[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

BILL FINGER

This is an interview with Mr. Clark Foreman in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 16, 1974, conducted by Jacquelyn Hall and Bill Finger for the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina. We want to maybe do a couple of interviews. One today and maybe on Tuesday so we won't go on too long and get you too tired. Maybe today we can talk about your early years in Georgia, your work with the CIC and on up to the Southern Conference. Cover your later years on Tuesday. That sound okay?

CLARK FOREMAN:

That's seventy-two of them to cover.

BILL FINGER

Well, let's start in 1902. You were born in Georgia?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Born right here in Atlanta, just a few blocks from the Biltmore.

BILL FINGER

Was your Atlanta background important to you in your early years? The influence of your grandfather?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, I don't remember it except what I've heard. My grandfather was the founder and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution. My

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grandfather on my mother's side. My grandfather on my father's side was a farmer in Washington, Georgia.

JACQUELYN HALL:

That's Clark Howell, right?

CLARK FOREMAN:

No, Evan unknown Howell was my grandfather. His son was Clark Howell. My mother's brother. For whom I was named.

JACQUELYN HALL:

So you grew up in Atlanta and went to the University of Georgia.

CLARK FOREMAN:

I grew up in Atlanta and I went to the public schools of Atlanta and then to the University of Georgia.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Was there an expectation that you would go into the Atlanta Constitution?

CLARK FOREMAN:

No. My oldest brother was the one who was interested in writing and he had ideas of going into that field, but I never did.

JACQUELYN HALL:

When did you go to college?

CLARK FOREMAN:

In 1916. Wait a minute. I guess it was 1917.

BILL FINGER

You were pretty young, then.

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yeah. I graduated when I was 19 in 1921. See, I was born in 1902.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What was your experience at the University of Georgia like?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, I guess it was a pretty ordinary experience at college. I took a regular liberal arts course, so to speak. Latin, Greek and so forth. Very little science. No economics. But the most important thing that happened to me at the University of Georgia was that in my second year there one morning at the Chi Phi chapter house where I was living—Chi Phi fraternity—I came down for breakfast. There was a lot of talk about a rape that occurred outside of the town of Athens. Where they said that some Negro man had raped a pregnant white girl and then killed her. Well, all day long on the campus there was talk about this going on. And that afternoon I went up to the court house, which was supposed to be a mobproof

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court house. Athens was very proud of having a mob-proof court house. Which in itself is an indication of the spirit of the times. But when I got there a mob was all around the court house and very soon after I got there the cry went up "Well, we've got him, we've got him." Cars started out in kind of a motorcade. I jumped on the running board of one of the cars to see what was going on. They drove out to the country. I suppose it was about five or ten miles outside of Athens. And there all the people lined up single file and went through this country house where inside, in a coffin, was this dead woman. They all passed by this bier and then crossed this road to what was a kind of a natural amphitheater. People were sitting all around on the side of the bank [back?] and below, in the middle, tied to a small pine tree was this Negro man. They built a fire around his feet and slowly burned him to death. Everytime the fire would spring up, catch his clothes on fire, they'd beat them down so he was slowly burned to death. Well, naturally, this had a very traumatic effect on me. My correspondence with my family for the next year or so was filled back and forth about this event. The papers, of course, in Athens were very much against it, of course, and my Greek professor I remember denounced it in class as barbarism. But it had, nevertheless, a very profound effect on me.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What kind of things did you say about it in your letters to your family? How did they respond to your concern?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, I just said what a terrible, barbaric thing it was. And they wrote back, very sympathetically. My family was broadminded. Both my mother and my father were very broadminded, liberal minded people. Strictly bourgeois people. But they believed very strongly in free speech and the right of the individual.

JACQUELYN HALL:

How did the Atlanta Constitution treat lynchings?

CLARK FOREMAN:

I don't remember what the Atlanta Constitution did, but I suppose they were pretty good about it. The Athens Banner, which was the local paper in Athens, was very good on the subject and denounced the lynching. I didn't do anything about it then. I went on to Harvard. The next year, after graduating at the University of Georgia I went on to Harvard. I went to Harvard for a year.

JACQUELYN HALL:

That's where you met Corliss Lamont, isn't it?

CLARK FOREMAN:

To show you the state of my mind at that time, just across from me in the dormitory where I lived was Donald CulrossPeattie, who later became quite a writer on botanical matters. And he invited me to go and hear W.E.B. DuBois at the Liberal Club. So I said okay, I accepted. When he came to call for me it was about 6:30 and I said "Well, isn't it awfully early to be going." He said "Well, we're going for dinner." "Going for dinner? I didn't understand that. I can't go." "Why not?" "Well, I can't go and have dinner with a Negro." He thought that was pretty silly and so did my roommates. And we argued about it until I had no rational defense. So I said okay and went. That was my first break, so to speak, from the southern tradition.

BILL FINGER

What other events in Cambridge do you remember from that year that pushed you into further breaks from your southern tradition?

CLARK FOREMAN:

I don't remember anything else on the Negro question. W.E.B. Dubois was very fine and made a great speech and I was very impressed by him at the time. I don't remember anything else on the Negro question.

BILL FINGER

You went on to London from Harvard?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yes, after a year at Harvard my family gave me $1,000 to go to Europe for a trip. So I said "Can I just take the $1,000 and make it last as long as I want to, not go on one of these special tours." They said yes.

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So I did. And as I left my mother gave me a copy of H. G. Wells' Outline of History, which I read going over on the boat and was greatly impressed by it. Particularly the last chapter when he talked about what could be. He talked about the kind of society that should be. So when I got to London I thought I ought to talk to him. I wrote him a note and said I'd like to come talk to him. He didn't answer. I looked him up in the telephone book and found that I had sent it to his country place instead of the place he had in town. So I called up. His secretary said "Who's calling." I said "Mr Foreman." She put him right on. I said "Mr Wells, I wrote you a letter but I sent it to your country place and I haven't received a reply so I thought maybe you didn't get it." He said "Oh, then you're not the Mr Foreman I talked to this morning." Apparently the only reason I got through right away to him was that he thought I was somebody else. Anyway I did and he told me how busy he was and how he couldn't take time away from his writing and so forth, but wanted to know what I wanted to talk to him about. I said "I can't go into it on the telephone, but I would like very much to have a little while with you." He said "Well, you write me another letter and send it here and I'll see." I did write another letter and sent it over by special messenger to his apartment and he replied very promptly and said I could come a few days later. He gave me an appointment for 15 minutes. When I went over to see him for the 15 minutes, he was very cordial, very nice and I told him why I'd come to him. I'd read his book and I was very much impressed by it and I wanted him to advise me what he thought would be the best thing for me to do. I really was coming to him just the way I would come to a doctor, for advice as to what I should do with my life to carry out the ideas he had in that last chapter in the book. He said "Well, no doctor would diagnose on the basis of such a small amount

