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away.
    Ask anyone about San Francisco and the odds are that he’ll tell you about himself and his eyes will be warm and inward—remembering.

A Primer on the ’30s
    SURE I remember the Nineteen Thirties, the terrible, troubled, triumphant, surging Thirties. I can’t think of any decade in history when so much happened in so many directions. Violent changes took place. Our country was modeled, our lives remolded, our Government rebuilt, forced to functions, duties and responsibilities it never had before and can never relinquish. The most rabid, hysterical Roosevelt-hater would not dare to suggest removing the reforms, the safeguards and the new concept that the Government is responsible for all its citizens.
    Looking back, the decade seems to have been as carefully designed as a play. It had beginning, middle and end, even a prologue—1929 gave contrast and tragic stature to the ensuing ten years.
    I remember ’29 very well. We had it made (I didn’t but most people did). I remember the drugged and happy faces of people who built paper fortunes on stocks they couldn’t possibly have paid for. “I made ten grand in ten minutes today. Let’s see—that’s eighty thousand for the week.”
    In our little town bank presidents and track workers rushed to pay phones to call brokers. Everyone was a broker, more or less. At lunch hour, store clerks and stenographers munched sandwiches while they watched the stock boards and calculated their pyramiding fortunes. Their eyes had the look you see around the roulette table.
    I saw it sharply because I was on the outside, writing books no one would buy. I didn’t have even the margin to start my fortune. I saw the wild spending, the champagne and caviar through windows, smelled the heady perfumes on fur-draped ladies when they came warm and shining out of the theaters.
    Then the bottom dropped out, and I could see that clearly too because I had been practicing for the Depression a long time. I wasn’t involved with loss.
    I remember how the Big Boys, the men in the know, were interviewed and re-interviewed. Some of them bought space to reassure the crumbling millionaires: “It’s just a natural setback.” “Don’t be afraid—buy—keep buying.” Meanwhile the Big Boys sold and the market fell on its face.
    Then came panic, and panic changed to dull shock. When the market fell, the factories, mines, and steelworks closed and then no one could buy anything, not even food. People walked about looking as if they’d been slugged. The papers told of ruined men jumping from buildings. When they landed on the pavement, they were really ruined. The uncle of one of my friends was a very rich millionaire. From seven millions he dropped to two millions in a few weeks, but two millions cash. He complained that he didn’t know how he was going to eat, cut himself down to one egg for breakfast. His cheeks grew gaunt and his eyes feverish. Finally he shot himself. He figured he would starve to death on two millions. That’s how values were.
    Then people remembered their little bank balances, the only certainties in a treacherous world. They rushed to draw the money out. There were fights and riots and lines of policemen. Some banks failed; rumors began to fly. Then frightened and angry people stormed the banks until the doors clanged shut.
    I felt sorry for Mr. Hoover in the White House. He drew on his encyclopedic arsenal of obsolescence. His gift for ineptness with words amounted to genius. His suggestion that the unemployed sell apples became the “Let them eat cake” of the Thirties. His campaign slogans—“Prosperity is just around the corner; a chicken in every pot”—sounded satiric to the shuffling recruits on the bread lines. Visiting the Virgin Islands, recently purchased from Denmark, he called them the garbage dump of the Caribbean. The Islanders still remember