The Great Depression; Interview with Dave Moore. Part 1

JON ELSE:

Let's start. You came in about 1927.

DAVE MOORE:

Yep.

JON ELSE:

Into Detroit. When you came, what, what did, the idea of Henry Ford, what did that represent to you or to your family?

DAVE MOORE:

Well, Henry Ford, at that time, you've got to understand that the Big Three, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, there was great rivalry at that time between the Big Three. Ford didn't have any stockholders. It was completely owned by the Ford family, Henry Ford himself. And he did things his way. And, and people wanted a job at Ford, they had to do certain things, you know. He provided gardens for them, he had a store for them, he had all kinds of what he called conveniences for his employees. And, but, when you started working for Ford, this was before my time, but you were totally tied to the Ford Motor Company. He owned you. He owned what, particularly what you would buy from him. Groceries, a land plot, and especially when you went into his plant.

JON ELSE:

Did you, when you worked in his plant, did you have to give up something to work in his plant?

DAVE MOORE:

I started at Ford in 1935. I can't speak for those who started there before 1935, but, but yeah, you had to give up something.

You had to give up your manhood. You had to give up your dignity. And you had to give up your pride.

You were totally at the mercy of the Ford Motor Company. He had his rules and regulations. He had the work schedule for you to work by. He had the time that you had to eat. He had the time that you had to enter the gate. He had the time that you had to get, get out of that gate on your way home. And the employee didn't have any say so about his working conditions. He didn't have any say so about who he worked with. Or, he didn't have any say so about the time he would work. He didn't have any say so about the job he would be working on and the production he would produce.

They would set the production, and you had to get it or you just didn't work.

JON ELSE:

When, even though you weren't working at Ford in the late '20s and the early '30s, from talking to people around Detroit, do you think most of what you were saying just now was probably true also?

DAVE MOORE:

Oh yeah, in fact it was that way from the beginning. As I told you from the outset that he was an independent individual who had no responsibility to anyone except Ford himself. He didn't have any stockholders.

JON ELSE:

Good, good. Well, do you want to tell me about, again, going back to when you were sixteen years old, seventeen years old, when you first arrived in Detroit, did you know anything about Ford's wealth?

DAVE MOORE:

I'd heard about it.

JON ELSE:

Heard about? Why don't you start again and say, \"I heard about his wealth.\"

DAVE MOORE:

I heard about his wealth. My,

my family moved to Detroit in 1927 from Columbus, Ohio

under certain circumstances.

I didn't like Detroit when I first moved here. In fact, I ran away three times, went back to Columbus, Ohio. But my daddy finally convinced me the third time that I had to stay. And Detroit at that time was a booming town. Businesses were booming, cars were being bought.

The economic situation was at its height. Prohibition was in at the time. People were making moonshine and selling it on the weekend, corn liquor. Those that didn't want to make it, they'd go across the river into Canada and get drunk, or have the wife go over with them and their wives would put it in their coat, pretending like they're pregnant, bring the liquor back to Detroit. Factories were booming.

Everything was going great.

1927, '28, 1929, that's when the bottom fell out.

JON ELSE:

What happened in 1929?

DAVE MOORE:

In 1929, that's when the Depression hit. Banks closed. Mortgages were taken over by people who'd buying homes. The factories began to close. Lay-offs was everywhere. And, you've got to understand, at that time, Detroit was an auto town, and everybody that worked, everybody that lived in the city of Detroit, mostly, I won't say everybody, the majority of the people, working people, had their income from either Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler, or some supplier plants who would make supplies for the auto, make parts, rather, for the auto industry. And when the Depression hit, 1929, all hell broke loose, to put it real bluntly.

JON ELSE:

In 1929, how did, how did you personally find out about the crash? Do you remember, do you have any memories of how you heard about it, or how you knew something had happened?

DAVE MOORE:

Well, as far as I, there was a bank on the corner of Hastings Street and Brewster, and on Tuesday morning there was a sign put on the door, big sign, \"This bank is closed until further notice.\" And people were lined up ten blocks long, you know, both black and white, who had savings in that bank. And, well, I wanted to know what the hell is this, you know, the bank closed, people got, why can't they get their money, you know? And a lot of, I would say, anxiety and disappoint began to happen in Detroit at that time especially at that, on that particular day I, I remember, I memorized it real well. People began to grumble and, \"Let's tear this damn place down. Let's go in and get our money,\" you know. But that was on a Tuesday morning. By Monday, you had three newspapers here at the time, the Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, and the Detroit Times. Each one of them came up with a big headline, \"Bank closings,\" \"Factories laying off,\" you know. And people began, that, to me, that was the beginning of a lot of disappointment, madness, hunger, which followed, and beginning, too, the rebellion of the people because of the economic situation that followed.

