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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview B-0005-3, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and activist Paul Green—most famous
for his symphonic drama The Lost Colony—spent his
youth at the turn of the twentieth century in rural Harnett County, North
Carolina. There, he began to gather material on the stories of poverty,
struggle, and race that would define his life as an artist and an activist. He
discusses both art and activism in this interview, describing how regional and
social context shaped his work, remembering overwrought stage actors who
struggled to bring life to his salt-of-the-earth characters, and activists who
seemed to thrive on the misery they sought to banish. These artists, distant
from their subjects, share something with the intellectuals who were more
devoted to their ideologies than to realizing their beliefs through pragmatic
application of them, Green believes. Green, on the other hand, defined himself
as an activist through direct action. In this interview, he remembers a number
of cases of injustice in which he tried to intervene, including the case of a
black teenager sentenced to death for rape, an instance of horrific cruelty at a
prison camp, tobacco workers and janitors struggling with substandard wages, and
the case of a fugitive communist organizer. Green's efforts, and the
collective action he sought to inspire, met limited success, a fact reflected in
some of Green's plays, in which poor folk struggle in vain against
their ill fortune. This struggle—its motivations, its successes, and
its failures—is at the heart of this interview, which will interest
scholars of drama and history alike.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and activist Paul Green—most famous
for his symphonic drama The Lost Colony—reflects on
social justice and art as he describes his work as a playwright and his efforts
as an activist.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
… at some length now about your life and work. But in this interview, I would like to focus as specifically as we can, I know that these things are all interrelated and can't be really separated like I am trying to separate them - but I wanted to talk somewhat specifically about your perceptions of social problems and the influence that those perceptions had on your work, especially in the '30s. If we have time, we can maybe move on to more contemporary things like your involvement in the campaign against capital punishment. I am really most interested in the '20s and '30s.
I want to ask you a very general question first, which is not a very good way to do this, but as you think back over your work when you first began writing plays here with the Carolina Playmakers in the '20s and then the '30s, what do you see as the impact of the Depression and the social ferment the Depression era had on you as an artist and as a person?
Well, you ask what effect the Depression had on me as a writer and an
artist, that's asking what effect it had on others. You could ask the
same sort of question about what effect the First World War had, or what
did the disappointment in such people as Warren Harding and Calvin
Coolidge have, or what effect did the failure of Woodrow Wilson's dream
of a united world, a League of Nations, what effect did that have on me?
All these things are a part of the pabulum or part of the grist that
comes out of your mill that you mix up and feed on. So, you see, the
Depression of the '30s, its effect on the environment in which I grew
up, was simply a continued statement of the poverty that I knew as a
child. In Harnett County, when I
But did the change in the intellectual climate of the '30s change the way that you thought about those problems, the causes of that poverty, the solutions to those injustices?
Well, that's a good question, because when I was growing up and we would
go to church on Sunday and I remember that if somebody had a dollar
bill, they would say to my father, "Mr. Billy, I want to give a quarter
to the church today. Could you change a dollar?" Well, my daddy, like
everybody else, would open his little purse, he had a little well worn
pocketbook with a little snap on it, and he would always turn his back
on the questioner and open it and fish out four quarters or fifty cents.
That was an interesting habit that people would always turn their backs
when they made change. I used to think about it. Well, money was so
difficult to get and I guess that they didn't want you to see how little
they had in their purse. Anyway, money Grapes
of Wrath came out of that. His fine novel was due actually, I
guess, to the Depression. Maybe he wouldn't have written it without the
Dust Bowl and so on in the Midwest. But it didn't change me.
I guess that what I am wondering is not so much whether the poverty of the Depression changed you, surprised you, because I can see that it would be very unlikely to. Just as the Depression for poor people didn't make that much difference in people's lives in a lot of ways. It made a difference much more slowly and wasn't a great shock to those people. But by 1930, you were part of a broader intellectual community. I am wondering more whether you began to think more systematically about things that you had taken more for granted, whether you felt more anger, were you moved more toward looking for solutions?
Yes, I think that's a very good question. I sort of slipped away from it.
Did I ponder somewhat the reasons for this sort of thing, why
What did you think about the New Deal at the time?
Well, I was suspicious of the New Deal because from way back, hard work,
and I guess the way that we were raised in Harnett County, I felt that
you could not give people liberty, freedom and so on, just give it to
them. I will never forget the feeling that I had here at the University.