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of information. I can't really tell you what you should do. But do you speak French?" I said no. "Do you speak German?" I said no. I said I studied a little French but German was not taught in the schools during the First World War. So he said "Well, my advise, in a general way, is to go to Germany for the winter and learn German and then go to France, next summer, and polish up your French, and then go to the London School of Economics." So I thanked him and left. Oh, I forgot to say that in the course of the conversation he said "Well, what were you planning to do before you read my book?" And I said "Well, my family had a job for me in the bank in Atlanta, but I don't want to be a banker." He said "Well, you could do a lot of good as a banker. Look at Thomas W. Lamont, how much good he's done." I said "Well, in the first place, I don't see any chance of my becoming a Thomas W. Lamont. And in the second place, I don't want to." So I went on to Germany, spent the winter in Germany. My mother had a stroke so I had to come home in the spring. I didn't spend a summer in France. After spending a summer at home I decided I would go back to the London School of Economics. My family was very much against it because they were afraid I was staying away too long and I'd just be another one of these lost Americans in Europe and I should go to work. It was a little bit difficult because the only reason I could give for going was because H. G. Wells had recommended it. Anyway, my father then played a last card and said that the expenses of my mother's illness had been so great that he couldn't really afford to send me for another year. I said that I could understand that very well but I was going anyway.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What did your father do for a living?

CLARK FOREMAN:

He was the state director of the Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company. The time came, I got ready to leave, father said well, he couldn't

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give me the money but he would lend it to me. Which turned out to be very good because when I got to London one of the first things I found out was that I couldn't work there. I had expected to work my way through, you know, the way they do over here. But that wasn't possible in London. So I went to the London School of Economics and there I had a very different kind of experience. Of course there were all kinds of people there from all over the world. A great many Negro students, some of whom I got to know quite well. One of the crucial things that happened was that I was given a book to review for the school paper. The book was J. H. Oldham's Christianity and the Race Problem. Now my parents had been writing me all the time urging me to come on home and get to work, you know, don't just stay over in Europe indefinitely. But when I read Oldham's book, he told about the starting of the Interracial Commission, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, it was called, and what a good job they were doing in Atlanta. Well, here I was from Atlanta, reading a book in London, learning about what was happening here in my own home town that I had never heard of before. So I decided to come home and go to work for the Interracial Commission. When I came home I told father that's what I wanted to do and he said "Well, I know the head of it very well, Dr Ashby Jones. He's a very close friend of mine. And I will arrange for him to see you." So he did. I went to see Dr Jones and he was very kind, but he said I should see Will Alexander, the director. I went to see Will Alexander and told him that I wanted to work with the Commission. He said they would like to have me but that they didn't have any money. There was nothing in the budget to provide for a job. So he couldn't pay me until January. I could start in January. Well, this was in August. I said "Well, look, I don't want to just sit around here from now until January waiting to work. Why don't I

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just come and work for nothing. I'll come to the office and work for no salary." He said okay, but then he found the money and to my great surprise I was getting $250 a week. I don't believe it was a month. I think it was $250 a week, maybe a month, let's see. It came to about $3,000 a year, so I guess that was $250 a month.

JACQUELYN HALL:

On the basis of reading one book you were interested enough in race problems to come back and go to work for the Interracial Commission?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, I was interested enough to do it before I read the book, I guess. But the book only showed me where I could work. Anyway, I went to work and I was very pleased with that salary because it was quite a good salary at that time. The first one I'd ever earned.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What did you do?

CLARK FOREMAN:

I became the secretary for the Committee for Georgia. Arthur Raper talked about it yesterday a little bit. And set up these committees around the state. For instance, I went to Augusta, Georgia, and went to see some people there. I went to see the leading white people that I knew about and talked to them. And they said "Look, we don't have any trouble in Augusta. Everything is fine here. We have the best niggers in the South. No trouble at all." Then I went to see the Negro leaders and talked to them and they said more or less the same thing. "We don't have any trouble in Augusta. Everything's fine here. The white folks just treat us fine. Everything's good." I said "Well, I noticed when I came out here, that the paving stopped when it got to the Negro part of town." "Oh yes, that's true, and there's no water, no sewer . . . " There were no public facilities for the Negroes who lived in Augusta. So I said, "Isn't that something that we should do something about?" They were all very interested in doing something about that. Then I went back to talk to the white people and told them, the white leaders. And they didn't know about it

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at all. They claimed they didn't. Sort of like the Germans didn't know about the Nazis, you know.

BILL FINGER

What kind of leaders? Were these church leaders or business leaders, bankers?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Both. Church, largely. I don't think there were many bankers in the Negro community in Augusta at that time.

BILL FINGER

I meant white and Negro.

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well . . . in the white community . . .

JACQUELYN HALL:

The mayor of the town or the ministers . . . .

CLARK FOREMAN:

I don't remember who it was I went to see.

JACQUELYN HALL:

In general, though, in setting up interracial committees, what kind of people were you trying to . . .

CLARK FOREMAN:

I'd try to find out who were the most influential people in town and the most likely to talk to me about it, you know.

BILL FINGER

But you talked openly about your interest in interracial activities and people would see you and . . . .

CLARK FOREMAN:

Sure, sure.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What kind of accomplishments did you . . . ?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, they set up the committee and they did get the streets paved and they did get the public facilities extended into the Negro community.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you set up local interracial committees in other towns?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Not in every town, but a few towns. Arthur Raper said Augusta, Brunswick and I don't remember how many others.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What were some of the other issues that you tried to work on?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Issues? No ideological issues. It was just a question of getting the roads paved and getting the facilities evenly distributed.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Those were the limits of what you were trying to do at the time?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, as Arthur Raper said yesterday, what we were trying to do was to get the people to working together. And for them, when they sat down together, to decide among themselves, what they wanted to do. How far they were willing to go.

BILL FINGER

Had you started to become aware of the poll tax?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Not at that time.

BILL FINGER

Did you learn about it through this kind of exposure to towns across Georgia? More political kinds of issues.

CLARK FOREMAN:

I don't think I did. That development came later and what happened, after I'd been down in Georgia here for two years . . . . I began to feel pretty depleted, you know? I felt that all the time I was trying to pull people along and I was not getting the inspiration that I needed. So I decided that I should go North for a while. About that time Thomas Jesse Jones, the director of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, came down to visit the Martha Berry schools. He stopped by Atlanta to see Will Alexander and asked me to go up there with him, to the various schools. I did. And I told him that I was planning to go to New York and he said that he thought that would be a big mistake, that I should stay down in the South and get my Ph.D. I said I wasn't willing to go back and ask my father to support me anymore and that I was going North. So he said "Well, next year I'm going to be in Africa, so if you come up and work in the office as my assistant on a part time basis and go to the University of Columbia and study for your Ph.D. we can give you a good salary." So that was very good and I accepted that offer. But while I was up there, I realized that politics was a crucial issue. I don't know when I realized it or whether I realized it here and then there or just how. But what I do remember is that Thomas Jesse Jones was horrified at this and wrote my father a long

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letter saying what a dangerous radical I was and how wrong it was for me to be thinking in terms of political activity for the Negroes instead of, you know, just gradually bringing them along.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Let me ask you something about the Interracial Commission before you go on. You said that you felt depleted, you weren't learning anything or weren't getting any inspiration in your work with the Interracial Commission. What about Will Alexander? You didn't learn anything from him or you didn't feel any . . . ? What was your impression of him?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, he was always very friendly. My impression was of a very nice Methodist minister.

