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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-0023-3, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
This is the final interview in a series of three. Since the previous session, Clifford Durr had died, making the interview feel very different. Virginia wanders several times and remarks how he always managed to pull her thoughts back on track. The interview begins with stories from Clifford's time with the Reconstruction Finance Commission. While there, he encountered the wealthy men from Alabama who had refused to offer him respect, revealing the role of family connections in southern society. She argues that poor manners made poor men. Though Clifford went into the chaos of Washington, D.C., every day, Virginia found peace and companionship among the gentility of Seminary Hill in Alexandria, Virginia. Throughout the interview, she compares the old aristocracy with the nouveau riche in Birmingham.
During the New Deal era, James M. Landis climbed to prominence in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration. Through his wife Stella, Virginia grew interested in New Deal politics and policies, and she also gained an insiders' view of the Landises' marriage. The people she met through Clifford and the Landises pushed her into a greater social awareness, fueling her growing activism. Durr's first participation in activism in Washington, D.C., was as a volunteer with the women's division of the Democratic National Committee. She had discussed this in an earlier interview, but here, she reflects on the other women working with her and the racialized nature of their lobbying group. Though Roosevelt had promised them his support, when the southern senators began to distance themselves from the administration's New Deal policies, Roosevelt dropped the anti-poll tax efforts. Durr explains what that meant for her efforts.
She then returns to the issue of southern poverty, explaining that it motivated
her and other reformers. She also describes how the southern New Dealers
composed The South: Economic Problem Number One in her living
room. This interview reflects a growing awareness of racism in the South, and
Durr describes her relationship with Mary McLeod Bethune, Lucy Randolph Mason
and others. She also discusses in greater detail her impressions of the 1938
Southern Conference on Human Welfare along with its subsequent actions. The
anti-communism of the 1950s disappointed her greatly, and even several decades
later, she found it hard to comprehend why the American public reacted as they
did. The red-baiting that occurred fractured many of the groups Durr admired
most and ultimately undid her own anti-poll tax committee. Durr also talks about
the sexual harassment she and other women working on the Hill endured. During
the last portion of the conversation, she tells stories of the various people
she had know and worked with, including Vito and Miriam Marcantonio, Lee and
Sunny Pressman, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. She maintains that when
Roosevelt died, the entire attitude of the nation changed. After the war,
Clifford worked with the Federal Communications Commission, so he and Virginia
befriended television producers and directors.
This is the final interview in a series of three with Virginia Foster Durr. Since the previous session, Clifford Durr had died, making the interview feel very different from the two in which he had taken part. The interview begins with Durr's growing awareness of racial matters and her activism during their life among the New Dealers in Washington, D.C. Among the topics she touches on are the anti-communism of the 1950s, sexual discrimination on Capitol Hill, and the southern reaction to Roosevelt's New Deal policies.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Well, we . . . I told you why we went to Washington, and that's all on
the tape. And we got to Washington in the early summer of 1933 and Cliff
had already gone up ahead, you see, and was staying with Sister and
Hugo. And they had a house out in Northeast Washington, a very nice
house. We only had one child then, you know, Lula, I mean Ann. And she
was about six years old. So we stayed with the Blacks, oh I suppose a
week or two, until we got an apartment close by them in one of those
great big apartments on Wisconsin Avenue. We got a furnished apartment.
And I began looking around for a house, a place to live. Cliff was
making during the Depression time, seemed a pretty good salary—I think
it was 6500 dollars a month. We thought that was—during the Depression—
was a pretty good salary. And I didn't want to live in Washington. I
wanted to live out in the country,
Did she have any children?
No. She was a thin little thing. She was the niece of the sister of my
nurse who was named Alice, the one who I told you
So here I was in this beautiful old house in Virginia. And my husband was gone all the time. He'd go to work in the morning. He'd come home for a hurried dinner, and then he'd go back and work. He'd come back at two or three in the morning. They were trying to save the banks, you see. The telephone would ring in the night. He was waked up by people calling from every point of the compass saying if we don't get the money—you see he was with the RFC who was trying to save the banks—if you don't get the money here by tommrrow I'll commit suicide, and we'll all be ruined. You know he was working as hard as a man could possibly work. He couldn't work any harder. But the trouble was that sometimes they did commit suicide. That was the awful part about it, was that this desparate voice that would be calling all night . . . And they were working as hard as they could, but some of them did commit suicide.
