Oral History Program Amos Brown Unknown Interviewers Unknown Date i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Amos Brown Interviewed by Unknown Interviewers Unknown Date Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii 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. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ 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 All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Brown, Amos, an oral history by Unknown Interviewers, Unknown Date, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Amos Brown. The date and interviewer are both unknown. Brown discusses the Depression and his views on Hoover and Roosevelt’s policies. AB: My name is Amos Brown. I am fifty-six years old. I was in high school; or just got out of grade school when the Depression started in 1928 and '29. Now I work at Hill Field as a technical manual writer. At the time of the Depression I was in high school, and of course before it was over, I was out working on construction and canning factories and wherever I could find a job. #1: Our first question is just an answer that'll cover it, and I'll just use these as guidelines to help you. Number one: what do you think were the main causes of the Depression? AB: When President Hoover went into office, all the best economists, as I remember, felt that President Hoover had the easiest administration to go into that any President had ever had. He was having good times, everyone was prosperous, and things were going well. No one suspected that we would have a depression. It wasn't too long after he took office that the stock market fell. Now, the stock market, back in those days you didn't have to put up all the money to buy stock, only a small percent, less than fifty percent of it. It's been so long I don't remember just how much, but everyone then felt that we was going to be real prosperous, that this was going to be the best administration that any President had ever had. So they was buying stocks and it was going up every day, raising and raising, and paying very little money on their stock, just making a deposit on it, and they'd buy it. As time went along, someone lost confidence 1 in the stock market, and it started to go down. As soon as they lost confidence in it, this spread like wildfire. Everyone lost confidence and the stock market crashed. People that only had a small amount deposited on their stocks, the stocks sold for less than what they had deposited on their stocks, and they lost everything. There was many people went broke during the stock market, and the crash on the stock market. However, there was some people that made a lot of money by selling the stock market short. But with the stock market crashing, I feel this was the main cause of the Depression, that everyone lost confidence. They quit buying. The news - it was in the newspapers, everyone talking about it, and there was - no one wanted to buy. We wanted to save our money because we needed it. We'd lost our jobs; that is, my father had lost his job, and there was many of my neighbors unemployed, and they didn't spend only for the things they had to have. There was no new cars, or very few new cars bought. They tried to avoid going into debt. This lack of confidence by everyone concerned, with no buying, there was people laid off and more people that was laid off, and there was less buying. It just started snowballing. The first thing - it didn't take long until unemployment was real bad all over the nation. I was here in Ogden at the time, I've never worked outside of Ogden, but I can remember how bad things were at that time. My father had a fruit orchard, and because he had a fruit orchard and was selling fruit to a canning factory, I was able to get a job at the canning factory. Worked there to put myself through school. But I can remember going to the factory to work, and seeing men; as many as approximately three hundred men, standing around outside of the canning factory, hoping that they would call them in, and somebody would get a chance to work. Now, the wages then was -1 think I was working for about twenty-five cents an hour at that 2 time. There was many men would be very glad to get a job and work for twenty-five cents an hour. During the summer time, at one time we took a load of peaches and tomatoes up into Morgan, the south, and there was no sale for cabbage; we run into one farmer, he offered to give us the cabbage - well, he didn't say give it to us, he said let me pick you a load of cabbage, you take it down to Ogden and try to sell it. Sell it for anything you can, and give me half. Now, this man had never seen us before, he didn't know for sure whether he could trust us or not. But this was his only chance to get anything out of his crop, is to let us haul a load of cabbage back for him, and sell it for whatever we could, and if we couldn't sell it, then we'd just feed it to the cattle. I remember one time; my father bought one of the best registered Jersey cows in the county, for fifty-five dollars. Pigs you couldn't hardly sell, sometimes you'd get as much as six dollars out of them. During the Depression, I remember one time that they tried to use script in place of money. People didn't have money, so the county -1 believe it was the county, as I remember - got set up so that they would buy our produce, our fruit and things, and give us script instead of money. This was just a slip of paper saying it was worth so much. Then they'd hire people and pay them in script, and the people could go down to this store where they bought the fruit, and pay for their fruit with script. They tried to help people this way. It was before the NRA or WPA or any relief was started in the county or in the government, and there were people really going hungry and suffering a lot from this Depression. #2: Sir, can you tell us a little bit about Hoover's and FDR's policies? AB: Because I was in high school at this time, and didn't really understand too much of the policies, I heard my parents and other people that I knew discuss President Hoover's 3 and FDR's policies. It was pretty much the opinion of the Republicans at that time that Hoover had the same policies as President Roosevelt. However, he had a Democratic Congress, and he couldn't get his policies into effect. I feel - I have always felt - that this was an excuse of the Republicans. I feel that President Hoover, if he would have tried a little sooner, gone to work on these problems, that he could have got those into action. Especially the policy about when the banks were going broke. Just before President Roosevelt took office, there was many banks every day going broke. There was one bank here in Ogden, the Ogden State Bank, that went broke, and many people here in Ogden lost a lot of their money. If he would've closed the banks, and put an insurance on them, and had the government guarantee these things, if the government would have taken action in Hoover's administration, they may have saved a lot of banks from going broke. When the banks went broke - this was another thing that caused people to lose confidence in their nation - just one more cause for the Depression, and I felt that President Hoover should have done something sooner. #1: Will you tell us a little bit about what the PWA and the CCC did for your local area? AB: Well, the PWA was a real help to us in this local area. I know it was a big help to me. This Public Works Administration - I was privileged to work on one of these projects, putting a pipeline down from Ogden Canyon. I remember at the time, I went to the company every day for I guess three weeks and asked them for work. It was the only prospect that I had, and finally they gave me work. But this work was - helped us a lot, and it helped improve our community. We got the pipeline into Ogden, we got irrigation out into North Ogden; it gave people money to buy refrigerators and cars, and the necessities they need around home, and this helped to put people to work in industry. 