I went out to the athletic field one day where they had a steam shovel
digging a bank and so on. The steam shovel had been moved over to one
side and they had about a hundred men with shovels and wheelbarrows. I
said, "Great gun, what is going on here?" "Oh, the New Deal is providing
jobs." I said, "Gee whiz, but look. It is just picayunish, that steam
shovel can do this." "Yes, but we have got to have jobs." So, I said,
"Well, this is crazy, because the whole philosophy of the machine age is
more result with less effort. Push a button and a great bulldozer will
push right through a hill." So, I felt that this was not right, this was
charity and there was something wrong about it. Then when I was down in
Manteo working on a drama down there, and seeing the CCC camp boys,
which was a WPA, a government thing set up, these boys were planting sea
oats along the sand dunes and were protecting the sea shore and doing
all kinds of good work, I thought, "Well, this is great, because that is
the only way that they can do it." But to stop a steam shovel! I don't
know what is wrong, except a simple statement that a democracy whose
liberty, the liberty of its individuals can run rampant without a
concurrent responsiblity to go with the liberty or freedom, will produce
this sort of thing. If a labor union thinks mainly in terms of its own
self and EXXON oil people think only in terms of their profit, then you
get these head on competitions and you get fights and this one will grab
and this one will grab. So, our democracy now, that I have always
believed in, has got a terrible evil in it, a lack of sense
Braxton Craven?
Braxton Craven said that the American people will not continue to fear
for their lives, violence, and be without jobs. They won't endure that
ultimately. Ultimately, they will be willing to give up the Ten
Amendments, freedom of assembly, freedom of this and that and the other,
in order to get these values which are now pretty much lost. When I was
in Russia, I could walk at night up and down the streets of Leningrad or
Moscow at any time of night. I can't do that in Washington or New York.
I don't dare do it. The fear for your life has become so strong that
Judge Craven said that ultimately people would be willing to give up
their certain kinds of liberty for jobs and for safety. Well, my good
friend Jonathan Daniels, who was Press Secretary for awhile for
President Roosevelt, editor of the News and Observer,
he said, "Oh, you quit worrying. We will muddle along. We'll
continue."
When did he say that? Recently?
Yes. I don't know that any of these things have affected what I've been
trying to do, what I have been trying to write, except right now I am
working on something and I can feel the present situation in the
country, the lack of leadership, the cruelty, the wastage bearing down
on me so that the scenes that I am working at now, I feel them affected
by it. So, I am having my characters say things that were true then,
this is back in 1783, they are
It's very interesting the way you talk about what is going on in society
today bearing down on you as you write. It is not that you are trying to
write about contemporary things, but they are there. When you were
writing something like This Body The Earth, for
example, in 1935, do you remember having that same kind of feeling of
what was going on in the society around you at that time?
Yes, that's right. I took a rural theme because …well, I went back some years and I don't remember what the date was, it would be about the First World War. Anyway, I remember that my young man that I was writing about and created, he didn't go to war. I think that he married or something. Anyway, … maybe it was before the war, but I had seen as a child this tenant farm system and it was still rampant. My father, we were poor farmers, but he finally got a couple of tenant houses. That tenant system had grown up after the Civil War and it was a vicious thing, the farm tenancy. Hookworm and pelagra in the South. So, I decided that I would try to write about a fellow … well, I made a tragedy out of it. I didn't treat the young man right because he could have succeeded if I hadn't wanted to give a tragic expression to it.
Why did you want to give a tragic expression to it?
I don't know, maybe that is a one sided view, this tragic or pathetic
thing, but I had seen so many people whose lives were sort of wrecked. I
remember one tenant on our farm and when my father would get a tenant
family, he would want a man and a wife with a lot of children so that
they could pick cotton. To a man and a wife with no children my father
would say, "No, I'm sorry, we are looking for a big family." Well, there
is no use in going into that, but I tried to tell the story of this
tenant farm business and I felt that somehow if I wrote about a man who
tried to move up, he did everything he could, he worked himself to death
almost and he couldn't make it and so the reader would ache in his heart
and say, "Oh, this ought not to be like this." That ache on the part of
the reader, the sense of sympathy, the strong sense of sympathy that you
would have for a man like this, a young man that failed, would be strong
enough to maybe make the reader get out and try to do something. I
think, if I may say so, that this is one of the flaws in the Russian or
totalitarian system, where in their works of art, usually in their
drama, their novels and poetry, they come out with a yea saying point of
view, optimistic, so that a spectator or reader is denied the rich human
experience of trying to provide a program of his own. So, if you read a
tragic thing, well … take Jude the Obscure by Thomas
Hardy. Jude wanted to go to school you know, and so on, but he had so
many weaknesses, sexual ones and all, and the greatest weakness of all
was what the author intended to do with him. Hardy didn't intend to give
him a chance.
