[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

MARY FREDERICKSON:

I am in Wendell, Massachusetts with Dr. Broadus Mitchell, on August 14, 1977 to conduct an interview for the Southern Oral History Program. Dr. Mitchell, I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your family when you were growing up, especially how much you remember about your grandparents.

BROADUS MITCHELL:

Maybe I had better identify myself. To begin with, my name is John Broadus Mitchell. I don't use the "John" and haven't for many years. I was born in Georgetown, Kentucky, December 27, 1892. My father at that time was a member of the faculty of Georgetown College. He had met my mother, who was Alice Virginia Broadus, when she visited Georgetown, I think with her father. They met when he was a student. My grandfather John Albert Broadus was a Baptist clergyman. After middle life he was the head of a small Baptist theological seminary in Greeenville, South Carolina, where my mother was born. The Civil War made conditions so difficult for the seminary that it was moved to Louisville, Kentucky, which was a more prosperous community. And at that same time, I think, the seminary was fortunate in having a gift from John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and the main building of the seminary was called Rockefeller Hall. I suppose it's torn down now, because the seminary moved years later, long after my grandfather's time, to a suburb of Louisville, where there is a building named for my grandfather. He was a writer as well as a preacher and teacher. I think it's unusual that thirty-two of his descendants now still receive royalties on a book that he wrote a hundred years ago. It's been kept in print all this time; it's gone through many revisions. [laughter] It was a book on a most

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fortunate subject. Since he was the head of a theological seminary, it was natural for him, in addition to writing more learned books such as a Greek New Testament or commentary on Matthew or whatever, to write a practical handbook or manual for young preachers starting out, and this one is called The Preparation and Delivery of Sermons. It is mainly common sense, that you mustn't preach too long, or don't dress in an extravagant way; try not to sneeze in the pulpit; open your mouth when you talk so that people will hear you; the kinds of material on which you can draw in making a sermon; what your relations with your community are in political matters as well as in moral matters; and so on. My grandmother was his second wife. His first wife was a daughter of Professor Gessner Harrison, who was Professor of Greek, I think, at the University of Virginia, where my grandfather had been chaplain as a young man. His second wife, my grandmother, was Charlotte Sinclair of Charlottesville, Virginia, where the University of Virginia is located, of course. She was a daughter of George Sinclair, a farmer. I have been to their house. It is standing now on a city street with other houses close by, because the farm was broken up into lots. I regret to say that none of the [laughter] financial benefits of turning a farm into a city location has seemed to have come down in the family, as far as I can tell. It's a large, handsome house, "Locust Grove," it's called. My grandmother was of Scottish descent, my Grandfather Broadus of Welsh and English descent. He had something of a Welsh look, if I [laughter] understand what a Welshman is supposed to look like. Not tall; a broad forehead; an unusually large head. One thinks in

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this country of a famous Welshman, John L. Lewis. Now my grandfather wasn't of Mr. Lewis's temperament, nor was he of the temperament of Mr. Richard Burton, who is another Welshman.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did you know your grandparents as you were growing up?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

I remember my grandfather faintly. I was a small child and was taken to see him in Louisville. Georgetown is close to Louisville, thirty miles. And I have a child's recollection of going toward him. He was seated in a chair with the light behind him. That's an impression in my mind. That's my only recollection of him, though he alluded to me as a grandchild in several of his letters and so on. I remember my grandmother very well, because she didn't die until I was a teenager. As I was saying, her father—and I can't say about her mother—was of strongly Scotch blood. And she had Scotch characteristics of thriftiness and a certain severity in dealing with children: no foolishness.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

How many children did she have?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

Four or five. Two sons, two daughters, and I think one or two died in infancy, as was usual at that time. When my father had moved from Georgetown to Richmond College in Virginia, where he remained for many years, he continued teaching Latin and Greek, which he had taught at Georgetown. But he was one who early sensed that ancient languages as a mainstay in the curriculum needed to be supplemented by history and economics, political science, sociology, none of which Richmond College included. So he resolved to fit himself to teach these social subjects; his colleagues thought that this was unnecessary, for him to go on and do further graduate

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work, that you read history, you didn't have to study history or you didn't have to have special instruction to fit you to be a historian. In any case, what with going summers to the University of Chicago and getting a year off for one solid year at Chicago, he got his doctor's degree.

But that year when he was at Chicago, my mother took us children to her mother's home in Louisville, my grandmother, which was a large house. And [laughter] if there was any severity in my grandmother's conduct, it was quite understandable because, in addition to my mother and her four children, my Aunt Ella's family, Mrs. Robertson and her husband, were there. And there must have been three or four of their children in the house. I remember some of the little peculiarities of my grandmother. She was very fond of a strong beef tea. It was made with beef extract, essence. It looked sort of like very thick black molasses. It came out of a little bottle or sort of a vial. I knew afterwards it was Valentine's Meat Juice. It was made in Richmond; I knew something about it later. It was to an ordinary bouillon cube what gin is to Coca-Cola, say. And she liked that. Her only exercise was taking long trolley rides, and I frequently went with her and my mother on long rides around Louisville. She liked that. She was a quiet, small woman, Scotch also in her habit of serving oatmeal.

And [laughter] one of the things that I associate with her, which is not her fault and which is not pleasant in my own recollection, is cold oatmeal, because at that time we didn't have quick-cooking oatmeal, and it was quite a production to make a big double boiler of oatmeal. So what was left over—and it was expected to last for several days—was put in the refrigerator in a bowl, and when it was turned out it

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was gray and slick and cold, and you ate that with milk, not heated up. My grandmother thought it wasn't necessary [laughter] to heat it up; it had been cooked and so on. Very kind; very kind indeed. And my father couldn't have got his degree—and that had everything to do with his later career—if she hadn't given us this cordial hospitality. Incidentally, my sister, the fourth child, was born at my grandmother's, which was another complication.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

How did your mother feel about your father going off to Chicago for a year to get his . . .

BROADUS MITCHELL:

I don't know about that, but I'm sure she shared his ambition and realized that this was very important for all of them. And it wasn't a sudden thing, because, as I say, he'd been going in summers.

You know how one does if you are holding a teaching position; you have to wait for your opportunity to get more than three months or six weeks or something for graduate work. The University of Chicago had just been opened. It was a Baptist institution founded by John D. Rockefeller, who had been the patron of the seminary of which my grandfather was head then, and that was a natural thing. Incidentally, my father was older than most of the graduate students, because he had been teaching for some years. He had a family of four children. And so when he took his degree, President Harper of the University of Chicago thought his judgment would be worth inviting and said, "Which of the professors has influenced you more?" Father told me that he hesitated to make the reply that he did; but he thought he'd been asked, he'd be candid, and said that it was one of the youngest of the

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members of the faculty who had meant most in his experience there. He was Professor Ernst Freund, then a young man, who later became famous as one of the earliest political scientists in this country to develop what we refer to now as administrative law. I remember Freund; he came to Johns Hopkins when I was a student there and lectured. I had the pleasure of meeting him. He had been very kind to my father, and my father had been of assistance to him. Freund had written a book, I guess, or had brought out an edition of Justinian's Codes, and since Father knew Latin very well he read the proofs of it to make sure, because I doubt very much whether Freund could have made the necessary corrections. And when Professor Freund was away in the summer and my father was there, he invited Father to occupy his apartment, so they had a very friendly relationship. And Father's judgment about Freund was certainly a good one. My grandfather used to dictate his books to my mother, who wrote on a typewriter. She didn't know shorthand, but she was an excellent typist. And they had an early [laughter] typewriter, one of the first.