Were these calls from all over the country?
All over the country.
Banks?
Banks, people in the banks. See, they'd set up this big deposit insurance
to save the banks. The banks were all closed after Roosevelt was
elected. You couldn't get any money out of them at all. And so the
government was putting money into the
Cliff was gone all the time?
Cliff was gone almost all the time.
Did you know very much about the work? Did he come home and talk about what was going on?
If he wasn't too tired. He'd usually come home and go to sleep. He was in
such a state of exhaustion all the time. It was like putting your finger
in the dike. They were afraid the whole country was going to bankruptcy.
It was the strangest kind of time. One funny experience we had which I
thought was amusing because it was so unlike Cliff. Cliff, you know, was
such a model of being a gentleman, having such good manners and very
rarely did he show any irritation or anger or resentment against
anybody. The head of the biggest bank in Birmingham, Alabama, where we
had just come from, came up, and his bank was in bad trouble. So he
thought he was an awful big shot and he went directly to Mr. Jesse
Jones, who was head of the RFC, and wanted Mr. Jesse to handle his
problem immediately. And Mr. Jones says, you'll have to go down and see
Mr. Clifford Durr, who is head of the general counsel for the bank
reorganization division. And so the man said, his name was Mr. Wells, he
was a rather pompous man, had been very rich and very powerful because
he'd been head of the biggest bank in Birmingham. And we had known him,
but only slightly. And so he said to Mr. Jesse Jones, Oh, Mr. Jones, I
couldn't deal with an underling like that, why that's just a local boy
from Birmingham. You know, I want to deal with the big shot, in fact I
think he thought Mr. Jesse Jones ought to get busy and draw up the
papers himself. He said, well, if you don't deal with Clifford Durr, you
just don't deal with anybody, because he happens to be the one, the
lawyer, that's drawing up
Mr. Jones apparently had a lot of respect for Cliff.
Oh, yes, he thought Cliff . . . he had a tremendous amount of respect for Cliff, and Cliff liked him very much. I never did like him at all. I mean personally we just . . . ugh (?) He was a great big overpowering Texas man. He told nasty jokes. You know that kind of dirty jokes I feel like are so offensive to women, that make women the butt of . . . And he'd tell them . . . I just couldn't stand him infact. I never did like him. He had a poor, pitiful little wife who looked like she wore black dresses and knitted black shawls. She was the most pathetic little creature I've ever seen.
Did he tell jokes on her?
No, he told jokes in front of her. But they were all sex jokes. I thought they were extremely bad taste and vulgar. I didn't like Mr. Jones at all, I mean just as a personal thing.
But anyway, that summer I made friends on the Hill and the Dean of the Seminary was there. I was so fond of him. He was staying there. He was a widower. And his niece kept house for him, and she was so nice. There were a lot of people around the Hill that were very nice.
You're talking about Seminary Hill now?
Seminary Hill. It's right outside of Alexandria. It's where
There was a paved road from Alexandria to Washington, but from Alexandria out to Seminary Hill was just a gravel road. And they had a bus that ran twice a day. It was isolated, but it was a real neighborhood. Virginia, you know, has got marvelous manners—the people in Virginia have the most beautiful manners in the world, I think. Everybody called. They were the days when people called.
You mean called to visit, not call on the telephone?
Yes, they came to visit in the afternoons. You were supposed to be prepared for visitors in the afternoons and have iced tea ready and cookies and have on a light dress and be prepared to receive visitors. I could write a whole book about visitors from Seminary Hill because some of them were just absolutely incredible.
Well, tell us about them.