JACQUELYN HALL:

He didn't have any vision of change in the South that he communicated to you?

CLARK FOREMAN:

I guess he did have visions in terms of Christian ideology, you know, but it was nothing that got into me. And as Arthur Raper said yesterday, always when people said what are the objectives of the Interracial Commission, he would say "Well, we don't have any objectives as such. What we're trying to do is work together as far as we can." And that made a lot of sense to me then and it still does. Because if I had gone down to Augusta and told those people "Lets do this and let's do that" there would have been much more resistance than if I said "Well, let's get you together and see what you want to do."

JACQUELYN HALL:

It made sense to you but it didn't take you very far, it didn't inspire you.

CLARK FOREMAN:

No, it didn't inspire me because I didn't feel I was getting the education that I needed.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What about Arthur Raper? How would you describe the differences between Arthur Raper and Will Alexander? Or were there any? Were they very close in their . . . .?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Arthur Raper took my place when I left. I didn't know him tool well.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Was Jessie Daniel Ames there at the time? What was she like?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yes, she was there. She was a very good woman.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Do you remember what kind of work she was doing?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yeah, largely on getting women together against lynching. I found Mary McLoud Bethune a more inspiring person than most any of the others, although John Hope was a very inspiring person to work with, too.

JACQUELYN HALL:

So you went to work for the Phelps-Stokes Fund?

CLARK FOREMAN:

I went to the Phelps-Stokes Fund and worked there for two years. After I'd worked there for two years I'd got my M.A. at Columbia. The Julius Rosenwald Fund, Edward Embree, president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, unknown wrote and offered me a job to come and work with them. He asked Jesse Jones for a recommendation or his opinion. And Jesse Jones wrote a long letter, three page letter, you know, telling really what a son-of-a-bitch I was but on the whole saying at the end take him.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What had you done to . . . ?

CLARK FOREMAN:

I believe I had thought W.E.B. Dubois was right and that political activity was the real answer. I hadn't done anything otherwise. It was just that he thought I was a dangerous radical.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you try to push Phelps-Stokes in that direction?

CLARK FOREMAN:

I tried to push him but he wasn't pushable. He was a Welshman. Jesse Jones. I remember I was working in his office at the time that Lindbergh flew to Paris. He came in and said "Oh, isn't this wonderful, wonderful. Only a Nordic could have done this." I was horrified. Here was a blackish Cephalic Welshman with a long head, as un-Nordic as you could be and still be white. I said "Nonsense." Well, I

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guess that was another thing that probably made him think I was a little radical.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did Will Alexander think you were a little too aggressive as the secretary of the Georgia Interracial Committee?

CLARK FOREMAN:

I don't think so because Will Alexander, when Edwin Embree sent him the letter that he got from Jesse Jones, Will Alexander wrote a long letter to Embree recommending me, on the basis of which Embree gave me the job.

JACQUELYN HALL:

There weren't any conflicts between you and the other staff members of the Interracial Commission?

CLARK FOREMAN:

No. Alexander and I didn't have any conflicts, no.

BILL FINGER

What exactly did you do at the Phelps-Stokes and at the Rosenwald Funds?

CLARK FOREMAN:

In the Phelps-Stokes Fund, while Jesse Jones was in Africa, my job was just sort of to take care of things in the office and see that letters were answered. I didn't really have to do a great deal of anything except to go to Columbia and get my M.A. degree.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Then you moved over to the Rosenwald Fund, to do what?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Then I went to the Rosenwald Fund. And the story with the Rosenwald Fund was this: When Julius Rosenwald set up the Rosenwald Fund, he gave $25 million with the provision that it all had to be spent within 25 years. But he gave it in Sears Roebuck stock. So in those first five years they gave away money every year, but at the end of the year stock had gone up so much that they had more money than they began with. It was 1928 when I went . . . . So Embree was very much worried then that he wasn't going to be able to get rid of all this $25 million within the 25 years he had to do it. So my job was to think up new ways of giving away this money. Which pleased me a lot. His idea really was for me to go out

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to Nashville and take over the Nashville office, which was then being run by a man named S. L. Smith, who had been in charge of their school construction program and was really very nice but sort of old fashioned guy, largely interested in school construction. When I got down to Nashville I saw that Smith was a good guy and doing a good job and it would be wrong for me to sort of try to push him out. So I told Embree that and said that I didn't think that I should supplant Smith but I would stay on and do a job along side him. He agreed. And I got Horace Mann Bond as an assistant for myself. He and I made a study of the school situation in the South, to try to prove or disprove the theory that Negroes were inferior intellectually, you know, by showing that if they had equal environmental opportunities that they would do equally well. Well, we made this study in I think 11 different counties in the South. We went to a school and gave them tests, the children tests. Then I also initiated the county library system.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you publish the results of that study?

CLARK FOREMAN:

I did later on as my Ph.D. thesis. I'll tell you about it. At that time there was no county in the South which provided a free library service for all the people. I thought that was a pretty bad thing and that the Rosenwald Fund could do a good job by giving assistance to a number of counties provided they would give free library service to all the people, rural and urban, Negro and white. So we found 13 counties that agreed to match our money on a four or five year period and set up these county libraries systems. Which I imagine now is a pretty general pattern in the South. After a couple of years with these libraries and schools and so on and so on, along with the declining stock market, Embree was no longer afraid of not being able to give away the money. He was

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afraid that the money wouldn't last. So he said "Look, Clark, don't think up any more ways of giving away the money. Go on to Columbia for a year and get that Ph.D. degree that you started that we interrupted." So he gave me my salary for a year to go to Columbia and get my Ph.D. degree. And then I published as my dissertation the study on the schools—"The Environmental Factors in Negro Elementary Education." And at the end of that year he said "Well, the situation is even worse now." This was '32. "So this is the last year we can agree to pay you. But we'll give you another year's salary to go to Europe and write a book on whatever you'd like to. Go to Europe for a year." So I did.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Why did he want you to go to Europe for a year?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Get rid of me. I was on his hands and he had his money and he didn't know what to do.

BILL FINGER

Wasn't that a little odd just to say I'll pay your way to Europe. He could have said "Go out and find a job" couldn't he. He didn't have to keep you around and send you to Europe. He must have been impressed with your work or something.

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, maybe he was. Who am I to say he wasn't?

JACQUELYN HALL:

Was the only reason he wanted to get rid of you because he was worried about his money or did he think you were moving along in directions that he—

CLARK FOREMAN:

There was no indication of anything except financial. And he gave me this year's salary and said go to Europe. On the way over to Europe, on the boat, I met my wife, who was a Canadian. And she was going to Paris to do stories for her paper. She was the women's editor of the Toronto Daily Star.

