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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview G-0023-2, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
In this fast-paced 1975 interview, Virginia Foster Durr and her husband Clifford banter back and forth as Clifford reminds Virginia of stories, names and significant events throughout the conversation. The interview, the second in a series of three, begins where the first one left off—with Virginia's growing awareness of social problems in the South, particularly of the evils of poverty. During the early 1930s, they faced a great many changes. Her brother-in-law Hugo Black returned to the Senate, and her mother had to be hospitalized because of depression. When Clifford lost his job in a Birmingham law office, he accepted a position with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in Washington, D.C. After they arrived in Washington, she attempted to join the social milieu. One day, however, she decided she had had enough of all the receptions and joined the women's division of the Democratic Party to work with Eleanor Roosevelt. She became involved with issue of the poll tax, having herself been unable to vote several times because of it. Through their various activities, the Durrs befriended Clark Foreman, Lyndon Johnson, John L. and Kathryn Lewis, Tallulah Bankhead, and other young New Dealers. The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee hearings following the brutal attack on Joe Gelders drove Virginia to recognize how complicit her family and friends were in the violence and injustice occurring across the South. As a result, she helped organize the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in 1938. She also met Mary McLeod Bethune, and in the interview, she tells stories about how Bethune handled the racial segregation in various places they went, often undermining it in clever ways. As both the Durrs became increasingly involved in the New Deal actions, they became aware of the growing anti-Communist feeling that was spreading across the United States. In the interview, they discuss various manifestations of the growing hysteria, including Truman's loyalty oath, which ultimately drove Clifford from public office. Still hopeful and idealistic, Durr campaigned for Henry Wallace, the Progressive candidate, in 1948.
In this fast-paced 1975 interview, Virginia Foster Durr remembers her growing awareness of social problems in the South, and continues sharing her life stories through 1948. Along with her husband Clifford Durr, Virginia recounts their move to Washington, D.C., particularly her disaffection with social society and her transition to political action.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
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
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.
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
Coke is made out of coal. Charcoal is made out of wood, but it is something of the same process.
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
Was there any kind of political organizing going on with the Unemployed Leagues or the. . . .
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.
You didn't hear of any kind of. . . .
I never heard of a single thing. I remember about one small bit of
rebellion that I heard of. I
That was the second time he had run.
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
Was that in Birmingham?
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?
Well, before I get on that, Virginia was talking about
We had sing-alongs, too.
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
Now, who would come to these? Would these be the people that you would be going out to. . . ..
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.
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.
Not Mr. Tom, you mean Logan.
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,
You weren't a partner?
I was a partner.
You see, they had a big retainer from the power company.
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
What about that old judge?
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 . . . .
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.
Well, he ran the politics. He never did any legal work and he had separate files and a separate secretary.
This is Logan Martin you're talking about?
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.
What was the name of this firm?
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.
You've got to tell about Will Dunn and how nice he was. He lent us some
money to live on for awhile.
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.
The banks were beginning to close.
I was supposed to head up the insurance
How long was it after you left the law firm before you went to Washington?
Well, we had been down on the river for about a week.
Now, before we leave Alabama . . . I'm just about to leave.
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. . . .
It passed in the House, right?
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.
How about North Carolina and Louisiana, hadn't they abolished it also?
Well, of course, we did get. . . .
North Carolina had abolished it in 1920.
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.
I think it was also abolished in Louisiana, by Huey Long.
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 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
But you knew that she was a Communist?
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!"
Would Dolly be a daughter or a grandaughter of the Baldwins?
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
And in the meantime, Cliff was already working in. . . .
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
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,
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]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
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
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. . . .
Was your father still working in Birmingham for the National Emergency Council at that time?
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
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
Were you reading things, were there political
Not much.
This Mrs. Nash Read and her . . .
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
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.
She was a journalist.
Yes, she was a journalist herself and her
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
What did Cliff think about all this?
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
Were there any black women in the Democratic committee?
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
You were talking about Clark and. . . .
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
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
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.
What year are we at now? Is this '35, '36?
Yes, '35 or '36.
The Hugo Blacks weren't really a part of that circle?
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
Claude Pepper came from Florida.
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?
Interstate Commerce. . . .
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
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
The house was beautiful, the flower garden was beautiful, the furniture
was beautiful, all beautiful old antiques. So, I met Kathryn Lewis.
Well, I don't know whether you ever saw Kathryn, 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
How old was Kathryn at that time?
Oh, I was in my thirties, she was in her late twenties, I suppose.
Did we get the story you were telling yesterday about John L. Lewis remembering your name because of Cliff's father?
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
Well, anyway, Ida gave me some idea of what was happening in Mississippi,
which was that people were being put in jail and
I didn't think that they held any hearings except in Alabama. . . .
Oh, all over the country.
But not all over the South.
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.
When did that happen?
Even dates like that, I can't remember . . .
He was about five years old?
No, he was only three. We got to Washington in 1933 and I got pregnant
very shortly thereafter and so it must
Reuther?
Reuther. Yeah, well, he was a big organizer at that time. You can't
believe it, but he really was. Oh, they all got beat up and shot. But
this was the kind of things that would happen. A man would get on the
stand, an automobile worker, and he would say that he had tried to
organize the automobile workers and he would tell about what he had done
and how they had been beaten up and forced out. They would ask if he
knew of any informers in the union and "No, not to my knowledge." So,
they would bring a man on that looked sort of like an automobile worker
and they would say, "Do you know this man?"
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Nobody knew whether he was dead or alive.
In Birmingham?
In Birmingham. Well, he had to go out to Colorado because he had tuberculosis, which he got in jail.
Is this Jack Barton?
I don't think so. I don't remember his name, those young Communists in
those days changed their names so often. I can't remember what name he
went by then, but I just remember running into him in Denver and saying
something to him and you know, he wouldn't recognize me and he wouldn't
admit that he had ever been there. He wouldn't admit that he had ever
taken part in it or anything. You know, you said that Annette Ross was
the same way. They had a rough time and the ones that got out and went
their way, they didn't even want to be reminded of it. At least, this
guy didn't. Maybe it was Jack Barton, I can't remember it. You see,
there were so many of them. The same thing was
Did the committee have a name?
Oh, I don't think so. I can't remember. I think that it was just a
citizen's committee or something. You see, they all formed citizen's
committees everywhere to keep them from organizing. But these were some
of the fathers of my friends and the leading men of Birmingham, the men
that I had been brought up to think were the leading men of Birmingham.
So, I did something that I look back now as showing how foolish and
stupid I was, I couldn't believe it. I thought that it was all just a
total . . . I just didn't believe that these men could do that or keep
people in communicado or have them beat up or disappear. And of course,
Joe Gelders you see, he was the sort of focus of this hearing. Anyway, I
will just say that I sent telegrams to all of my friends' fathers, these
high class gentlemen, saying, "I have heard today in the LaFollette
Committee you accused of such and such and I am sure that it is not the
truth. Please refute this unwarranted lie." News and lived on the next block up from us, oh, all
kinds of people.
But you believed it about Harlan County and all the other places?
But I didn't know them, you see. I knew these men. They were the fathers of my friends who had been so sweet to me all my life and were the leading citizens, so you know, I just didn't believe it. Well, I got some of the most embarrassed letters back that you have ever seen. They didn't send any telegrams, but . . . "My Dear Virginia, I do not think that you understand what has gone on here in Birmingham. I can assure you that our only objective has been to maintain law and order and we had nothing in the wide world to do with all this shooting and killing and holding incommunicado. That was absolutely not our intention." They just excused themselves completely.
But anyway, but this was the first time that I had heard the name of Joe
Gelders. What had happened to him was that Crack Hanna's police had
picked him up one night and taken him over the mountain
Yes.
Well, it's all in that.
The National Committee for the Defense Political Prisoners or. . . .
Is that the name of it? I forget. Well, anyway, I got terribly interested
in this fellow from Alabama who had been beaten up so bad and left for
dead. He was kind of the hero of the hearing. I don't think that he
testified, as I recall, but I heard all the testimony about it. I came
home and asked Cliff if he had heard of him and he said, "Why yes, he
was at the university with me," and he knew him well. Then, I remember
that I knew his brother and it all came back to me who Joe Gelders was.
In Birmingham, we had always had a very rich community of Jews. They
owned the big department stores, you know, and a lot of businesses and
they were a very wealthly community. There were poor Jews, but I didn't
know
But I did go to see Joe Gelders, wherever his office was, and there he
was, tall and thin and I thought he was a good looking fellow and he
looked like a Jewish prophet, kind of beautiful blue eyes and with
lovely manners. Then, he had this darling wife named Esther Gelders, who
was
Well, in the meantime, Cliff had joined something called . . . what is it, I forget. Well, anyway, it was a group of young southerners in the New Deal, Clark Foreman and. . . .
Southern Policy Committee?
That's right . . . how did you know all this?
I've been studying.
Well, you want to ask me any more questions.
Is this 17% of the population or. . . .
No, this is a percentage of the potential voters, of the people over 21 who could vote. So, this was a tiny little minority you see.
Almost no blacks voted and no women voted then to a great degree. You
see, I was working on that. We hadn't gotten to the point yet of working
on the black vote but we were working on the women's vote. Anyway, Clark
Foreman had come down and taken part in that, the fight against Senator
George and the purge and of course, he had been very reviled in Atlanta
as an agent of the New Deal and so forth. He had a pretty tough time,
you know, because his family were fashionable and belonged to the
Piedmont Driving Club and all and they took it hard for Clark to turn
against his family and class, as they said. So, when Clark came back
from that, he was really het up about the South and there was another
fellow in there named Jerome Frank who was a brilliant man, he got to be
a Yale professor, but he was then working in the Agriculture Department
and he was the one, you know, that proposed or was there when they had
the big row about killing the pigs and tearing up the cotton and the
corn, you know. And Atlantic, and Tex Goldschmidt, and Cliff has got a
copy of that here, you must have that, Report on the
South, and there is a letter that Cliff wrote to the President
saying that the South was the paradox of the nation, rich in natural
resouces and the poorest of all. It got to be known as "The South,
economic problem number 1." That's what the president said about it.
Well, anyway, that was written. . . .
What part of that did Cliff write?
He wrote the part on credit, I think, or banking. So, they had written this, a lot of it got written in my drawing room,and the fights that they used to have.
What were the controversies among these people?
You will have to ask Cliff about all this. I wasn't in on it, no women
were allowed. I just had to feed them, you know.
O.K., I've got the picture.
You see, I was always bringing in coffee and food, but they were fighting each other. You will have to get it from Cliff, because I wasn't present, except rarely, and then I wasn't allowed to take part. I was still not taking part in things like that at all. Well, in any case, they wrote this pamphlet and then they got a lot of very distinguished people up from the South to certify it.
He's got the pamphlet with all their names on it. Have you got it?
Yes.
O.K., well now, just about this time, which must have been the spring of
'37, or the summer of '37, because the first Southern Conference was
held in the fall of '38, isn't that right? Well, I think that it was the
early summer, because
Yes, in '38.
Was he put on in '38 or '37? I think that he was put on in '37.
He took office in '38, perhaps.
Well . . . it's absolutely stupid that I have forgotten dates, because I can remember all about it just like it was yesterday, I could up and fill a whole reel on that, it was. . . .
He was re-elected in '32 and he was getting ready to run again in '38 and. . . .
Yes, but the primary was in '37 and he took office in '38, and he may have been running, but he was put on the Supreme Court by that time.
The election was in '38, but that wasn't. . . .
Well, he was put on the Supreme Court after the big Supreme Court fight,
you see he took Roosevelt's side in all that and that is one of the main
reasons that he was put on the Court. And I swear to God, I can't
remember
And he was on the Court at that time.
