Excerpts not working on home page?

I’m having problems getting excerpts to show up on my home page. The excerpts show up just fine on my archive and search pages, but not on the index.

Here is the code I’m using on index.php, inside of the Loop:

<?php if(is_category() || is_archive()) {
the_excerpt();
} else {
the_content(‘<small>read more…</small>’);
} ?>

Has anyone else had this problem? How does one fix that?