Well, that question of "yea saying" and "nay saying" is very interesting
to me. I wondered whether … Gerald Rabkin, for example, in this book,
Drama and Commitment, compares your play, The House of Connelly, to the way Tennessee Williams
would treat the same theme. I don't know if you have read that.
No, I have not.
He says that in the beginning of the play, you are talking about the decadence of the old South, the corruption of the old aristocracy, which is very much a Tennessee Williams theme, but if Williams had been writing the play, he would have ended it … he would not have had the new order be possibly better than the old. The difference in the two is that you see corruption as a function of institutions and classes and therefore potentially changeable, whereas Williams sees it as existential or irrational, something like original sin, I suppose. But what struck me about it was that whole sequence of events in which you changed the ending of the play when it was put on by the Group Theater, to be a more positive ending and then you changed it back to a more negative ending. I wondered if you have the play ending the way you do, with the tenant girl being smothered, does that put you back in Williams' camp, that evil and ….
No, no. That is very interesting. You structure something, let's say a
play or a novel, (or a house,) you structure it and pretty soon you see
the intent which is the direction in which it is going. So, when the
Group Theater persuaded me to come out with a "yea saying" ending then
to do the right work of art, I should have gone back to the very first
and intended it so. It was a spurious and a sinful thing
You don't think that drama should reflect life? That's not what you're trying to do?
Oh, yes, but it sublimates life or it ….
Ennobles life? When someone reads one of your plays, what is the purpose of that play, what do you want the reader to have from it?
Well, it's to tell a story. You've got a story to tell and then you say, "Well now, what is a story?" A story is an arrangement on the part of the artist of the actions and the raw material of life shaped into an art form in which the participants, the readers, the spectators, the auditors, they can come and see that and get enriched. It's part of the process of humanistic growth. I was reading last night something of Tennyson. H.L. Mencken used to call him "Long Tennyson" but he's a great poet, and I read about "And on her lover's arm she leant, And round her waist she felt it fold, And far across the hills they went in that new world, which is the old: Across the hills, and far away Beyond their utmost purple rim, And deep into the dying day The happy princess follow'd him. And o'er them many a sliding star, And many a merry wind was borne, And, stream'd thro' many a golden bar, The twilight melted into morn."
So, he got something and there it is and "Way the twilight comes down …", it's wonderful. He put it down nearly a hundred years ago and it is still there. The vapor has disappeared, but art takes life, shapes it and fastens it down and a poem is like a chalice. You can go back and drink from it, and art makes permanent the values in life that would fade away. So, you could almost say that a civilization is great only as its artists are great.
But you also wrote with a didactic purpose. The way that you talked about
This Body The Earth, that the reader would feel
the injustice of
That's right.
Whereas Tennyson's peom does not effect you that way, it's aesthetic.
Yes, but it makes you … well, it is in a way always that. You could not
deny the pay-off of possible learning from any work of art and by
learning, you simply mean not only learning of an emotional nature but
of a logical strength so that if you have a pedantic novel or play that
teaches, if it is done beautifully enough, the pedanticism is
illuminated and sublimated in such a way that it is inspiring. Now, I
wrote something that I knew when I was working at it, that it wasn't
actually physically true, about some people who came to Roanoke Island
in the sixteenth century and tried to make a settlement and they
perished, they were lost. Well, I put words there that actually,
realistically, didn't fit and had them do things that they didn't do,
but you could say artistically, they should have done. So, I have a
fellow come out, the narrator, and say, "We have come to dedicate this
bit of humble earth." It's right where this colony was and then he says,
"For here once walked the men of dreams." Well, all of us are dreamers …
"the sons of hope and pain and wonder." Then I have him go on about the
sunlight of truth on their foreheads, their lips sang a new "song for
ages yet unborn, For us the children that came after them, O, new and
mighty world to be," they sang. "O, land, majestic, free, unbounded."
Well, they never said that but you use them to be beyond themselves so
the artist, the playwright, he can never put life down just as it is. He
interprets it. Anyway, I do in my feeble efforts. Now, in these later
years, in feeling
I wrote a thing at Williamsburg, The Common Glory.
Well, Jefferson never did do exactly the way that he is put down there,
and I know that a lot of people in Virginia came to me and said, "Here
you are writing something … ",and I never was too proud of the thing, I
thought that I couldn't get enough humanity in it, didn't have time. But
they would say, "You don't want to write about Jefferson, you ought to
write about Patrick Henry. That's the man." Now, why didn't I choose
Patrick Henry? Well, because in studying the life of Patrick Henry and
also in realizing that he didn't have the impact in the world that
Jefferson did, I found that Patrick Henry had a narrow minded view I
thought, of the democratic faith. I couldn't go all out for him. Well,
you can write a play about Patrick Henry, but not an epic that I wanted.