JON ELSE:

I want to talk a little bit about that later on. But I want to go back for a minute, again, to see if, I want to get back to this question of Ford as well. Do you remember Ford being, representing rich people, or being a rich man, or were you not aware of that.

DAVE MOORE:

Well, no, I was, I say Ford was, was an independent guy. He had a kind of a paternal attitude towards his employees, you know. None of the other two, General Motors or Chrysler, had offered them what Ford had, where you could go and buy groceries on credit until you get paid, or you'd, he'd give you a plot of land out in, out at the Rouge or Ecorse, out there. You could raise vegetables, what not. The wealth part of it, no, I'm not up to what he had or what he didn't have at that time. But I can assume that, he being the employer, that he was, he had plenty of it.

JON ELSE:

Good. Let's, let's go back now, and let's move up and talk a little bit more about the Depression itself, those early years, right after the crash, things were starting to get bad, Detroit started to slip downhill. Why won't you tell me a little bit about your, your family? Tell me, tell me about, first of all, in those early years, you know, of the Depression. Tell me about your mother.

DAVE MOORE:

Well, I came from a family of seven boys and two girls. And, as I indicated to you before, I was born in the state of South Carolina. And my father was a fire man on a train in South Carolina. And my mother had a brother living in Columbus, Ohio, and he convinced my daddy if he could come to Columbus, Ohio, he could get a job firing the train there. In South Carolina, a white man would not fire a train, that was below his dignity. That, those jobs were relegated to blacks in the South. Anywhere in the South you saw a train running, you could bet your life that a black man was the fire man on that train. We did. We left the South and moved to Columbus, Ohio, and my daddy applied to Pennsylvania Railroad to Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and the, the Big Four.

JON ELSE:

Go ahead and skip ahead to when your dad came to Detroit.

DAVE MOORE:

OK, my dad had a brother, or, not a brother, a cousin, living here in Detroit.

JON ELSE:

Go ahead a start that again. \"My dad had a cousin living here in Detroit.\"

DAVE MOORE:

My dad had a cousin living here in Detroit. My mother and my daddy, and other people, on the weekend, they would run an excursion from Columbus, Ohio to Detroit for several reasons: people wanted to come over to visit their relatives, others wanted to come over to get some Canadian liquor. My mother and my father came over several times to visit him.

JON ELSE:

Tell me about dinner time at your family's home, when times were hard, about supper time. What'd you have, what'd you have to eat? How did you eat?

DAVE MOORE:

Well, my family was no different than any other family. When the Depression hit, that threw everybody that was working in my family out of work, including my dad. Times were hard. I can remember the days I used to leave home so my sister, my brother, other brothers, and my mother could eat. I wouldn't eat, because...well, they'd say, \"Come on! Let's...,\" you know, well, \"I'm going over to Al's house,\" you know, but, but I would do—I would go down to Eastern Market and help the farmers out. Not only me, others did the same thing. These conditions did not get any better. They continued to get worse. I was living right next door, at that time, to a Jewish family, Mr. and Mrs. Berris. They had one son and two daughters. And I can remember Mrs. Berris asking my mother did she have anything she could give her so she could feed part of her family. As the Depression began to get worse, people began to grumble, and people began to become more close to each other because of the conditions that was existing at that time. Everybody wanted to know why this was happening. Then you begin on street corners, you begin to see people get on stepladders, or on a bench, and begin to make remarks about the government, remarks about the city administration, remarks about the plants, and they got jobs but they don't want to let us work.

JON ELSE:

Tell me about those remarks. What were people saying?

DAVE MOORE:

They were saying that they have taken our money, which they had, you know, people had lost their bank accounts, \"They're taking our money,\" \"They work us for low wages in these hazardous conditions.\" You had some of the most brilliant orators. If you wanted, you could walk from one corner to another, and you could see a speech maker. All of it was about the condition in the system. Then after a period of time, they began to organize among themselves. Blocks clubs, like, they began to say, \"Well, if you live in this block...,\" everybody began to look after each in that block. I can, one example of...evictions and foreclosing on homes.

JON ELSE:

Tell me about that, the evictions.

DAVE MOORE:

The bailiffs would come around to evict your family. In fact, I lived in the first block, I think, it was in my block that the whole thing started. They would evict your family, and the people in that block would threaten the bailiffs, and the bailiffs'd say, \"Well, they're giving me seventy-five cents to evict you. I don't give what a...\" Even the policemen, to a certain extent, were sympathetic. And,

sometimes, a fight would ensue, and the younger guys would get on the porch and say, \"No God damn anybody's going to take anything out of this house!,\" you know. And so the bailiffs would have to go back to court, then they would send the police, couple of policemen out the next time to evict them. And, after the bailiffs would leave, we would set the people back in.