BILL FINGER

You were going to Paris also?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yeah, I was going to Paris also. Then from Paris I went on

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to London and then I went up to Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia and then into Russia. I stayed in Russia for five months. Then I went on down to Turkey, Greece and came back through Italy and Switzerland and then to Paris again and met my wife when she came over the next summer. We met in Paris and got married.

BILL FINGER

That's very romantic. Traveling all through eastern Europe and then swinging back through Paris to get married.

JACQUELYN HALL:

So you just knew her one summer and then married her the next summer?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yeah.

BILL FINGER

Did you have any idea at that point that you would return South and she would leave Toronto . . .

CLARK FOREMAN:

Nope.

BILL FINGER

Did you think you would stay in the North? After you got married did you think you would go to Canada?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, what happened on that was I got a letter from her saying that she was arriving on such and such a date in July. And the next day I got a letter from Edwin Embree saying that he wanted me to come back to the United States. There was an important job over here to be done. So I wrote him a letter. I couldn't tell him at that time when I would be able to come back because I didn't know.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

CLARK FOREMAN:

I wrote him and told him that I would be coming back the first part of August but I couldn't tell him just exactly when.

BILL FINGER

Did he give you an indication of what the job was?

CLARK FOREMAN:

No. The day before Mairi arrived I got a cable from him saying "Cable when you will arrive." So we got married after a few days and I sent him a cable saying "Just married. Would like to stay a couple

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weeks longer." So he cabled, said okay.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Had you decided to get married before she came?

CLARK FOREMAN:

No. How could I decide to get married before she came?

BILL FINGER

You mean you decided in three days after she arrived on the boat?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yeah.

BILL FINGER

You were a bold young man.

CLARK FOREMAN:

As my mother said, how could you tell? How could you be sure? But we both were sure and it's worked out very well.

BILL FINGER

Did you write a book when you were traveling around Europe?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yes.

BILL FINGER

Did you expand your dissertation about Negro education?

CLARK FOREMAN:

No. That had all been published before I left. At Columbia you have to publish your dissertation before they'll give you the Ph.D. That was fortunate, too, because the Rosenwald Fund took care of that. They paid for the publication of the dissertation. Anyway, when Mairi arrived, her assignment was to write a story about how the French spend their summers in French summer resorts. So we decided that we'd see. I went to the American Express and asked what was the best place to go to see, at that time, resorts, summer resorts. So he told me the name of some beach —Deauville— unknown and it was completely deserted. Everywhere we went people said "C'est la crise." You know, the crisis. Nobody . . . the French were not having any vacations at that time. Big gambling halls absolutely deserted. Well, I had been invited to make a speech in Geneva at the Geneva School of International Studies by Alfred Zimmern, who had been a professor at Oxford and who later became Sir Alfred Zimmern. I suggested that Mairi go down there with me to Geneva. So we flew to Geneva and when I got there I said to . . . I called Mrs.

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Zimmern and said that I couldn't stay with them as they had invited me so kindly to do. I'd be staying at the hotel because I was going to get married. She said "Oh, that's fine. Why don't you get married here." So I said "Well great, we'll come out and get married there, tonight." In about an hour she had somebody call me up and say that it wouldn't be possible to get married in Geneva that quickly, that you had to issue banns, allow two weeks to pass, you had to have your birth certificate and all kind of things that we didn't have. We decided to go out for dinner with her anyway. And all through the dinner I kept needling Alfred Zimmern about getting married, you know. And he had written a book called Greek Civilization. He had been a professor of Greek Civilization at Oxford. So I said "Well, Alfred, why don't we have a Greek ceremony. Be married in a Greek ceremony." He said well, that wouldn't be possible because that took two weeks. They started one week and then finished the next week. I skipped, in this process, the fact that in the morning we thought maybe we could get some extraterritorial help so to speak and had gone to see the Canadian consul in Geneva. He turned out to be a friend of Mairi's father and he said "Are you Colonel Frazer's daughter?" She said yes. He said "Well, I think you should get married in Toronto. Toronto is a very beautiful place to get married in. I was married there." We said thank you very much and left him and went to see the American consul. When we got to the American consulate they said, "Oh, he's not here." "Where can we find him?" "He's probably swimming out in the lake." So we went out there and swam out to this raft and there, sure enough, was this fellow. I started talking to him about it and said we wanted to get married. He said he couldn't do it, that he didn't have authority, which wasn't right. He did have authority. Could have done

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it, as I found out later. But he said "There are only two ways for you to get married, legally, right away. One is to go to Russia and the other is to go to sea." I said "Well, I just spent five months in Russia and I don't want to go back there. That's the last thing I want to do right now. So I guess I'll wait til I go to sea. But I want to get married tonight." "Well, you can't do it here." I said "Well, I guess we'll just have to sit around, have drinks, have a Quaker wedding. Just say we're married." Well, that shocked him terribly. Anyway, I told all this to Alfred Zimmern at dinner and I said "Now Alfred, tonight we're going to get married. And if there's any moral unknown connected with it, it's going to be on your head, not mine. I've tried every way I can to make this thing legal and it doesn't seem to be possible." So he said "Well all right, come on. I'll marry you." So we joined the ladies in the living room and he called everybody to join around and said to Mairi "Do you take this man for your legal husband?" She said yes. unknown So he kissed us both and said we were married. So we said so too and I went off to the conservatoire where I was supposed to give my lecture and spoke about the new internationalism which was the subject of my talk.

JACQUELYN HALL:

That's the book that you wrote.

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yeah. Then later on . . . the substance of my lecture I wrote in an article for the New Republic and they published it with a big whole front page given to it. So when I got back WW Norton, the publisher, asked me to put it into a book. I did. After the lecture, we gave a reception at the hotel had a sky room up at the top. I remember this young man who had worked for them, worked for the Zimmerns. Later on became a professor of psychology at Harvard. He was the one told me we couldn't get married because of the bans. When he heard me introducing

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people to my wife he came up and said "Clark, you can't really say that. You know, you're not really married." I said "Get the hell out. I am married." Anyway, it didn't shush him up. When we got on the ship . . . . Did I say that I cabled Embree that I was just married and wanted to stay two weeks later and he said yes? Well, we got on the Ile de France to come back on the ship and registered as Mr and Mrs Foreman. So I remembered what this American consul had said, the two ways of getting married. One was at sea and one was in Russia. So I went to the captain and said that we wanted to get married and he said "Well, is one of you dying?" "No, we're in perfectly good health." "Well, then if you are I can't marry you." He said the French line, unlike all other lines, is under French law and so you don't have that same kind of privilege. So there we were, registered as Mr and Mrs Foreman and having declared ourselves to the captain the first day as not being married. But he was very nice about it and he gave Mairi a big send off on her birthday which happened on the way back at the captain's table. When we got back to New York . . . . I'd cabled to friends to meet us in New York and they took us down to City Hall and we got married in City Hall in New York. But neither one of us made allowances for the dirth of news at that time. And since my uncle was the editor of the Atlanta Constitution and she was the women's editor of the Toronto Daily Star, some enterprising reporter picked up the fact that we were married, see, and wired our respective papers. Wired the Toronto Daily Star and the Atlanta Constitution. So there were stories, very confusing, about the marriage saying that . . . I had wired my family saying that we were married in Geneva. So when the paper got the wire from New York they ran a story that we'd had this double wedding, civil and religious ceremony, you know. How they could have done that I don't know.

