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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What happened that made Robin Langston realize a crisis had begun in the country?

2. What did an industrialist ask Gordon Baxter to destroy for him?

3. What did the Wagner Act outlaw?

4. Which movement sought to replace the American Federation of Labor in the 1930's?

5. In Hard Travelin', Peggy Terry says that America teaches people that poverty is what?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Slim Collier's discussion of her father say about the effect unemployment has on men?

2. How did Yip Harburg find his way to making music?

3. How did blues and alcohol play a defining role in Terkel's college years?

4. Who is Bob La Follette?

5. How did the jazz community take care of its own in the Depression?

6. Why was psychoanalysis largely ineffective in the Depression?

7. How did the effects of the Crash become apparent in Terkel's parents' business?

8. What was the purpose of the Bonus March?

9. How did the Bonus March end?

10. Describe E.D. Nixon's struggle to unionize sleeping car porters.

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Studs Terkel interviews enough people who lived through the Depression that certain archetypes begin to emerge over the course of the book. Write an essay in which you choose an interview that fits each archetype:

Part 1) Choose an interview from an individual who lost wealth in the Depression and discovered a talent at making money through hard work. Where did this person turn to make money? What did he or she discover about society that this person did not know about before? What is this person's worldview after the Depression?

Part 2) Choose an individual who is disappointed by the fact that the country was not largely radicalized by the Depression. To what cultural-political ideology does this person subscribe? What was his or her personal experience during the 1930's? What hope does this person have for the future of America?

Part 3) Choose an individual who lived in a bubble of comfort in the Depression and was not aware of widespread suffering. What was the nature of the bubble in which this person lived? What is his or her impression of the Depression?

Essay Topic 2

Studs Terkel's Hard Times is an oral history, meaning that it relies entirely on the conflagration of differing ideas. By including voices that speak from different experiences of the Depression, Terkel makes the debate the central focus of the history. Write an essay on this debate in three parts:

Part 1) The topic of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's success as a president is among the most controversial in the book. What are the arguments for his saving the United States? What are the arguments against such an assertion? How do these arguments reveal the dueling ideologies in America both in the 1930's and in 1970?

Part 2) Terkel interviews individuals who suffered greatly in the Depression and those who did not, including some who actually prospered in the desperation. How do the two groups' perceptions of the 1930's differ? What facts existed to support both a horrific and a majestic impression of the Depression years?

Part 3) Terkel interviews not only those who lived through the Depression but also their children and grandchildren. How does he juxtapose the worldviews of those who survived the poverty with those who did not? How do the younger generations see the Depression? Can they understand the residual effects it left with those who survived?

Essay Topic 3

Write an essay about the Appalachian mining communities' attempts to unionize. How was this group of workers facing Depression-style injustice before the Depression started? What type of power did companies wield in Appalachia, and how did they enforce this power? Discuss how normal tension between management and would-be unionizing broke into full war in the 1930's? What was the result?

(see the answer keys)

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