There's a picture somewhere—I think my sister has it—of the study in the house on Fourth Street in Louisville where my grandfather and grandmother lived (it was the home of the president of the seminary) with Mother at the typewriter, and Grandfather. He wrote a good many books and many articles. He was not only scholarly, but he was able to give his books, if he wished, a popular turn or a very useful turn.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did your mother do the same kinds of things with your father? How did she help him in his work [unknown]?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

She had too many children to participate in that way

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in Father's work. Also, my father was not a writer. Recently I got a copy of the magazine of the University of Richmond, where, as I say, he taught for many years. It has a long article on Jacob Billikopf, who was a student of my father and who had left a quarter of a million dollars to the University, much of which establishes a chair in my father's name. And in this article, the close friendship between my father and Jacob Billikopf who came to the college as a young Jewish immigrant and my father befriended him, Billikopf tells about his affection for my father and his admiration of him. But he explains very properly that since my father taught Latin and Greek [laughter] and history and political science and every now and then took excursions into philosophy, that he was not and could not be a scholar in the technical sense, because his interests were too broad. He had great curiosity, but he was primarily an interpreter who relied less on original sources and documents than he did on the ordinary texts that were available for teaching. He was keen about going to places associated with his subject, and nobody enjoyed travel more than he did. He contrived on a small salary, somehow, to get to Europe many summers, sometimes taking groups of students. And he drew a great deal of pleasure and inspiration from visiting the places associated with history or whatever it was that concerned him. He edited a volume of a series called The South and the Building of the Nation, which you may know. His volume was the one on social life in the South, just as there was one on politics and on war and religion and so on. He wrote many articles, but they were usually hortatory things. They were urging something. They were made at meetings of college people, all kinds of meetings, as a matter of fact, public meetings. He concerned himself actively in community affairs. That is what had taken him from ancient languages into the social

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sciences to begin with. So that he became a principal advocate of the development of high schools in Virginia at a time when there was much more reliance on the private academy than there is now, and there were relatively few and poor high schools. I remember going with him as a child to the office of the Superintendent of Education of Virginia. It was in the old home of John Marshall, which is still standing in Richmond. We went to the second floor, a large room—a different shape from this, but bigger—and the whole atmosphere indicated [laughter] a languid kind of administration, very different from the bustling office which I'm sure that of the Superintendent of Education of Virginia is today. I don't remember any other employees [laughter] around or anything. He was president of the local anti-saloon league, for example. He was active in occupying pulpits from time to time, because as a young student at Georgetown College possessing promise, he was urged to enter the ministry, he was ordained, and for a while when he still was teaching at Georgetown College he had a couple of country pulpits he would visit on alternate Sundays. He was an ordained Baptist clergyman. And in Richmond if a minister was on vacation or something, sometimes my father would be asked to "supply," as it was said, during his absence. One summer he went to Germany and preached during several months at a German Baptist church. I suppose it was for Americans living in Berlin, because while he knew German in the way that every graduate student has to show a reading knowledge of German, he couldn't speak the language, I'm sure. He was an activist and very sensitive to needs of the community where he was and

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eager to pitch in to lend his aid. And it was remarkable, I think, that he could extend himself so widely in the community and at the same time be a vigorous and devoted teacher. But the two worked together: he brought the community into his classroom, and he brought his classroom into the community. But that didn't leave time for research. Once, I remember, early on (I must have been about ten years old at the time), he formed a project of writing a life of George Wythe whom he greatly admired. Father had written his dissertation on the convention in Virginia that ratified the Constitution, and George Wythe was a member of that convention but unfortunately was called back to Williamsburg by the illness of his wife, so he didn't really participate much, or hardly at all. But Father admired him greatly as the teacher of Thomas Jefferson and, I think, of John Marshall, and to the extent that Patrick Henry [laughter] had any legal teaching, of Patrick Henry. Father worked in the Virginia State Library, which is a very fine one, and he even, for a while, had a secretary to whom he dictated parts of this book. I don't know what became of that manuscript or how long it was or what about it, but he soon became so absorbed in other things that that was dropped. And that was the one start which might have ended in his being the author of a scholarly book, but it wasn't.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

As busy as he was, did he have time to teach his children as well? Did he spend a lot of time with his family? Was his family important to him?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

Yes, it was. But my father had very few recreations.

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He didn't have time for recreation much. I remember once he made a kite for us and tried to fly it. It didn't fly, and he had to go back to lunch and left us out on the campus with the kite on the ground and a lot of string to wind up. He was not good with tools. He had no interest in doing things with his hands. He wrote a beautiful hand, but repairs around the house or anything of that sort, simply we didn't possess any tools. And he never thought it was necessary to have a lawn mower sharpened. It fell to our lot to mow the lawn. And in a sense—and I don't want this to sound unkind—his children were sacrificed to his sense of responsibility to the institution where he taught and to the community. He always had a small salary, and there were five of us. We were pinched all the time. We had a position to maintain, and Father and Mother had a position to maintain in the community and so on. And that demanded a certain amount of expenditure. But I think that he was unable to take the view that many would take today that the first responsibility is to your own family, and that they should be brought up in comfort and given every opportunity and so on, and if you do other things outside of your job, that's fine. But Father had kind of a ministerial commitment, which was part of his connection with the church.

He and Mother belonged to the First Baptist Church in Richmond, and they went way downtown. It was down in the center of the city across from the City Hall. We lived out on the edge of town at the college campus. And while he used to have family prayers when I was a child and seemed to be religious, I think later in life that

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meant very little to him. I think it was social values that took the place of individual goodness or devotion or anything of that sort. My mother was less religious than he was, though she was a daughter of a Baptist clergyman.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

That's interesting. How did that come out?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

My mother was highly intelligent. She had seen a good deal of the world as a daughter of a president of a theological seminary. They had known a lot of people and so on. She had not been to college. In those days girls didn't go to college so much. She went to a private young ladies' seminary.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Where did she go to school?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

In Louisville. Incidentally, I know pleasantly in New York City Jimmy Flexner, who is well known as a biographer and writer on historical subjects. My mother as a young woman taught his mother in Sunday school. Mrs. Flexner was at that time, I don't know; I've forgotten what her maiden name was. I remember once as a child being in bed with my mother, and she didn't kneel down beside the bed to say her prayers. And I asked her if that wasn't the way you said your prayers, and she said she found that [laughter] it worked just as well in bed if you were chilly. She was sensible about the whole thing, and I don't think any of the supernatural part won through to her at all. I think that she had, though she didn't make a parade of it, a very realistic view of religious legend . . .