BILL FINGER

How did your parents handle all this, these cables and . . . ?

CLARK FOREMAN:

They didn't mind. My mother said "Well, how could you be so sure?"

JACQUELYN HALL:

What kind of impression did your trip to Russia make on you?

CLARK FOREMAN:

That I didn't want to live there. My impression of Russia was that they were really struggling and trying to do something. But they were so far behind us that they had nothing really to teach us except in the spirit of working.

BILL FINGER

Political ideology of the times didn't effect you? Leninism.

CLARK FOREMAN:

No. In fact, some of the people that I knew there were called Trotskyists and one of them later on disappeared. The husband of Freda Utley. And she wrote a book called The Dreams we Lost in which she said I was one of the few people who came to Russia who was not taken in by the prevailing euphoria.

BILL FINGER

Had you read Marx's and Lenin's works in London at the School of Economics?

CLARK FOREMAN:

I don't think I read them in London, but I read them in Russia. I studied a lot in the Marxist Leninist Institute in Moscow. I said I studied . . . I read there.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What were your criticisms of what was happening in Russia?

CLARK FOREMAN:

A complete lack of freedom. Complete lack of bread, or almost a complete lack of it. 1932 or '33. Very hard times.

BILL FINGER

Were you aware of how hard the times were in the States?

CLARK FOREMAN:

No. I missed out on the depression completely. I mean by that I was fortunate in keeping afloat during the depression, thanks to the Rosenwald Fund.

BILL FINGER

When you came home you still were able to keep out of the

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depression? You were back in New York in 1933.

CLARK FOREMAN:

When I came back to New York in 1933 Embree and Will Alexander met me and told me that when the New Deal had been set up they made a presentation to Roosevelt saying that there should be some special provision made to be sure that the Negroes got their fair share of the New Deal. Roosevelt agreed but said that it should be handled by Harold Ickes. So they went to see Harold Ickes and he said suggest me a name, give me a list of names of people that you think can handle the job. So they gave him a list of names, out of which he chose me. Ickes chose me.

BILL FINGER

On the recommendation of Will Alexander?

CLARK FOREMAN:

From the list that Will Alexander and Embree gave him. I don't know who the other names were, if that's what you mean.

BILL FINGER

So you went to work within the Department of Interior.

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yes.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Let me ask you first to go back a little bit. What was the thesis of your article and your speech on the new internationalism?

CLARK FOREMAN:

That the withdrawal of such a large part of the world economy as the Russians represented made the old theories of capitalist economy out of date and no longer workable. At the same time, the socialist theory that could have a new system wasn't going to work because of the fact that the United States and the rest of the world didn't go into it. And that . . . what I said was that there would be more and more exchange between governments and less and less between individuals. So there would be more intergovernmental activity in economics. And that's what I wrote up in a book called the New Internationalism.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Wasn't there some protest on the part of the blacks about the appointment of a white man?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Not at first. When I took the job . . . . When I went in to

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see Ickes and he offered me the job, I said to him "Now Mr Secretary, as I understand this job, the main thing that I would be supposed to do is get jobs for Negroes." He said yes. I said "Well, one job that a Negro could certainly handle would be the one that I am taking, so it would seem to me that it would be much better for you to appoint a Negro than to appoint me." He said "Well, that may be true, but I don't know any Negro that I would give the job to, and if you don't take it I'll give it to another white man." So I said "Well, on that basis, I will accept provided that when the time comes that you will appoint a Negro to the job and I will resign." He said okay. And I said "Well, now I would like to have a Negro assistant and a Negro secretary." He said okay. So I found Robert Weaver, who was teaching down in some little college in North Carolina. I don't remember what it was. I brought him to Washington. And Lucia Pitts, Ickes recommended her because she had worked in Illinois and been a secretary for his wife who was in the legislature in Illinois. She found her very good. I wrote Lucia Pitts and asked her to come down to be my secretary and she did. And I brought Robert Weaver in to be my assistant. Now there was some feeling that—later on—that a black man should be doing this job, my job. But that was a lot of different—John Davis, who was, at that time, radical but now very conservative man. I would say that by and large I had the support of the black community. People like Mary McLoud Bethune. unknown Editors of the newspapers and so forth. People like that were very supportive.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Were there any other black secretaries in the Washington bureaucracy at that time?

CLARK FOREMAN:

At the time I gave the job to Lucia Pitts she was the first black secretary in government. Gene Talmadge, who was then the governor of Georgia, went on the radio twice a day and denounced me for doing such

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an outrageous thing as appointing a Negro secretary. Now, of course, it's the most common thing in the world. And when Weaver came up . . . he came up to talk to me about taking the job. We were talking in the morning and we hadn't finished our conversation when it came time to have lunch, so I said "Why don't we go up to the government cafeteria and have lunch." So we went up there and when we sat down the hostess came over and said to him "Do you work in the department?" He looked completely dismayed, you know. I said yes and she said "Where?" and I said . . . told her the room number. So she wrote it all down. I said "Well look, if we can't meet here in our own cafeteria to talk we can't do the job at all, so let's go ahead with it." The reason they did this . . . they had a sign outside "For Employees Only" and there was a separate dining room for the Negro employees. So Negroes were not, at that time, eating in any of the government cafeterias in Washington. I wondered what happened to this protest, this woman writing all this down, what was going to happen. I found out much later . . . . One time Secretary Ickes had an office, a big long hall. He sat down there and people came in and sat around waiting for their appointment in line and move up. So when I got nearly there—it was something else that came up, I don't remember what it was—and he said "Well, it's just a matter of fundamental justice. It's just like that question about Negroes eating in the dining room. When that was brought up to me I said of course they should eat in the dining room. I don't want to hear anything more about it. And that was the end of that." So that was the protest.

JACQUELYN HALL:

That's amazing, because the other government dining rooms stayed segregated, didn't they. The department of Interior cafeterias were the only, still were the only integrated cafeterias in Washington.

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, later on even, during the Second World War, when they built the new big Interior building, some women employees came to Ickes and protested the fact that Negroes were eating in the dining room. So he went down next day, himself, and ate in the general dining room. When he got through he stood up on his chair, knocked on the table and said "I've got an announcement to make. Yesterday several employees came to me and complained about the fact that Negroes were eating in the dining room and I want everybody to understand that it is absolutely okay and it should be done and if anybody comes to me with any complaints on the subject any more that person will be fired." So that was the end of that.

BILL FINGER

So in 1933 and 1934 you ate with Luca Pitts . . . you ate with your secretary in the dining hall.