He was on the Court at that time, but I believe that he had been put on the Court in '37, but maybe I am mistaken about it. I wish that I had a better memory for dates, but I have some sort of weakness about numbers, they just slide out of my mind. You know, that's one of the southern lady traits, you can't balance a checkbook. I never did succeed in arithmetic.
Well, this might get off the subject too much, but I wanted to ask you about this, the controversy over Blacks membership in the Ku Klux Klan. Did you want to talk about that now?
Let me come into Hugo later, because I've got to bring all these threads together or they will be just be oblivion and cobwebs. Well, I've told you about Clark Foreman going to assist Roosevelt in the purge in Georgia and about how badly they got beat. So, he came back and he did that work with Georgia for the National Emergency Council, which was kind of the propaganda wing of the New Deal. So, when he came back, that was in the spring of '38, the purge must have taken place in the spring of '38, didn't it?
I think that the election would have been
In November of '38. Well, anyway, do you want me to go back and look it up?
We can look it up.
Well, anyway, Clark came back and he got Cliff and all these people
together and they wrote this report on the South and this was going to
be a kind of a launching force for some action on the South. Then, he
brought up all these distinguished people from the South to certify that
this was a good thing. Their names are all in the report. O.K., but just
about at this time, I am still a friend of the Lewises in Alexandria,
but I had no connection with them officially or through labor or
anything. I was friendly on the social level and had become quite
friendly with Kathryn by this time, but I was invited to a luncheon
given by a Mrs. Bryant, whose husband was head of the banks and there at
the luncheon, I met Mrs. Bryant's sister, who was Lucy Randolph Mason.
Well, you see, the Mason's were another big aristocratic family from
that area. They had a house down the hill from where our farmhouse was,
of course, they didn't own it any longer, but it had been the Mason
house. You know, George Mason, who had the big house down on the river
and was the Mason who was the author of the Civil
And did John Lewis want that, too?
I really think that he did, yes. I really think he did. He also wanted to
identify later with the big corporation overlords. But Mr. Lewis had
been a miner and he had come from Wales and his family had worked in the
mines and Mrs. Lewis had been a schoolteacher and I think that she
taught him to read and write. He was a very massive and very brilliant
man, you know, he had those big
But Mrs. Lewis was a very well educated woman and lady, you know, and she
wanted to associate with ladies and gentlemen.
What was it about the YWCA that had discouraged her?
Well, she thought that these girls didn't get paid enough. How could you
work with a lot of To Make My Bread. Well,
Jimmy Collins was trying to organize the textile workers in Mississippi
and he was beat up and so forth and so on and it was about this time,
you see, that Ida Engeman got kidnapped and run out of town in a
nightgown.
Was she organizing for the textile workers?
She was organizing for the ILGWU. So, anyway, they had gone to see the
Roosevelts to tell them
Now, you will have to find all out about how the black people got there
from somebody like Dr. Charles Gomillion or Louis Jones. Or Myles
Horton, because they know it. But I just remember about the labor people
being there and the New Deal people being there and the liberal people
being there. So, they all got together in Birmingham in November of
1938.
Did they sponsor you for. . . .
Oh, yes, I had a badge on saying that I was a delegate from the Women's Division. So, Cliff had been asked to make a speech on credit because he had written a thing on credit for that little pamphlet Economic Problem #1. Then, they had decided to give Hugo the Thomas Jefferson Award. So . . . this is taking a lot of time, I think it is interesting, but do you. . . .
Oh, it's fantastic.
You think it is?
Absolutely.
Well, what happened was, Clark Foreman was going and Tex Goldschmidt I
believe went, so anyway, I went and stayed at my mother's house. My
mother and father were still living in that old house. She had a kind of
a nurse housekeeper that was keeping the house and I think that Daddy
still had a job then with the National Emergency Council. But mother was
still in a terrible deep state of depression, melancholia. Then, Hugo
came down. So, Cliff had gone to Texas with Jesse Jones for a meeting of
the American Bankers Association. So, he got there after I had gotten
there and after Sister and Hugo had gotten there. Oh, they had asked
William Dodd, you
Hugo gave a perfectly marvelous speech, quoting Thomas Jefferson all the
way through it. Mrs. Roosevelt was there that night and we were strictly
segregated. All of one side of the city auditorium was black and the
other side was all white. Because, you see, Hugo got there the last day
of the meeting, but I had been there for several days before and I went
to the
Can we go back to that?
Well, we can, but I will talk for three or four weeks or months if you
are going to carry in all these various things. But I must say that the
Highlander Folk School
Well, the first day, they had workshops and as I remember, Cliff came in and he gave his workshop on credit. There were a lot of people like Donald Comer of Avondale Mills and General Persons of the First National Bank, people that the New Deal had helped out of the hole and were still kind of New Dealish. But soon, of course, the labor unions, the blacks and the radical groups, there were socialists there too . . . oh, what was that man's name, I despise him so . . . a big socialist. What was that fellow's name? Isn't it funny that you forget people that you hate so? I thank God that you remember the ones you like . . .
Where was he from?
Oh, he was from Georgia, and the. . . .
Frank McAllister?
Frank McAllister!
Dolly was at the Birmingham meeting?
Yes. And I said, "Well, Mr. McAllister, you know, these people are all
doing the same thing that we are doing, they are trying to fight against
the poll tax, get the labor organized. They are doing what the New Deal
wants to do." "Well, Mrs. Durr, you are young and naive . . . " H.L.
Mitchell says that at that time, the socialists thought that I was a
Junior League dilettante. He told me that the other day. I said, "Well,
H.L.. you remember me at the Southern Conference?" "Oh, of course I
remember you. We all thought that you were a Junior League dilettante."
Because the socialists . . . now, I like H.L. Mitchell, he lives in
Montgomery and I still see him often. I think that H.L. did a great job
over in Arkansas, but the point was that at that time . . . now, H.L.
has changed. You know, he doesn't red bait the way that he used to. But
those socialists, by God, the Trotskyites, it didn't matter what came
up, whether it was the size of a peach or nothing, I swear, you couldn't
decide where you were going to lunch without them bringing up the damned
red baiting. "Are you sure you want to have him to lunch? We think he's
a Communist." You know, you would just go crazy with it, you couldn't
sit down to do anything, you couldn't sit down to have just the simplest
meeting on procedure without this thing starting up. They were crazy on
the subject. I have never people so nutty on anything in my life. I
still don't understand why they were so nutty about it. They still are,
I reckon. Do you think they still are? Are they like the Maoists and the
Revisionists, you think now? Or even worse? You know, here we were in
Birmingham, Alabama . . . (well, with the Maoists and the
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
some influence on their lives. Doing things that just were absolutely
fundamental, right on the lowest level of political and economic
democracy and these socialists and Trotskyites did nothing in the world
but red bait. It made me mad. And if you didn't go along with them, then
they red baited you. McAllister red baited me to fare-thee-well from
then on out. It really was something and it made you mad, too. I still
get mad when I think about it. I used to think that the Trotskyites were
some form of fleas, I didn't even know what they were.
In the meeting? She would do this in the meeting?
Oh, no. In the papers. And she "didn't know what the niggers and the
white women were up to." They were eating together and "what did they do
at night and where were they staying." The same old dirt, you know. Just
get a black man and a white woman in a big auditorium and by that night,
they'll be in bed.
We had the meetings and the workshops and Aubrey Williams got in trouble.
He was presiding over a workshop on relief or something like that and
somebody said to him, making a joke, "Oh, come the revolution, we'll do
this." Some joke, you know, just a remark. And Aubrey said, "Hooray for
the revolution," or some joking remark. Well, it came out over the radio
that Aubrey Williams, one of the heads of WPA had said that we
But there were an awful lot of people at that meeting. Wasn't Black there to accept the Jefferson Award?
Oh yes, I'm getting to Hugo. Oh, yes he came. We were all staying at my
mother's house. I told about Ambassador Dodd's mind slipping and having
to be led off the stage. Well, it was pretty grim. Poor fellow,
something happened to his mind, he couldn't even prononce words. Well,
Roosevelt was very upset about this and Aubrey was just joking, but it
shows you how this was so current. They fought the
Yes, there are some that. . . .
Where are they?
They're at Tuskegee and unorganized.
Oh, they ought to be organized. Well, anyway, Maury Maverick was a
Congressman then from Texas. He came from San Antonio and he was a dear
friend of mine and so was his wife. I just saw her last week in Texas.
He was a lovely, great, marvelous man. He was kind of short, he had been
injured in the first World War and was kind of humped over, had been
severely injured in his back. He was one of the bravest, finest men that
I have ever known. You know, a real New Dealer. He was kin to Maury
Fontaine, a great geographer and he was very proud of that. Forty Acres and A Mule, I
believe, and he was a professor at Vanderbilt University or had been or
got to be. I know that he kind of dropped out of things later, because
he was a professor. Did you ever know him?
I've seen the book.
Well, he was a lovely guy, he was sort of a mountaineer, pioneer type, popular type. That book just about expresseed was he believed in. But he was a really well educated man, too and an awfully nice man. But he dropped out of the Southern Conference later on. Then, people got scared off . . . Frank Graham was elected president, you see and. . . .
Virginia, when the controversy over segregation came up, is that . . . had you thought about that issue before?
Oh, I was furious at Bull Conner. By that time, I had come around to thinking that segregation was terrible.
How had you come around to that from the time that. . . .
From the time that Clark Foreman and I had the big fight? Well, just by
osmosis, I reckon. See, I
Was this Hugo?
No, no, Cliff's brother, who is a lovely man, but you see, he was just as
rigid as he could be. I remember that. You know, it's like having
escaped from a prison, as if you had gotten out of a cage. That's why I
get so upset over the blacks that want to put themselves back in a cage,
because it was a terrible thing to be white and have to think that
everybody that wasn't white was inferior and looking down on them and
thinking that they smelled bad, were
Were these stories he told you at the time, in the 30's?
Yes, this is something that he was concerned with down in Georgia.
Anyway, this country white girl got pregnant by this black fellow and
so, she had a baby who was sent to a black orphanage, because her family
had found out about it. But the mother of the child wanted to see the
child after it had been there some time, so she went to the black
orphanage where the child was, I guess that the child was four or five,
but anyway, it was eating at the table with the other children and the
people that ran the orphanage said to her, "Don't you want to sit by
your child?" And she said, "Well, I couldn't do it, eat with blacks?"
This was her own child! She couldn't sit by her own child! She could
have nursed him at her breast, but she couldn't eat with him. And he
told me that as a true story. He even told me a funnier story about how
down on the Howell plantation,
So, anyway, where was I when I got off on this strange. . . .well,
anyway, the
So, you were on that committee?
I was the vice-chairman and Maury Maverick was the chairman. I think that he had been defeated by. . . .
What about Gelders?
He was the secretary. See, he lived in Birmingham and he only came up and. . . .
He was the secretary of the committee? Or the secretary of the whole Southern Conference?
He was the secretary of the committee. I forget who the secretary of the
Conference was. But in any case . . . I don't think he was secretary of
the whole Conference. I know that he worked and worked and had no money
at all. I remember coming into Lee Geyer's office one morning and
finding him on the front steps. He had been there all night long. He
didn't even have a place to sleep.
Could I go back and ask you a question? Did you say that you were vice-president of the Southern Conference at Birmingham or were you. . . .
I was elected vice-chairman of the poll tax committee, but I . . . was not . . . elected vice-chairman of the Conference.
Why was it that the poll tax issue was the one that you really decided to concentrate on?
Because I don't think that people have any political freedom until they have the right to vote. I don't think that . . . I think that is the first recognition of a democratic society, that people have the right to vote. I didn't think that the labor people or black people or women were getting their right to vote.