Well. There was one old gentleman . . . The trouble is it was so long ago
now that I'll have to look up my notes to think of the names and maybe
I'd better not tell the names anyway. One day, night, we would take a
walk . . . You've never seen Seminary Hill but it's just a perfectly
beautiful place with the old brick buildings of the Seminary, the brick
buildings to the Virginia Episcopal high school, and this is where the
gentility of Virginia had gone for generations. They never would refer
to it as . . . They would say "The High School," "The Seminary," and
"The University." That meant the Virginia Episcopal High School, the
Virginia Episcopal Theological Seminary, and the University of Virginia.
But nobody ever said that. They would say, "The High School," "The
Seminary," and "The University." And you were supposed to know what that
was. So we would take a walk after supper at
Nobody was even, you know . . . Then there was another very odd, another
couple had rented a house. They lived in Alexandria, but they'd come up
to the Seminary to get out of the city, which was Alexandria, you see..
I don't suppose it's all so long ago. Their names were Herbert, and they
were great aristocrats from Virginia, and in some way they were related
to the Fairfaxes who had settled Virginia. It had been discovered that
the Fairfax who lived in Virginia was the last Lord Fairfax. He'd gone
back and claimed his patrimony. So he had taken Mr. Herbert, who was a
bachelor, with him—he was a great friend of him—and for years he had
lived there in England and been part of the British aristocracy. Lord
Fairfax didn't have much money, but he did have the title, and maybe a
castle. Anyway, Mr. Herbert had lived over there in England for many
years with Lord Fairfax and then either Lord Fairfax fell on hard times
or he did. He came back and was living with his three old-maid sisters,
who had rented a house for the summer right across the road from where
we were at the
But they would fix all of this for their guests.
They would fix this for their guests, really wonderful food, the most
wonderful cooks, or they had a cook, I think. But they would be telling
you the same time about the fact that it was all going to kill you. It
was absolutely deadly cooked food . . . But, you see, nobody thought
they were odd either; they were just taken as a matter of fact, too,
they were
Well, the reason what we were accepted to the degree that we were, and we
really were accepted, was because the Dean of the Seminary had been a
Dr. Crawford, and he had had two, several, beautiful daughters. One of
them particularly beautiful name Alice Crawford. And she came down to
Birmingham as the wife of an Episcopal minister. And my mother and she
were friendly and I had known her, so they vouched for us, if you know
what I mean. They had come back to Virginia and he was teaching in a
Episcopal school somewhere in Virginia. His name was Randolph. And they
were the bluest blood of the bluest blood of Virginia. And they had
known my mother, and Mrs. Randolph was one of the most beautiful women
I've ever seen. I have seen many pretty women, but she was an absolute
beauty. She had perfect features, masses of black hair. You very rarely
see black hair that's wavy and curly and very shiney. And then she had
lovely white skin and slender figure. She had been proposed to, we
always understood, by every millionaire in the country, but she married
Dr. Randolph, who was an Episcopal minister with whom she fell in love.
She was a devoted wife to him because we got to know them quite well. He
finally . . . He was the head of this Episcopal school somewhere in
South Virginia, and he failed the son of the Bishop or he failed the son
of some big contributor or he failed the sons of some very prominent
people in the Episcopal Church. He wouldn't pass them. And there was a
great to-do
But I was trying to contrast some of the odd people. There was a lovely
old man over at the Virginia Episcopal High School that, Mr. Reid, he
was an Englishman. And I was devoted to him, and I would go over real
often in the afternoons and have tea with him, because, being English,
he made delicious tea and he loved to have people drop in for tea. And
when the war started he was very concerned because of course we weren't
in it yet—that was when the Second World War started— So I said to him
one day, Mr. Reid,
And I remember there was a woman that I went to see one time, whom
somebody in Birmingham had asked me to go see, who was a cousin. This
was Tinsley Harrison's relatives, you don't know who he is, you know the
great doctor. Well, this is his mother asked me to go see the cousin. So
I went there, and my heavens, here was this handsome woman with all this
brood of handsome children. The windows were out, and it all looked like
it was just a wreck. Some of the windows were out, and her poor old
mother, or something, was huddling over a little wire. And she greeted
me with perfect grace. So when I came back on a visit, I told Mrs.