I know that I am paying some penalty for it, too, because the characters
that I am creating now, they won't bleed, if you cut them, the way that
some of my folk characters will. The fellow in that novel, as bad as it
is written, I broke down in that novel and it's got a weak place in it.
The turning point should have been the big scene and I kind of
floundered. But I was working in a hurry, and they had already started
setting it up at Harpers, and I did the best I could at that time.
You mentioned the rebellions that went on in the '30s, against the
poverty and the whole sweep of industrialization by the working people,
who gained this certain kind of self-consciousness and a certain kind of
understanding of where they were and began to try to organize. There
were many different kinds of things that happened in the '30s. Could you
kind of talk about this … the Burlington Dynamite Case, for example?
Some of the incidents of labor organization
Well, in the South, the labor union, the trade union movement was slow
and they never got started. Some of the reasons were that the people who
came out of the Civil War depression and gradually awoke, like the
Reynoldses, the Grays, the different people around and got the South
started again. All around the South, the Carolinas, Georgia, a local
fellow would get the idea and he would build him a little factory and
then he would expand it. So, these were sort of landlords with a
landlord's point of view and I know that down at Erwin, North Carolina
right near where I was born, when I was a little boy, I would go by
there with my father and we saw a lot of Negroes sawing and cutting down
trees. We said, "What's happening?" and they said, "We are going to
build a cotton factory." And the Dukes and Mr. Erwin, they changed the
town's name, it was called Duke but it is now named Erwin, and that was
early in the century. So, more local industry began to spring up
everywhere and the people behind that, Mr. Erwin, was a good
Episcopalian and he gave the money and helped build this Episcopal
church down here, the new one and they were all, every darn one of them,
good church members. Some of them taught Sunday School, like John D.
Rockefeller, Sr. did. Each one of them also had that possessive point of
view about his factory. He herded in these people, cheap labor. At
Erwin, I used to go by and see these children at the noon hour come out
of the factory all yellow. I tried to deal with it a little bit in that
novel you just mentioned. Well, gradually, when the war came on, a lot
of these mill people went to Europe and were treated with this doctrine
and so on and saw some new things in the world and then the impact of
the labor unions in the North and the Middle West began to seep in. Now
and then, there would be a young man in the labor group here in the
South who
How did you get involved in the Burlington incident?
Well, earlier at Gastonia, I had gotten a little interest in it. Well, I read about it and I thought, "This is a shame, it ought not to be. These people …."
You had been aware of it and been involved in the Gastonia strike?
Not involved in it myself, but reading about it and writing about it, writing some letters.
Who did you write letters to?
Later, I got involved with Fred Beal, who was a leader.
Yes.
But actually, I got really involved in the Burlington thing, actually working. You see, I was in Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship and got back here in 1930 ….
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
… maybe I wrote some letters to the newspapers or something, but it was from outside. Then one day, the phone rang and a fellow named Hoggard said that he wanted to come see me ….
Hoggard?
I think that his name was Hoggard. I've got all that somewhere.
Do you remember Don West?
Oh, yes. Did you ever know him?
Yes.
Don's a great tall guy.
Yes. It wasn't him that first came to talk to you?
Well, maybe it was. But anyway, the thing that really fired me up, they were tried. I didn't go to the trial, I think that the trial maybe took place while I was in Europe. When I got back, I read about these guys who had broken out thirteen dollars worth of glass with dynamite and the total amount of penalty was something like a hundred and something years in the penitentiary for all five of them, or however many there were. Well, that was just what fired me up. About that time, Don West and Hoggard and some others showed up. The mother of one of them, a man named Blalock, his name was Florence, by the way, he was a man but his name was Florence Blalock, she was in the group and they looked so pitiful with their sunbonnets … these were mill workers, but really eloquent in their complaints. The language would just pour out. So, I got interested in trying to do something about it and then we looked around for a lawyer, and Bill Couch here, who was running the University Press, was interested and we met. I think that Elizabeth was appointed treasurer of the thing. We started writing letters to get money to hire us a lawyer and we hired a [Major] Colonel Henderson, I think it was, from Graham. Well, I don't remember, I'd have to look it up.
How did Susie Sharp come into the picture?
Have you seen some of this ….
Yes.
Yes, I never did like Susie Sharp after that. She was a lawyer from
Reidsville, I think, and we heard some way that she was interested in
labor cases and we got her to meet. And then Norman Thomas,-we lived
over in town and one day there was a knock on the door and there stood
this tall man and
Was there a pretty good sized group of people in Chapel Hill, around the University, who were interested in this kind of thing? Who else worked with you on it?