Had you or other people encouraged the
Oh yes, Myles Horton had done it. He brought a case one time, it was a case brought in Tennessee and which reached the Supreme Court but they turned it down on the basis that the state had the right to name the qualifications of voters, you see. That is in the Constitution. You see, what we claimed was that this was not a qualification of a voter, it was simply a tax on a vote and these are two opposite points of view.
Had you or Myles tried to lobby behind the scenes at the Conference to raise the poll tax as one of its main issues?
Well, no, it was almost unanimous. With the black people, the labor
people and at that time, the radicals, there were the Communists, the
socialists and so they and the New Dealers and the women . . . there was
no woman's movement at that time, I was its only representative. And
some of the labor people were all just unanimous about it. They couldn't
get anywhere until they had the right to vote. You see, the labor people
were being thrown into jail and beat up by sheriffs which they didn't
elect. It was almost a unanimous feeling. You see, you've got to read
(and I am sure that you have read and it is too long to tell,) but you
have to read the whole struggle for the right to vote never given the right to vote when
the black men were given the right to vote and the black men got the
right to vote before the white women got the right to
vote. People don't seem to realize that. Of course, it was taken away
from them by all these different disen-franchising provisions, all the
poll tax and white primaries and so forth. But it wasn't a question of
lobbying for it. Everybody wanted it, it was almost a universal desire
of the people there. You see, we were at that time, part of a Roosevelt
coalition. It consisted of the labor unions, they were sort of the
bedrock of it, but it wasn't a question of lobbying for it, but of
responding to the demand. I was in it for the women, but my God, the
blacks had stronger feelings, although they always said that even when
we got the poll tax abolished, they still had the registration
restrictions to get around. The Grandfather Clause. So, while they were
for it, they always realized that
Well, that's what I wanted to get at really. Getting rid of the poll tax would bring more of the working class white voters into the Roosevelt Coalition instead. . . .
Sure, but at that time, you've got to realize that Mrs. Roosevelt was working with us in the Southern Conference and she was working with black people and with Mrs. Bethune. What we were trying to bring about was an alliance with a lot of different people, this was the first step, to get rid of the poll tax. In the Constitution, a Negro man was regarded as 3/5 of a person and. . . .
That was in the original Constitution, but of course, all that was changed by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Yes, well, I am just trying to show that there was this long struggle.
They did have a short time when they could vote after . . . and if you
have read the books on Reconstruction, and I suppose that the best one
is Vann Woodwards, you know, Jim Crow and then The Origins of the New South. But all these
disenfranchising provisions took place around 1901. But you see, those
provisions were aimed at the poor whites too as well as blacks. This is
why I say that the poor whites continually cut their own throats because
they voted for the provisions because they thought it would keep the
blacks from voting and at the same time, it kept them from voting, too.
They continually have cut their own throats because they actually voted
to disenfranchise themselves by allowing these things to be put into the
state constitution. You see, the Southern Conference also brought a
case, I think it was in Tennesee and the man in Birmingham, I think it
was Hugo's law partner, named Crampton Harris, he began the case. John
L. Lewis, I think, gave ten thousand dollars for that. I'm sure he did.
But the Supreme Court ruled that the The Origins of the New South, it's
Well, this was the freight rate differential, the rate on raw materials
going from South to
It is just imperialism. It's just the same way that they kept Africa and South America and Asia for so long, just in the same category of a supplier of raw materials.
They had another system they had worked out called the Basing Point
System. Steel was manufactured in Birmingham, but the steel produced
there was just heavy rail ingot steel and it was shipped north for
fabrication in the US Steel fabricating plants. You would think that in
order to have cheap steel, you would have little fabricating plants
springing up, but the price of steel, wherever you bought the steel, you
had to pay the cost plus the freight rate from Pittsburgh, where the
fabricating plant was, to wherever you bought it. So, if you wanted to
set up a plant within a quarter of a mile of the steel mills of
Birmingham and bought steel from them just around the corner, you had to
pay the same price as if you had bought the steel in Pittsburgh and paid
all the freight from Pittsburgh
The main idea was to keep all the manufacturing in the North and keep the South supplying raw materials. But you see, the thing that Hugo Black began to fight when he got on the Supreme Court was the Fourteenth Amendment, the idea that a person is a corporation . . . explain that, please Cliff.
Well, the Fourteenth Amendment, up until well into the 30's, was never invoked successfully to protect the rights of individuals. Corporations invoked it, such as a Delaware corporation doing business in Alabama, if they felt that they were regulated too strictly. The public utilities, invoked it if you kept their rates down, then there was a point that you were confiscating their property without due process and so on, under the Fourteenth Amendment. Of course, the Fourteenth Amendment was invoked in Plessy vs. Ferguson, but they lost that case. But the corporations, it was one of their main weapons of defense, they were individuals and protected by the 14th Ammendment.
You can't imagine what . . . for instance, when I lived in Birmingham and
was a young lady making my debut, Mr. Gary, who was then the president
of the United States Steel Corporation, George Gordon Crawford
How much of this was talked about at the '38 Conference? Did you. . . .
Of course we talked about it, but we all knew it so well. Yet, it was talked about, I'm sure, but we didn't have to spell it out, everybody knew it.
That was one of the things that I talked about in my paper on credit.
Where is that pamphlet, you've got it.
I don't know, I can't find it.
By the time that you came to the '38 Conference, you had moved from being a Junior League. . . .
Dilettante?
No, I don't know that I . . . but I was passionately on the side of labor. I had listened to the LaFollette Committee hearings and I related that to what I had seen while working in the Junior League and working in the industrial districts with their terrible poverty and the fact that they treated the people so badly. They would close down the big industries and throw the people on charity. But they would feed the mules. It was that lack of care for the people.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
I moved to Birmingham in 1925 and at that time, the workers in the steel mills, were sort of the aristocracy of labor, had twelve hour shifts and as Virginia said, twenty-four hour swing shifts from morning. And the coal miners had to compete with convict labor.
You know John Beecher's poems, well, he has a whole book on this. You
see, his father was the secretary-treasurer of United States Steel in
Birmingham, but John worked in the steel mills, so much of his poetry is
about working in the mills and what it did to the people. I think that
they were paid two dollars a day then, or something small. So, the
unions were terribly wanted, they would long for a union. But you see,
there again, you have that competition between the black and white. You
see, I was telling Sue, and I have said this so many times, one of the
reasons that the poor whites were so opposed to the blacks was because
there was this frightful competition for jobs between them and if they
made any protest to an employer saying that they thought they should get
more than a dollar or a dollar and a half a day, he would say, "Well,
O.K., if you don't like it, I'll get a nigger and he'll do it for 50¢."
Well, he would. And the Negroes were often
When you went back to Washington, your main work for the Southern Conference was. . . .
I don't remember getting any support from Louisiana, I do remember Estes and Claude.
What about Brooks Hays?
Well, it may have been something he was for, but he never did anything about it. He is a nice guy and I am crazy about him, but I don't remember it.
How did the Southern Conference move to set itself up structurally following the '38 convention? Did Gelders or somebody. . . ..
No, I told you that we had the office in Geyer's office, but after a year or two, Geyer died. In the meantime, what we did, we set up a board or committee and anybody that was against the poll tax was a member of that committee. Now, our great support and help of money was John Lewis and the CIO. They were our first support with money.
Did that go directly to the Southern Conference or to the poll tax committee?
I don't remember, but I think to the Southern Conference. I know that he
paid for the case that was taken to the Supreme Court and I know that we
had on this committee, the AFL, the CIO, the Railway Brotherhood . . .
all of labor, you see . . . we had the NAACP, all the black groups that
I can think of, the
Did you talk to Alice Paul?
Oh, yes. Those women were the most rigid sectarian women that I have ever seen. They wouldn't talk to you about anything, and we even got the American Association of University Women to go along with us.
Didn't they think that the poll tax discriminated against women?
Yes, I guess that they just didn't . . . well, they wouldn't do anything
to help us or make it a part of their program. They were terribly
sectarian, you know, just women's rights. That's what I keep telling the
women today, that if you are just going to work for women's rights,
you're not going to get anywhere, you have got to work for the rights of
other people, too. See, this was the same thing with civil rights, too.
As long as they just worked for
Well, your first critical exposure came in trying to build a coalition among all these different groups to. . . .
For the rights of labor and in that I included women because women were
so badly paid. Now, we did get this great coalition going. In the
meantime, Farley, after this poll tax bill was introduced or maybe
before it was introduced, he came down to the Democratic National
Committee and told the women's division that they had to stop backing
the poll tax bill because it was making the southerners too mad. So,
they had to stop it, but the Democratic Women's Division had supported
us. Then too, the biggest set back that we had, and this is something I
think is quite interesting. After Geyer died, we moved over to the
Railway Building. The Railway Brotherhood had a big building on Capitol
Hill where they all had their offices and headquarters and they Labor and they had an awful nice guy who was the editor of it,
he was a Catholic from Colorado named Keating and we got as a paid
secretary then, Frances Wheeler, who was the daughter of Burton K.
Wheeler who was the senator from Montana. Now, her sister lived out by
us and was a real great friend and I met Frances through her sister,
Elizabeth. And Frances was just out of Mout Holyoke, I believe and she
wanted to go to work for the United Mine Workers but John L. Lewis had a
prohibition in his constitution that not only could no Communists work
for the Mine Workers, but no married women could. If you got married,
you had to give up your job. He didn't believe in married women working
outside the home. So, Frances had married, a very nice fellow named
Allen Saylor, who was in the Communications, Federal Communications
Commission then. So, Frances became a secretary of the anti-poll tax
committee. Her father was extremely popular with the railway people. Why
was that?
Well, he had fought that battle for the unions very early. They had tried to defeat him in Montana, he ran as a young radical, to start with, and he headed an investigation of the railroads, that was one of his famous investigations.
That was when Max Lowenthold was working with him. Now, you must read his
book on the FBI if you can get ahold of it, that is one of the great
books. But anyway, we had this very large committee and finally, Mrs.
Bethune and Mrs. Mary Church Terrell, she was from Memphis and I'll tell
you a tale about her too, it's fascinating. But finally, this large
committee decided that it would be better to break away from the
Southern Conference and be a national committee to abolish
Weren't you getting your contributions from the Southern Conference?
No, not at all. So, the Southern Conference poll tax committee became the originator of this national committee to abolish the poll tax. Actually, we were by far the most active part of the Southern Conference because we just kept on going and getting bigger and having more people backing us all the time. You see, much of the New Deal was mad at the South for blocking all the New Deal measures, too. So, we stayed in this Railway Labor building for quite a long time. Then, what happened was that they had a big fight in the firemen's union, they were trying to get rid of the Negro firemen. You all should remember that that was one of the biggest fights in the railway history, trying to get rid of the Negro firemen and put in white men. The railway people, Mr. Keating continued to be friendly and very nice to us and supporting us in every way, but at this point, the railway unions got all involved in this racial struggle over the firemen. You see, they used to have firemen that shoveled the coal into the engine.
This change came about because it was fine for the blacks to be firemen when they were shoveling coal into the engine, but when they came up with the diesel locomotive, that was a nicer job, so they wanted that for whites.
I would say that it was original sin, it was selfishness, I suppose, but
it is the original sin of the human race, it seems to me is
I think that the national committee was set up in '41.
'41? Well, we went to see her and it was just at the beginning of the new
Congressional year and by that time, Frances had gotten a job with the
United Electrical Workers and Sara D'Avila had become secretary. She
came from Pennsylvania and she came from a very upper class family, she
had been to Vasser. But she had gone to work as a social worker in
Memphis and Richmond and she had become extremely radical. I think that
she joined the Communist Party for awhile, but anyway,
In the poll tax fight, were you mainly working to get legislation passed through the Senate?