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yeah.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What were your duties as adviser of the economic status of the Negro? That was your title?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yeah. Adviser on the Economic Status of the Negroes. Another example of the kind of thing that went on. You see, when I went in there Ickes said "It's understood with the President that even though you're working in my office you're to be operating throughout the government, anywhere." I found that the CCC was set up, you know, to give employment relief to people. They had Negro camps and white camps, but in the Negro camps they would not employ any Negro skilled, intellectual labor or any . . . . And the army people there were all white, even in the Negro camps. So I went to the head of the CCC to complain about this and he said "Well, there's nothing we can do about that. The reason we can't do anything about it is that the army is in charge of assigning people to the camps and they are assigning white officers. They don't want the white officers to be eating with Negroes." I said "Well, I

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better go and see the army about it." So I went to see the army and the man in charge was a Major Major. His name was Major Major. As soon as I made him aware of who I was and what I'd come to talk about, he said "Well now, Mr Foreman, I leave here usually at 4:30 and it is now 4:20." I said "Well, Major what I have to say won't take more than ten minutes. Really, the problem is, why can't we have Negro officers in the Negro CCC camps?" He said "Well, it would never work. You don't understand. Obviously you don't understand the South." I said "Well, in the First World War there were Negro companies in the South and Negro officers and no trouble as far as I know and I don't see why you couldn't have them now. It doesn't make sense to me to give employment only to the most ignorant, illiterate Negroes and not give employment to the officers who are trained and to the educated Negroes." He said "Well obviously you don't understand the South. Where are you from?" So I said "Well Major, I'm from Georgia. Where are you from?" "Well, I'm from New York, but I've lived in the South a lot." "I don't think I need to take any more of your time, Major. You still can get out on time. It's not 4:30 yet." So I got up and left and I went back and reported this conversation to Ickes and said "I have found out that you have a right, as ecretary of the nterior, to appoint the people in the camps in the parks of the country." Because the National Park Service was a part of the Interior Department. And any CCC camps that were set up in the parks, he could appoint the people. He said "Well, all right, you write me a peremptory order to the Park Service saying that the next job that becomes available in"—intellectual work, I've forgotten what they called it—"should go to a Negro." So I wrote up the peremptory order, all right, and sent it down to the Park Service. A few days later they came in, a delegation to see me and said "We have this order from you but it's not going to be as easy

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as you think. The job that's become available is that of an archeologist who will do some work for us in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania." Finding an unemployed Negro archeologist in 1933 was not an easy job. But we scoured the countryside and found a very fine fellow named Dr King from West Virginia and sent his name down to the Park Service for the job. A few days later a delegation came back to my office and said "Well, the man's name that you sent down is obviously the best qualified that we have for the job. But we don't believe that you can understand what the situation is in Gettysburg, Pa. There the CCC office is in the same building with the post office, just above the post office, and there are only white people there and they're not used to working with Negroes and not used to having Negroes around. If you insist on this, there will be riots and bloodshed and it will be on your head." He was trying to scare me into backing away from it. I said "Well now look, my grandfather fought at Gettysburg to keep the Negroes slaves. And your grandfathers fought there to liberate them. If there's any more blood to be shed on this issue, there's no better place for it than Gettysburg. So I think you should go ahead, get the job done and give it to Dr King." They got up and were furious and marched out. For days after that I looked at the paper every day to see if there were any riots or bloodshed in Gettysburg, you know. But weeks passed by. I got a call later, from Gettysburg. It was some colonel there who called, said he was coming to Washington the next day and could he see me. I said yes. He came in. I didn't know what to expect. He said "Well, Dr Foreman, I understand you are responsible for recommending Dr King to take the job with us in Gettysburg." I said "Well yes, that's true. I was responsible." "Well, I just wanted you to know that if you have any more like him, we'd like them. Like to get them. We've never had a better person. We haven't had a bit of trouble. The whole

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time he's been there, everything's been fine." So that's always stood out to me as an example of how, if you allow yourself to be intimidated, you see, you can lose an opportunity. But once we went through with it and King got the job, then the whole question of Negroes eating . . . Dr King was a Negro and he sat there and he ate with the officers. Then they put Negro officers in, later on. Other jobs they gave to Negroes. It was a question of really trying to intimidate me on the part of the Park Service.

BILL FINGER

Did that have a ripple effect throughout the CCC? Were there more and more black officers . . . .?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, I can't generalize as to how prevalent it was, but that's something you could find out. I mean somebody that did research on it could find out. But it did have some ripple effect, but how much I don't know.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Were you involved at all in the public housing aspects of the Department of Interior?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Very much involved in it. At that time, in 1933 and '34, my involvement was to see that Negroes got their share of the jobs. And when they started a public housing venture or any other public works, say in Atlanta, that ten percent of the Negroes—or whatever the percentage of the population was—got jobs.Finally we got an order to that effect through the Public Works Administration. That employment should be on the basis of the population. And if the skilled workers of the town were available, they had to be . . . jobs had to be given to Negroes in proportion. But later on I became the director of defense housing. That was an entirely different story.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you try at all to challenge segregation in the public housing projects that you built?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, as a matter of fact I didn't because that had to be done through the local housing authorities. For instance, any housing that was built in Atlanta was done through the Atlanta housing authority. They made the policies. Policies were not made in Washington.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did Ickes try at all to pressure them, the local housing authorities . . . ?

CLARK FOREMAN:

No, I didn't.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did that issue even come up?

CLARK FOREMAN:

No.

JACQUELYN HALL:

It was just assumed that housing projects would be segregated.

CLARK FOREMAN:

I think now thatwe were just so eager to get houses built that we weren't thinking about the problem of segregation. But I don't remember the issue ever being made. Anyway, after two years I said to Ickes that I thought that Robert Weaver was capable of handling the job. And if he would make him the advisor, I would resign. Ickes said that he would make him advisor, but he didn't want me to resign. He would like me to stay on as his special counsel in his office to give him advice on general things. Which consisted largely of writing his speeches and working on a book for him and so forth. So that takes us to 1934.

BILL FINGER

You stayed on as his special adviser?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yeah. That's '34. So I think that's enough for today.

JACQUELYN HALL:

During the panel discussion you mentioned an incident which almost got you fired from the Interracial Commission. I wondered if you would tell me that incident again and any other similar incidents which might give us some idea about what the members of the Interracial Commission, the white members in particular, were trying to do. What their

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attitude toward blacks was. What their vision of society consisted of. Whether, how you fit in to the stance of the Interracial Commission at that time.