Well, there was Loretta Bailey, J.O. Bailey's wife, a girl named Muriel Wolfe, Bill Couch, Elizabeth, J.O. Bailey himself … I don't remember.
What about Ericson, E.E. Ericson?
Oh, yes. Eric. Well, he was a Communist, everybody said. Eric brought a little shady something, he was a wonderful fellow, but he was so outspoken that it was very easy to call him a Russian sympathizer and we sort of tried to tame him down a little bit, but he was an eloquent fellow. I think that a question came up about his tenure here at the University, but he left here and went someplace, I don't know where. But he was so outspoken that he handicapped us somewhat. Well, that was the main group.
Were these people … was there a large or strong chapter of the Socialist party here?
No.
Did these people have political affiliations? How did you identify the people who ….
I don't know, it was just Bill Couch of the Press and he was interested in interpreting the South and we had Howard Odum and Gerald Johnson and Rupert Vance and Guy Johnson … Guy is still here. They were working in the Southern Regional Council down in Atlanta. They were not as definitely pro-labor as this little group, but they were opening up and almost acting as midwives from the old order into a new order to be, I think. They worked for racial justice and Johnson himself went down to St. Helena Island or someplace where they had a group of people and he wrote a book on Sea Island music, I think, down there. So, we were supported somewhat by Odum and Johnson, although Odum … I talked to him some, but he had an institutional responsibility and was always trying to get money from the foundations to support his endeavors, so he didn't go … he never met with this group, the mill crowd. We were renegades, in fact, we were investigated by the FBI.
Well, what is the difference between you and Ericson and Bailey and the people that would work with you on something like this and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences crowd?
Well, we were, they would say, more radical and we were for case action rather than a general program. For instance, I had a lot of correspondence with Theodore Dreiser about another case, the Scottsboro case where five or six Negro boys were sentenced to death for the so-called "rape" of a white girl, who was a sort of a tramp. We worked on that. Well, just the case.
Why that strategy of focusing on particular cases?
Well, we finally got the ILD, the international labor organization from
New York, they got into it somehow, I was opposed to that. I did all I
It is interesting because clearly you were more radical than Odum and that group and yet, when you describe your strategy for dealing with injustices and social issues, it could be seen in another light as being less systematic, kind of piecemeal social work thing, the approach that a social worker would take to problems. Really, a feeling that you could never change the social system as a whole, you can only ameliorate individual cases. What is the difference?
No, I'm saying that the real way to change it is by exhibits, statistics.
You can pull a fellow out … We appealed this Burlington thing
Why did you think that they would ruin it?
Because for one thing, we had a local North Carolina Supreme Court and it
was just like the University here. As long as we have got good North
Carolina boys running it, the President and the Chancellor, good fellows
and all, we don't have a single voice that has a nationwide clarion call
as a great educator, we are all administrators, good fellows. We've got
some good teachers, but … I knew those members of the Supreme Court and
I used to always find it easy to go to the governor and talk, but not go
as a representative of the Civil Liberties or the NAACP. I went not as
an institutional man, but as a simple citizen and I was always welcomed
by every governor going way back to Angus McLean, Gardner, Hoey,
Broughton, Ehringhous, right on back even Luther Hodges. As soon as we
had this ruling from the Supreme Court, Alex Heard and I had a little
caucus and we said, "Now is the time to hit" and we went to see Luther
Hodges, he was the governor and we said, "Now Governor, we've got the
backing of the Federal United States Supreme Court and we have already
talked to Mr. Davis at Chapel Hill and he is ready to move to let the
students enter Chapel Hill and we can have a pilot project right off to
start it." Well, to my surprise, I was in school with Luther and he
said, "Paul, you can't do this." And then he used that phrase that
infuriates you, "You can't do this overnight."
What made you think that Luther Hodges would act differently?
I thought that he maybe, being educated here, and that he had the backing of the United States Supreme Court, and had been a businessman out in Chicago with the Fields company, that he would maybe … just like Foo Giduz when he wanted to run for mayor, you know Giduz who writes for the local paper. Well, they wouldn't let the Negroes in the restaurants here and so I said, "You are going to run for mayor, you've got a great chance, Roland. Come out for this thing. Take the lead. It's right and the time is right." Well, he wouldn't do it. He was against opening the restuarants, and Lee beat him. Well, maybe he would have beaten him anyway, but he wouldn't do it. I remember working …
I'm off the subject now, but anyhow, these are all connected with the
general matter of improvement of relations. We tried for years to get at
least Negro graduates into this Porgy and Bess arrives
here and I go to Carrington Smith and I say ….
When did this happen?