And the House, to remove the poll tax in federal elections, you see. This was only in federal elections. The point was, that Congress had the right in federal elections to do away with things like this and. . . .
Did you try to organize grass roots support?
Oh, heavens yes. We sent out newsletters and letters and had meetings all over the country and had speakers and the unions took it up and all these other organizations that were part of the committee took it up. It became a tremendous issue.
Did you do much speaking, then? Did you travel and speak?
Well, I had a family by that time, you know, a pretty large family. I did
some speaking, but not a whole lot. I did some, but I used to raise
money a lot. Oh, Lord, what did I do? I lobbied and I raised money and I
went to meetings and I just worked and worked. It became a kind of . . .
Cliff thought that it became a sort of an obsession with me. The
children would say, "Oh, Poll Tax!" I was just reading Bleak House, about Mrs. Jellaby, you know, and her African
project. I often
But anyway, you see that I was in contact with all this tremendous broad sweep of people. We knew that we were backed by the White House and that was quite a. . . .
Roosevelt would not come out publicly.
He did it through his wife, you see. She supported us and came down to
Nashville to the Southern Conference meeting which was in 1940, I
believe. That McAllister, he began to red bait Mrs. Roosevelt through
Paul Robeson, you know, who came down and sang. Further than that, he
whispered around that Mrs. Roosevelt was having an affair with Robeson.
Isn't that the old nasty thing, a
What about the Southern Electoral Reform League?
Oh, that was the same thing, the socialists formed this to hurt us. And Mrs. Roosevelt, I have a letter from her, but I think that it must be over in Tuskegee, they had been putting her on the list of people of the Southern Electoral Reform League, so she went down to the meeting and she said they just did it to try to hurt us.
How? What was the. . . .
By trying to form a different organization. You see, the thing that they were so. . . .
Who set up the Southern Electoral. . . .
McAllister. The same thing. The socialists who
Supposedly, they were trying to abolish the poll tax on the state level, right?
No, they weren't trying to do anything but make trouble for us as far as I could see.
They were trying to say that this was the only way to do it.
They only had one or two meetings. I have a letter from Mrs. Roosevelt somewhere, she went down to the meeting and she wrote a long letter back to me and said that it was nothing in the world but a nusiance, they were just doing it to hurt us.
What about Moss Plunkett?
Well, he was a nice guy, he was from Virginia and a lawyer and he was a very nice guy and he went along with this Southern Electoral Reform. I went along with it too, you see. I took the position that I would support anything that was against the poll tax. So, I didn't red bait them, I was on the committee and I went to the meetings when they had them, but it didn't amount to a hill of beans. You see, wasn't their action just. . . .very few of the states were ready to abolish the poll tax and the action was in Washington because it was becoming a national issue and it became a great national issue all overthe country. It was mostly through this Roosevelt coalition, you see. And it was mostly related to the unions.
Because you see, the southerners were always voting against anything that
benefited the unions. And my Lord, my brother-in-law, Hugo Black, you
know the
The 30 hour week, which finally became the Wages and Hours Act. I think that the minimum wage to start out with was something like 30¢ an hour.
Oh, all the southerners fought that. I was down with my sister at Point
Clear, we spent one summer
and I really think that Cliff ought to tell that because he. . . .
Well, I can give you that article that I wrote, which was for the Georgia Law Review and was. . . .
Could we come back and pick this up and. . . .
Yes, why don't we go on with the poll tax. . . .
Well, as I was saying, we did have one very bad setback, which is very interesting. Now, you see that all this time, the Spanish Civil War was going on. Fascism was rising in . . . there was Mussolini in Italy and Franco won the Spanish Revolution and I first really got upset about foreign affairs during the Spanish Revolution, that was the first time that I ever came to on that. And that was how I got in touch with Decca and how Decca came to live with me, but you have heard all that and know that story.
I've heard that story, but we don't have it on tape.
Well, I can't put that in right now. But anyway, though,
So, Sara D'Avila and I went over to see Mrs. Roosevelt. This must have been the beginning of '40, sometime. Mrs. Roosevelt was still going great guns on the anti-poll tax bill. It was '41. . . .
Had you been to the conference in Nashville in the meantime?
Oh, yes. That was in '40, wasn't it?
Now, had you met Jim Dombrowski by that time?
Oh, yes. I had gone to Highlander Folk School a lot by then and I was devoted to Jim and I was just crazy about him. He stayed with us a great deal.
What I am trying to get at is what was going on in the Southern Conference outside of the poll tax fight?
I really don't know. I must have had a very single track mind. I thought
that the Southern Conference existed for the poll
You were talking about your setback.
Oh, yes. Well, we went to see Mrs. Roosevelt and she was perfectly
lovely. She had us out for tea on the South Portico, you know,
overlooking the Washington Monument and she couldn't have been more
gracious and more sweet and kind than she was. So, she discussed what we
should do and what she could do to help us and all. So, she said, "You
know, before I do this, I think that I had better speak to Franklin and
see what his ideas are." So, we had tea, you know and the White House
butler came out and I will tell you, being a southern liberal in those
days in Washington could be very pleasant. They used to say in the
Oxford Democrat that if you were a
Well, this was even before we got into the war. He was trying to . . .
you see, he had gotten his rebuff with his quarrantine speech in 1937,
that we had to quarrantine the aggressor. The isolationist sentiment was
so strong that he had to back off on it,
They were ready to support him, you see.
The old League of Nations, the Wilson idea, still prevailed in the South. So, Roosevelt was very much concerned not to offend the southern senators, because he needed them on his foreign policy so badly that he decided that he couldn't offend them on such issues as the poll tax.
You see, Senator George, who he had gone down to Georgia to try to defeat, was one of his great supports in getting ready for the war. So many of the southern Senators and Congressmen supported him in his war efforts, while the isolationist Republicans in the Middle West, even the Democratic isolationists didn't. And of course, you know that Burton Wheeler fought him bitterly on the war and of course, John L. Lewis did too. So, Mrs. Roosevelt came back and she was upset and said that he had said that and whatever we did from now on, we would just have to do it on our own. Which we actually did, because the war broke out in '42, didn't it?
No, '41. December of '41.
December of '41, o.k. Well, I went to see Mrs. Roosevelt again and she
and I together cooked up an idea that we would get a federal bill
through to remove the poll tax from the soldiers. That's a fact. She got
Tom Corcoran and Ed Pritchor over again and Ben Cohen, all the big shots
in the White House, you know. William Hastie, he was the dean of the
Howard Law School there and Dr. Nabrit who was a professor at the Howard
Law School. Oh, Mrs. Roosevelt just
What was the name of that bill and who sponsored it? Do you remember?
I think that it was the Soldiers Voting Act. But anyway, we kept on
fighting and Marcantonio, as I was telling you, we went to see him, I
had never seen him before, and we told him that we had met and decided
to back Congressman Baldwin's bill and would he mind withdrawing his
bill? And then, George Bender had a bill, too. He was the Congressman at
large from Ohio, he was one of laft's lieutentants, he was a Republican.
Bender said that he would withdraw his bill if we would all concentrate
on Baldwin's bill. Well, we walked in the office and Marcantonio had a
secretary named Miss Johnson who was a very austere New England old maid
type, you know. She looked like she had been carved out of granite, but
she was a very nice woman, too. So, she introduced us and I had taken
along this lady who had helped us on the anti-poll tax fight, named Miss
Eleanor Bontecu. She was a great sort of an intellectual who had been
dean at Bryn Mawr for awhile and she was working with us. She finally
got into the civil rights division of the Justice Department. We sat
When he died, you were asked to be one of his pall bearers, as I remember.
Well, the newspaper articles said that I had served, but I. . . .was not contacted.
Well, I think that they wanted you to, but we were out in Colorado at the
time, but we got to be very devoted friends. And Marcantonio, you know
that he was the son of Italian immigrants and he was the most perfect
Jeffersonian that I have ever known. He would work with anybody but he
was a Jeffersonian if there ever was one. He believed in freedom of
speech and he believed in free voting and he believed in the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights and he was . . . you could always
believe Marcantonio, he never told you a lie. He was one of the most
trustworthy men that I have ever worked with in my life. And the
Catholic Church, you know, refused to bury him when he died. You see, he
wasn't a Communist, but at
Well, some in the American Labor Party. . . .
Yes, that's what I am saying, you could have 3,000 people and if 3 were Communist, then you were a Communist front, that's the way that they were carrying on. And the Catholic Church refused to bury him when he died. They wouldn't give him the last rites or anything. But he would get that bill out of Congress every time. He would get it signed out you see, but then it always failed in the Senate. The southerners would filibuster it over and over again. And of course, it finally, it only got passed by a Constitutional amendment and that didn't happen until sometime in the 40!s, I believe;. . . .
No, it was later, it was. . . .
Sometime in the 50's or 60's?
You were friendly with both Sparkman and Lister Hill.
Yes, I was friendly with both of them, but they never would support us, of course, and I knew that, but I was friendly with both of them. They never would support us at all.
Did they ever tell you that they were in favor of abolishing it but just couldn't. . . ..
No. . . .
I remember Lester Hill telling Virginia that, "if you guarrantee that this thing is going to pass, I'll support it, because the kind of folks that we'll get from abolishing the poll tax are the ones that will vote for me." But he knew that she couldn't get it through because of the opposition.
Lister Hill was a real New Dealer and he helped. . . .
He would have been glad to see the poll tax abolished provided that he didn't have to take any part in it.
Did he filibuster it?
Oh heavens, yes. They all did. I was subjected to one of Mr. McKellar's famous filibusters. He was the Senator from Tennessee, you know. You see, my uncle, as I told you, was the governor of Tennessee and Kenneth McKellar had been a friend of his and a friend of my grandfather's even, I believe. By God, he got in the Senate and you never heard such a carrying on about me as you ever did in your life. He thought that I was an arch fiend, you know, with a bomb in each hand. He was just awful, just terrible.
Is it in the Congressional Record?
Oh yeah, it's all there. Oh, we were terribly attacked time and time again. The anti-poll tax committee and the Southern Conference and we just caught it. You see, the filibuster prevented it getting passed in the Senate, but the fact that we had made it a national issue and it had become . . . I really believe that the thing that finally got it over was, now we did abolish it for the soldiers in the war, but I do think that the Constitutional amendment passed because in the cold war, we were the great apostle of freedom and it is awfully hard to explain to people why we had a poll tax and people couldn't vote and yet we were fighting the Russians because they were totalitarian dictators and we were the apostles of freedom. You see what I mean.
Were you involved at all in trying to abolish the Alabama poll tax when you came back here in . . . well, it was modified in 1953.
Well, no. To some degree. I belonged to the League
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
So, you see, this is the way that people commit suicide. The AFL was in
the power fight with the CIO and they sent word that unless we got rid
of the CIO, they wouldn't come to the meeting. We had had this absolute
flat out rule that everybody subscribed to, that anybody could come to
the meetings, any organization that sent a representative that supported
the anti-poll tax. There was a Communist there in Washington . . .
He was switching around. . . .
He was a legislative representative of the Communist party.
He was an instructor at Johns Hopkins, I don't think that he had tenure or anything like that.
I don't think he had at that time, but he had been. He was a philosopher and he was an awful nice fellow, but after the red baiting got so bad, he stopped coming around to the office. Maybe the name will come to me. He and his wife both finally got put in jail. I can't remember the name right now, but it might come to me later on. But in any case, he was a lovely fellow, just as nice as he could be and a philosopher and very philosophical. He was always giving me books to read like Kant and things like that and other philosophical books, which I never did read, really, because I really couldn't understand them. But when the red baiting started up, he stopped coming to the meetings.
