to 1935. MT: Which ward was that? DW: Ogden 12th ward. MT: I just talked yesterday to Raymond Wright, who was Bishop of the First Ward from ’35 on through… 10 DW: I went into the Stake Presidency in ’35, became the first regional chairman of the Church Welfare setup. I was present in the Tabernacle when President Grant appeared there and announced the LDS Welfare program. MT: Was there a significant difference between the way you as a Bishop was able to take care of the needy after the welfare program come in – was there a difference, or what do you visualize there? What do you recall? DW: Well, I lived in an area where we had little unemployment. I was in the southeast part of Ogden, where we had business and professional men, and men who were employed. Our rate of unemployment was small there. We didn’t have any difficulty taking care of our people. You always have an irreducible number that you carry no matter how good times are or how bad they are. MT: That’s correct. DW: We had that experience – we were fortunate in that we lived in an area of the city where we were not hit as hard as they were in other areas. MT: Yes. Down in Raymond Wright’s area there, I guess they really had it bad. DW: There, and all the west part of the city. MT: He told me there that in his particular ward, being right there close to the railroad and so forth, they picked up a tremendous number of transient people who were just coming through and desperately in need of help. DW: Well, ours were all people in fixed residences and mostly homeowners, you see, in their own homes. So we had a – we started a large building program in our 11 ward in 1929, when we ran into this situation, but we dedicated our building in 1935. So you can see we were not as hard hit as some other areas. MT: That’s right. DW: I remember that the stake and regional welfare offices, they carried quite a load. MT: Were you able to offer some employment on your building, there, to people, or how did you operate that? DW: The ward people did some work, but we contracted a lot of it. MT: I see. Do you think of anything that you – customs that you developed during the Depression years that might have carried on to the present time with you? Either you, or your family; or do you feel that they had a significant effect on your life? DW: Well, I don’t think so. We always lived frugally. I never had an unusually large income. As a matter of fact, the amount that I pay in taxes now exceeds considerably the total income that I had in the ‘30s when I was sending my children through college. MT: That’s interesting. Very interesting. DW: Fees the lawyers get now are triple, quadruple what they were when I was practicing. In fact, they’ve doubled since I quit practicing seventeen years ago. MT: Has it been that long? DW: I left in 1954. 12 MT: When you went to Washington? DW: New York. MT: New York, yes. DW: But we must recall also that the purchasing power of a dollar then was many times what it is now. Forty years ago, when we had the Depression, I told you about the groceries you could buy, and how you could buy everything – a car for three or four hundred dollars. A car costs about as much as a home cost then. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Midway or not; that’s my old hometown. There’s a beautiful architectural specimen, as you come up from Charleston and Midway. In the older part of the century, that beautiful home was sold for $2,500. I imagine now you’d have to pay $50,000 for it. MT: Yes, you probably would – I should say. DW: It’s difficult to talk in specific terms, but six or seven thousand dollars fifty years ago was a lot of money. MT: Oh, yes, I should say. DW: I remember telling my wife, when we got to the point where I earned $5,000 a year, we’d be in the clover. MT: Certainly under the prevailing prices at that time you would have been, too. DW: Now, I went to Weber Academy, and I taught there, when we first moved to Ogden, as a teacher. It was then a high school, the old Weber Academy. I got 13 the highest salary ever paid a beginning teacher - $1,200. H.A. Dixon, who was a classmate, got a thousand dollars. The next year I got $1,400. Now you see a youngster just out of college, in his early twenties, would demand probably six, seven thousand dollars now. MT: That’s right. $6,400 in Weber County now, is the starting salary. DW: That’s better than five times what I got, with a college degree, teaching high school. MT: Yes, and you probably wouldn’t live any better on it now than you did then, that’s the thing. DW: So, as I see, it’s difficult to make specific comparisons. MT: Right. DW: But those times had their virtues and taught their lessons. People really learned to be frugal, learned to get along on what they had to get along on. It’s amazing what you can do if you have to. MT: Yes. DW: Making money stretch. Maybe someone could give you a better picture on this than I could. MT: You’ve given me exactly what I’m in search of on this type of thing, Brother Wilson. 14 DW: There was only one attorney active in Ogden who preceded me in the practice there, was Sam Paul. MT: Sam Paul is still living, too, isn’t he? DW: Still in active practice. Roy Young is still living; he’s out of practice for some time, don’t know whether he could help you or not. MT: Was Ira Huggins practicing during that period of time? DW: Yes. Ira started to practice about 1924 or ’25. Ira made his big money after that, when he got into politics. MT: Oh, yes. DW: See, I don’t know who they are that can aid you. MT: Jay mentioned Sam Paul, and I plan to see him. DW: He’s been in active practice longer than anybody else. Everybody else now practicing started after I did. MT: Well, that’s very interesting. I surely appreciate your time, and I want to thank you.