Oh, a few years ago, not too long ago. We had already had the Supreme
Court decision and so on to back us up. I went to Carrington and said,
"Carrington, Porgy and Bess is coming here and that is
a Negro movie and this would be a great time to invite our Negro people
to come and see their movie." "Oh," he said, "We can't do that." So now,
you go up there and the Negroes are coming in and it is wonderful. We've
finally done it, but without the backing of Uncle Sam and the Supreme
Court, we would still be in the darkness.
It is very surprising to me how slow the University of North Carolina was to take any kind of position ….
We are a terribly provincial state and there are many reasons for it. One is because of men like Billy Graham. When you already have all the truth that you need, you see, a fellow that is lost and wandering and hunting for salvation, he is always more sympathetic, but a guy that has already got it has got it all made. So, the University has been controlled by Baptists, and our battle to eradicate capital punishment in the state has always found its greatest opponents in good church people. The Roman Catholics first of all are adamant as a rule, the Episcopalians next and the Baptists and Methodists down the line, but you find a free thinker, nearly everytime, he is on our side. There is something funny there.
I was interested in The Enchanted Maze.
Oh, what a play.
What did that play come out of? How did you view this University? Have
your views of the University changed over the time, have
Well, the young people … I know that they come out here and you are young
and you can see old people like me and see where they are missing it. I
came up here and was very much like Jude the Obscure
who looked toward the dream city of Oxford or Cambridge where he might
go to school some day and this place to me was the light on the hill.
So, when I got up here and got close by, I found that it was more human
and the first thing I thought was, "Gee, this is wrong." When I was a
student here, I saw a little Negro boy come into the library with a
note, I was there at the desk getting a book. This little fellow handed
the note to the librarian and she said, "I'm sorry." And then she handed
it back to him. Well, I got interested and maybe my sympathies were with
the little black boy already and I asked her, "Do you mind telling me
what it was?" He said, "He is a school teacher, a Negro school teacher
that wrote a note and wanted to borrow a book and we are not allowed to
lend them." I said, "Oh, " … of course, I said it in language too strong
for her, I said, "I know …" I said that I knew, I really didn't, but I
said, "I know that that boy's granddaddy built this place. He toted the
mortar and moved the rocks." So, I went to see the dean or somebody,
there wasn't a chancellor then, and they looked at me as if I was from
another planet. So in no time, I fell afoul of this place.
When did this happen, in the early '20s?
That was in 1919 or 1920. It was incredible and right on up to the recent times. Why couldn't they do that?
Why didn't Frank Graham take more leadership in the question of race?
Well, Frank and I were cousins. His father and my grandmother were brother and sister. I didn't know it until one day he mentioned it and then I looked it up. So, I felt a little closer to him. It is an interesting thing. Frank was a wonderful person, but he wouldn't fight. I heard him once when he was a professor of history here make a speech in Memorial Hall, it was a real fighting speech about justice. It was a great thing and then he asked me to come in and help him on some labor dispute or something but I only lasted about three days. I wanted to get in there and do something and he began to sort of back away from it. I was too radical. So, I fell out of the thing. He loved people so that even when he had a scoundrel to deal with, it weakened his fighting power.
When Frank Graham was President of the University, did you ever try to talk to him about dealing with the black community around here or about integrating the University?
That's right, I did and he was in principle for it. I remember when Frank
was appointed-and this is funny, I haven't thought of it since, I
guess,-Howard Odum and I held a lamentation session and I will never
forget. I wrote something in my diary or somewhere and Howard Odum and I
both agreed that one of the first things that would happen, we would
look out under the Davie Poplar and there would be a religious meeting
of the Holy Rollers. Frank was so religious and we were just sick, but
Frank was better than that and he made quite a name for himself. But, he
was just too darn good. It just killed him for somebody to come up and
say, "You son of a bitch, you …" He couldn't take it. He loved people
so. I went with him on some trips and we couldn't make any progress at
all. Every little town that we would drive through, he would say, "I
have to speak to So-and-So" and he would come into a drugstore and "Dr.
Frank." The first thing that you'd know, he would have
How do you deal with that kind of conflict? Do you have real personal conflicts with people, do they come up to you and say, "You son of a bitch …"
Yes.
How does that effect you?
Well …Bill Friday interviewed me once and he asked me something about appraising eastern North Carolina and I got loose and said, "Well Bill, I suppose that two of the greatest evils that have held us back here in North Carolina and that may have held back other parts of the country are a narrow-minded fundamentalist religion and mistaken patriotism and worship of the flag and so on." Well, I got loose on that and I got some letters …whew! They would say, "You ought to be run out of North Carolina."
But what about among your peers and friends in the University community? Have you had real personal conflicts with people?