Harrison about her cousin and what a desperate time she was having. And
she said that was on account of the fact that her grandfather'd been a
gambler, or maybe it was her father, anyway she laid it all to the fact
that there was a streak of gambling in the family and they'd lost alll
their money. She said, you
From the hubbub of Washington?
From the hubbub of Washington. You'd go across the river to Seminary Hill
and after the Zabriskie's came back, someone died, and we got a house
next door. It was a very pleasant house. And we lived on, we finally
bought a house. So we lived on Seminary Hill, you see, the whole
eighteen years, or nineteen years, we were in Washington. It was a
wonderful place for the children because they could range in this great
territory, you know, it was so safe. It was a neighborhood. And when our
little boy died, I can remember everybody coming over with jelly and
custards and cake and casseroles. So on the social side, on the personal
side, of pleasant living, it was just delightful, absolutely a
There weren't a lot of people on the Hill besides yourself who worked in the New Deal?
None, we were the first ones.
You were completely in the world of Old Virginia.
You were completely in the world of Old Virginia. Now they began to move in, you see. Sister and Hugo finally moved, got a house out there, when he got put on the Supreme Court, but that comes later. No, we were the first ones. So we were received into this world of Old Virginia. And as I say, we were guaranteed by this Mrs. Randolph, who had known my mother in Birmingham, and it was a kind of a, you know, a guarantee that we would not create any disturbance, I suppose. But of course, we did. Everything that happened in Washington was such far removed, if you know what I mean.
So for the first year that you were on Seminary Hill, did you have much to do with Washington?
Not at all. I lived on the Hill. You see we lived in this lovely place, which was the Zabriskie house, which was very large, and we had lots of visitors—people were coming up all the time and staying overnight and having dinner with us.
People from Alabama?
Uh-huh. And then the family all came up and Cliff's family and some of my
family. And of course Sister lived in Washington, too. See Hugo was in
the Senate then from Alabama. But I was
Well now, was your behavior, your not wanting to go to these luncheons, was that looked upon as being odd by the other . . . ?
Well, I don't know if it was or not. I never did bother about it much,
because, the thing was that I, you know, I didn't make any friends in
the RFC particularly, except one named Alley, married Jim Alley—he was
the head of the division. His father and my father'd been to school
together, so there was a family
Did you find that society in Virginia similar to the Alabama aristocracy?
Well, you see, the Virginia society was so different from Birmingham. You
see, Birmingham had a few people who were aristocrats, I mean they
claimed that they hadn't done their washing, as my mother says, in
several generations. They were freed of that. But the Virginia
aristocracy, or the Virginia gentility, was much . . . I can't tell you
because there was no competition. You know, they were just sure of
themselves. They knew that if they were kin to the Randolphs or the
Crawfords or the Patricks or the Jeffersons or the Washingtons . . . And
my father would come to visit us quite often. I told you the story he
told the Virginia ladies that shocked them so terribly. My father would
come to visit us quite often and the ladies would have teas in the
afternoon, all the ladies on the Seminary Hill, very pleasant, you know.
Sit out in the garden if it was warm, then in the winter by a fire and
have . . . And it was pleasant, you know, so I'd take Daddy with me, and
he'd love to go. They'd always invite him because Daddy was very chatty,
you know, and always made himself very pleasant. But he went to one Mrs.
Walker's
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
And this was at the Ladies' Auxiliary?
Yes, this was at the Ladies' Auxiliary, or ladies tea party. Nobody laughed, I can assure you of that. And Daddy was just disgraced. They really didn't think that was funny at all. Because they just spent hours developing these family themes. But they were lovely, sweet people on, you know, a personal level.
Now your father came from an old Alabama family. It must have not been totally alien for him.
Well, it wasn't, but the point was that they made him feel that being from Alabama was kind of a disgrace. If you weren't from Virginia, you know, you really didn't count. You didn't amount to a hill of beans unless you came from Virginia. Of course you could be away from Virginia temporarily, but to leave Virginia, to have your ancestors pick up and leave Virginia, they always thought there must have been something peculiar about you.