4 The Public Works Administration helped tremendously to restore confidence. It not only gave people work that were working on the PWA jobs, but when they spent their money, it gave work to someone else. This CCC took a lot of boys - mostly young fellows that went into the CCCs, they didn't have work to do, their parents were hard pressed, larger families then than they have now, and the boys got to go up and work on projects. Gave them work, gave them the chance to earn a little money. Probably helped them through school, at least it relieved the burden at home so their parents didn't have quite as many mouths to feed and it made things much better for them. They mostly worked in the mountains on roads and the forestry service, things like this. It improved our natural resources and gave work to people. #2: How did FDR's programs help you and your family? AB: Well, FDR's programs helped us a lot. In fact, it gave me work two or three summers that I wouldn't have had, although we didn't get to work full time all the time, but if - even a summer's job would get us enough to get by through the winter. I haven't mentioned WPA; the Works Progress Administration. This was another government works project, designed to help those who were really poor and didn't have practically nothing to get along on. They were investigated the same as a welfare case is today, and was allowed to work forty hours a month if I remember right, it might have been forty-eight hours, but they only worked a few hours a day and a few days a month. This was just enough to get by, the bare necessities of life, but they had to work for what they got. But it did help families who were destitute, and kept them from starving. This was a great help. There was government loans, farm loans that President Roosevelt initiated while he was in 5 office; they loaned money to farmers and enabled them to buy their farms at a low rate of interest. This is the way my father got his farm, is through help from a farm loan. #1: How do you feel towards FDR when he, between elections and the inauguration day, refused to act? AB: Well, this period, from the time the President was elected until he was put into office, there really was accused of not doing much in Congress. In fact, this session of Congress was known as the lame duck session. I feel that it is much better that the President take office soon after he is elected. It's just like many other people, when they've lost their job and know that the job is terminated; they just slide along and don't do what they should do. There was a lot of valuable time wasted between the time that President Roosevelt was elected and his inauguration. Hoover had lost everything and he knew that he was out - of course, the Republicans who was in office, they were also defeated, it was a Democratic landslide, and there was some very valuable time lost. It is better that we have the inauguration sooner. #1: Do you think that FDR's programs helped the nation, or do you think that it was just a preparedness for the Second World War? AB: I think in many ways, President Roosevelt's plans helped the nation a lot. We got work, of course this was the start of the government going in debt; we're in debt a long ways now. How we'll ever get out of it, I don't know. But I don't think that we would have come out of the Depression; there would have been many people had starved or been real destitute and not had the necessities of life, if President Roosevelt hadn't done something to help us. The Depression really wasn't over until we did start preparing for war in 1940. I remember in 1938, that people were still gathering around canning 6 factories, men by the hundreds, looking for work. There was an awful lot of people unemployed. He didn't solve the whole problem; the problem just wasn't solved until we started preparing for war. We was well on the way out of the Depression by 1939, and of course the war had already started then, back when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, then we started making ammunition and it gave a lot of people some extra work. I was one of the people that got a job at the Ogden arsenal then, on account of the war. I made application for a laborer's job, and in civil service when my numerical rating came up, I was three hundred and something, and I went to see how soon I could go to work, and they told me it'll probably be three years because I was three hundred down the list; they didn't think they'd ever hire more than two hundred. There'd been over fifteen hundred people that passed the examination that applied for these jobs that amounted for maybe a hundred and fifty or two hundred. #2: What did you learn from the Depression, from all that you've talked about, and all that has happened? AB: I think one thing that we learned from the Depression, I feel that this nation will always be a prosperous nation; that those who give up in discouragement and lose courage in the country are, in themselves, have lost an important part in life. The more we put off things, we've lost that time. The only time we have is today, and we should take advantage of this time. Those people, back during the Depression, businessmen, men who had money; if they would have invested their money in real estate, bought stocks, done anything with their money, they would have made money during the Depression. I think that if we have another Depression, those who have courage that this nation will 7 come back and be prosperous again will be the people who will be prosperous and make money from a Depression. #1: What advice would you give to this generation that would save them from a Depression? AB: Well, this is a big question, and I really haven't thought it over too much. I think industry is one of the most important things; that if we'll prepare ourselves for a trade, an occupation; have an optimistic viewpoint that this nation is going to be successful, that we should go ahead and do the best we can with what we have today, that we've going to be better off. The people that set back and wait for the golden opportunity to come, is going to be waiting forever. We should take advantage of our opportunities today. 8