Not here, no. They have always been either pretty silent or just … as far as I know, I was never penalized. I was sort of disappointed, I never had a cross burned in front of my house and I've never been shot at. Well, the opposition to all is the Ku Klux Klan and the narrow fundamentalist religion, justice among laboring people and all of those things that I have been involved.
Could we go back to the Burlington case for just a little bit. You talked
about the International Labor Defense lawyers, the New Yorkers,
Well, it is a part of that local mores where the stranger is always suspect. We had a man [A.M. Scales] who was running for governor. He was solicitor at the time and he was, of course, the prosecutor of these Burlington boys. He lived in Greensboro, a very upstanding man. I went to see him two or three times. There was some chance that we could get an amelioration or deviation of their sentence. Well, he agreed with us, but then he pulled that thing like often when I would go to the governor about commuting a sentence when a poor devil was about to die, he said, "Paul, I would like to do it, but the jury said so, the judge said so. I have a letter here from the judge urging me not to commute or reprieve the man." They always pull that other authority on you, so this lawyer said, … the sentence wasn't too unjust and he said, ….
Who was this?
I was just trying to think of his name. His son was here in school and
became a Communist and I will think of it in a minute. Well, after the
case went before the Supreme Court, these ILD guys got up in the middle
of things and started preaching and cussed out North Carolina for the
injustice here, the blindness of the people, "You sir, sitting there."
Well, gosh, these fellows threw them out and wouldn't hear the case and
it was reaffirmed, and that was when we went to the solicitor and
prosecutor and judge. I forget, but some of these boys served some time
and they got out of prison … I would have to look up the correspondence,
but I know that one fellow, Florence Blalock, they had him in jail over
here in Hillsborough. He had done some other misdemeanor and had been
locked up over there and his mother came to see me and said that
Florence was going to die, he had tried to kill himself and couldn't I
do something for Florence. She was a mill
You put up bail for some other people too, didn't you?
Yes, I did, but I don't remember who. Anyway, Florence got out and whooped and hollered any enjoyed himself and went down here towards Sanford somewhere and broke into a store and the next thing we knew, he was back in the pen again.
Did you get your bail money back?
Well, we didn't put up money, we just signed and so we went up there
later, I drove up to Alamance or wherever it was … well, maybe it was
Graham or somewhere but I went to the Clerk of the Court and told him
that I would like to get this bail cancelled because it was against my
bank record here, I had committed the $4500. He smiled and said, "I wish
I could do it, but I can't." I said, "What?" He said, "The bail says
that you promised to deliver him for trial on a certain day for trial."
I said, "I can't deliver him, he's in the penitentiary." He said, "Well,
that's what
What about someone like Don West? What did you think about him?
Don was slightly unreliable. He was excessive in some ways, but a very imaginative person, as I remember him. I wish I could look up some things, but I don't remember him too well, except that I got the impression from his volubility, he would get up and make speeches to us and was quite over fluent. Where is he, is he still living?
Oh yes, he runs an educational center in Appalachia. He's still quite active.
Well, I imagine that he is ….
But he is a very strange person, I think. He is really a loner.
I had a feeling that his self expression, this need to express himself in words and statements was often put as a prerogative before other things. I got the feeling that, "we are interested in this case, let's keep on this thing," and it was a means by which he had a freedom of self expression that he enjoyed.
To make speeches and write ….
I think that some of us, our hearts were all tied up in knots over these poor devils and there was sort of an enjoyment in West in participating in this.
Well, you have some files which include the broadsides put out by the
Workers Defense Committee and letters written by Don West and he was
Well, I don't remember it all and may convict myself with contradictions.
Well, the thing that interested me about this material, as time and again I look into the '30s, is how much more radical, much more openly … I don't know how to express myself very well here, the whole intervention of the '50s and '60s changed the terms of political discussion. By the time I was coming along, nobody in Graham, North Carolina, would dare to put out the kind of literature that Don West was putting out at that time.
Right.
It was very extreme, very radical, very hard hitting. There are a couple of letters from the local Communist party of Alamance County, which after the '30s, you could not openly put out literature in the name of the local Communist party of Alamance County. There wouldn't be a Communist party of Alamance County that would be above ground.
I wonder what sort of faith Don has now?
I don't know.
Well, I knew a lot of them in those times and that came out of the Depression, they thought that they saw in the American system such a failure, the system was failing and like the Group Theater, they were all young people who felt that Joe Stalin was the greatest guy and Thomas Jefferson was a kind of a phony.
What about the Group Theater? Your involvement with the Group Theater was
in 1931, which would have been four years before the Burlington Plough and Furrow which I thought
I think so.
I was wondering what kind of impact your experiences with the Group Theater had on your thinking? Did it change you?
I don't think that it affected me.