You see, we were surrounded by the FBI. We were always having strange
young men come in and saying that they wanted to be volunteers and
saying that their names were Joe Smith and they worked in the Post
Office Department but they had a few off days. As soon as they left, I
would
I think that you had better slow down, you are getting tired.
Oh, I am just trying to tell how it all broke up. So finally, these FBI people would try to get her and she was perfectly open and frank with them. The FBI was surrounding us but they never really got anything on us because it was open to everybody. It was one of those completely open organizations. Anybody, any organization.
But then you see, first the AFL got mad at the CIO and they had that big
fight and they wouldn't come unless we got rid of the CIO. Then John L.
Lewis got mad at Phil Murray. You see, John L. Lewis pulled his mine
workers out of the CIO. He had supported us very much and given us a lot
of money and been wonderful to us, he sent word that if we didn't get
rid of the CIO, he wouldn't send his men anymore. So, the man came
around, an awful nice guy from Kentucky, I think that he later got to be
governor of Kentucky, I can't remember his name either. But he said that
John L. had said that if we didn't get rid of those leftist CIO unions,
he couldn't come anymore and he was awful sorry, we had gotten to be
real good friends by that time, but he never came anymore. So, then by
God, the CIO split right open. You see, we had lost the Railway
Brotherhood on this race issue, we had lost the AFL on account of the
CIO, we lost the mineworkers on account of the CIO and then, by God, the
CIO split! That was the last
We
Oh, he was living in luxury.
Oh, he was serving Napoleon brandy and. . . .
I think that while he was working for the union, the ship owners were paying him about $35,000 a year.
Well, anyway, we didn't know anything about it. We still thought that
Hoyt was our friend. So, he said, "Now look, I've just been talking to
Phil. He says to tell you girls . . . " that was Sarah and me and some
of those other people on the committee . . . "to tell you girls that we
will support you and get you money and do everything we can for you. But
you have got to get rid of some of these unions that you've got in
there." You see, by that time, they were having a purge in the CIO, when
they got rid of Harry Bridges' union and the United Electrical Workers
Union and the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union and the
As I look back now, I don't think that it ended in a blaze of glory. Because you see, this was just two years after the war was over. We had a meeting and the Anti-Defamation League, you know, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, a representative was on the committee and they said to meet at his office. You see, we didn't have offices at this time, money was running out and we were having a hard time. So, he said to meet at his office and we met at his office. We still had a lot of the Negro organizations and a lot of the civil rights organizations and church organizations and some of the left wing unions. . . .
Who is this man, now?
I can't remember his name, somebody in the Anti-Defamation League. So, we
met in his office, which was a very nice office, he was a very nice
Jewish gentleman and so he gave us quite a little talk and he said that
the Anti-Defamation League and some other Jewish organizations were
going to be very helpful and they would raise money for us and would do
all that they could to help us and it had just one proviso. He had the
Attorney General's list and he wanted to be sure that nobody in the
committee was on the list. Well, my husband at that time was head
Not in 1947.
Well, you had been head of the National Lawyer's Guild.
No, I had nothing to do with it until I got out of the government.
Oh, well, anyway. . . .
I was fighting Truman's loyalty' oath during those years.
Yes, you were fighting Truman's loyalty bills, so then Tom Emerson up at
Yale was head of it, I believe. But in any case, he picked on the
National Lawyer's Guild and something else. There were two or three
more. He said that they would all have to get out. I said, "Why?" And he
said that they were all on the Attorney General's list. I said, "You
mean to say that you are going to use the Attorney General's list to
decide who can be on this committee?" And he said, "Now Mrs. Durr, you
have got to be realistic. The United States government is starting to
purge all leftists and Communists and radicals of all sorts and we have
to do the same thing or we won't get any support from the government or
various people." I was pretty tired by that time, too, Cliff was
fighting the loyalty oath and we had been through the war. I remember
that I looked at him and said, "You know, you are the kind of Jew that
brought on Hitler." That was the end of the committee. It was a pretty
bad ending, I'm afraid. We stood by our principles, you see, but the
thing was that people didn't stand by us. Everybody began to purge. The
NAACP purged, the unions purged, everybody purged. So,
Did you formally dissolve it?
Oh no, it just fell apart. We didn't pass any resolutions, it just fell apart. Nobody supported it, no money. We didn't have any backers that had money and we couldn't hire an office. You see, you have got to remember that the backbone of the New Deal and the backbone of the anti-poll tax committee and the backbone of most of the liberal things in the country and in the Southern Conference was the unions. Well, when they broke up and got decimated and all, you didn't have any solid support at all. The unions just got split all up.
It's getting hot in here isn't it?
Well, you wanted the fire lit. Do you want the door open?
I guess that I just get hot thinking about this. I can't even remember the man's name, but I just remember saying that to him in absolutely a fury. "You are the kind of Jew that brought on Hitler." What I meant was, that by being so, by going along with what was happening, that. . . .
Well, of course, he was trying to defend his own respectability, that's what they were doing.
What I meant was that if they had fought Hitler in the beginning . . . I didn't mean that Jews were for Hitler, I just meant that if you didn't fight facism from the start, it ate you up. But then after that, we went into the Progressive party and it made a big deal of this poll tax fight. That was one of the main things. Herry Wallace had supported us all along.
Do you want to go back and talk a little bit about
Sure.
I was just looking again at Keneger's book on the Southern Conference and he talks about how at the Nashville meeting in 1942, that. . . .
Well, it was at the Chattanooga meeting where they had the big fight over foreign policy, that wasn't worth while
You tried to stay out of that, but you were very much on the side of Frank Graham and the people who wanted to pass a strong resolution supporting the Allies?
Yes, I was on the side of people wanting to pass a strong resolution supporting the Allies. I didn't want to pass a resolution against Russia. I thought that Russia had a perfect right to make a deal with Hitler to buy more time and I thought that anybody who was fool enough to think that Russia had made a deal with Hitler on a real basis of collaboration was crazy in their head. I mean, you couldn't live through that period and read the papers and know what was going on and think that this wasn't just something to buy more time. It couldn't have been anything else. Hitler's whole base of anti-Communism and anti-Russia was too strong. But what happened was, you see, at the meeting in Chattanooga, and I forget what date it was. . . .
1940.
Yes, but what was the time of the year?
In May, I believe.
I think that it was in May. Well, you see that the
Well, they compromised and
The first time that I had been to Highlander and I hadn't seen Jim Dombrowski before. Across the hall, I saw this handsome man with dark brown eyes, you know, Jim looked like St. Francis of Assisi, and so he came up and introduced himself and you know, Kathryn was with me all the time. It was the strangest combination because here I was on one side and she on the other, but we still stayed friends.
Now, we are talking about dates. This is 1940, and you hadn't met Jim earlier?
No, I hadn't met him before in my life. I didn't meet him down at the
Southern Conference in '38. So, he came over and introduced himself and
asked us that if we would like to come up to the Highlander Folk School,
he would drive us up for a day or so before we went back to Washington.
So, we did. And Jim drove us up and Myles met us and oh, I had never
been there before and I just loved it. I adored Zilph ia, you know,
Myles's wife who was so beautiful and such a
That wasn't all they wanted.
Well, that was the first step in that direction anyway.
Now, when did you first start getting disillusioned with them?
I first got disillusioned at this CIO convention in Boston, but I forget
what year it was. It must have been about . . . I can't remember. But
during that time, I became friendly with John Abt, the chief counsel for
the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and he was always very helpful and
then, of course, Sidney Hillman was always very helpful. Now, the person
that just fought us tooth and toenail and all on the red baiting thing
was the head of the ILGWU, David Dubinsky. He was terrible. He wouldn't
give us one damn dime and never supported us at all because we didn't
have any anti-Communist provision. It got to be an absolute fetish. Of
course, that's what helped kill off the Henry Wallace campaign, you see.
But this shows the length to which it went. The last year that Cliff was
on the . . . wait, do you want
Do you want to talk any more about the Southern Conference?
What happened between the '38 conference in Birmingham and the '40 conference in Chattanooga? Was there a whole lot of red baiting that went on then, at that time, that made it so different in terms of the people who attended? I know that one of the accounts that I read said that the big names of the Roosevelt era were notably absent at the '40 conference, but that they had been at Birmingham.
Well, I think that's true. I think that the big thing was, you see, that
in '38, the conference had the backing of the Roosevelts and Mrs.
Roosevelt was there. Now, what happened was that in '40, when they met
in Chattanooga, Mr. Roosevelt had turned, as we said, from Dr. New Deal
to Dr. Win the War, and he was trying to cultivate the southerners to
back up his war effort. So, he neither came nor sent greetings and Mrs.
Roosevelt didn't come either. But he passed the word around, I'm sure,
among the New Dealers, that "we are not going to fool with that because
I have to keep the support of the southerners." Because, you see, he saw
Hitler looming and he realized that he had to have these southerners, or
so he thought, to fight Hitler. Not only were they in important
positions on the committees, but they were interventionists, they
believed in fighting Hitler, you see, they were all for the war. They
were not isolationists at all. He and John L. Lewis had broken by then
and Lewis was leading his efforts for isolation and Wilkie. So, I don't
know whether he sent
How much of the anti-Communism that went on then was wrapped up with the party's position in terms of the war?
Quite a lot. You see, when the Communist party switched, you see, the united front had been the line of the party for years, by that time. Ever since fascism had begun to rise. During all of the Spanish War, the united front was a great thing, a democratic force and so on. And then, when the democracies, England and France and the United States, refused to support a duly elected government in Spain, and wouldn't even send them even any materials to fight with and while Germany and Italy were supplying Franco with all the munitions and airplanes in the world, at that point, Russia said, "To hell with them." No, I think that even after that, Litvinoff tried to get some anti-Hitler coalition going.
That break didn't come until the Chamberlain deal.
Litvinoff, you see, was a great united fronter and
It wasn't Esperanto, it was a basic simplified language. . . . Basic English.
Simplified English, maybe that was it. . . .
They had about five or six hundred words and they would use them to. . . .
Well, Madame Litvinoff was then married to Maxim Litvinoff and living in
Moscow and in addition to being the wife of the Foreign Minister, which
he was at that time, she was also a great expert on Basic English. So
was this friend of ours, Janie Siepman, was going to China to visit the
Lattimores, who were living in China at that time, Owen Lattimore. So,
she stopped by Moscow and got in contact with Madame Litvinoff and took
some lessons from her in Basic English and got the books and all and she
and Madame Litvinoff struck up this very warm friendship. So, when
Madame Litvinoff came to Washington as the wife of the Ambassador, and
he became Ambassador, Janie renewed the acquaintance and they got to be
very devoted friends. So, we had a carpool then, that
Well, there was a subdivision going on and they called it "revolutionary homes"
And she said, "Well, I don't think I see anything revolutionary about
that." We thought that was a very funny remark, you know, and we said,
"Well, what do you know about a revolution?" And she said, "Well, I know
quite a bit about revolutions." We said, "Why?" She said, "Well, I'm
Maxim Litvinoff's wife." So, that did make her sort of an expert,
although she hadn't been through the revolution.
Is this the story that you started to tell about how you first got interested in foreign policy and awakened to what was going on?
No, the first way that I got awakened to foreign policy was through Decca
and Esmond Romilly, right after or during the Spanish War. Dinky Donk's
mother and father. You don't know Dinky Donk? Well, Sue does?
Dinky Donk is Dinky Romilly, who was in SNCC and married . . . lived with, I thought that they were married, but Virginia tells me that they were just living together, but with Jim Foreman. I think you may have met her.
Well, I was conscious of the Spanish Revolution and. . . .
