Hard Times; an Oral History of the Great Depression Chapter Summary & Analysis - Book 2: At the Clinic, Sixteen Ton, The Farmer Is the Man, Editor and Publisher Summary

Book 2: At the Clinic, Sixteen Ton, The Farmer Is the Man, Editor and Publisher Summary and Analysis

In this chapter, Dr. Nathan Ackerman—a psychiatrist—explains how during the Depression, analysis was not concerned with social situations. As such, people were complaining of anxiety and chronic sadness, paying large sums for diagnosis, and analysts were not connecting the anxiety with the patient's social precariousness.

Sixteen Ton is focused on the campaign to organize and regulate the coal mining industry. Right from the beginning, with the interview of Buddy Blankenship, the reader is informed that miners are living in Depression circumstances long before the thirties. The Company owns entire towns, pays barely subsistence wages, and it pays in company vouchers to be used in company-owned stores. The 1930's desolation brings the move to organize to the Appalachian coal country, leading to an all-out war with Company thugs in Blankenship's county.

Aaron Barkham speaks to an oddity of Appalachian society at this time: the tenuous relationship between the Ku...
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