How did you see yourself as being different from these people?
I always felt that I couldn't subscribe to … there was a sentimental fervor in them and that offended me. They were so full of Stanislavsky, but I never saw a Group Theater actor on stage that I didn't realize that here was a guy or a person much more sensitive and much more resilient to the theater than, say, some of the old timers like Sidney Blackmer, who was a good actor. These people, they felt … Lee J. Cobb, Morris Carmovsky, John Garland, Elia Kazan, they all went through there and they all came out, I think, with their emotional nature exacerbated.
It is interesting to me that you were critical of their emotional involvement in their work because your plays are very emotional. I am sure that you have been criticized for being too personally involved in your work and too emotional.
I guess that one thing was just their ignorance of and their distaste for
the American philosophy of government. They knew little about it. They
were, most of them … well, one of them came down here and wanted to play
in one of these outdoor dramas that I had written and the
What about the Theater Union, were they more or less different from the Group Theater?
They were all sort of similar. I remember Mike Gold, wasn't
The New Masses?
the New Masses or whatever it was. Well, a lot of them,
they were full of feeling and full of ignorance, naive, but were much
better artists than the Gordon Craig theory. He has a theory that an
actor is just a puppet, he is moving and the director is the man,
everything comes through the actor by way of the director. These people
… I remember one night in the Theater Guild in New York, we had a
rehearsal without scenery, we had an invited audience, some critics and
these kids, they had no scenery but they had some props and had a table,
they pantomimed the story as they went through. They got so overcome at
a place in the play that Morris Carnovsky let out a sob or something and
another girl, Stella Adler, dod too and they all broke down and cried.
They had to stop the show while they all cried and wept. They were all
so full of their own feeling. Well, I was about to go around and spit on
the ground, "to heck with this."
The Theater Union occurred to me because there is a letter in your files from J.O. Bailey suggesting that during the Burlington Dynamite Case you try to start a worker's theater in cooperation with the Theater Union and the Workers Education Project of the Federal Emergency Relief Corporation, and he seems to be sort of tentative about it, he is assuming that you are not going to be sympathetic, that you will assume that it will be too much of a propaganda device. But there is no record of your reply.
I don't know. I remember that we wanted to start a dollar theater, I
remember that Bobby Lewis was a member of the Group and when the Group
began to break up, it was strange that it would break up, but with that
You have done a lot of different kinds of things. You have written in different genres, folk dramas, social protest, symphonic drama. What do you think is your most important? What has given you the most satisfaction?
I have a lot of regrets, and then you say, "What is the regret?" Regret maybe based on ignorance, selfishness, or what. I remember when I first started working on what I call the people's theater in these outdoor dramas and so on, Brooks Atkinson said, "You are making a great mistake. You ought to stick in here." And so did Barrett Clark and others. I said, "Well, I am just worn out with this, you can't experiment here. I want to get some big cast and you can't do it, you can't pay the thing. One play that I tried with a big casts, and kind of symphonic thing with dance music and so on, we lost our shirts."
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
So, why did you make that transition to the people's theater?
Well, why did I quit writing movies? Not that I had made enough
Did you write Cabin in the Cotton?
That was the first one that I wrote and it was a funny thing, I got some protest in that. They left me pretty free. Darryl Zanuck and the Warner Brothers, he was the producer there, I guess they just thought, "We'll just put out a feeler and see how well it does." In order to protect themselves, they had it signed by "Professor Paul Green."
Rankin says that …he's critical of your change in your work from your earlier social protest.
Who is that?
It's a book called Drama and Commitment. It's about the
'30s, the drama of the '30s. He says that in your early work was formed
by an intense regionalism, social and psychological insights, and then
you moved from
Yes, that's the kind of critcism that Brooks Atkinson of The
New York Times made, and I guess that there is something to it.
I guess … I have two or three plays out there almost finished now about
protest, and I found that I was repeating myself. I have a play about a
Negro boy who tried to get into this University early and I don't know
why, I worked on it and I found that I was saying my same message. Well,
you could say that "in these outdoor dramas now, maybe you are saying
the same message." I don't know. After you do a thing …I guess there is
a truth in that, but maybe when you keep singing one song, you want to
try another song.
How did you get involved with Fred Beal?
Well, if I may, I'll speak about that in a minute, but to go back to this
Cabin in the Cotton, one thing that I learned
early in trying to write plays, and I don't know where I learned it,
maybe it was just sort of natural, but I knew that if you are going to
get the truth between two antagonisms and usually in a play, you have a
protagonist and antagonist point of view, one against the other, and I
bet that I have half a dozen labor protest plays half finished out
there, scenes of rioting and all, and maybe I should have stuck and