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

BROADUS MITCHELL:

[I'll give you an example of] Mother's very realistic view. When Theodora, my daughter, came from school one day when she was six, seven, eight, something like that, she said that she had been told (in what connection, I don't know) about the Virgin Birth of Christ. And she was doubtful about it, and my wife said to her, "Well, how do you think Jesus was made?" and Theodora said, "With sperms." [laughter] Now my mother believed in the sperms rather than in the miracles. She was respectful of other people's attachment to religion, and she knew the Bible well. As a young woman, she had written Sunday school lessons for the blind that were put in Braille, and this required skill because, since Braille is so expensive to produce, anything in the way of a religious lesson had to be not only undenominational but unsectarian [unknown] So, of course, I suppose she drew largely on the Old Testament. But she knew the Bible thoroughly, just as she knew Shakespeare very well indeed. And I remember once her showing me a list that I'm sure she had made up of some literary puzzles. They were little snippets of verse, and you were to try to say which came from the Bible and which came from Shakespeare, and it was very difficult to tell; they were much alike.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What was her relationship to her family, to her children?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

Very loving and imaginative and doing everything possible to develop our understandings. She was never cross with us, and she tried very hard, in spite of being, I think, often strained herself, not to be irritable or to scold. And she didn't. And she tried hard with pictures and books and stories and sending us to as

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good schools as she could and everything to open the world to us. Father did, too, and he would take us on trips and was eager to show us everything.

And later on, when we travelled more, we went to Providence and Father used to take us to places there and nearby. I remember he took me to see the first cotton mill at Pawtucket. And afterwards, when we stopped in New York on the way back to the South, he took us to see the "Mauretania" and he took us up to City College and he took us to Columbia. I never go to Columbia now but what I pass the old Low Library and think of going there in 1909 with him. He was very eager to conduct us on these little expeditions. We fortunately were able to go to college, because he was always identified with a college, and we could go wherever he was. My youngest brother went to Richmond College, but I went to the University of South Carolina because Father had become President of that. Another brother went to Delaware College (now the University of Delaware) because Father was head of that at the time, and so on. And we went to a primary school on the college campus, always, kept by the daughter of the professor of chemistry. She was a very fine teacher, Miss Kate Winston. She had a little private school—you would call it a mom's school—in a room not bigger than this, and maybe eighteen or twenty pupils ranging in age up to maybe twelve. And then I went to Richmond Academy, which was the preparatory school of the college. I never understood exactly why they troubled to start it and maintain it for a number of years, as they did. The College owned the property where it was nearby, and it was, to a

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degree, a feeder to the College. I suppose we had maybe a hundred boys in the school. My brothers, though, and my sister, I think, all went to public school in Richmond. We were no great distance from an elementary public school on Main Street, and I know my brother Morris went there and I think the others did, too.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Growing up in the South as you were at the time that you were, how did your parents deal with the issues of race? What did they teach you about racial differences in the South, or did they leave everything open to question or let you decide for yourself what you thought? How did social mores fit in?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

The attitude of children toward race was determined quite differently from . . . It had nothing to do with our parents. In Richmond we lived in an old house which is still standing. It was a fine home built in the country by the Haxalls who were flour manufacturers in Richmond. Later on the farm was sold off, and the house and thirteen acres became the property of Richmond College.

The whole college was conducted in this large house at first. And then later, as the institution grew, they put up other buildings and homes for the professors and so on. But we happened to live in what had been the original college building. It had two stories and a large basement. It was a large house. And as long as I can remember, we had as cook and monitor and friend Willie, a large Negro woman who at the time she came to us, I would think, was in her late thirties. But she continued with us for a dozenyears. The children, when young, lived largely in the kitchen, and Willie was our

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friend and provider. Had a severe manner but the kindest of hearts. But she had to be a little brusque with us, I suppose, because we were underfoot all the time. But we went to sleep in Willie's lap, the five of us, (not all at once!) from the time we could remember. And so we knew Negroes familiarly. She would have friends to come and sit with her in the kitchen at night. I remember one little old man that she called "Old Man Sylvester." He lived out in the country a few miles from Richmond, and he used to come by with his team of four little mules. They were not much bigger than burros, but he had this wagon and he was a farmer out near a place called Short Pump.

And Old Man Sylvester would come and sit in the kitchen. There were others, women, too. And we always had Negro nurses, maids, and I remember very well being taken by one to see friends of hers over on Clay Street not very far from the college, but sitting in this home, living room with a fire in the winter. And then there was a Negro boy who used to come by and get any ashes that were thrown out, because he would sift these and get what coal was still burnable. He had a little wagon with a box on it and two wheels out in front, and he could collect his ashes. And once he and I made a long walk way over the other side of the railroad tracks over to what became later the Virginia Union University. I remember this beautiful Indian summer afternoon with him. And also, as children in Louisville, we knew the son of a woman who did the washing for the family, a black boy, and he taught us to draw. In the South, you know very well, children grew up together, black and white, familiarly.

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Any prejudice that developed on the white side (and I don't think much developed on the black side) came later.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

You said that the experience that you and your sister and brothers had was different from that of your parents, or had . . .

BROADUS MITCHELL:

No, I mean to say that it wasn't any instruction they gave us or anything like that. They didn't say, "You mustn't feel that these people are beneath you or anything." No, the thing never came up, really.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

How did they feel themselves?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

They were both liberal, notably so, and they understood that the disabilities of the Negroes of the South were due to their history of slavery, of poverty, of ignorance, and that what they needed was opportunity and respect and encouragement and so on. At the same time, even in my father's case, I think the views that have become common since, of equal rights and so on, were not held by him with the intensity that they are nowadays. The organizations with which he was identified which touched on race relations were such as that of the Southern Interracial Committee [Commission on Interracial Cooperation], which became later the Southern Regional Council, of which, incidentally, my youngest brother was the Director for a good many years. They were organizations of whites and blacks that worked together for specific corrections or improvements in the community. They didn't deal with large constitutional matters and so on, but rather with getting better schools or breaking some of the segregation, and the whole program was a gradual one, as they saw it, and was to be participated in by blacks and whites of

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good will working together. But the constitutional demands, as of the NAACP, for example, later, were not what they contemplated, or what, I think, they would have approved, as a matter of fact. Because they felt that it would take a long time and many adjustments and that it was important to keep peace and to avoid doing damage which it might be hard to repair. They were patient. I recently have had a copy from an old friend—we were roommates at college, Marion A. Wright, whom you may know—an address that he gave to the History Department at Winthrop College in South Carolina. And I read it with a great deal of interest for many reasons, because I know him well and I know something about the scene that he was reviewing of his experience as a public person in South Carolina. But I wrote him that I would disagree with him in his contention—if I understood it—that it was good will and the growth of education and greater prosperity and so on which had ameliorated race conflicts in the South, and that changed attitudes, which had been diligently induced by advocates of improved race relations, [unknown] had been responsible. Well, I wrote Marion and said I didn't think so, that it wasn't improvement of the southern conscience which had been effective, but the appeal of blacks themselves to the Constitution of the United States that said, "Look, you can't be two-faced about this thing." It was lawsuits and compulsion, not the other, had a lot to do with it. I suppose there might possibly [laughter] have been some kind of revolutionary outbreak if the negroes had insisted and the whites were utterly unprepared to receive it. But look how long it's been since 1954 with the Topeka decision, and my brother, among others, worked for years trying to prepare the