So—

JON ELSE:

You would take all their—

DAVE MOORE:

We would take all of their possessions that had been put out on the sidewalk and put it back in the house. So that'd mean that the landlord or the banks who owned that property had to go back to court again and say that we had defied a court order. \"Who are they?\" \"Well, I don't have the names,\" so they jury would say, \"Hell, we can't do anything unless we got the names. Who are we...,\" you know. But even some of the judges was being affected by the Depression. The police officers was being affected by the Depression. Remember, the policemen were getting $23.00 a week in scrip, not in American money.

JON ELSE:

I'm going to, that story about evictions is important. I'm going to have you do it once again for me. Why don't you just start with, you can give me a little bit shorter version of it, OK, just start telling me that you saw the bailiffs taking furniture—

DAVE MOORE:

Well, we saw the bailiffs taking furniture out of people's homes, evicting them, in the dead of the winter.

JON ELSE:

I'm going to have you start once again. Because I was, I was still talking.

DAVE MOORE:

We saw, at the beginning, and during the Depression, people being evicted from their homes. People were mad, and through their madness they decided they were going to take some action. And that action was that they would defy the bailiffs or after the bailiffs leave they would put the furniture back into the home, and which they did. They did that. And out of that, in my opinion, came the beginning of the Unemployment Councils, because it was, it was, it was a spontaneous thing, what happened, by people taking action and putting people back into the homes. But after that, some of the people who had been making the speeches about the conditions, and about people being evicted, became, out of that came the formation of the Unemployment Councils, in my opinion.

JON ELSE:

And you were active in the Unemployment Councils, weren't you?

DAVE MOORE:

To a certain degree.

JON ELSE:

OK, I'm going to have you do just one more sentence for me on the evictions, because it's a real important story. Tell me again how, how you felt about the bailiffs, that sometimes you wanted to beat the hell out of them.

DAVE MOORE:

Well we consider the bailiffs part of the structure that had caused us to be in the condition that we were in. And I don't, when I say us, I mean everybody. And we would defy the bailiffs and tell them, \"What in the hell do you think you're going to do?\" In fact they, there were some fights that ensued, you know. They had to retreat. They could not do what they were supposed to do because they were outnumbered, number one, and, number two, the anger of the people was so great that they, they could get real seriously hurt.

JON ELSE:

That's great. Good, good. Now, tell us about, you know, you walk down the street and you would hear orators talking. What would you see if you walked down the street? If you looked around, what, what people—

DAVE MOORE:

You would see—

JON ELSE:

Start, \"If you walked down the street.\"

DAVE MOORE:

You'd walk down the street, you would see men standing on the corner. You would see standing between the blocks. All of them were talking about their families.

All of them were talking about how they had been mistreated, how they felt they had been mistreated. Most of them were talking about how they had lost what little bit of learnings they had by putting it into the banks. And the question would be, \"We'd been talking all the time. Why in the hell don't we do something?\" Do what, you know? What the hell? \"Let's go and break in the damn bank.\" Some of them actually said that. \"Let's go down to the city hall. Let's go to Lansing, to the governor.\" All kind of ideas were being offered by individuals, and you had some difference of opinion, you know. The difference of opinion among them, well some of them would, well, \"If we do this we're going to get arrested. If we do this we're going to, they're going to call the police.\" The other part of it was, \"If they call the police, let's beat the hell out of them.\" Some say, \"Well, the policemen are being affected just like we are, you know. They're on our side, some of them are.\" Which they were, some were.

JON ELSE:

Did, can we express the idea that people were just, they were not willing to sit there and starve? Is that true?

DAVE MOORE:

That's true.

JON ELSE:

Just tell me that.

DAVE MOORE:

Well, yeah, they, they, they were unwilling just to see their families suffer. They were unwilling to see the loss of the deposit they had in the bank. And they were unwilling to see that their families freeze. At that time, they had, they didn't have gas, they had furnaces. And what some of them would do, they would, they would—Pere Marquette Railroad, these boxcars loaded with coal, they would actually get on the freight train as it slowly comes down the railroad over on the East Side, here, and throw off coal. And they'd divide it up among themselves, each one of them would take so much of it home. That was one way they existed, by working and communicating together like that.

JON ELSE:

Tell me your stories about people stealing food from grocery stores.

DAVE MOORE:

Yeah, yeah.

JON ELSE:

Tell me about those.

DAVE MOORE:

In this town, at that time, they had Kroger, was the chain store in this town. And on the, on some occasions, they would. The police would even cooperate with all this. Kroger used to put potatoes and hams, whatnot, in the window, say, as a display. I'd call a certain policeman's name. I don't know whether he's still living.

DAVE MOORE:

—such and such a time, I'll be ten blocks away. So what guys would do, would go up, stand beside the window, reach and get the food and divide it up among them. That was the good thing about the whole thing. It seemed like, even with the Depression and the hardships that people were enduring, it seemed like it brought them together more, to some kind of understanding, you know.