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yes, well, this man, Marion Jackson unknown wasn't typical at all of the rest of the board. At the time I didn't know him or know anything about him. I just knew his son, who had been a childhood friend. We were walking home from town late one afternoon and just talking about things in general when the subject got somehow about the North and the South. The relative merits of the North and the South. He was very partial, of course, to the South and said so very emphatically and gave as an example the fact that in the South men took off their hats in the elevator when a woman got on and they didn't show this courtesy in the North. So I said to him "Well, Rick, why do you think they do that?" He said "It's out of respect for womanhood, in deference to women." I said "I don't think it could be that because if a Negro woman gets on the elevator we don't take off our hats." I do, but they didn't. Well, the conversation drifted on to other things and I didn't think anything more about it until I learned sometime later from Will Alexander that Rick gone home and told this story to his father and his father had called up Will Alexander and urged him to fire me as being too radical. Anybody talked like that shouldn't be on the Interracial Commission. Will Alexander talked him out of it in some way. Probably told him I was sophomoric. Never heard any more about it.

JACQUELYN HALL:

But he wasn't typical of the board?

CLARK FOREMAN:

No, he wasn't typical.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Was there any difference between the staff of the Interracial Commission and the board as far as how far they were willing to go in

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challenging the status quo? Any conflicts between board and the staff?

CLARK FOREMAN:

I was never conscious of any conflict.

JACQUELYN HALL:

I have been doing research on Jesse Daniel Ames and the campaign against lynching and I came across some remarks of hers somewhere about you, saying that you were awfully hot-headed and aggressive young man. Does that surprise you?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Doesn't surprise me at all. She came in some time after I was there. She came from Texas and joined the staff. I thought of her as being a very aggressive woman.

JACQUELYN HALL:

In what way?

CLARK FOREMAN:

In wanting things her way. She came in with the idea of sort of changing things around, seemed to me, as I remember it, to her way of doing things. And they weren't always mine. I think we had some mild disagreements but I don't think they were anything deep or ideological.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What kind of things did you disagree about?

CLARK FOREMAN:

I don't remember. But they weren't anything important, I don't believe.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Do you know what the source of tension was between her and Will Alexander?

CLARK FOREMAN:

I was not conscious of any tension except she was the kind of person that wanted to take over everything. She probably wanted to tell him how to run the organization and he resisted a little bit. That would be my guess.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Yesterday when we stopped we were at 1934.

CLARK FOREMAN:

Came 1934, I said to Secretary Ickes that I thought Robert Weaver could handle the job and would he accept him as adviser if I resigned. He said he would but he wanted me to stay on as his special counsel to help

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him with his books and speeches. I had to write and check with the Rosenwald Fund about this because they were paying my salary. Ickes was a very smart, thrifty guy. So when Embree came and told him he thought he ought to take me on the staff, he said he didn't have any provision in the budget for it. But if Embree would pay for the job from the Rosenwald Fund, he would do it. Embree did pay for it. I think he also paid the salary of Miss Luca Pitts, my secretary. I'm not sure about that, but I think so.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Was it while you were special counsel that you organized the interdepartmental committee on Negro affairs?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, I'm not sure whether I did that before or after I became his special assistant. What I did was to go around to speak to every one of the secretaries and ask them if they wouldn't have somebody on their staff do the same kind of work I was supposed to be doing. Some of them did have. For instance, in Commerce . . . Eugene Kinkle Jones was there in Commerce. I think his secretary was named Roper. I'm not sure of this now. Henry Wallace wouldn't have anybody. He didn't think he needed it.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Well he was under a lot of pressure at that very time about the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

CLARK FOREMAN:

He did need it, but he didn't think he did. I talked to Harry Hopkins. Harry Hopkins thought he knew better, you know. He later on got married unknown. At that time he didn't have any. When we organized the interdepartmental committee—so-called black cabinet of which I was a shady member—it was Eugene Kinkle Jones, Forrester Washington, who came later. I don't know unknown was. He was with Harry Hopkins, wasn't he, but later.

JACQUELYN HALL:

He stayed for just about six months, I think.

CLARK FOREMAN:

He came in and left

JACQUELYN HALL:

What was the purpose of the committee?

CLARK FOREMAN:

To relieve me of the responsibility of trying to work through other secretaries. I had a very good relationship with Ickes unknown work with him, but when it came time to working with some of these other secretaries, they more or less resented the fact that Ickes . . . .They put it on to Ickes rather than Roosevelt, you know. Ickes was telling them what to do. And that included Harry Hopkins.

JACQUELYN HALL:

You held hearings in the South, didn't you, about the effects the NRA and the Agricultural Adjustment Act were having on blacks?

CLARK FOREMAN:

No I didn't.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Oh. It was pretty much an internal operation. You weren't going out and trying to find out . . .

CLARK FOREMAN:

No. You're talking about this committee? No, the inter-departmental committee was just a way of comparing notes, making suggestions to each other what we could do. So we may have suggested that somebody else hold these hearings, but I didn't have anything to do with them.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What kind of information did you have about what kind of effect the New Deal agencies were having on blacks?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, the letters that I would get complaining about discrimination. I got one letter from Mississippi from some tenant farmer down there. He wrote to "Your Race Majesty" and he wanted to know if I couldn't do something about helping the situation down there.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you feel like you got any results for your efforts?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Well, I think we got some results from that regulation about employment. They had to employ on public works jobs a proportionate amount of Negro skilled and unskilled. I think there were some results in

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the CCC as a result of that Gettysburg job. Because once the army had to start eating with Negroes in one place they couldn't very well object to it in another.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What was your perception of the internal conflicts that were going on within the administration? Did you feel frustrated? Were there a lot of pressures on Ickes, for example, that were keeping him from being able to go as far as he might have gone? Or at that time did you feel pretty self confident about what you were doing, pretty hopeful?

CLARK FOREMAN:

I don't remember feeling frustrated or self confident. A lot of articles in the Negro press and so forth about the need of having a Negro in my job and I was very sympathetic to that. And as soon as I felt that Ickes would do it, I moved in that direction. There was a meeting in Washington where I announced it. John W. Davis was this firebrand. He was having some meeting and I think the meeting was designed to protest my being in the job. I was on the program. When it came time for my speech, I announced that I was resigning and that Robert Weaver was taking over. That had a somewhat deflating effect on Mr John Davis. Emotionally deflating. He weighed about 300 pounds.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What did you think of Henry Wallace at that time?

CLARK FOREMAN:

At that time I thought Henry Wallace was difficult and evasive. I thought that he could have been more forthright about the problems facing him than he was.

JACQUELYN HALL:

It's always amazed me that he emerged as the Progressive Party candidate in '48 and by then was seen as being so radical.

MAIRI FOREMAN:

Which he really wasn't.

CLARK FOREMAN:

Of course C. B. Baldwin was close to him and kept working on him. Milo Perkins was gone; he didn't have anything to do with the

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Progressive Party. I was at a dinner party one time, sitting next to Henry Wallace. I noticed that he had his hand on my ankle and he kept sort of feeling my ankle around. I thought this was a very strange procedure. After about five minutes he said "Clark, you've got an ankle of a thoroughbred."

MAIRI FOREMAN:

He was rather strange. Fanatic.

CLARK FOREMAN:

A veterinary can probably tell, but I can't.

JACQUELYN HALL:

He was fanatic in what way.

MAIRI FOREMAN:

Maybe religiously, I'm not sure. He always struck me as being rather fanatical.