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South first for that decision and then to get compliance with it afterwards, and we are still lacking it not only in the South but in South Boston. It was a kindly attitude, Mary, not one of justice but of duty. You see? It was your responsibility to be friendly and to entertain hopes of their progress. But you weren't going to see it tomorrow, and anything like a lawsuit would be unfortunate. You didn't appeal to ultimate things.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

But within your home you were able to develop and maintain very close relationships with black people?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

Not with black people generally, but with the blacks who worked in our home. There was a cook and a maid all the time. But I didn't know any Negroes except those who worked on the college campus, and those I knew well. One was a remarkable man called Chris who was, to tell you the truth, he was the librarian. He was supposed to be the man who took care of the library as a sort of a janitor, but the librarian . . . I don't want anybody to misunderstand me on this. [laughter] He was not trained as a librarian. He was the Treasurer of the College, who was also Librarian, and actually, if you wanted a book, which was the purpose of going to the library [laughter] , Chris got it for you. But he also lit the lamps on the college campus on winter evenings, and I used to go around with him with his ladder. I liked him very much indeed. He was a friendly man, and he used an expression often—I used to ply him with questions, you know—that you have heard, maybe: "Larrows to catch meddlers."

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Did you ever hear that?

MARY FREDERICKSON:

No.

BROADUS MITCHELL:

Well, that was his answer if you asked him so-and-so. "Larrows to catch meddlers." Another was John Johnson, a man of a very different type. A large, very black man who was in charge of the main building of the College as a janitor. He was a surly man, usually chasing us out of some place where we had no right to be. But I remember him and knew him well for years. Much later I went back to see our old house, and John Johnson was living in the basement. I guess he was sort of retired from the College at that time. Oh, there were others that we knew around the College, but there were no black students. Of course there were no black members of the faculty. I went to protracted meetings in the summer in Madison County, Virginia. The blacks had a church near, of course, in what was called Zion Town. In many southern communities then, and I suppose now, there's a nearby place where the Negroes have settled which has a disparaging name like Egypt or Zion Town. Well, I don't know why Zion should be disparaging, but . . . They had a church there. But we went, I'm afraid, to see something curious and emotional. I went to one or two Negro weddings when I was a child, I remember. But we never knew black professional people in our home. Father and Mother did, and they were friendly with a Dr. and Mrs. King. He taught in the black Virginia Union University, which was over on the wrong side of the tracks. And also President and Mrs. Hoveyof that institution they knew, and they would be in our home and Mother and Father in theirs. But it

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didn't enter into our . . . These were white people teaching in a black college. And also I knew about the existence of Hartshorn College, a smaller institution near the Virginia Union University, a college for women. It passed out of existence some years later, but I remember that. But we didn't know any black preachers or dentists or doctors or lawyers. There weren't any to speak of. There were black preachers, oh, yes, and some of them very talented, but your closest contact with a semi-professional black man was with a barber. The barbershops were manned by Negroes, and I say "manned" beccause there was no such thing at that time as a beauty parlor. These little barber shops. Women didn't have beauty treatments, or they . . . I don't know. Maybe those who could afford ladies' maids got treatments that way. I remember a visit from Ray Stannard Baker to our home to interview Father, because Mr. Baker (who lived at that time, I guess, in New York; afterwards in Amherst) was writing a series of articles on the color line in the South. And it was a line then. I speak of the fact that we didn't have very much money when we were growing up. One winter, to economize, instead of operating the furnace in this great old house, we burned a Latrobe stove, which was a kind of a little furnace that fitted into a fireplace, a little bit like a Franklin stove. And it heated the room above with a flue that went up, so we had only that. When Mr. Baker came to see my father it was right after breakfast, and the kids had dressed in this room where there was the Latrobe stove. And Father was very

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embarrassed—he was a very proper person in his dress and in his deportment and everything—because our nightgowns or pajamas or whatever were in little piles around the floor, because this was the warm room in the house. I don't think Mr. Baker minded. Anyway, Father was one that he wanted to consult on this, and this indicated that his views on community problems were very much respected in Richmond. He was prominent in these ways. But I'm sure that my mother and father, while they would not disapprove of the developments that have taken place since in race relations, would be astonished by them. I'll put it that way.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Were your mother and father sort of at the same place as far as their views on race relations? Did they hold the same ideas about race relations?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

Father more liberal than Mother, I think. He knew more about it. He knew more about the means of improvement, about the potentialities in the situation, than Mother did, because she wasn't active in those circles quite as much, though she was always responsive to needs of the community.

I remember one little episode which explains it. Mrs. B. B. Munford in Richmond was an enthusiast for building a new high school, which turned out to be the John Marshall High School in the yard of what had been John Marshall's home. But she had come to this a little late in life; it was an enthusiasm of hers. She was a woman of means and position in the community. Once she was talking to Father about it in the living room of their home—I guess they were at

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Westhampton at that time—Mother was there, and Mrs. Munford turned to Mother, who wasn't saying anything. It was a conversation between Mrs. Munford and Father about the high school. She turned to Mother and said, "Did you never think of yourself as a member of the community?" And Mother said, "All my life." [laughter] Which was enough answer. She had, of course, grown up in a home where there was this responsibility to an institution, to the community, and my grandfather was a man well known in that community and widely. But I think that she would have had Father's attitudes if she had had his survey of the whole situation, but she didn't. After all, she had five children to bring up in narrow circumstances.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did she have time for any activities or work outside of her house? Did she ever work in the suffrage movement or anything like that?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

Not until later. Later she became an active member of the Women's Club and participated in that, especially with bringing new books to the attention of her fellow members and that kind of thing. She was always a great reader, and wherever we were we took out cards in the public library. Not in Richmond; there wasn't any public library in Richmond when we grew up. There was just the state library, and the librarian, Mr. Scott, lived in Gordonsville, Virginia, which is, I suppose, sixty or seventy miles from Richmond. He commuted on the railroad to the Virginia State Library. My father knew him, and Mr. Scott tried to satisfy my father's needs in using the library, but Father indicated to me that under Mr. Scott's administration the

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library . . . That he was a custodian of books and that he was kind of a local historian and a man regarded by his constituency as learned in history, but a very different man from those that succeeded him in the library. Later Douglas Freeman made great use of it with his life of Robert E. Lee and his books on the Civil War and later Washington, and he couldn't have under Mr. Scott's . . . I hope Mr. Scott's friends and descendants won't blame me. The state library was sort of a mausoleum at the time. It had valuable deposits, but I suppose it stood very much in need of modern methods that would have made this valuable material readily available [unknown] This was specially at the period when my father was working on the life of George Wythe, that he would be going down there. I'll tell you a story about Gordonsville I think is amusing. Gordonsville was a junction point on these little Virginia railroads. It's near Orange, Virginia, [unknown] Trains would stop there and wait for another train to come, from which passengers were going to transfer and so on. Black women in Gordonsville would bring to the train great trays of fried chicken and soda biscuits. The biscuits had yellow splotches on them because of the kind of baking powder they used or what, I don't know if you've ever seen. They were large and pallid. And the chicken was encrusted with yellow whatever-they-fried-it-in, flour and egg and so on. Well, we had in Richmond a clever newspaperman, Mr. Evan Chesterman, who had a column [unknown] called "The Idle Reporter." He used to relate incidents, little personal episodes and so on. He told about stopping

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on the train at Gordonsville and buying one of these legs of chicken which was handed up to the window. [unknown] train stayed there twenty minutes. He finished and he got down to the bone and just idly carved his initials on this chicken leg and tossed it out of the window.

[laughter]

Said he was back in Gordonsville bought a leg of chicken, and when he finished he found the bone bore his initials!

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

BROADUS MITCHELL:

. . . [laughter] the meat and crust and so on were just plastered on to bones. There hadn't been a new leg, properly, in a long time.

They hadn't the shape of a leg when you got it. It was just something that held the meat together.

[Interruption]

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Yesterday we were talking about your family, and I asked how they dealt with race relations, and about relationships between blacks and whites in the South when you were growing up. And today I wonder if you could say just a little bit about the way you were taught about class lines in the South as you were growing up.

BROADUS MITCHELL:

One of the most shocking developments, of course, was the lynching of Negroes. My father was always indignant at the lynchings, and I remember very well when I was with him at Blue Ridge, North Carolina, which is a YMCA training center where meetings were held and classes, too, in the summer. When there was a lynching in Georgia and the newspapers were full of it and the

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magazines and so on, Father talked about it, distressed by the whole episode. I remember his showing me a picture in some magazine, maybe Newsweek or Life, something like that, of the little sheriff in this county holding a piece of the rope with which the man had been hanged. And this sheriff was a little under-sized meek little man, the last person [laughter] that you'd expect would take an active part in protecting a prisoner. And Father said that that to him represented the lapse of law in the South, and he deplored it and constantly scolded when lynchings occurred. It wasn't very long after that that they began to diminish. The Federal Council of Churches had a practice in the thirties, it must have been, of issuing a little fact bulletin on each lynching that occurred. They would invite somebody in the locality who presumably was accurate to report to them exactly what happened, in a circumstantial way. And then the little bulletin recited all the particulars, not with sermonizing or editorial comment or anything of that sort, but simply letting the dreadful detail speak for itself. My father approved strongly of what I tried to do in the case of two lynchings that happened in rapid succession on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I can't give you the date, but I suppose it must have been around 1935. The first was at a little place called Snow Hill, and I don't recall the particulars except that a black man was taken out and lynched. The Eastern Shore of Maryland is separated not only geographically from the western part of the state by Chesapeake Bay, but it's separated culturally. It's kind of an enclave over there, and they have an inferiority complex which

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takes the form of overdefensiveness. Shortly after this lynching at Snow Hill occurred another one at Salisbury, which is a bigger place. This black boy, who was about eighteen years old, I think, worked at a lumber yard in Salisbury. And he went in, as I remember, to speak to his employer with some grievance—what, I don't know—and a quarrel developed, and he shot his employer, who didn't collapse immediately but chased this black boy through the lumber yard and tried to catch him and so on. Or maybe that was when he got shot; I've forgotten. Some of the people in the office came to the rescue of the employer, and they shot this man in the face and he was taken to the local hospital. There he was held under guard. Some guard, not much. The chief of police of Salisbury was summoned when a mob collected and moved toward the hospital to seize this boy and do him mischief. The head nurse stood in the hallway and tried to resist the entrance of the mob, and the chief of police [laughter] stood behind her and offered no real resistance. So the mob surged into the ward, and they threw this boy out of a first-story window and dragged him the short distance to the town. On the way they had to pass over a fairly narrow bridge, not wider than this living room, and there a courageous veteran of the First World War parked his car across the bridge so as to try to block the passage. And he stood on the roof of the car and tried to harangue the crowd and turn them back. But they surged all around him and over the car, and they took this boy to the fire station where they got a rope, and then to the court house yard, where they put a rope around his neck and threw it over the limb of a tree. At that point another citizen of

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Salisbury did a courageous thing. He was somebody employed in the courthouse who was brave enough to go and try to take the rope off this boy's neck. But, of course, it was impossible for him to accomplish this, and the man was hanged. They cut him down and dragged him by the rope tied to the back of a truck to a gas station, where the body was drenched with gasoline, and then they dragged it over to the negro section of Salisbury, where they dragged it around the little streets there and set the body on fire. And then they distributed in the crowd short lengths of the rope for souvenirs, and they cut off his fingers and distributed them. The Federal Council of Churches, Ernest Johnson was in charge of it and asked me if I would go over to Salisbury and make a factual report on this lynching. So I did. I got there in the evening and spent the next day—I wish I'd spent longer—in talking with people who figured in one way or another in the lynching. Of course, I didn't find anybody who confessed to having been in the mob, but I talked to two of the ministers of the town—it's a town of many churches—and to a principal banker, to the chief of police, to the sheriff, to the head nurse, to both of these men who had tried to prevent the lynching, and maybe some others that I have forgotten. And I thought I had an accurate account of it. So I reported to the Federal Council of Churches. My report was published also—I don't know how that happened—in the Baltimore Sun newspaper. The Federal Council of Churches, I believe, sent them a copy. There was immediate outcry from numbers of church people in Salisbury because I had [laughter]

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observed in my report that while this was a town full of churches, and some of them quite elaborate, where there were church houses where there were religious workers and so on, that as far as I could tell, no clergyman in Salisbury on the Sunday following the lynching on Friday had mentioned it. And I said in effect that the most spectacular sin that had been committed in Salisbury went without notice. Well, this bit them. I did say that one minister told me that while he didn't include it in his sermon, he mentioned it in his pastoral prayer, that he told God about it but he got to his parishioners only indirectly. The other clergyman, who was the head of one of the largest churches, had said to me in almost so many words that he was ashamed that he had not immediately condemned this dreadful murder, but the implication was that there were doubtless [laughter] members of his congregation who, if they did not sympathize strongly with the mob, may have been in it even. Well, that caused some sensation. I went to see the Attorney General of Maryland to urge that they press prosecution of members of the mob, particularly after a list was published in an Eastern Shore paper of persons who were in the mob and who didn't deny it in any way. Well, here was confession of guilt. I couldn't see the Attorney General; I saw his assistant. But he explained—and afterwards I think I got some word from the Attorney General himself—to the effect that this was something that lay within a local jurisdiction over there, and it wasn't their responsibility and so on. Black communists in Baltimore who were few but active at that time, and who had a house

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somewhere in the black section of the city which was their headquarters, and they were joined by a young member of the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, Albert Blumberg and some other white men. And they organized a party to visit the Governor in his office and appeal to him for action. They asked if I would go along with them, and I did. And when we reached the Governor's office we found him pretty much barricaded, and he sent out word that he would see only a few of the delegation, but Albert Blumberg and myself and some of these black boys went in and found him surrounded by large men who were evidently his bodyguards. It was put on me to state our case, and when he was not responsive I said I thought he ought to be impeached, that his first obligation was to protect the citizens of the state and that he hadn't done it, and there had been two of these lynchings. He hadn't done anything in the Snow Hill one or this either. We never did get any action from it. H. L. Mencken, who was always condemning abuses (you know, Mencken was regarded as a sort of a sardonic critic, and much that he wrote was intended to be extreme and to excite people to oppose him), on an occasion of this sort was serious and impressive in his condemnation of what had happened. It was an excoriation that he gave these lynchings, and the neglect of the authorities to do anything about it. So my little report had appeared, and he asked me to come down to see him at ten o'clock at night. He always worked, I was told, until ten o'clock, and then he knocked off and frequently would go and have beer with friends. He had a circle, you know; I went once or twice.

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And I enjoyed very much talking with him that evening. He was entirely sympathetic with what I had tried to do. The Federal Council of Churches wired me after the reaction to my report flared up and said that it had been released by their office prematurely or without sufficient consideration and that they proposed to issue a statement to the effect that this was just my view and that they had asked for it, but that they didn't sponsor it in any way or take responsibility for it. So I wired them back saying, what you propose to do now leaves me standing alone, which I am perfectly willing to do; by all means, issue your statement right away. Well, that brought down the Secretary of the Federal Council of Churches to see me right away. The next morning was a Sunday morning. I remember I got him at the station. And he asked me whether I was a churchman, and I said no. I said, "I don't see what that's got to do with it." But it was because some of these people had said that a heathen had come in among them and was scolding them and so on. So they didn't issue the statement, but they did delay issuing the bulletin. However, finally, I think, after some weeks, it did come out, is my recollection. Many people on the Eastern Shore who could be regarded as spokesmen, I think, for the Eastern Shore assumed an attitude of pride at what they had done, they were defending themselves, and they got out stickers that went on the bumpers of their cars saying, "I'm an Eastern Shoreman and proud of it." They turned back trucks bringing provisions and so on from the Western Shore to the Eastern Shore, making it very clear that they felt that the Western Shore was intruding on their mores, on

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what they had done.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

How did the people at Hopkins react to you?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

The President of the University was Joseph S. Ames, whom I liked very much. I had known him as long as I was connected with Hopkins. He was a splendid person and sympathetic with freedom of thought and expression. Hopkins was noted for its maintenance of academic freedom. He got letters from the Eastern Shore protesting against what I had done, and he wrote back in a politic sort of way; I regret to say it was somewhat apologetic. He said that Hopkins people knew me and that they could understand, in effect, that I would get off the reservation sometimes and so on, but that I wasn't a bad person. Well, Mencken picked this up and wrote a piece about Ames and said that he thought that the ears of this corpse should be cut off and sent to the President of the University, in the way that they cut off the ears of a bull in the Spanish bullring as a trophy. Well, that ended that. I had nice relations with Ames throughout, really. And as far as I know, there was no objection in the University to what I had tried to do. I went to see the State Police and asked if it hadn't been possible for them to put a machine gun on the roof of the jail or something to hold back the crowd. There has been a recent case—you may have seen it in the paper—where a mob was threatening a prisoner, and the sheriff stationed himself in front of the jail, and he indicated a line a safe distance ahead of him and said, "The first man that crosses that is going to be dead." But they didn't do that. By the time I went to see the State

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Police, the Chief of the State Police had changed, and the new Chief was a man that I knew very well, because he had been the Commandant of our ROTC corps at Johns Hopkins, Major Geary, a fine person. And Geary said that he thought that the police had not protected their prisoner properly and that it would have been possible to turn back the mob. Well, that was that. Then, when I left Johns Hopkins not long after that, friends in Baltimore arranged a little testimonial dinner for our departure, and my father and mother came to it. And what I had tried to do in condemning these lynchings became a matter of comment of several of those who spoke on that occasion. And my father was asked to say something, and I think he centered particularly on his approval of my efforts to hold these people up to ignominy and so on. My father was at that time in his seventies; it was ten years before his death. Johns Hopkins University, as I say, had been a delightful place to live and work. I never knew any restraint or confinement or censorship or anything of that sort until we got a different President, who followed Ames, Isaiah Bowman. I've dealt with that in my account to Mr. Single, so I don't think we need to go into that now. But he was an entirely different sort, tense and nervous and over-cautious, and any breath of criticism of the University was apt to be passed on to whoever he felt was responsible for provoking it. So that ended my tenure on the faculty at Johns Hopkins, and we went to Occidental College in California, but that's another story.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

You were saying that your father was very supportive of

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your action in this case, and I was wondering how he reacted and felt about the work that you did, and your brother did as well, on industrialization in the South. Was he as supportive of that, which was a much more academic exercise, but was he as supportive of that kind of work that you were interested in?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

Oh, yes, very much. And you are at the same stage, I gather, in your dissertation as I was when I suggested to my father that I would like to try to write a dissertation on the development of the southern cotton manufacture. We had spent a year in Providence, Rhode Island, when my father was teaching at Brown University, supplying the place of Professor Wilson who had gone to the London Naval Conference in 1908-09. And as I mentioned to you yesterday, he took me out to Pawtucket to see the cotton factories, and I became aware of the great concentration of textile mills in Rhode Island around Providence and over into Massachusetts. Then when we moved to Columbia, South Carolina, when he became President of the University of South Carolina, here again were cotton mills but much newer, and the whole industry was still developing. And we were drawing down mills from New England and from Pennsylvania.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

When you were at the University of South Carolina, did you have any contact with manufacturers then or with the people who were going to work in the mills?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

Only by hearsay. There were two worlds there in Columbia. There was the town, and then there were the mills.

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Columbia had at that time the largest cotton factory in the world, the Olympia Mill. I think it had something like 100,000 spindles. But the factory population had almost no connection with the life of the community. That was characteristic of the industry at that time in the South. It was a matter of remark when two boys from the cotton mill village entered the University. They were the Brandenburg brothers. I knew them well, and they both were excellent students. How they had come into the University I don't know. I suppose their native capacity and curiosity had marked them as promising students in the schools. But that was my only contact with actual factory workers or conditions while I was in college. But this experience of having been in a textile community in New England and then in South Carolina suggested to me when I went to Johns Hopkins for graduate work in what we termed at that time political economy (now that term is less used) that I would like to inquire into the circumstances of the transformation of an agricultural and slave society into an industrial society with free labor and wages and all the problems. So Father said, "Well, what you want to do is to go down the line of the Southern Railway and stop off at all the different places such as Charlotte and Salisbury and Greenville and Spartanburg and Anderson and Augusta." So he gave me the money, and I bought what you could get at that time for twenty dollars, a ticket that permitted you to ride, I think, a thousand miles at two cents a mile or something like that. And I went. This must have been about 1915 or '16. I had spent the

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summer before working in the Library of Congress on southern newspapers that would give accounts of the establishment of cotton factories not very long after the Civil War. I came to feel that while there had been some pioneers who had braved the depression of '73, that the development really commenced about 1880 or shortly after that. I read the North Carolina newspapers and South Carolina, Georgia, and so on.

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

BROADUS MITCHELL:

Warrington Dawson was an Englishman who espoused the Confederate cause; he contrived to conceal himself, I think, on a Confederate warship, the "Shenandoah" or some such name, that was in an English harbor. He got over here and joined the Confederate Navy, later he shifted from the Navy to the Army and fought through the War. And having been acquainted with the economy of England, he more clearly than most people saw the need for changing the productive habits of the South, and he made his News and Courier an engine for encouraging the establishment of cotton factories, It was called the Cotton Mill Campaign, which continued for several years. He would publicize every project for starting a factory in Kannapolis, North Carolina, or Gastonia or Columbia or wherever. So I had some little background by the time I went down to talk with the people who had built the mills. It was my good fortune to be able to interview a number of those who

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had been in on the development from the very start. For example, Mr. Cannon, Sr. had been a merchant in China Grove, North Carolina, I think, a little town. And when it was proposed to establish a cotton factory there or nearby, he was chosen President. He had no industrial experience, but he was a businessman of ability and he had some credit, and he was deputed to rally capital, to induce local people to subscribe, often in the form of their work on the factory itself, brickmasons or carpenters, and a farmer would give his field and take stock in the mill. And then Mr. Cannon would post off to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where the machinery was made, and offer stock in the factory in return for machinery. He would engage an experienced superintendent in New England, and he managed it. His efforts succeeded, and at the time I talked to him, when he was an elderly man, he already had a group of mills, the Cannon Mills. It has since developed much beyond that. But he was more or less typical of those with whom I talked who had gone from a local merchant or banker to be cotton mill president and a great industrialist. I remember people in Greenville and Gastonia and Augusta and other places. Sometimes they were people who had come into the industry a little later; they were younger. Sometimes they were New Englanders who had come down as superintendents of the mills, supplying the technical knowledge and experience. But sometimes they were just public people. I remember one in Greensboro, North Carolina, who was, I think, a local judge or had been a judge or something, and he knew the whole community and what its resources were and how they were gathered to start this

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adventure in industry. Sometimes they were politicians. I talked to Cotton Ed Smith, for instance, who was a senator from South Carolina and a very prejudiced man who traded on white supremacy and that kind of thing. I remember joining him on a train somewhere in the upcountry of South Carolina. He was very busy but said that if I would join him, say, at Greenville and ride with him to Spartanburg or whatever, and we would talk in the smoking car, and I had a very pleasant meeting with him. And he knew a lot, though he wasn't an industrialist himself. He was aware of everything that was happening in the community. And so with others. One of those who had come into the industry a little later was a Mr. Separk at Gastonia, North Carolina. He had been, I think, the principal of the local school and married the daughter of Mr. George A. Gray, if I'm not mistaken, who was the promoter of several cotton mills in Gastonia. And Mr. Separk had then left teaching for the position of superintendent of the Gray Mills after Mr. Gray's death. I talked with him and with Mr. Gray's son, who helped me very much, a young man. I was sorry I couldn't have met Mr. Gray, because he was one of those who came from the typical southern small mill and was able to develop a great complex of factories. Maybe it's worth saying a word about him. George A. Gray very early went to work in a small cotton factory. I think he was only ten years old. His father was killed, and he had to help to support his mother. And he worked in this little mill, a primitive sort of affair, and was told that on winter mornings he'd have to go out and cut the ice from the water wheel to get a day's run in the factory. By the time he was seventeen or eighteen, his extraordinary

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mechanical faculties were apparent to people of some means around there. And when they wanted to establish a cotton factory, they sent this young fellow, not more than a youth, up to New England to buy machinery. And when he went up, these men with whom he talked couldn't believe that he was properly deputed or that he knew what he was about. They said to him, "Mr. Gray, where do you come from in North Carolina?" "Pinhook," he said. They said, "What the hell kind of name is that for a town?" "Well," he said, "that's the name of our town, Pinhook." [laughter] I guess it was where he'd worked in this little mill. But he knew all about it, and he got the machinery, and before his death I think he had five mills. The largest, 50,000 spindles, was the Lo-Ray Mill at Gastonia. He was the man who started Gastonia, town and Gaston County, as a great southern industrial center. It became and still is, I think, in many ways, the Pawtucket of the South, so to speak. And it has drained much from New England.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did you have any thoughts about the Grays or Mr. Separk later in 1929 when Gastonia erupted, more or less?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

I wasn't there. I knew afterwards the leader of the strike. His name escapes me. Unfortunately, one or two people were killed in that strike, and this man was imprisoned for a long time afterwards. And afterwards I knew him in New York. I didn't know him; I met him and talked with him when he was a worker in a knitting mill in Brooklyn.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Fred Beale?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

That's right. The time I met him, he was a man in his forties, something like that. But I had only the knowledge that one got from the newspapers and so on of that strike. On the score of Mr. George A. Gray, I spoke of his unusual mechanical aptitude. It was said that he could go into a spinning room with thousands of spindles, and if any were down, as they said, he would sense it because a difference in the sound in the room would tell him that over there is a frame that you need to repair or whatever it was. He was entirely a self-taught person. His education was an exceedingly practical one. But with his genius for mechanical facilities, he became a large industrialist. He was the one who departed from the older practice of water power with a shaft running the length of the room and belts coming off of it to the machines; he installed electric motors on the individual machines, which was much more flexible and much safer. One of his contributions was the electrification of the textile industry in the South. I would think from what I recall that he was one of the pioneers in developing that, and that was of great importance because you didn't have to locate a mill near water power any longer. You could bring the power from a hydro plant, you could put your mill on the outskirts of a large town or city where you could get plenty of labor. And so, as you know, the cotton mill villages grew up, not only in rural districts as they had before, where it was really necessary for the company to build houses for the workers and to furnish whatever social services there were, but to the suburbs of cities where there was still

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the company town, though it relied on the local community for fire protection and sometimes for schooling for the children. But this isolation of the mill village continued even after it was juxtaposed to a city.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Why do you think that was?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

In the first place, it was the use of electricity that made it possible. Or sometimes they had steam, but electricity particularly, I think. The reasons were deeply sociological and crassly economic. If the workers were separate from the rest of the community and the company was paternalistic, it was possible to pay low wages, have long hours, child labor, repel any union organization. And what had begun, I was convinced, as a patriotic and partly philanthropic undertaking in the eighties to supplement the South's economy or to get away from the one-crop agricultural system and add industry to agriculture, became a much more crude and selfish undertaking later on. But the men with whom I talked in the main were of the first generation, and they were public-spirited. I told a story, I think, in my dissertation about the beginning of the cotton mill at Salisbury, North Carolina, where it really took its inception in a religious revival. I met afterwards Mr. Pearson, who was the preacher at this revival. And he said that "Salisbury is sodden and drunken and illegitimate and ignorant, and what we need here as a religious advance [laughter] is opportunities to work and earn. And you deacons and elders, put your pennies together and build a cotton factory." And they did. I talked with the secretary of the mill there, who was one of these, and he was of that group that

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had responded to this appeal of a gifted southern revivalist. And sometimes those mills used to take active part in other improvements in the community and would contribute to the local orphanage and schools and all that sort of thing. But later on the officials of the industry became, so far as I could tell, of a different stripe, afterwards. I don't know that all of them did—I can't generalize, really, about them—but when I think of their persistent opposition to child labor legislation, for example, and to unionism, I can't escape the feeling that they were motivated no longer by community improvement or rescue of the economy of the South, but feathering their own nests. I've never forgiven a man in North Carolina who had been a student of my father at Richmond College and who became a lawyer for the North Carolina Manufacturers' Association or the American Manufacturers' Association, I've forgotten what it was, opposing child labor legislation. And we had finally the child labor laws, you remember, which were held unconstitutional by the local federal courts and then the Supreme Court. I thought that this man was lacking in conscience, really, in representing the manufacturers in opposition to this humane legislation. It was at that period that the famous case of two brothers was very much in the public eye. The law was that no child could work in a cotton factory under the age of fourteen, and not more than eight hours, and in the daytime under sixteen. These two brothers were under fourteen and between fourteen and sixteen, and they both worked in the mill, I think, in Charlotte. Theirs was the test case that the manufacturers brought, and it was on that basis that the

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child labor laws in their cases were held unconstitutional. And many years later I saw in a newspaper a statement by these two brothers—they were then men in middle life, almost—saying that their lives had been ruined by this, that they had had no education; they'd been overworked; and they were indignant that they had been used by their parents and by important people in their communities as fronts for this opposition to national child labor legislation. Then, of course, the child labor amendment was not approved, not ratified by enough states, and the federal government didn't begin to get at the problem until NRA in the Depression of the thirties forbade the employment of children in factories, mines, and some other dangerous employment. And this was accepted because there was so much unemployment. And this was accepted because there was so much unemployment for adults that there was no reason for employing children. I tried to do what I could in articles and so on to encourage readers to approve of the efforts to curb child labor. I remember going to Augusta and seeing in front of one of the factories along the canal [unknown] low spinning frames that had been built to be operated by children. And they improved their [laughter] labor relations, and they were discarding this machinery, and it just happened to be sitting out in the front of the mill for the time being. There was quite a lot of it, they were installing the regular frames because they were having adult workers. But that was in steel a reminder of the cruelties which had begun, of course, in England many years before and had been transferred to the South.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

How did the men you interviewed, these men who were members

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of the first generation of industrialists, view their workers at the time you were talking to them? In more detail than that what they were doing by setting up a cotton mill was a philanthropic effort, but how did they rationalize or think about child labor?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

I can't answer that specifically, because I don't recall.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Was it something they didn't think about?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

I tried to talk with them about as many aspects of the development as I could, and in my little book about it later I treated first the origins of the enterprise and then how they collected capital and their labor relations and their relations with the local community and everything. Those that I would regard as the abler and more conscienceful ones took this attitude about the isolation of the mill villages and about the paternalism of it, that they were in a position of giving a beneficial tutelage in a transition period from agriculture to industry; that the workers who came to the mills at first had nothing; they hadn't experience, they hadn't skill, they hadn't any money, they had just a few sticks of furniture and a farm wagon which they had brought to the mill village that was being erected; and that they had to give them houses, schools, fuel, morals, as well as employment. And sometimes the wages took the form of furnish at the company store. It began with many marks of agriculture and of slavery persisting. It was a master-servant, a master . . . I hesitate to say a slave relationship; it wasn't that. One thing that saved it from being a master-slave relationship was

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that there was a strong prejudice against Negroes and opposition to giving Negroes employment in the cotton factories, so that there was a strong alliance, though an unworthy one in many respects, between the owners of the mills and the white work force. The white work force was exploited, but at the same time the white workers had a certain bond with their employers because they were all in opposition to the blacks. I talked, I remember, with one cotton mill president particularly about the support of the churches in his mill village, that the company had built the churches in the first place and contributed to the salaries of the pastors and so on. I talked to the pastors themselves in the churches. And the consensus was that this was a service and that the dominance of the company was necessary if they were to have these facilities at all. The people on the whole in the beginning were very grateful for being able to move in from little tenant farms to a comfortable cottage in the mill village where they had companionship and some social life. And they put up with a great many restrictions and limitations, because this was the open door to something better for them, in spite of the fact that the work force was made up in great part of women and children. The men who had been farmers, typically, didn't have the digital dexterity necessary for work in the factory, not in the spinning departments, at any rate. Some of them were employed around the mill in various capacities, but it was known as the city of the dinner pail, the fathers bringing lunch to the children and sitting around and chatting and then going back to the house while the women

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and children did the work in the mills. Aside from the attitude of the cotton mill officials, historically it was an excusable thing because by some such means and only some such means, I think, could an agricultural community graft on industry with all the entirely new resources that were necessary for that purpose: capital and machinery and technical skill and engineering of power plants and everything that went with it. I afterwards knew Frank Tannenbaum, who was a professor at Columbia for a good many years and who had written an article called "The South Buries Its Anglo-Saxons." And he condemned this exploitation of the southern population, saying that it was being swallowed up in this industrial maw. Well, he was right; that did happen. But probably there was no other way of opening opportunity. It was a high cost that the workers paid and that southern industrial morals paid, really. And it ought not to have persisted after the southern textile industry was well developed and had gone on from cotton factories to add rayon mills and woollen mills and finishing and marketing and the whole complex was developed. But it did, and, as you well know, to this day it hasn't been possible to accomplish widespread unionism among southern textile workers. And recently there's been in the newspapers the Stevens plant at Roanoke Rapids. My youngest brother George tried to help with the Committee for Industrial Development, CIO industrial organization, in their campaign, which was called Operation Dixie, to organize mills, and he wrote a dissertation which Chapel Hill published on southern unionism. And he detailed the discouragements that there

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were, but he was hopeful of a development that has never occurred. I knew the man who was placed in charge of the Operation Dixie by the CIO. This must have been before the union of the AFL-CIO. And they sent organizers to the South, in many cases college students or recent graduates, who were idealistic and who were southerners, and every approach was studied and made. But the resistance on the part of employers and the lack of knowledge and experience on the part of workers has prevented . . . There were many studies in this period of the industry. Mine, I think, was among the earlier ones. There had been some of a different sort earlier. Mr. Copeland at Harvard had written a book on American cotton manufacture, and he knew something about the South. I enjoyed studying his book before I started my project. And Mr. August Kohn in Columbia, South Carolina, who was a newspaperman turned real estate operator and became a man of means had visited many of the cotton mills in South Carolina and had written a book reciting the particulars of individual mills. That was published, I think, in articles in the News and Courier, of which he was a correspondent at that time. And there were some others like that. There was a man whom I later knew at the University of West Virginia, who was President of the University of West Virginia. His name escapes me; he wrote a book called From Cotton Field to Cotton Mill. I think his was before mine.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Right. Holland?

BROADUS MITCHELL:

Holland Thompson, that's right. And there were others. You speak of the exclusion of blacks from the cotton mill employment . . .

[TAPE 2, SIDE B]

BROADUS MITCHELL:

This man was the son of a prominent white man in the community who set his mulatto son up in a cotton mill. It didn't succeed for a number of reasons. Also, blacks were employed in cotton factories in Charleston, but the experience of the employers was not good. I talked with them. It was because the workers were unaccustomed to the rigors of long hours and confinement in a mill and that kind of thing, and they were accustomed to a different kind of life. And in strawberry time, many would leave [laughter] the mills, and when they went oystering they would have a high absent rate.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

A lot of the same problems they face with white workers, though.

BROADUS MITCHELL:

Yes, I'm sure. I know that. But I was going on to say that the employment of blacks developed gradually. I remember seeing in a mill in Charlotte staircases built on the outside of the factory so that the blacks could get up to the floor where they worked without passing by the white workers in the other departments of the mill. It's been fascinating to see how industrial practice has filtered into a v