Decca is Jessica Mitford.
The writer, you know. Have you ever read her book called Daughters and Rebels or The American Way of
Death and all that? Well, shall I tell that story?
Mitford was her married name?
Well, she is Jessica Truehaft now. She married Churchill's wife's nephew first. Well, now let's see, I'll try to condense that, but o.k., well . . . let's see. Before the war broke out. . . .
You were very much concerned with the war in Spain and. . . .
Oh, yes, I was very much concerned with it. You see, the war in Spain was
a tremendously popular war for the democracies, not for the countries,
but for the people. You know that For Whom the Bell
Tolls was written by Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn
wrote all those wonderful journalistic accounts of it and then, who was
that boy that got killed over there? And then the Lincoln Brigade, you
know. Oh, the Spanish War was a very romantic episode in the life of
everybody who was active at that time. You see, it was a democratically
elected government that was being overthrown by a military usurper. So,
I went to a meeting of the Spanish Relief Committee or the Spanish Aid
Committee at Mrs. Pinchot's. Mrs. Pinchot was the wife of the
ex-governor of Pennsylvania named Gifford Pinchot who was all involved
in the forestry fight. . . .
He was the first environmentalist, back in Teddy Roosevelt's time.
And Mrs. Pinchot was some rich lady from New York named Cooper, the
Cooper Union family . . . anyway, she was older than I am now, and of
course, I tint my hair a little bit, but her's was just firey red, it
was just the color of that truck out there, except a little more orange.
Sounds awful.
Well, it was beautiful, but it was a little startling at first, I must
say. And pheasants are not so grand, really, they are kind of dry. And
she lived in this really elegant style and she had butlers and footmen
and maids, but nothing to drink. But there was a catch about Mrs.
Gifford Pinchot's parties which we soon found out, which was that they
were
Well, you and the children had this bad habit of wanting to eat.
That's right, but anyway, I got an invitation from Mrs. Pinchot and this
must have been right at the end of the Spanish War and New
Republic. Now, let me explain who he was. His mother was one of
the Whitneys, you know, the big rich Whitneys and she married. . .
..
Let's place him.
That's right. Well, you have to find out where the money comes from,
after all, he is worth maybe a half a billion dollars, you know and
still is. He's probably worth a billion today, I saw his house last
summer up in Martha's Vineyard and the house cost a million dollars I'll
bet Well, anyway, he was a very handsome boy and his mother had married
Williard Straight, who was a member of the Morgan firm, the J.P. Morgan
firm, and he built the railroads in China. Of course, they made a good
deal of money out of them. But anyway, he died and she went to England
and married a Mr. Elmhurst and they have a famous school called
Darlington Hall. It was where Sean O'Casey sent his son. Have you ever
read Sean
The bibliography is growing.
Sean O'Casey, his autobiography. Well, anyway, this was a very
progressive school and they took the side of the Spanish Loyalists of
the Democratic government,
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
haven't you ever read about Virginia Woolf's nephew? Well, these were the
great heroes, these were the young men in their twenties who died for
the faith, you know. They were all beautiful, all handsome, all wrote
poetry and all were just great romantic heroes. And they died in Spain
and so, the whole history of the New Republic, you see, his mother was
a great liberal do-gooder. So, Mike began to run the New
Republic, and Helen Fuller, who was a girl
So, she could place her.
Well, this was. . . ..
I would never have made it in one of your stories.
I couldn't have placed you.
Well, that's digressing.
Yes, it is. Well, he never would go. He just hated them, but I loved
them, you know. I adored them. Daughters
and Rebels, it is a very fine book. So, we got into the war
and. . . ..
No, we hadn't gotten into the war then, it. . . .
No, but England was at war and it was the period of
Yes, you know that they had about a year where nothing happened.
Well, Esmond came up at Christmas to borrow some money to put into this bar, from Mr. Eugene Myer, which he got, and he came out to see us. At that time, you see, England was in the war and I don't know if I asked him about it or what, but he said, "I'll never go to war for England as long as Chamberlain is Premier. He is nothing but a Birmingham broker and he is money mad and those Chamberlains are just money people. . . ."
"Tradesmen."
That's right, "Tradesmen." It was a very aristocratic sort of looking
down on the Chamberlains. Well, of course, Chamberlain had just sold out
England, you know, and just acted sawful. But he said, "If my uncle,
Winston Churchill, gets to be Prime Minister, I will go because I know
that he will fight." I said, "Why do you know that he'll fight?" And he
said, "Because he and his crowd own England and they will fight for what
is theirs. Even if they don't own it, they think they do so they'll
fight."
He had gone to join the air force and leave?
Well, he had gone to Canada.
He was training up in Canada.
But he was going to be back.
Oh, yes, he was going to be back but he wasn't going to be back for some
time. So, I said, "You stay here until you get over being sick, because
you can't possibly go to New York and get a job throwing up the way that
you are." So, she agreed. Well, in the meantime, Cliff had gone to
Oxford, you know, had been a Rhodes scholar, so he got a letter from
Oxford saying that they were trying to send all the dons and their wives
over to America because Hitler was threatening to bomb Oxford and
Cambridge. You know, they had a series of what they called the Bacdeker
Raids, when they bombed places like Coventry, you know, and destroyed
the cathedral. You know, it was just smashed flat. Well, Hitler said
that he was going to bomb Oxford and bomb Cambridge and bomb everything
that was sacred, like he bombed St. Paul's. So, Cliff got this letter
asking him to take a regugee, and the lady's name was Mrs. Woozley and
her husband was the librarian of Queen's College. Well, Cliff said that
he thought we had to take her. She had a baby and he said that we had to
take her. Oh, God! In my house at that time, Cliff and myself and Anne
and Lucy and Tilla, you see, the little boy had died, and then my
mother, my father came up very often and then Decca, that made nine and
then there was this woman and her, well, and if the baby came, that
would be eleven. Well, you know, eleven people is quite a lot to feed on
rations and
You were looking for a British refugee and you had one right there.
We had all become devoted to her by then and it was all a big joke, you
know. So, she stayed on until her baby came. Esmond came down for
Christmas and then he came down to see the baby and then he flew over to
Scotland where he was going to be with the air force. So, about March. .
. .
I haven't met her.
Well, she makes a joke of everything, you know and
When did she come?
She came up. . . .
During the war?
During the war or right before the war, but she was suffering from melancholia and so she just wept and wept all the time.
And your father was. . . ..
Well, he stayed in Birmingham, but he visited a lot. And that was seven people. Then, there was Decca and Dinky Donk, that was nine.
Then, another thing that happened was Lowell Mellett, who had been head
of the National Emergency Council lived right down the road and he had
become a White House aide and he had a Japanese butler named . . . well,
it will come to me in a minute. Anyway, he was a very elegant butler,
but when Lowell Mellett got to be a White House aide, the FBI said,
"Look, you can't have a Japanese butler that is not even a citizen of
the United States in your house when you are on a hot line to the White
House." So, Lowell came up and asked me if I would take him. I said,' "
Lowell, I can't take a Japanese butler. He can't cook or wash or nurse
Was he still at the RFC then or. . . .
No, he was on the Federal Communications Commission then. Well, anyway,
Saiko was a marvelous cook, she did everything beautifully. You couldn't
imagine anything that she didn't do perfectly. She would clean a room so
well that it shined. If she washed or ironed, it was perfect and if she
mended clothes, you couldn't see the stitches. Everything that she did
was perfect and she was the sweetest, kindest, best woman that I have
ever known. Then, there was a white woman working
And you were still involved in the poll tax and. . . .
Oh, I was still involved in the poll tax, but the FBI wasn't
Was the FBI embarrased?
No, they aren't ever embarrased.
I was going to ask if you got involved at all in the issue of civil liberties for the Japanese-Americans on the west coast.
No, Hugo wrote the decision interning them.
Well, what did you think. . . .
Well, I didn't have much to do with it. Cliff thought that it was wrong at the time, I remember him saying that. I was so busy at that time. I still did the poll tax, but there was another girl there that ran it. A perfectly beautiful girl, great big blue eyes and lovely hair, but I can't remember her name. Wonderful person, Katherine somebody. She ran it, because I was really involved at this point just trying to run the house and all and I couldn't get down there for more than once a week, or sometimes twice.
Kreuger talks about that and intimates that at the national meeting of the Southern Conference, where they wanted a panel on civil liberties and that you were on it. He says that that panel, said that under the pressures of war, some civil liberties had to be removed, that it sort of justified what was being done.
I don't remember any of that at all. Iwas
What about this thing with McAllister. I came across some letters in the Frank Graham papers about this incident in which McAllister said that you said that he said Frank Graham was a Communist.
Well, he did. He said that Mrs. Bethune was a Communist and so, I said, "Well, if you want to call her a Communist, call her one openly, don't call her a Communist behind her back."
He denied it. . . .
He denied it, but it was a lie, because I had proof from people who were
there and heard him say it. He was a nasty character and a dangerous
fellow. I know that he. . . .you see, you've got to understand my
position, which still is strange. While I was not a Communist, as long
as the Communists were doing what I believed in, which was fighting the
war . . . now, when they didn't fight the war, when they had that period
of the Stalin-Hitler pact, I said that I thought Russia had a perfect
right to do that, because the democracies had let her down and hadn't
supported her in the fight against fascism. So, if she wanted to buy
more time to make a deal with Hitler, I didn't see anything wrong with
that. But what I thought was so stupid and I still think it was stupid,
was for the American Communist Party and the people that went along with
them, to say that it was an imperialist war and that Hitler's rule was
not any worse than the democracies and all that kind of junk. It was
crazy. Well, in any case, I thought that red baiting was the most
Sure. ZZ!
Were there people like yourself?
Sure, lots of them. Clark Foreman was one of them and Frank Graham, more or less. He got kind of red baited when he ran for the Senate and he asked me to write him a letter assuring people that he was not a red, which I did. But there were lots of people like me. Well, oddly enough, Barry Bingham and Mark Ethridge didn't red bait, as I recall. And Mike Straight didn't red bait at that time. He had just been red baited himself. There were a lot of people that didn't. There were so many people who didn't know what it was all about, who were still thinking in terms of the local issues, or the down to earth issues of their jobs, pay and stuff like that. This Communist business was always sort of a . . . it ruffled the waves, but it wasn't the waves, if you know what I mean. There weren't enough Communists really, to make the great decisions. If they hadn't been red baited and made into such an issue by the reactionaries, you know, they would have just gone along as a small group who were supporting the war when it came, this,that and the other. What made them such an issue was the reactionaries were always using them to defeat the things that you were working for, like anything, the TVA, or the agricultural administration or the poll tax. Simple things that the New Deal was working for, the reactionaries like Martin Dies red baiting the labor unions, you know, they reactionaries used the Communists to try to kill them.
Well, the rationale that anti-Communist liberals give for their own red baiting or their refusal to work with Communists is exactly what you are saying, that if they worked with Communists, they could then be red baited and they wouldn't be able to do the things that. . . ..
Well, I know, but that's not the Communists' fault. It is the
reactionaries fault. And the thing about it is that if you swallow that
red baiting, then you are done for, because as you know, they say that
"if they come for them in the morning, then they will come for you in
the afternoon," or whatever it is. I forget the phrase, but the point
is, you see, you can't imagine what it was like at that time, and this
is why is why I get on badly with Mike Welch let's say, because I don't
see how an American Communist cannot defend free speech and the Bill of
Rights and the Constitution. I think that if they want to say, "O.K.,
let Russia be a dictatorship, O.K." I don't care if Russia is one, if it
is. But they defend all the time, you know, things about Russia, saying
that it is a free democracy, much better than we have got. I do think
that they get people jobs and they have raised the standards of living
and o.k., for Russia, that is great. But that is not the United States.
And for the American Communists not to defend the right of free speech,
and this is what makes it so paradoxical to me, this is why I have these
great debates with John Abt by letter, is that they were the most ardent
defenders of free speech, when they were fighting for their rights and
the Communist unions were fighting for their rights all through he
LaFollette Committee. Nobody fought for free speech harder and all
through the history of the Communist party, free speech was a great
issue. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and all the great battles in New Jersey,
were for you know and you go back to the very beginnings of the
Socialist party in free speech,
People have a sort of instrumentalist view of free speech, though. I think a lot of people didn't see those kinds of civil liberties as ends in themselves but they took a stand on free speech and the right of assembly because without that, they couldn't organize.
I don't believe that. Now, I never had a closer, sweeter or dearer friend
in my life than Marcantonio and he would have died for free speech. He
believed in it as absolutely as a man could believe in anything. And he
never did a dishonorable thing in his life or anything that he didn't
speak the truth about. He was a great man and a great leader, he did a
whole lot for people, you know. And John Abt, this is why John and I
have these long arguments, John Abt was marvelous in the La Follettee
committee. There was nobody that ever did more than he did for free
speech then. Now, why would he come around today and defend the
Russians' treatment of the Jews and he is a Jew? It is beyond me, I just
get all bogged down in it. Well, anyway, where were we at?. . . . Decca,
we were still. . . ..
We were starting to get back to talking about the Southern Conference.
I wanted to ask you about the Southern Conference Washington Committee and how that related to the southern office of the Southern Conference.
Well, you see what we did was, the Southern Conference was not exempt
from taxation. It was started as a political organization not tax
exempt, you see. The idea was that we could have a state committee in
Virginia, a state committee in North Carolina, a state committee in
Georgia, in Tennessee and we had one in Alabama that Aubrey Williams was
head of. So, the effort was to start state committees and these
committees would be engaged in active politics trying to get people to
run for office and be political committees. Of course, you see, the
Democratic party at that time was such an oligarchy and so closely
confined to so few people and we were trying very hard to broaden the
base, you know, and trying to get more people to come in and take part
in politics. So, Jim Rambowski had his headquarters at highland and Jim
and Myles . . . well, anyway Jim wanted to leave
Now, what was that about?
I never did know exactly. He and Myles . . . you know, Myles was a very strong person, a very strong natured person, if you know what I mean.
But Jim stayed there longer than, or rather, he stayed there a pretty long time.
A pretty long time. I don't know how long, but it was a pretty long time.
You know, it was founded by Jim and Myles and Don West and so, Jim came
up . . . the Southern Conference wanted a secretary and you see, Joe
Gelders went into the Army. He was forty-five years old, but when the
war came, when Russia got into the war, Joe's one idea was to get into
So, did he work with you on the poll tax committee up until that time?
Yeah. Well, he had worked with the Southern Conference in various
capacities, too, as I recall. But he had a lot of stomach troubles,
ulcers and things. Now, I remember that in Nashville in '42, I remember
that in Chattanooga, when they were having this foreign policy struggle
and the mineworkers were there. Then, in '42, he was already in the army
and he came to Nashville and he was in uniform. But he was transferred
out to California and in the meantime, while he was sick and all, Audrey
Williams had gotten his wife a job in the NYA, in Birmingham. They lived
in a little place called Trussville outside of there. So, Joe joined the
army and was transferred out to California and then Esther went and took
the two girls and he had some trouble, I forget what it was, from an FBI
report or some sort of red baiting that happened out that. But I think
that he stayed in the army until the war was over. He was way out in
California and while we wrote every once in awhile, we didn't have that
close
Some of your letters to him are in the Southern Conference papers at Tuskagee.
Oh, they are? I didn't know that. Well, in any case, he lived on in
California and I think that he worked in one of the universities.
Now, Jim came on in '40 or '41?
Well, Jim came on and became the secretary of the Southern Conference in
. . . well, by the time of the Nashville meeting, he was the secretary.
I know that Clark and I and all kinds of other people helped him get the
job because we thought that he would just be marvelous and he was. So,
by the time
When was Clark elected president?
[END OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE B]
I think that he was elected president in Nashville. I know that Frank
Graham began to get worried, he certainly didn't like the isolationist
sentiment in Chattanooga. But you see, there is this with Frank Graham,
and he was a lovely fellow and I was very fond of him and admired him,
but he fell into the same trap that others did. Instead of blaming John
L. Lewis and the mineworkers for the isolationist sentiment and the
resolutions and all like that to stay out of the war, he blamed the
Communists. You see, this is so typical of that whole era. There would
be three Communists there and three hundred mineworkers, but they would
blame the Communists rather than the mineworkers, if you are getting my
But you don't think that Clark was elected president until Nashville?
I think that it was then. I just don't remember. I remember that . . . no, Clark, you see, went off to the war and stayed for two years or more. Maybe he wasn't even elected in '42. Didn't you get all that down when you talked to him?
Yes, we have all that in an interview.
Well, you can check all that, because you see, he went off and served in the war and I don't believe he got elected president until he got back from the war. I believe that was when we had a meeting up in North Carolina.
But anyway, up in Nashville, Jim was the secretary and Mrs. Roosevelt
came down again. That was in the middle of the war, you see, and we were
all united again to defeat Hitler. Paul Robeson came down and sang.
Then, there was a fellow there named Louis Burnham, do you know who
The Hermitage?
I think so. Anyway, we got there and I had just got in, you know, and Jim
said, "Virginia, we are having a meeting of the board, you see, I was on
the board. I don't know whether I was vice-president then or not. I
can't remember. Isn't that ridiculous? I know that I was vice-president
of the poll tax thing, but I don't know if I was of the Conference or
not. So, we went to the elevator and in the group, there was Mrs.
Roosevelt and Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune, Jim Dombrowski and I believe
there was Dr. Charles Johnson of Fisk and me. So, we went to the
elevator and the elevator operator, a young black boy said to Mrs. Mary
McLeod Bethune, "I am sorry Mrs. Bethune, but you cannot ride this
elevator, you will have to ride the freight elevator." Well, Dr.
Johnson, I think he was there, but I don't remember him playing any part
in this episode. Well, Mrs. Bethune drew herself up in all her majesty
and said, "Young man, Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune is not freight." So, with
that, she began to walk upstairs. It was on the fifth floor and she had
awful asthma, you know. So, she would pause at every landing and gasp
and by the time we got upon the fifth floor, we thought she was dead for
sure. We were scared to death. Here we were, the wife of the president
and all, and scared to death. Mrs. Bethune was a consumate actress, you
know, so we never could be sure just
What was Burnham doing at that time?
Was that when he was with the Negro Youth Conference . . . I don't know.
I just remember that was what he did and you've got to remember that he
was one of the people that broke the segregation at the hotel, too. Of
course, Paul Robeson came down in his magnificence, you see
Well, only on records.
It was marvelous, just terrific. In any case, that Nashville meeting, as I recall, went off fairly well, except for that fight that I had with that McAllister. He was going around red-baiting everybody.
The Socialists weren't sending people by `42, were they?
He was there.
The Southern Tenant Farmers Union didn't let anybody go then.
Well, I don't remember. I wish I could that . . . You know, that is so
long ago and I just can't remember all these dates. I can remember the
episode about Mrs. Bethune and I can remember too . . . let's see what
else happened there because I know that Louis Burnham was there, that
thing about him putting on a turban and then I remember McAllister
sliming around telling people that others were Communists and spreading
suspicions. And there was a fellow from the textile workers named Roy
Lawrence, he was another slimy character. He was always saying to me,
"Well, Mrs. Durr, I suppose that you want to know what the ‘workers’ think." He thought that was a really great blow.
‘workers’ think. And then, when they get out
to mow you down and destroy you, you know, a lot of them
The big controversy was over John Thompson.
Oh, John Thompson was a saint on earth, poor man, he is dead now. He came from someplace, Oklahoma. He was at the University of Oklahoma and then he went up to Chicago, you know, to the chapel there and he was one of the most saint-like creatures that I have ever known. You see, Jim and Myles and John Thompson and Don West had all been at the Union Theological Seminary and had studied under Harry Ward. He was sort of their guiding light. He was a tremendous old fellow. But I think that the meeting in Nashville went off pretty well, as I recall. I don't remember any particularly . . . except for that McAllister character.
And then Jim set up a national office in Nashville.
Well, he had already set it up. He set up in Nashville and then they had that sort of terrible massacre shooting right near Nashville.
Columbia.
Columbia . . . where they went down and shot into all the black homes and all. He set up some sort of . . . now, that shows you another example of how things were. About how difficult things were made. So, after that shooting, I don't remember what triggered it off, but they just rode through the black community shooting at houses, you know and for days, the black people just stayed in their houses with the shades down, scared to go out to get a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk. It was just under siege.
There was something about a black soldier who had just returned from World War II and he objected to the way that his mother had been treated and so they reacted.
Well, I remember that Jim and some other people started a committee to
protect these people or help these people in Columbia. So, I was a
member of that committee and we met in Washington and had a meeting at
the YWCA,, I think. There were lots of people there, left wing union
people, right wing union people, lots of union people there. Well, then
when I . . . the next day, I got a call from Walter White and he said,
"Mrs. Durr, we are forming a committee to protect the people in Columbia
and I want you to join." I said, "Well, Mr. White, I have already joined
the committee." He said, "Mrs. Durr, if you join that
committee, you are going to be sorry, it has Communists in it." That
same old thing, you know. But he got furious with me. He was just mad as
a top. You see, he had gotten to be a real . . . this was so typical.
Two committees were formed and the New York committee wouldn't have
anything to do with the Washington committee because they had, or New
York said that they had two Communists on the Washington committee. I
can't even remember who they were talking about. It was incessant, it
never let up. You just got so sick of it. But the Washington committee
of the Southern Conference was quite active. We used to have these
meetings at the YWCA, have luncheon meetings and have speakers and we
took up a lot of issues. It was quite lively. Then, we lobbied on the
hill for various acts, including the anti-poll tax, so it was really
quite an active group. They had that Watergate meeting for Henry Wallace
and that got all tied up with being investigated by the Un-American
Committee.
What else do you remember the Washington committee being involved in?
Well, we had a dinner, the one that I told you about for Hugo, and that
was one of the biggest things that we got involved in. Now, as I said,
the emphasis had gone from labor to the war and now it was on
You might tell the way that we arranged to get the hotel.
Oh, the way that we arranged to get the hotel. Well, Bill Douglas's brother was head of the Statler chain and he had married a girl from Montgomery named Florence Peebles. So, Bill got his brother to allow us to have this dinner at the Statler Hotel and this was the first big breakthrough on the hotels in Washington and so, we had this great big dinner in honor of Hugo. As I said, most of the Supreme Court came and it was really quite an affair. Lots of people came and it was a mixed gathering. Of course, we were all red baited too, and people were calling up and being told not to come and there was a lot of hoorah about it, but it went off very successfully.
Do you remember any kind of tension between Dombrowski and Foreman?
Oh, good God, yes! Talk about being a bridge! It was like walking a
tightrope. You couldn't have had two people that were more
What else was pulling them apart besides that difference in styles?
I can't think of anything else, really.
But how did you try to deal with it, to act as a bridge?
Don't ask me. It just seems to me that I spent hours and days of my life trying to make peace between them. But Jim never would say, you see, he's a very controlled and contained person. But Clark would just get mad and break out and it was really difficult.
Was there any competition between them about the leadership role?
No, no. Not at all. Jim was perfectly satisfied being the secretary. He
didn't have any desire to be . . . no, no, it wasn't that,
Did the Washington committee function during that time as a fund raising office and committee for the whole Southern Conference? You were on the fund raising committee.
We were always trying to raise money.
Where did the Southern Conference get this money, besides from. . . .
Oh, lots of people gave money. We were not exempt from taxes, so we didn't get tax exempt money from foundations. Well, I told you that Luke Wilson's mother gave us money, certainly for the poll tax. Then, there was a man over in Baltimore,4 I can't remember his name, but he gave us some money. We collected money by mail. You see, the unions gave us money, this was the main thing, the unions gave us money. They gave us monthly money. For instance, a lot of the unions just gave us a monthly allotment of money. The unions provided the money in those days for most everything.
Did the unions stop giving you money when they decided that there were too many Communists in it?
Oh sure. But that time, it had all broken up, you see. The whole union
movement had broken up. They broke up and then broke us up. All the
money sort of dried up and all the unions were fighting each other. It
got so that . . . for instance, let's take the United Electrical
Workers.
Phil Murray?
Yeah, and so did Joe Curran. You see, whenever they stopped being reds
and became Catholics . . . you see, they had been Catholics but they
became reds and then they went back to being Catholics. They would have
to get right with God and the Church and the priest. Cardinal Spellman
was a big anti-Communist leader of the Catholic Church. He was the one
that kept Roosevelt from sending anything to the Spanish War. Jim
Farley, you see, was the chairman of the Democratic Party, and he was a
big Catholic. There was Catholic influence
I was thinking that we could go on and talk about how the Southern Conference got so involved in the Progressive Party campaign.
Well, that's what I wanted to go on to. Well, then, as I remember, Clark
came back and we had a meeting in North Carolina. I can't remember where
it was. (Greensboro, North Carolina in January, 1947) But we still had
segregation. So, we met at some hotel there and this is just an episode
about Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune, which illustrates the situation; we had
permission to meet in the hotel. So, when lunchtime came, Jim was the
secretary and he got up and in the sweetest way said, "Well, you know,
I'm terribly sorry, but the hotel won't serve any of our black members
and we have arranged for you to be carried over to the Negro school."
So, Mrs. Bethune got up and she just let out a real diatribe. She said,
"Now, look Jim Dombrowski, when you arrange a meeting, you arrange for
us to eat together. We are not going to be shunted off this way." Oh,
she got very upset about it and poor Jim was just terribly upset. But
Mrs. Bethune refused to go over to the black school to eat. I said,
"Mrs. Bethune, you come on up to my room and I will get you a sandwich."
I wanted her to lie down because she was an old lady and . . . she
didn't have an asthma attact that time, but she was pretty agitated and
got everybody else pretty agitated too. Mrs. Bethune could make the most
marvelous speech about black roses. You've never heard her rose garden
speech? About how she went into this lovely rose garden and there was a
pink rose and a yellow rose and a white rose and the red rose and then
one day, she went into the garden and there was a black rose, the most
beautiful rose of all. She was a masterful orator. She was an amazing
woman. So, I took her up to my room and she lay down on the bed and I
called down to the dining room
I would like to hear the story about Mary Church Terrell, while you are on stories.
Oh, Mary Church Terrell was an extremely old lady . . . this is a very
strange story . . . she was extremely old when I knew her. She was very
light and she wore these high boned . . . my mother used to wear them,
they were made out of net and had little whale bones and the idea was to
hold up your double chin, I guess, or your sagging chin. But they had
little frills on top. Old ladies used to wear them all the time. You
see, when people got to my age in those days, they dressed like old
ladies. They didn't put a henna rinse on their hair and they wore black
dresses and white frills and these high collars with these little whale
bones, you know. It held their neck up, if you know what I mean. And
very attractive, really. Because that awful bloodhound look that you
get. I want to have my face lifted, but Cliff won't . . .
What if some psychiatrist looked at your face, what is he going to come
out with there?
Well, I was just giving the difference between old ladies in those days
and old ladies now. Everybody wants to be young and then, everyone just
accepted the fact that they got old and dressed old and looked old. Mrs.
Mary Church Terrell looked old and she dressed old. She wore a little
kind of bonnet and always wore black and always had these white frills
on and white gloves and pearls and earrings. She was a very handsome
woman and very charming and intelligent and very nice. She was the head
of the Republican Women. So, she came to the anti-poll tax meetings for
years. And we were very friendly and pleasant and so one day, she said
to me something about coming from Memphis, Tennessee. And I said, "You
know, my Mother's family came from Memphis, Tennessee." And she said,
"What was your mother's family name?" I said, "Patterson." She said,
"You couldn't be the grand-daughter of JosiahPatterson, could you?" I
said, "Yes." She said, "Well, he was my guardian." I said, "My
grandfather was your guardian?" You know, this really gave me quite a
turn. It just seemed incredible. She said, "Yes, yes. I have a great
many letters from him and from your uncle, Governor Patterson, and if
you will come to my house one day, I'II show them to you." So, she lived
in one of those brownstones in Washington, up on one of those avenues
with trees and everything. A nice old Victorian house and it was all
furnished with Victorian things inside. You see, her husband had been a
judge, Judge Terrell, a Negro judge. So, she showed me these letters
from my grandfather and my uncle, and this is the story that she told
me, which really shook me up, because it was something else that I
hadn't known. You see, my grandfather lived in Memphis and was a lawyer
and he went off to war, one of his best
He was black.
Well, he was half black. So, he gave him his name and said, "Now look, you are my son, I have claimed you and given you my name and I don't want you to ever let a white man treat you like a nigger." Or something like that, I can't remember the exact words. Anyway, it was to hold up your head and be proud. Well, Bob Church, Jr. became the black political boss of Memphis and this was first time that blacks voted after the disenfranchising acts, because he formed an alliance with old Ed Crump and he provided the black vote for Ed Crump. They would bring them in from Arkansas by the truckload and vote them in the Memphis elections. They controlled the city for years and years. And this Mary Church Terrell was old Bob Church's daughter. She had been sent to Oberlin College up in Ohio to school. You know that that was one of the first integrated schools. Then, his son, Bob Church Jr.'s son had some break with Ed Crump after his father died, I never did know the details of that story, but he had gone to Chicago and become part of the political power there, in the Republican party. And Mrs. Terrell, you see, was also in the Republican party. So, she told me all this and she had the letters to prove it, you know.
Well, you skipped a bit there, about how your grandfather got to be a
guardian under the will of old Colonel Church. By this will, he
Yes, of the black Church children. Now, that was a very surprising thing
for me to find out because that was the first time that I had realized
that all these relationships had existed. You know, some of the white
men did protect their children, their black children, and educated them.
Here in Alabama, Governor Oates, when he was running for governor, they
got up in the legislature and said, "Well, what about all those nigger
children you've got in the back yard?" And the governor got up and said,
"What about them? I feed them, I clothe them, I house them and I educate
them. What do you do about yours?"
Well, what happened about the Progressive Party was that the Cold War
started and Henry Wallace was opposing it and Mike Straight with the New Republic was working with Henry and he made Henry,
when Truman fired Henry, Mike made him the editor of the New Republic. Haven't you read all these books on Henry
Wallace? Well, Henry had traveled all over the world and he traveled all
over the country making speeches and finally, the political action
committee of the CIO supported him and the Citizen's Political Action
Committee. So, he got quite a lot of support. There was something called
the Arts, Sciences and Professions and Harold Ickes was head of that for
awhile. All these things would have period of tremendous popularity and
people would join them. At the same time, the ADA was forming, which had
the anti-Communist provisions in it. The Americans for Democratic Action
and so, the lines were being drawn up of the Communists and the
anti-Communists. Not the Communists, really, but the people who were not
Virginia, how exactly did you get involved in the Progressive Citizens of America? That was the predecessor of the Progressive Party.
Well, through Beanie Baldwin. I knew him very well, he was in the
Agricultural Department and became the kind of the executive secretary.
He was a dear friend and his wife. He came from Virginia and he still is
a dear friend.5 Haven't you interviewed
him? He was one of the reasons I joined. I lived in Virginia. There was
no Republican party to speak of, there may have been ten or twelve,
Republicans but I never met any. But the Democratic party of Virginia
was absolutely controlled by Harry Byrd. It was the Byrd machine. 12% of
the voting population voted. It was the lowest of any place in the whole
entire country. You were up against an absolute oligarchy, a total
machine. The Democratic party was the most tightly controlled thing in
Virginia. You couldn't break it to save your life. It was all around PTA by keeping on
voting in Alabama. So, I said o.k., I would become a citizen. I really
liked Virginia. Cliff never did become a citizen of Virginia. He was an
Alabamian from start to finish. He never even thought about being a
citizen of Virginia. So, my neighbor across the way, Mary Walker
Livingston, she was Mary Walton McCandlish. Her family was very
prominent in Virginia
Did you have to pay a poll tax?
Not at this point. Just registered. I was in this precinct, you see, and had to register in this precinct. So, then I came back and said, "Now, Mary Waltors, what do I do next?" She said, "Well, you have to go up to the Fairfax County Courthouse and pay your poll tax." You register in the precinct but pay your poll tax at the courthouse. So, that was about twelve or fifteen miles and I had to go and scrounge around for some more gas to get up there. I went up there and Virginia had a poll tax where you had to pay two years back plus the current year. I had to pay a dollar and ahalf a year and I paid four dollars and a half. You see, I had to pay the two years back that I hadn't paid. So, I thought, "Thank God, this is over. I am registered, I've got my receipt and my receipt for my poll tax." So, the next time that they were having an election, I went down to the place where they voted right down the hill from us and. . . ..
[END OF TAPE 4, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 5, SIDE A]
. . . so, I went up to Mr. Donaldson who ran the polling place, and
said, "Well, I want to vote and check my name on the book." He said,
"But you aren't on the book." I said, "Mr. Donaldson, here is my poll
tax receipt, here is my registration receipt. I must be on the book." He
said, "Well, you are not." I said,
Why didn't the people at the courthouse tell you?
Because they didn't want me to vote. Nobody in Virginia wanted you to vote, they tried to keep you from voting. This was just one of their ways. They didn't tell me because they didn't care about my vote, they didn't care about anybody's vote unless they knew you. If I had been a member of the courthouse ring, you know, or somebody they knew, then they might have told me, but they didn't want me to vote, I was an outsider, a stranger. So, I couldn't vote. I had to go back to the Fairfax County Courthouse and pay something like 27¢ or 17¢ before I ever finally got on the poll book. Now, I went to Wellesley for two years, I had been working on the anti-poll tax for five or six years. I was keenly interested in things then and did my best to find out the best in information and this is what happened when I went to try to register. Now, this was typical of Virginia. 12%, they had the lowest number of people voting in Virginia of any place in the entire South. It was an absolute Byrd machine. So, when the Progessive Citizens of America was formed, they formed a northern Virginia branch and a lot of CIO people lived in northern Virginia. This was not the Political Action Committee, this was the citizen's committee. Beanie Baldwin was the head of that. So, that's why I became a member, because the Democratic party was so hopeless. You know who ran it in my area was Howard Worth Smith. You know, he was the head of the Rules committee, who stopped every New Deal measure from getting through.
Did you think that there really was a possibility that
No, it never crossed my mind that it would win. But the thing was that in the first place, I was really against going to war again after 1945. We lived in a neighborhood where there were a tremendous lot of military people. We weren't too far from the Pentagon, so we were surrounded by all sorts of colonels and generals and military people and they were always talking about the preventive war and war with Russia. So, I really was scared and thinking that we might be getting into war again.
Well, how did you think that a third party could keep that from happening?
Well, let me tell you what happened. This is another story. You see, the Progressive party, I joined the National Citizens PAC, the fact is that I was just crazy about Henry Wallace. He had been a great friend of my sister's and