CLARK FOREMAN:

I didn't get into that at all. Had all this guru stuff going on. But I didn't know anything about that. I had nothing to do with his religious or his emotional feelings. He would go to a party and just go to sleep, you know. After dinner, sit around like this and just go to sleep.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Who were the most cooperative people in the administration? Besides Ickes.

CLARK FOREMAN:

Let's see. I didn't get very much cooperation from anybody outside of Ickes. Ickes was very cooperative. But that wasn't cooperation, he backed me up. And he always did do that. He was very good about backing me up.

JACQUELYN HALL:

He always did?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yeah.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What was your role on getting the report on economic conditions in the South published?

CLARK FOREMAN:

That came some time later. It was around 1938. We're still in '34. At the end of '34, Edwin Embree, the president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, took the position that they were perfectly willing

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to pay my salary so long as I was working on the Negro problem, but they couldn't quite see paying me to write Ickes' books and speeches. So I told Ickes this and said that Embree was no longer willing to pay my salary. He said "Well, I'm not prepared to let you go. What other job in the administration would you like to take?" By this time I had done a good deal of work for him on a book on public works administration, so I knew about the public Works Administration and I knew how badly they were handling applications for public power. Which were very controversial. And the engineers were usually pretty conservative people. So when something came along that was controversial they put it at the bottom of the heap and played off the top. So I said to him that I thought that of all the things under his administration the one that was being handled worst was the applications for public power. He said well what did I think he should do about it. And I said I thought he should set up a power division in the Public Works Administration and make me the head of it. So he said "Well, write me up an order to that effect." I said all right and I went out and wrote up the order and he signed it. So in August 1935 I became the director of the Power Division of the Public Works Administration. And I took Miss Pitts with me as my secretary there. I don't remember whether it was then or earlier that Gene Talmadge went on the radio in Georgia every day and denounced me for having a nigger secretary. But the work of the power division was largely one of getting . . . acting on the applications from the various cities over the country that wanted public power.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Were these cities that wanted municipally owned power systems?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yeah, municipal power systems. In many cases it necessitated buying up the private power company. Buying them out and turning the whole system into municipal. That involved doing a great deal of work in the

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courts because the private power companies, led by Wendell Wilkie, were challenging practically every one of these loans that we made and saying that we were acting unconstitutionally doing it. So I got as my lawyer Jerome Frank, who was then more or less in retirement. He was over in the RFC, having been fired by Wallace, along with Alger Hiss, as being too radical. So Jerome organized the legal fight. Took the cases to the Supreme Court and won. In the course of it all the power companies got behind Wendell Wilkie. This I think, to a large extent, was the reason for his getting the nomination, the Republican nomination for president in 1940.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you deal directly with Wendell Wilkie at all?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Dealt directly with all of them.

JACQUELYN HALL:

With Wendell Wilkie?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Oh, no. I didn't have anything to do with him.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What about TVA? Did that come within your jurisdiction at all?

CLARK FOREMAN:

Hugo Black, who was a justice of the Supreme Court, said that what we were doing was the real thing. Because if it hadn't been for these cities being able to buy TVA power, TVA would not have been able to succeed. But we furnished TVA with the customers and made it possible for them to go ahead and do it.

MAIRI FOREMAN:

Was it after that or before that that Ralph Bunche was your general counsel.

CLARK FOREMAN:

I don't remember that. No, you're wrong. He was in the State Department.

JACQUELYN HALL:

You were mostly involved in litigation, then. In processing the loan applications . . . .

CLARK FOREMAN:

Yeah. It was a question of litigation and getting the organization to pass on these applications. I'll give you an example.

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Augusta, Georgia, wanted to buy out the Georgia Power Company and have a municipal system. So they would have to apply for the loan from the PWA. That would be referred to me in the power division and we had to examine it from an engineering point of view to see if they could handle it and from the financial point of view to see if it would be a sound loan. If so, we would approve it. Well, immediately the power company would challenge it. So then we had to fight in the courts. Now, Preston Arkwright was the president of the Georgia Power Company. President of the Georgia Power Company. He was an old friend of my father and mother from college days. He came into the office one day and he was absolutely incensed that he had to pass a Negro secretary. But he came in and he said "Is it Mr Foreman or Dr Foreman? How should I address you?" I said "Clark, Mr Arkwright, the way you always have." Because I had known him since I was a child. His son was a very good friend of mine. Well, his whole idea was to persuade me that this loan to Augusta was a dangerous thing to do. I took the position that all I could do was to follow the law as laid down by Congress. Congress had said that they were entitled to it and my job was just to pass on whether they could meet the loans. He was very unhappy about this whole thing and came back down here to Atlanta and went to see my father to complain about it. Well, my father wasn't in the office when he got there, so he talked to my brother, who ran the office when my father wasn't there. He told him that this was a terrible thing that I was doing up there. My brother took the position, well, Mr Arkwright, he's just doing what he thinks should be done and I can't tell him to do what I think should be done. He's the one that has to make the decision. So Mr Arkwright left, accomplished nothing.

JACQUELYN HALL:

How did he try to pursuade you not to give Augusta the loan?

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What were his arguments against it?

CLARK FOREMAN:

The argument was that the people of Augusta had a perfectly good electrical service now and they didn't need a municipal one. So I took the position that that was up for them to decide, not for me to decide or for him. If they said they wanted a municipal plant, then they were the ones to make the decision. And they had decided that they did want one.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you have other run ins with the Georgia Power Company later on in your career? Were there any permanent repercussions from your tenure in the power division? It seems like you were making some kind of powerful enemy.

CLARK FOREMAN:

I don't think we had any other applications from Georgia. But he was a part of the big holding company, Commonwealth and Southern, and they had a good many of them under . . . . Wilkie was the overall president. Chattanooga, Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis in Tennessee and in Alabama there was Besemer and another one. But in Georgia I don't believe there was anything but Augusta.

JACQUELYN HALL:

How long were you in that division?

CLARK FOREMAN:

About three or four years, until Roosevelt made the decision that Dr New Deal was dead and Dr Win the War was the one that we had to obey. This was about 1937 and the funds for the Public Works Administration sort of gave out. It was about that time that I made a speech before . . . . There was a group of liberal southerners that met together in Washington for dinner at Hall's Restaurant. And we'd meet down there about once a month. And one time I was talking down there and I told it to Jerome Frank. And he said what we really need is a pamphlet that sets out, for people to understand, exactly what this is all about. I agreed. Then I got a call one day from the president, Roosevelt, to come over to

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the White House. I went over there and he told me that he was very unhappy with Senator George, of Georgia, who was opposing most of the legislation that he sent up to the Congress. And he was going to be up for re-election in '38. And he wanted to get a good man to defeat him. Did I have any ideas about that? I had to tell him that I did not, that I had been out of the state so long that I wasn't familiar with it.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Did you ordinarily have personal audiences with Franklin Roosevelt or was that unusual for him to call you over?

CLARK FOREMAN:

No, that was unusual, I'd sayunique, that he should call me over.

JACQUELYN HALL: