[TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
The Great Depression was in progress and there was no money left whatever
and nothing that they could sell and nothing that they could borrow and
nothing that they could do except starve to death. So, the Red Cross
workers at that time had no cars and they had to go on the street cars
to investigate these cases. You see, the greater part of the complete
destitution was in these towns around Birmingham, these sort of
industrial suburbs like Ensley and West End and Gate City, where the big
corporations like the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company and Republic Steel
and those places were. So, Rachel London, who was the president had the
idea that we would form a motor corps and take these Red Cross women
around so that they could certify more people, you see. If they had to
go on the street car, it took them forever to go from one place to
another. So, we did. The Junior League formed a motor corps and we took
these Red Cross workers around and I began taking Mrs. Bishop around,
who was a Red Cross worker, and a very intelligent and fine person and
finally, we found that she had some connection to
Cliff, one of his cousins had married a Bishop, so there was kind of an
in-law relationship there. I became very devoted to her. She was just
overcome with the weight of the misery that she was trying to deal with
in this way and so, I began to take her out one day a week and then I
think that I . . . he said that I did it every day, but I really
didn't, I. . . .
CLIFFORD DURR:
I want to tell you how I was suffering. I was walking the whole way,
fully two and a half miles and back every day. It was every day of the
week once you got started.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
I had a cook and I had a nurse. I don't know what I paid them,
but I know that it was mighty little. They were so thankful and
delighted to have a place and food. Everyday black men and black women
would come to the door begging for work. They would work for fifty cents
a day or for anything. Then, the white people would come begging for
work and they would work for anything. It was just mass misery. But I
began to get the full extent of the scope of it when I took this Red
Cross worker out and saw whole areas just flat out broke. What the
corporations had done was, they had shut down everything, you see,
because they couldn't operate at a profit
and the people who were living in company houses, and you know, they had
these company stores where they traded in scrip, they would be paid in
scrip rather than in money. Now, the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad
Company, which was a part of US Steel, they let the people stay in their
houses, but they cut off the light and water and there was one water tap
on every block. They would have to go to this one tap to get their
water. There were no lights, no electricity and no heat. Then, at
Republic Steel, Tom Girdler was the president of that and I conceived
this mortal hatred of him, because they wouldn't let the poor
people even stay in their houses. They drove them out and put in guards
to shoot them if they came back. And those people, a lot of them, were
living in coke ovens. You know what coke ovens are? They are kind of a
brick beehives where they smoke the wood. You know, coke is made out of
wood, isn't that right, Cliff?
CLIFFORD DURR:
Coke is made out of coal. Charcoal is made out of wood, but it is
something of the same process.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Anyway, these little beehive ovens, they would crawl in there like
animals and keep the rain off. So, I saw more accumulated misery in the
shortest time that you can imagine. I saw more children with rickets and
these poor pitiful women and the men so ashamed of
themselves. But the thing that really bothered me the most was, they
were like the people who blamed them for being so poor, they blamed
themselves for being poor. They never did say, "We are in this
situation because US Steel doesn't treat us as well as they
treat the mules." You see, they fed the mules in the mines and
the animals, whatever they needed to keep going, but they
didn't feed the people. They fed the mules! But they never
once said, "The United States Steel Company or the Republic
Steel Company is to blame, they are the ones that laid me off."
There was no wrath or indignation. They would always say,
"Well, if we hadn't bought that old Ford or if we
hadn't gotten that radio." They were so full of
guilt about themselves. It was just the way that my mother and father
were full of guilt because they lost everything. They didn't
blame it on the cotton market, they blamed it on themselves. These
people were the same exactly. They blamed it all on themselves. And
these preachers would come around. You would be in this cold house
trying to certify that a woman or man was absolutely penniless so that
he could be certified for the two and a half dollars a week and some
damn preacher would come in. He would tell these people that they had
sinned and that was why they were suffering. He
would pray with them. You know, I got to where I wanted to kill them. I
really thought that to come into these starving people in these cold
houses with rickety children and tell them that they had gotten that way
because they had sinned! And to tell them that they had to come to God
or they would all go to hell! Well, I really got such a strong bias
against preachers at that point that, particularly these hell fire and
damnation preachers, that I haven't gotten over it yet. There
was no rebellion, there was no feeling that they were being done in.
There may have been a few people around there that felt it, but if there
were, I never ran into them.
SUE THRASHER:
Was there any kind of political organizing going on with the Unemployed
Leagues or the. . . .
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Not that I know of. Hugo Black was out running for the Senate and I am
sure that he was telling them that if they would elect Roosevelt, that
he would do something for them. I don't even remember . . .
and telling them how awful Hoover was, but of course, they voted the
Democratic ticket anyway.
SUE THRASHER:
You didn't hear of any kind of. . . .
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
I never heard of a single thing. I remember about one small bit of
rebellion that I heard of. I went to a house with
Mrs. Bishop and there was a woman there who was in labor and she
couldn't go to the hospital. This was a white woman and there
were other women with her. Her husband had been working for the steel
mills and for some reason, he was still kept on, but he was on the swing
shift. When they went from day to night, he worked twenty-four hours. As
far as I can remember, they kept a few men on to keep the machinery
working. Well, here she was, having a baby in this cold house with other
little children around and she wouldn't send for her husband.
She was so scared that he would lose a little money. . . .I just
remember that as one of the things, how awful it was, because she was
actually frightened to call him from the twenty-four hour shift. I think
that Mrs. Bishop finally got a doctor for her or got her in the hospital
someplace. But the accumulation of misery mounted so that I found myself
just reading to go into these houses. I just thought that I
couldn't stand it, it was just too much. I just
couldn't bear to even hear another complaint. Well, about
this time, bless God, Hugo won the race for the Senate and he went on
over. . . .
CLIFFORD DURR:
That was the second time he had run.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Yeah, that was in '32. He went back to Washington with Sister
and his family. They had the two boys then. He got elected . . . I
don't remember who ran against him . . . Kilby. Yes, and
Kilby accused my sister . . . Hugo was going all over the state and
Sister went with him and acted as his secretary and so he was paying her
what a secretary would cost. You see, she had been in the Navy and she
knew how to typewrite. And in the course of the campaign, Kilby accused
Hugo of paying his wife and cheating the government. And oh, Hugo got so
furious! I never saw a man get so mad and after that, he just lit into
Kilby tooth and toenail. Oh, he was so mad! And he beat him. He got
elected and they went on back to Washington. And at that point, Mother
and Daddy came over to live with us. Well, they rented the house and
they thought that they could get some rent for the house, because by
then, everything that they had in the world was gone. Well, Mother began
to develop the symptoms of what in those days they called
"melancholia." She wouldn't eat and she
couldn't sleep and her mind seemed confused and was just
rapidly going down. So, finally, there was an institution there called
Hillcrest, and she went out there and that was a
horrible period, because she begged and begged to come home all the
time. She cried and that didn't work. So, that was a
horrible, horrible period. Things got worse and worse in Birmingham.
Well, finally, Roosevelt got elected, you see and my father . . . that
campaign saved his life. What with losing everything he had and Mother
becoming so melancholy. Today they call it
"depression", but in those days they called it
"melancholia." She was so helpless, you see, she just
didn't know what to do and all of her pride and now having to
live on her sons-in-law. It just killed her, it ruined her. Then, Daddy
just plunged head first into the Roosevelt campaign. That just saved his
life, he just worked and worked for Roosevelt and stayed at the campaign
office. That was the hope that he had. Sure enough, he did get a job
when Roosevelt was elected, what was it called . . . National Emergency
Council. That was a kind of a public relations part of the New Deal and
he loved that, he made speeches and so on and. . . .
SUE THRASHER:
Was that in Birmingham?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Yes.
In the meantime, Cliff was having trouble down at the Alabama Power
Company, where he was the lawyer. Do you want to tell that, or shall I
tell it? [reel tape is changed at this point]
. . . at the same time that my father came
over to live with us and my mother had to go to the sanitarium, Cliff
also left the law firm. Now, this was in early 1933 and he left the law
firm where he was a full partner. He got fired, there seems to be some
little difference of opinion about that, but he is here and I would
rather that he tell you about it than me.
CLIFFORD DURR:
Well, before I get on that, Virginia was talking about the milk program.
Virginia did that herself and put it across. And I can remember your
blackmailing the Southern Dairies Association, too. They had quite a
reputation as gangsters and here was a chance to reinstate themselves in
public esteem a little bit. That's a long story and here is
another thing that Virginia didn't mention and I think that
it was rather important. She came home one night and was talking about
these families who had nothing, not even a dime for the movies. They had
no outlet at all and so they were tugging on each other and taking it
out. She said that if they just had some kind of recreation and all at
once, she broke off the conversation and called the chief of the fire
department. She said, "Everytime I pass the fire department
down there at Five Points, I hear somebody tooting away in the back on a
trombone or a bass horn. Have you firemen got a band?" He said,
"Well, sure, we've got a good band down here, but
there is nobody around to listen to us."
So, Virginia said, "If I get an audience for you, will you put
on a concert?" He said that there was nothing the boys would
love better. So, the next thing I knew, she was calling the mayor. This
was nighttime. She said, "I want to get the city auditorium
next Sunday at 2:30." The mayor said, "Well, I
don't know what you want with it, nobody else wants it, but
you must promise not to tear it down and you can have it." So,
then she called the newspapers and announced that they were having this
free band concert at 2:30 on Sunday in the city auditorium. Well, we
were eating breakfast and the phone rang and it was the chief of police.
He said, "What is this about you putting on a concert with the
firemen's band? The policemen have got a hell of a lot better
band than the firemen." So, Virginia said, "Bring them
along, let's see." So, this thing began to build up
and volunteers began to show up and these people began to flock in. . .
.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
We had sing-alongs, too.
CLIFFORD DURR:
Virginia insisted that there be sing-alongs to let the people
participate, too. Well, some guy showed up, I think that he was an
insurance salesman or something, but he was one of the best masters of
ceremonies that I have ever heard and with a line
of chatter that was magnificent. So, every Sunday, we were having this
free concert and show that really got going about the time that we went
to Washington.
SUE THRASHER:
Now, who would come to these? Would these be the people that you would be
going out to. . . ..
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Well, honey, I don't know. Anybody could come. I suppose that
anybody did come. Of course, no black people came. The city auditorium
was closed to black people and of course, the black people were terribly
in want. Now, through Mrs. Bishop, we did go to some black families and
they were eligible for relief. As I can remember, the relief, which was
two and a half dollars a week, went mostly to these people of Tennessee
Coal, Iron and Railroad Company and Republic Steel and the big northern
corporations who were down there and who had shut off everything. Well,
anyway, that was in 1933.
Now, you didn't tell why you left the power company.
CLIFFORD DURR:
Well, you see, this was the law firm and the power company was just one
client. The senior member of the firm was the brother of the president
of the Alabama Power Company and he pretty well controlled the business.
He was a son-of-a-bitch if there ever was one.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Not Mr. Tom, you mean Logan.
CLIFFORD DURR:
Yeah, Logan Martin, not Tom. Tom was a hard working man and a rather
decent fellow. Well, there a whole series of things that went on and
increasingly unpleasant, but finally, Logan just started firing people.
So, even before a meeting of the members of the
firm, I was above the line and my percentage was low, but I was sharing
the profits and he was the top man and he drew more than anybody, about
almost as much as the rest of us put together. He was a bachelor and had
no responsibilities at all. So, without consulting the firm, he started
firing people, a lot of young lawyers and stenographers.
BOB HALL:
You weren't a partner?
CLIFFORD DURR:
I was a partner.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
You see, they had a big retainer from the power company.
CLIFFORD DURR:
We had some young lawyers who were just working there. I was above the
line, but the lowest man on the top totem pole. I can remember that the
head stenographer came to me in a great state of excitement, we had one
stenographer left whose husband had left her and she had a baby. Mrs.
Cole came to see me and said, "Can't you do
something about Mrs. So-and-So? Judge Martin has just told her that she
is fired. She's got no family and she
has this baby and I am afraid that she is going to kill
herself." So, I went into Martin and I asked if we could keep
her on. He said, "Will you pay her salary?" I said
that I had a wife and a baby but I was willing to take my share of the
cut, so that we could keep the thing together. Also, some of the younger
lawyers were married and had children and I protested against their
summary dismissal. They didn't even get a week's
notice or anything of that sort, they were just fired. So, he said,
"Well, unless you are willing to pay their salaries.
I'm not." The other members of the firm would agree
with me and were very upset about it, but they wouldn't take
a stand.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
What about that old judge?
CLIFFORD DURR:
Well, he didn't take a stand. You see, Judge Foster was the
first partner and he had been on the State Supreme Court and . . . .
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Well, tell them how Logan hated Hugo, though. That was one of the things.
He just despised Hugo Black, more than anybody in the world. Tell them
what he said about Hugo.
CLIFFORD DURR:
Well, he ran the politics. He never did any legal work and he had
separate files and a separate secretary.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
This is Logan Martin you're talking about?
CLIFFORD DURR:
Yeah. And when Hugo ran for the Senate the second time, I found out that
one of the vice-presidents, old Colonel Mitchell, His brother was Sidney
Zollicoffer Mitchel, who was head of the Electric Bond and Share. and
came from the next county over there in Lollaford, Alabama. He
didn't like Kilby and so we began talking about the situation
and he would call me up to his office and would get on the phone with
the power company local managers and tell them all to vote for Hugo
Black and the senior member of the firm was going all out to cut
Black's throat. Well, between Colonel Mitchell and me, we
carried the power companies for Hugo. Logan didn't like
that.
JACQUELYN HALL:
What was the name of this firm?
CLIFFORD DURR:
Martin, Thompson, Foster and Turner, it was then. It later became Martin,
. . . (Foster went to the Supreme Court) . . . Martin, Turner and
McWhorter. Thompson was appointed to the state court. There was a good
deal of argument about whether he fired me or I resigned. I was going to
start practicing law in Birmingham on my own, and in the depths of the
Depression.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
You've got to tell about Will Dunn and how nice he was. He
lent us some money to live on for awhile. He
didn't lend it to us, he told us he would lend it if we
needed it.
CLIFFORD DURR:
So, I had a fishing camp down along the river and the river was not too
popular in those days. I told Virginia that the best time to take a
vacation was between jobs. So, we had a little Chevrolet car that we
sold and we got about $350 for that and we got my brother to
drive us down with some groceries and he was going to come down on the
weekend and bring us some more groceries. It was spring, beautiful down
there and we had spring fires. I found out where the fish were biting.
We were near Clanton, about fourteen miles away. So, a fellow drove over
in a truck and said that somebody, he said, "I think that
it's New York, is trying to get you on the telephone and they
said that it was very important and so, you come go with me."
So, we went to Clanton and it was Hugo and he told me that the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation was looking for corporation lawyers
and they had asked him for recommendations and he had given them about a
half dozen names of people in Alabama who he thought were qualified and
he said that if I was interested in the job, I had better go right on up
there.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
The banks were beginning to close.
CLIFFORD DURR:
I was supposed to head up the insurance program to
start with, but the legislation didn't get through. So, I
went to Washington and Stanley Reed was then general counsel for the RFC
and he hired me. The next thing I knew, I had never represented a bank
in my life and I knew nothing about banking, well, two of us set up the
whole banking program for the recapitalization of the banks. And Jim
Alley, the fellow that was working with me was made general counsel.
Reed was appointed Solicitor General and Alley was made general counsel
and I found myself, with no banking background at all, head of the
program to recapitalize the banks.
SUE THRASHER:
How long was it after you left the law firm before you went to
Washington?
CLIFFORD DURR:
Well, we had been down on the river for about a week.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Now, before we leave Alabama . . . I'm just about to leave.
[Laughter] I want to tell you two
episodes that I think you will find interesting. One was, while we were
down there on the river, there were a lot of people who were refugeeing
on the river. People were just starving and all, no money at all and
there was a lot of land, islands, that the power company owned and
nobody lived on and what they would do, is that they would come down and
build some sort of shack out of anything they
could. They called them "Hoovervilles." They would
fish in the river, which was full of fish, and then just live off the
land, like they had gone back to nature almost. So, while we were down
there, one night, Mr. Mims, who had a fishing camp . . . but nobody came
to it, because nobody had any money, he brought down his whole family
and one of these families that were living on the island and I was
terrified because here were ten or twelve people and I didn't
know what to give them to eat, you know. Mr. Mims was a kind of a funny fellow and he played a guitar and
they sang a lot of the old songs and somebody got up and sort of danced,
a buck and wing dance but I knew that I had to give them something to
eat. And I was terrified because I didn't know what to give
them. I went back in the kitchen and fortunately, I had a five pound
sack of sugar and I found some chocolate and I made some fudge. Well,
honestly, do you know that those people had not had any sugar for months
and months. They hadn't had anything sweet. You see, sugar is
one thing that they couldn't buy and they couldn't
grow and the sugar cane wasn't around. If I had given them
the most marvelous meal in the world, they couldn't have been
any more thrilled than
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Was working for the abolotion of the poll tax and that went on for years
and years. As I say, finally we got it signed out of committee, and it.
. . .
JACQUELYN HALL:
It passed in the House, right?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
They would sign it out of committee and pass it in the House and it would
go to the Senate and be fillibustered to death. And of course, the
fillibuster, everyone from the the South would do it. The only support
that we got from the South was Claude Pepper, who introduced the Bill to
abolish the Poll Tax several times, and he did it because they had
abolished it in Florida by state action and also in Tennessee. So, we
had Estes Kefauver and Claude Pepper. Those were the only two. Estes
Kefauver is dead, but Claude Pepper is still living, if you can get him
to talk.
SUE THRASHER:
How about North Carolina and Louisiana, hadn't they abolished
it also?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Well, of course, we did get. . . .
SUE THRASHER:
North Carolina had abolished it in 1920.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
We did get help from Frank Graham of course, but I can't
remember getting any help from any other North Carolina politician. Of
course, Frank Graham got to be Senator eventually and did help.
JACQUELYN HALL:
I think it was also abolished in Louisiana, by Huey Long. they were. They not only ate every piece of fudge I made,
but the children came in and took the bowls and licked the spoons and
they were just thrilled because they hadn't had sugar for
weeks and months. They hadn't tasted a bit of sugar. We
thought that we were having a pretty tough time at that time and I
realized that we were just living on the fat of the land, because
although Cliff didn't have a job and we didn't
know what we were going to do, we knew that we always had somebody to
fall back on, you see. I told you that his brother-in-law had offered to
lend him any amount of money that he needed. I realized that these
people were completely desperate.
Now, what I want to tell you now .
. . you'll be interested in this because it ties in with Ted
Rosengarten's book. You asked me if I ever met any organized
political groups when I was working out in the industrial areas. No, I
didn't, but I did come in contact with the Communist party.
This was in 1932, in the depths of the Depression, 1931 or
'32. It was just the period that Ted wrote his book about,
All God's Dangers. So, you see, the
Communist party was organizing the sharecroppers up here in Talapoosa
County and of course, you know that H.L. Mitchell and the socialists
were organizing the sharecroppers over in Arkansas . . . and Claude
Williams, too. Well, I didn't know any of this. I had no idea
of it. But I came down with my little girl to
visit my brother and mother-in-law in Montgomery . . . this was before
Cliff left his firm . . . and this is rather complicated, but I will try
to make it plain to you . . . my mother-in-law had as one of her dear
friends, a Mrs. Nash Read. Her mother was a Baldwin. She had been Jean
Craik. Now, the Baldwins were always and still are, in a measure, the
great family of Montgomery. Mr. Martin Baldwin was head of the bank and
the Baldwins were always the most aristocratic and the richest people
and also had control of the credit. So, that made them extremely
prominent. Mrs. Read's mother had been a Baldwin and she had
married a Mr. Craik, and she had three daughters, Jean, Dolly and
Sheila. Well, their mother and father believed in culture and travel and
while they were never terribly rich, they went abroad and they studied
and they spoke languages. Jean got very much interested in the child
labor movement. You see, they were working seven year old children up
here at the mills, of which Cliff's grandfather was president
of at one time, I'm sorry to say. But, you know, I never knew
the old gentleman, but Mrs. Durr was rather ashamed of the fact that he
was Chairman of the Board and this was going on. This was, you see, back
after the Civil War. The attitude that they took was that they were
saving these children from starvation, that the tenant farmer was so poor and these poor little children, they
were helping them by giving them jobs in the mills. It never occurred to
them that they were not doing a benevolent act. Can you imagine that?
Isn't that strange? Of course, it's the same
attitude that they had in England when they started the mills and put
the women and children in them. Of course, Mrs. Durr, Cliff's
mother was very much ashamed of this. She thought that it was terrible.
Well, anyway, Jean Read got very interested in getting rid of child
labor. She worked with whoever was heading that movement in Montgomery.
Then, her sister, Shelia, married Paxton Hibben, who was a famous
journalist during the 19-teens; he went to Russia and covered the
Russian Revolution and he died and is buried in the Kremlin wall. He was
the nephew of the president of Princeton. So, he was one of the
contemporaries of John Reed, you know, that wrote Ten Days
That Shook the World. Both of them are now buried in the
Kremlin wall. Then, the other one was named Dolly and she married a Mr.
Speed from Louisville who was extremely aristocratic. There is
something, I think, called the Speed Museum there and the Speed
Seminary. They were someway connected to Abraham Lincoln's
wife, you know that she came from Kentucky.
So, in any case,
Mr. Speed died and Dolly was left with this girl and boy. I think that
their fortunes had gotten low then, so she took them to Vienna to
educate them, you see. To give them culture and teach them music and
languages. Well, they got to Vienna during the Dolfuss period when the
socialists were in control and they were fighting against Hitlerism.
There was a very strong Communist movement. That was when the Fascists
attacked the Karl Marx Houses and had a great gun battle, you know. I
tell you who writes about that. It's Lillian Hellman in her
memoirs called Pentimento. Have you read it? Well,
there's a fascinating article in there about her carrying
money in her hat to Vienna and this girl being disfigured by the Nazis
and killed and so on. It was that period that they were living in
Vienna. So, the two young ones, in their late teens, became absolutely
passionate anti-Hitlerites and joined the Communist party. This was in
the early 1930's, about '31 or '32. Or
maybe before that, around 1930. It was just when Hitler was coming into
power. Things were getting very bad in Vienna and so, Dolly Speed . . .
who had become a Communist too . . . she brought her two children back
home. She had no money, this time as I recall, so she came and lived in
Montgomery with her sister, Mrs. Nash Read. Well, Mrs. Nash Read had
married a man who had a lot of money and she had a beautiful old house
and it was all fixed up with a beautiful garden. She was the leading
society lady of Montgomery. She was it. Her food
was the most delicious, she wore the prettiest clothes, she gave the
nicest parties, her garden was the most beautiful, her house was the
most tasteful. She was head of the little theater and put on these
wonderful plays. If anyone had a ball, she decorated the ballroom. She
was a woman of tremendous talent, she had great artistic talent. Just to
go to her house was a poem, you know. So, when I was visiting with my
little girl, I went over for tea. And oh, this was in the early summer
and you can't imagine anything so delightful. You would sit
by this lovely pond with water lilies and Jean would be such a gracious
hostess and then Ben, the butler, would come out with the most marvelous
food that you would ever taste in your life. Things like puff pastries,
you know. Really, it was marvelous. And then there was Jean and Dolly
and Jane Speed, Dolly's daughter, who was a Communist and so
was Dolly. Now, what happened to the son, I don't know. I
never met him. But anyway, Dolly was trying to make some money by taking
pictures and so she admired my little girl so much and we arranged that
she would take pictures of Ann by the pool. I have a lot of them
somehere, they were lovely pictures of Ann with no clothes on . . . she
was about three or four then, with her little blond curls and sitting by
the waterlily pool. So, I got to be quite fond of
Dolly. This went over a period of some time. I didn't know
what a Communist was then any more than a man in the moon.
JACQUELYN HALL:
But you knew that she was a Communist?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Oh yes. Mrs. Read would say . . . she had sort of a high society voice
and she would say, "Oh, isn't this darling? This is
amusing, Jane and Dolly are Communists! What do you know about
that!" [Laughter] Well, Jane was
a a red-headed girl and she didn't laugh like it was a very
laughable matter. She didn't think it was very funny. As I
said, I didn't know what a Communist was from a man in the
moon. Hugo had been called a Bolshevik, you see, because he was on the
side of the labor unions. So, I associated everybody who was in a labor
union with being a Communist. I just took it for granted that if you
were in a union or for labor, you were a Communist. So, I gave it a
rather general definition. But I did hear from Dolly and Jane something
about the horrors of what had happened in Vienna, you know, but it made
very little impact on me,. . . .I was so divorced from it, that Hitler was just a name and so was Dolfuss and
Vienna. It was as if it was another world. I did come into contact with
Dolly and Jane. Well, they were the ones at that time, you see, who were helping the sharecroppers union up here
in Talapoosa County. They were, I'm sure, the two white women
who were sitting at the table when Nate Shaw was tried. Although, there
was, as I found out lately, a Marxist study group in Montgomery, who
also supported the strike. Now, they are some of the most prominent and
richest people in Montgomery and they will tell you about it but they
won't have their names used. I told you that I could arrange
for some interviews for you and I told Ted the same thing, but they
won't have their names used. You have to do it with no names,
because they are terribly respectable. But you see, Jane did support
this strike, and Dolly, too. And then the Marxist study group. And then,
bless God, the shooting broke out. Well, at that time, Mrs. Read, as I
understand it, I wasn't present at that time, Mrs. Read began
to stop laughing about Jane and Dolly being Communists and
"isn't that amusing?" She said,
"Leave, I can't put up with this." She had
a son, too, named Nicholas Read and she was afraid that they might
influence him. She was anything but a Communist. Anyway, Jane and Dolly
then came to Birmingham and I will have to take them up later, when I
take up the Southern Conference, because they were still there, being
Communists and running a Communist book store when the Southern
Conference started.
SUE THRASHER:
Would Dolly be a daughter or a grandaughter of the Baldwins?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
She was the grandaughter. Well, her mother was a Baldwin, she was the
grandaughter of old Martin Baldwin. Dolly was Jane's mother
you see, and they had become Communists in Austria. Well, anyway, I will
leave Jane and Dolly in Birmingham running their Marxist book store.
In the meantime, after Cliff got this job in Washington, he thought that
he might only be up there for a few months. You see, Roosevelt had just
taken office, he went in in March and so this was about April. So, I
arranged for the baby, Ann, to stay with her grandmother for awhile and
I went on . . . or did I take her with me? No, I think that I left her
in Montgomery for a little while and I went on up to the Junior League
Convention in Philadelphia. I was still the vice-president of Junior
League at that time. Well, this was a great big convention of all these
well off young ladies from all of the eastern seaboard. I realized at
that time, this was about June or May after Roosevelt had come in in
March, well, at this convention I first began to hear the criticisms of
Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt. You know, how they had been so rich and
aristocratic and socially prominent but they had taken up the cause of all these people who were completely
inprovident. You see, this was a great word that people used. You
hadn't provided for the future, you see. You were poor and it
was your own fault. You see, no one in Birmingham blamed the Tennessee
Coal and Iron Company, even the people out of work didn't
blame them. Nobody blamed them, these big Yankee corporations. Now, I
did. By that time, I was just getting furious at these Yankee
corporations, particularly Tom Girdler, he was the one that made them go
out of their houses and live in cake ovens. Well, anyway, I went to the
Junior League Convention and I heard this criticism from the young
ladies and. . . .
SUE THRASHER:
And in the meantime, Cliff was already working in. . . .
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Cliff was already there in Washington. Then, I went to Washington and we
lived with Sister and Hugo for awhile and then I went down and got Ann
and we lived in an apartment. But while I was at the Junior League
Convention I met a girl who was a real estate agent in Washington and
she said, "Where do you want to live?" Her name was
Ann Carter Green. She was a sort of a dilettante real estate agent. She
went and put me in touch with one of these. I said, "Where . .
. well, you know, I would like to live sort of out in the country where
people are poor and genteel." She said,
"Well, you have described Seminary Hill." This is
where the Virginia Episcopal Theological Seminary was. "It is
out in the country and everybody is poor and everybody is genteel. They
rent their houses for the summer and I will try to get one for the
summer." So, we rented the Zabriskie house, he was one of the
professors at the seminary. It was a perfectly beautiful old house,
brick and sort of like an octagon. We were just delighted with it, great
big oak trees around. It was the most beautiful kind of refuge that you
can imagine, it was a lovely place. So, we lived
on Seminary Hill all the time that we were in Washington. We bought a
house there, an old farm house with two acres of land for
$6500. [Laughter] Imagine?
Well, the land was so cheap then, the Depression was still on. So, we
lived at Seminary Hill and Cliff was working at RFC and he was working
day and night, terribly hard. I had brought a nurse with me, she acted
as nurse and cook. I still never thought that I could possibly get along
without servants, you know. I just never dreamed that it was possible.
So, anyway, I began to . . . after I got settled and started to look
around me, I went with my sister to a lot of things. You see, Hugo was a senator from Alabama then, and she took
me to a lot of parties and to do the usual Washington things, you know.
To Call on people and to meet those in the courts and Congress. I met
Mrs. Roosevelt at a garden party. Well, now, Mrs. Roosevelt was not
considered to be a beauty, as you know, but I thought that she was
absolutely lovely. She was a tall slender woman and had brown hair and
beautiful eyes. It was the lower part of her face, you know, that was
ugly, the jaw and teeth. But she gave the impression of just such beauty
and graciousness and charm and cordiality and I was just crazy about
her. I thought that she was just perfectly wonderful. Well, I heard that
Mrs. Roosevelt worked for the women's division of the
Democratic National Committee. Then, the RFC ladies began to invite me
to a lot of parties which I found extremely dull, because they would be
bridge parties and awful Washington luncheons at some hotel that served
that awful limp chicken with peas and oh . . . terrible! The whole thing
was as boring as it could be. So, I asked Cliff, I said, "Look,
if I have to go to these parties for you to get on in Washington, it is
going to kill me because I just despise them. They are so boring and
they only invite me because you are head of the banking section. They
don't care anything about me." So, he said,
"Well, if I can't succeed
without your going to these parties, I don't think that I
will succeed anyway, so . . . " Well, he told me that I
didn't have to go to those horrible bridge parties anymore.
So, I decided that I would volunteer for the women's division
of the Democratic party, mostly because I was so crazy about Mrs.
Roosevelt and I knew that she worked with them. I thought, "Oh,
this will be lots of fun." So, I did.
Now, I
won't go into my private life at that time except to say that
I had had another baby and I went to a very good doctor up there. They
had told me in Birmingham that I could never have any more children,
because I had had these two bad miscarriages, but I went to a good
doctor up there and I had our little boy. And although Cliff was only
making $6500 a year, we had a cook, a nurse and a yardman. .
. .
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
We had a cook, a nurse, a yardman and a washlady. The yardman and
washlady, of course, weren't full time, but you can imagine
how little they were paid. I think that we paid the cook eight dollars a
week and the nurse maybe eight a week and the yardman about two or three
dollars a day and I suppose that we paid the washlady the same thing. And you know, there again, I was totally
blind.
I paid what was the going wage, you see. . . .
And it never occurred to me that I was . . . you know, Cliff was making
$6500 a year and we were sending money back home to my mother
and father who had lost everything . . . in the meantime, they had moved
back to their house and we had gotten a lady to live there with her
family and look after them, or look after my mother who had come back
from the sanitarium and we were sending them money. My brother had a job
then with the New Deal and was sending them money. And so, they were
back in their own home. . . .
SUE THRASHER:
Was your father still working in Birmingham for the National Emergency
Council at that time?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Well, he got that job later. Anyway, after he got his job, we
didn't send money but we were always going to have to be
prepared to do so, you know, we didn't know how long the job
was going to last. It lasted several years, though, I believe. But in
any case, $6500 a year, which Cliff was getting, was not a
great amount of money, but the point was that in those days, things were
so much cheaper and the servants were so much cheaper. I had free time,
you see, because I had the cook and nurse and even though I had the two
children. I was free. So, I began to go into town and work at the
women's section of the Democratic
Committee. It was very pleasant, because the woman who was the head of
it was named Mrs. McAllister from Grand Rapids and she was a very
attractive woman and Mary Evans . . . what was her name . . . Mary
Thompson Evans, a very attractive southern girl from North Carolina was
the second in command. Well, what they were working on oddly enough, was
that they were trying to get rid of the poll tax so that the white
southern women could vote. You see, the women's division at
that time was working on something they called "The Fifty-Fifty
Plan", whereby the Democratic Committee would be composed of
50% women and 50% men. Now, there was no mention in the Democratic
National Committee at that time of black people, very few of them voted
in the South. Of course, they did in the North. But the southern women
didn't vote, either. They had come to the conclusion that
they didn't vote on account of the poll tax. You all know
what the poll tax was, it was put on around 1901 to disenfranchise the
Negroes, but it disenfranchised everybody who was poor, because in
Alabama, for example, if you missed a year, you had to go back and pay
your back taxes before you could vote. And if you started paying when
you were forty-five, and if you hadn't paid from the time you
were twenty-one, you had to pay $36 before you could vote. It
was an accumulated poll tax, you see. Well, I had
had personal experience with it in Birmingham, which made me realize how
stupid it was and how difficult. Because when I was twenty-one years
old, before I married Cliff, my father was always a registrar and one
reason was because they knew that he had never registered any black man.
He used to come home from the Board of Registrars and say, "I
swear to God, there was a damn nigger there today who had been to
Harvard. Harvard, mind you! And you know, you just couldn't
hardly think of enough questions to ask him that he couldn't
answer. But, I did." So, he never registered a single one.
Well, I took this completely for granted too, you see. Daddy was just
upholding pure white southern womanhood and the white supremacy. You
see, I accepted all of this. I had been surrounded by it all my life and
I accepted it. But anyway, I got registered when I was twenty-one and I
paid a dollar and a half for my poll tax. Well, from then on, when I
would go down to vote, they would say, "You haven't
paid your poll tax." I would say, "But I did pay my
poll tax." I didn't know that you had to pay it
every year. You see, I was as stupid as that and I had been for two
years to Wellesley. So, I would sign an affidavit that I had paid my
poll tax. When I got married, Cliff went with me to vote and found that
he had to pay about fifteen dollars so that I
could vote, because all these affidavits that I had made out
didn't mean a thing. [Laughter]
They had found out that I hadn't paid my poll tax. So, I got
a first hand lesson in paying poll tax. So, Cliff thought that I was so
terribly stupid for not knowing that I had to pay it every year. But
anyway, when I started working for the women's division of
the Democratic National Committee, they were working on getting rid of
the poll tax for the women of the South. O.K., you leave me for the time
being and I'll branch out in other directions.
You're going to leave me as a young married woman on Seminary
Hill in an old farmhouse that we fixed over, with a little boy and a
little girl and two full time servants and two part time servants and an
automobile, and in a lovely, quiet neighborhood, which I adored, but I
also wanted to be in Washington in the midst of all the excitement,
because the New Deal to me was perfectly thrilling. Cliff was saving the
banks and the telephone was ringing and some man would say,
"Mr. Durr, if that money is not here tomorrow, I'm
going to jump out of the window." And bless God, they did jump
out of the window sometimes. You know, it was a terribly exciting and
thrilling time to be there. So, although I loved Seminary Hill, I also
liked to be in the excitement in Washington.
BOB HALL:
Were you reading things, were there political
things in print that you could follow?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Not much.
BOB HALL:
This Mrs. Nash Read and her . . .
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Mrs. Nash Read and Dolly and Jane and all? No, I wasn't
reading any Communist literature. All that was just purely social, you
see. It had nothing to do with politics for me and as I say, Communisim
was just as foreign to me as Buddhism would have been. But anyway, there
in Washington, I began to get interested in the Democratic party and the
women's division and they were interested in getting rid of
the poll tax and I got very much interested in that. You see, I was
slowly becoming a sort of a feminist. I had had a great resentment, I
now realize, and an unexpressed resentment of the role that southern
girls had to play. You know, nice southern girls always trying to get a
husband and fooling the men and having to be so pleasant and putting up
with everything that you had to put up with to be popular. But it
hadn't come to the surface,. . . .it was still sort of
gestating inside of me. But I must have felt it because I plunged into
this fight to get rid of the poll tax for the women of the South with
the greatest gusto. I would go there every morning and of course, I was
an unpaid person but I clipped and read the
newspapers . . . I did begin to read the newspapers and that was a great
help to me. So, about this time, Clark Foreman came back into my life.
You know, I told you that I had met him when I was at Wellesley and he
was at Harvard. I saw in the paper one day, a picture of this very
handsome dark-haired girl walking on Connecticut Avenue with a big cape
swinging behind her and it said, "Mrs. Clark Foreman, one of
the young beauties of the New Deal Set, who has recently come to . . .
" Her father was the chief of protocol at Ottowa in Canada at
the . . . what do you call it, you know, the man who is sent out from
England to be the head of the Candadian government . . . Viceroy! No,
that's in India. Anyway, whatever it was . . . what do they
call it? You know, there is some nobleman who comes out and is the
titular head of the government of Canada.[1](n1)
1. The officer in question is the Governor-General, the Royal
representative in Canada who performs the functions of the
monarch while he or she is absent.
Well, Mairi's father was the chief of protocol, which was a
permanent position and she had been brought up in that sort of
atmosphere around the court, so to speak, but her family was not
rich.But they moved in sort of court circles and she was quite
fashionable and beautiful and very stylish.
JACQUELYN HALL:
She was a journalist.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Yes, she was a journalist herself and her name had
been Mairi Fraser, her family were all Scots. So, I wondered if this was
possibly Clark Foreman's wife. I hadn't seen or
heard of him since I left Wellesley. So, I looked in the book and found
him and called up and said, "Mrs. Foreman, are you the wife of
Clark Foreman from Atlanta?" She said that yes, she was. I
said, "Well, tell Clark that I called, I was Jinksie Foster
from Alabama." So, he called that night and the friendship was
resumed. He came out that following Sunday and brought her and he had
come up . . . after he left Harvard, he had gone to the London School of
Economics and had studied socialism, you know, the British brand. Then,
he had gone to Russia and studied communism and while he was over there,
he became aware of the race issue. You see, he was brought up like I
was, he just took it for granted. So, he didn't become a
socialist or a communist, but he did decide that he would come back to
Atlanta and take part in the race issue. And since you interviewed him,
I know that you remember that he had that horrible experience when he
saw the lynching when he was at the university. So, he did come back and
he worked with Mr. Will Alexander, you know, in this Interracial Council
and then he worked for the Rosenwald Fund. Anyway, Ickes, who was the
Secretary of the Interior, had asked the various interracial groups to
recommend someone to work in the Department of the
Interior to see that blacks got their fair share of jobs in public works
and so forth. You know, Ickes also got to be head of the Public Works
Administration, and also to try to desegregate the Department of the
Interior. You see, the bathrooms were segregated and the cafeteria.
So, Clark arrived in Washington with a beautiful young wife whom he
had met on the boat and promptly hired a Negro secretary. Well, this
caused an absolute storm throughout the whole government. Here was a
young white southern boy, who came from a good family, the Howells, you
know, of Georgia and having a black secretary. Of course, they
immediately accused him of the woman being his mistress, you know, that
he slept with her. Well, of course, that was absurd. She was a very
efficient secretary, but I forget her name. Well, he was the first
person that broke that barrier of having a black girl as a secretary.
So, he was a great believer in racial equality and was working at it.
So, that Sunday afternoon when he came out, he began telling us what he
was going to do and what he was doing. Well, my Lord, I just fell into a
fit! I just couldn't believe it. We got into the most awful
fight that you have ever known in your life. Cliff said that he had to
take the wood basket out of the way because I would have brained him or
he would have brained me. Because you know, Clark
is not tactful at times. He said, "You know, you are just a
white, southern, bigoted prejudiced, provincial girl . . . "
Oh, he just laid out at me. And of course, I had known him so well and
we had been just such good friends and I got furious and I said,
"You are going back on all the traditions of the South. You, a
Howell of Georgia going back on all of it. What do you think of the
Civil War? What did we stand for?" White supremacy, of course.
Boy, we got in a horrible fight. So, they
left. So, Cliff said, "Well, I don't think
you'll ever see him again." But we did, they called
us up the next week and invited us to dinner.
JACQUELYN HALL:
What did Cliff think about all this?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Well, of course, Cliff believed like me, but he didn't holler
about it the way I did. I hate to say it, but we had both of us been
surrounded by it since infancy, and we had this terrible double vision.
We had both been raised by black women whom we had adored and trusted
and on whom our lives depended and yet, at the same time, we were
brought up to think that all black people were inferior. So, we did have
this double vision, if you know what I mean, which I am sure contributed
somewhat to our later changing our point of view.
But anyway, we saw
a great deal of the Foremans and through them, we
met the Goldschmidts, who were from Texas, Wicki and Tex. Wicki worked
for the WPA, in fact, she worked for Aubrey Williams. And
that's how I met Aubrey Williams and he had come from
Alabama, you know, from right outside of Birmingham from . . . oh, what
is the name of it?[2](n2)
2. Springville, Alabama
It'll come to me later. Well, Aubrey was at that time
working for Harry Hopkins and the WPA, you see. So, we got to be good
friends and they lived out in Virginia and had a big old house over in
Arlington and Anita and Aubrey used to have parties on Sundays. Oh, all
kinds of people would come, Helen Gahagan Douglas and Pete Seeger and
Allen Lomax and all kinds of people. There was a lot of music and
playing and singing. That's where I met Pete and Allen Lomax
and we began to build up a group of New Deal
friends. You see, by this time, I was beginning to enlarge a little bit,
if you know what I mean and particularly there in the Democratic
committee.
SUE THRASHER:
Were there any black women in the Democratic committee?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Not a one. The only black woman that I ever saw was Mrs. Mary McLeod
Bethune and she was working for Aubrey Williams. Aubrey got into this .
. . you see, through Clark, I met some black
people, the girl who was working for him for instance, and then he had
some assistant . . . I forget his name right now. But anyway, I met some
black people through him, they would have them to their house, you see,
for dinner. Oh, my goodness, that was . . .
[interruption while original reel is changed] . . . Where
were we?
SUE THRASHER:
You were talking about Clark and. . . .
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Oh, yes, and his assistant, Robert Weaver.
I'll
get to him later and pay my respects to him, but anyway, Clark had
blacks to dinner and that's when I met Mattievilda Dobbs. Do
you remember her? She was Maynard Jackson's aunt, his mother
was a Dobbs. The singer. Well, I remember very well that Mairi in her
sweet way said, . . . Mairi and Clark were much more into the musical
and artistic world, because neither Cliff nor I had any musical or
artistic tastes, but Clark and Mairi were very much into the cultural
life of Washington, the symphony and the arts. They really both loved
it. Mairi painted, you see and they went in for modern art and we
didn't know what it was. I remember that we went there one
night and they had a marvelous new painting that they were thrilled to
death over and they asked us what it was and we said that all we could
see that it was an old tin wastebasket. It turned out to be some
marvelous symbolic painting by Ben Shahn, I think,
and anyway, we were completely out of that part of their lives. We
didn't even know or appreciate it. I never had any training
in art and I was blind as a bat and still am, for a matter of fact. If
it doesn't look like what it is supposed to look like, I am
just lost. Even Picasso. And oh, they adored Picasso and all those
one-eyed people. You know, music, the only people I could ever
appreciate was Pete Seeger, Allen Lomax and the country folk singers. I
still love them, but you get me above them and I'm lost. But
in any case, you see, Clark had known Mr. Dobbs very well in Atlanta nad
had worked with him in his interracial work. So, they arranged for
Mattiwilda to have a concert in Washington in some quite famous place
where they had musical events and she called me up and said,
"Jinksie, could you possibly come over and arrange about the
tea." She had a servant, but "I have to go to the
reception but could you please come over and arrange about the tea
because I don't want to leave the cook in the kitchen with
nobody to help her out." So, Cliff and I went over and we set
up the tea table and I made sandwiches and all. So, when the Dobbs all
came back, Mattiwilda had made a tremendous hit. Everybody had stood up
and cheered and they were all thrilled beyond words and I
don't know how many Dobbses there were, there must have been
fifteen. So, I served The Phillips Gallery the
tea, quite a reversal role, as you can imagine, for me. Here I was
serving tea to this black family. You know, they were so charming and
sweet . . . I don't think that you have ever known Mrs.
Dobbs, I'm sure that she must be dead by now. That was
Mattiwilda's mother, who would have been
Maynard's grandmother, but she was one of the sweetest, most
charming women that you have ever known. She made everybody thoroughly
at ease. She had lovely manners, just those wonderful southern manners,
whether they are black or white, when you run into them, they are just
sort of like oil on the waters, everything is smooth and lovely and
charming and sweet.
So, through Clark, I began to
meet a lot of black people and through Aubrey, I met Mary McLeod Bethune
and then through the Goldschmidts, I met Lyndon and Lady Bird. You see,
Tex was in the Interior Department too, and he was in the dam building
or water conservation or whatever they called it. You see, at that time,
when Lyndon first got elected as Congressman, there was another very
attractive man from Texas named Alvin Wirtz, who was the Assistant
Secretary of the Interior and they were both just hell bent on the Lower
Colorado River Authority. You know, that was to dam it up to irrigate
some land. Well, then Tex Goldschmidt was active at the bureau that
controlled all of this, maybe that was Public Works. Well, anyway, there
were the Lyndon Johnsons, The Alvin Wirtzes,
the Clifford Durrs, the Clark Foremans and then Nancy and Mike Straus,
they were there quite often. He was also in the Interior Department, and
Abe Fortas and his wife. We had a little circle,
and we began to meet maybe once a week for dinner and we became very,
very friendly with each other. Lady Bird had just come up from Texas,
you see, and Lyndon was a young Congressman with a great big
adam's apple, as thin as a stringbean. We used to laugh and
call him "The Drugstore Cowboy," because he always
wore cowboy boots and all. And you know, when I think of
Lyndon's later life when he was so maligned and being called
just such a vicious and cruel . . . he was the sweetest young man. Of
course, we were older than he was, we were ten years older, but he was
the sweetest young man and I just adored Lyndon. You all
won't believe it, I know. I just loved him dearly and I loved
her dearly and I still do. You know, we are just back from visiting her.
Because you see, I knew them when they were this young couple, just out
of the South, like new laid eggs, almost, it was so . . . and so young
and so sweet. Very charming and then Alvin was a very attractive man and
had a very cute wife. But the thing that impressed me about Lyndon in
those days, when he wanted to go after something like the Lower Colorado
River Authority, he did not miss a trick. He
cultivated everybody in the Interior Department and he sent presents at
Christmas and he was always on the job and always there remembering
birthdays and everything else. He was a constant politician. He never
took his eyes off the Lower Colorado River Authority. Anyway, he got it
and then he got electricity for the Pedernales River where his home was.
We are just back from there and everything around there is electrified,
but you see, when he grew up, there wasn't any at all. And no
irrigation and it was awful dry.
Well, anyway, at that time, I also
met Mr. John L. Lewis. Now, do you want to hear about that, because he
plays a very big part in the Southern Conference? The Southern
Conference is just about to come.
SUE THRASHER:
What year are we at now? Is this '35, '36?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Yes, '35 or '36.
JACQUELYN HALL:
The Hugo Blacks weren't really a part of that circle?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
No. Heavens, they were much higher. You see, he was a Senator than. He
was elected in '32 and by then he had become one of the great
New Deal Senators. He had worked on all of the Roosevelt things. We did
see a great deal of them. And at their house we
met, we were there constantly, but we met an entirely different set of
people, people like Lister Hill of Alabama, he was in the House then and
Claude Pepper, who also came from Alabama. . . .
SUE THRASHER:
Claude Pepper came from Florida.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Well, he came originally from Alabama. He came from the same county where
Hugo came from Clay County He comes into the story too, because he was a
great champion of the anti-poll tax bill, you see. Then, we met Lowell
Mellett, he was in the White House at that time and he became a great
friend. And the Thurman Arnolds. He was in the Justice Department then
and we became friends. Oh, we met everybody. We met Bob LaFollette. This
is my next story. What had happened was, you see, they passed the Wagner
Act very soon in Roosevelt's administration, giving the
unions the right to organize under Clause 7-A. And at the same time,
they passed the . . . what was chicken case?
[Laughter]
JACQUELYN HALL:
Interstate Commerce. . . .
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
That was under the Interstate Commerce Act, but what was that case . . .
where they declared it unconstitutional. The NRA, National Recovery Act,
well, under the first National Recovery Administration, they gave the
business the power to sort of form into
organizations that regulated themselves and they also gave labor under
7-A the chance to organize. And of course, the NRA was later declared to
be unconstitutional, but then, they passed the Wagner Act, which gave
labor the right to unionize and set up the Labor Relations Board.
So, about this time, I met Mr. John L. Lewis. Well, John L. Lewis at
that time, you see, had fallen out with the AFL and was forming the CIO
and used the 7-A to organize the CIO and there were tremendous labor
struggles going on and Mr. John L. Lewis just loomed over Washington
like some great big giant, he had tremendous character. So, the way that
I met him was again purely social. One of my neighbors on Seminary Hill
was named Brookings and her husband was with the Brookings Institute and
his father had started that and this Mrs. Brookings went to the
Wellesley Club. She was always begging me to go to it because I had gone
to Wellesley and so I did go with her occasionally. But that bored me to
death, too. They were as remote from what was going on as the man in the
moon. So, through Mrs. Brookings, I went to a tea one afternoon and met
Mrs. John L. Lewis and she was a very charming woman. She was very sweet
looking and had been a school teacher and she spoke beautiful English
and she dressed well. She wasn't a fashionable woman, but she
was a very lady-like lady, very charming and
sweet. So, she was very pleasant to me and asked me to come and see her.
She said, "You know, I have a daughter, Katheryn, who I want to
meet some of the younger people." They had bought this
beautiful old house in Alexandria which was one of the Lee Houses. So, I
was longing to meet Mr. Lewis since he was so prominent in the news, you
know. So, Cliff and I went there one Sunday afternoon and called on the
Lewises at her request. Well they lived in this marvelous old house
there on the corner of Lee Street, I believe, and right on the main
corner, beautiful garden in the back, you know. One of those magnificent
old houses with great high ceilings. It was beautifully furnished and
Mrs. Lewis was just lovely. They had a butler that met you at the door
on Sunday and they had a chauffeur and a cook
and maid. Mr. Lewis was living in great style and in very good taste.
The house was beautiful, the flower garden was beautiful, the furniture
was beautiful, all beautiful old antiques. So, I met Katheryn Lewis.
Well, I don't know whether you ever saw Katheryn, but she
weighed about 300 pounds, she had some sort of glandular trouble and she
looked like a great balloon, you know. Very small hands and feet, but
this enormous body and naturally, she was
quite sensitive about it. She must have weighed 300 pounds, maybe 250.
But she was huge. So, she was quite sensitive but I found her to be a
very bright girl and witty and funny and she was her father's
assistant. I got on well with Mr. Lewis and Cliff did too, so we had a
very pleasant social visit. Then, they invited us back for a reception
that they had and anyway, the friendship slowly grew. Katheryn and I
used to have lunch together occasionally.
SUE THRASHER:
How old was Katheryn at that time?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Oh, I was in my thirties, she was in her late twenties, I suppose.
SUE THRASHER:
Did we get the story you were telling yesterday about John L. Lewis
remembering your name because of Cliff's father?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
I think we did. Well, in any case, then you see, what happened in the
South was that the Wagner Act and the NRA were fiercely fought. One of
the people that organized for it was John L. Lewis and he sent down lots
of young Communists. You see, he wouldn't have a Communist in
his Mine Workers, there was a legal barrier there against them, but all
these young Communists . . . there were quite a lot of them at that time
because the capitalist system appeared to have
fallen on its face and of course, Roosevelt and Cliff and all of them
were trying to revive it. But these young Communists thought it was
beyond hope, you see and the Communist party at that time was much more
open. The unemployed had been organized by the Communists and it was
still sort of vague to me but I just thought that they were people who
were for the labor people. So, anyway, these young Communists got beaten
up and held in jail incommunicado. I don't know how many of
them got killed, just any number. It was really awful and then of
course, you know, that damned old John Rankin of Mississipi, he was so
awful. About that time, I met a girl named Ida Engeman who was from
Mississippi and had gone to Wellesley. Her name had been Ida Sledge.
Now, this really will floor you, so I will have to say it slowly. [Laughter] Ida Engeman was Tallulah
Bankhead's half aunt. If you want me to explain that, I will.
[Laughter] Well, Will Bankhead, who at
that time was speaker of the House, when I was in Washington, Will
Bankhead, from Jasper, Alabama, you know, the son of the Senator
Bankhead who was the head of the penitentiary and rented out the
convicts and who was the one that Cliff was telling you about last
night. Will Bankhead, when he was a young man, had married Miss Ada
Sledge from Mississippi, who was a very beautiful
and aristocratic lady. She then bore him two daughters, Eugenia and
Tallulah. Then Miss Ada Sledge died. If you go down to the museum, in
Montgomery you will see Miss Ada Sledge's wedding dress and
her traveling dress, her trousseau all there in a glass cage. She must
have had a waist of about fifteen inches. Anyway, she died when Tallulah
was born and so her father, Mr. Sledge, married again and had another
daughter named Ida and that was the one that I knew. She had gone to
Wellesley and had come back down to . . . she had gotten extremely upset
about the plight of labor and had gotten much more radical than I was
and she had gone to work for the ILGWU and was trying to organize in
Mississippi. Well, she got run out of Mississippi twice, at the head of
a mob practically, although she was kin to the aristocracy of
Mississippi. So, I met her because her mother was a friend of my
aunt's . . . all these connections! So, they got us in touch
with each other because Ida was living near us on Seminary Hill in that
big complex of apartments and married to George Engeman. Her children
were more or less my children's ages and we got to be friends
and remained so up unto her death which just took place last year.
Well, anyway, Ida gave me some idea of what was happening in
Mississippi, which was that people were being put in jail and killed and so forth. And then Bob LaFollette
started the he arings which are the most significant set of hearings
that have ever been held and if you all don't get them, steal
them or buy them . . . we had them, but like so much of our stuff, I
gave it out to people to read and I can't find them. But all
of this is contained, the beginnings of everything is contained in the
LaFollette Committee hearings, in every part of the country, California,
Ohio, Alabama, Mississippi and in Harlan County of Kentucky. Now, this
is where I got my education. . . .
JACQUELYN HALL:
I didn't think that they held any hearings except in Alabama.
. . .
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Oh, all over the country.
JACQUELYN HALL:
But not all over the South.
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Well, Kentucky, but they held hearings in Washington for months on end.
You see, we had a son and he had died. He had appendicitis and they
didn't diagnose it right and they took him into the hospital
and it burst and they didn't have any penicillen in those
days and he died.
JACQUELYN HALL:
When did that happen?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
Even dates like that, I can't remember . . .
SUE THRASHER:
He was about five years old?
VIRGINIA FOSTER DURR:
No, he was only three. We got to Washington in 1933 and I got pregnant
very shortly thereafter and so it must have been
about '36, that he died. So, I was terribly distressed and I
began going to the LaFollette hearings, they sort of diverted me. Then,
I got so interested in them and I finally got into them and I really
learned all the economics and everything that I knew from the LaFollette
Committee. I would go in every morning with Cliff and come back with
him. Again, you see, I still had my first little girl, Ann, and I had
Lucy by that time, too, my second daughter. But I had servants, you see.
Still had a cook, still had a nurse, still had a yardman, still had a
washlady. So, I would go in with Cliff in the morning and stay all day
long at the hearings, just absolutely fascinated by them. You just
can't imagine how dramatic they were. The Harlan County
hearings, here would come in these great big tall people out of the
woods of Harlan County and then in would come in a gunslinger or deputy
sheriff with a gun on his side, of course, they made them leave their
guns outside, thank God. They were the scariest looking people I ever
saw. And the thing that was so horrible about the whole thing in Harlan
County was that the man who had shot down the fellow they were
complaining about, there was so much shooting . . . but they were all
kin! First