So you see, what I've told you, I've lived in so many different levels.
Here, by chance, we got in the middle of the most conservative, sort of
genteel community in northern Virginia, where they'd lived there for
generations, where the houses . . . You know, the old Mason house was
there, you know, the Mason that went with Slidell to England. And so the
first year until I got
Did Ann start to school there at the Seminary?
Yes, but Ann was only about three, about four when we went there. No, let's see, she was older than that because we were married in '26 and she was born in '27, and we went to Washington in '33, so she was 6. So she did start to school, oh and that was . . . She started at St. Agnes, that was the Episcopal school. there. I asked the ladies about the . . . of course St. Agnes was the only school they even thought about going to. The public schools, they said you couldn't even think of sending her to a public school because of the nits. All the children there had nits in their hair. And the public schools of Virginia were so bad that nobody went there, no nice person went there, so St. Agnes was the only school that they ever considered.
Was it like a private school?
Oh, it was a private school. It was run by the Episcopal Church. And we
would have a car pool, and I'd pick up the Zabriskie's, or the
Zabriskie's would pick up Ann or Margaret or Thompkins or, anyway we
would all combine. So I lived my . . .
And by the greatest luck in the world. Just by another great stroke of luck, my next door neighbor was Stella Landis. Stella Landis came from Mississippi. And she came . . . Did you ever read a book called "So Red the Rose" by Stark Young?
I remember you talking about it.
Well, it was written all about her family and about the plantation and
you know that place they all had during the civil rights they had so
much trouble down in south Mississippi? What was the name of that place?
You know, Bob Zellner got beat up there. Macomb. Well, I think their
plantation was near there. Anyway its all written up in a book called
"So Red the Rose" by her cousin that was named Stark Young. And her
mother's father had been Bishop Galloway, who was the presiding bishop
of the Methodist Church of Mississippi. And Stella had gone to Millsaps
College. And she was a tall, thin, I thought, beautiful girl, woman, and
by some strange freak of fate, she had come up to Washington to look for
a job. She didn't want to stay in Mississippi, and if you ever heard
anybody strong against male oppression, she was. She had several
brothers and maybe it was the Bishop too, but anyway she just felt the
women in Mississippi were just treated, you know. And she wasn't one of
the beautiful kind of floating southern belles, you know, She was tall
and thin, and near-sighted and like me read a lot. We were sort of
similar in a way, you know we were both tall and thin and read a lot and
we were near-sighted.
This was sort of in your second year?
This was in about the second or third year, it was the second year I was in Washington.
Had you had another child by that time? Had Lucy come by that time?
No, it was my son. He was born then.
He was born about the second year you were in Washington?
He was born about the second year I was in Washington. He was a beautiful
boy. . . . Stella Landis . . . I began to go out, you know, to go to
hearings. She also was interested in hearings. Stella had worked for the
Scripts-Howard papers. And she was such a bright, interesting woman, so
attractive that old-man Scripts had taken her around the world with him
on his yacht. And this was certainly no scandal connected with that; he
was about 87 then. But he found her such a delightful companion. And she
was, I think, one of the most charming women I ever met in my life. And
Cliff got to know Jim pretty well, because they'd go in the car together
in the morning, but he never did like Jim much. He said Jim was one of
the most cold-blooded, selfish people he'd ever met. He didn't think he
was arrogant and cold-blooded in the sense . . . he was unaware, if you
know what I mean. I don't mean he was deliberately cold-blooded and
selfish; he was just unaware. He was that way with Stella. I remember
the little girls went to St. Agnes, too, and when they would have plays
or put on something, she would have to beg and beg Jim to come, you
know, because they wanted their father to be there. Jim was just
unaware. Whatever he did, he did with his entire concentration, you
know, his entire mind. And he talked very little, but if you'd go there
to dinner, if he drank a great deal, along about 12 o'clock, he'd start
talking. And then he'd talk til 4 o'clock in the morning and be just
absolutely brilliant. You know, he really was just shy and
And of course through Hugo and Cliff, you know, just being up there, too, being free, able to get away on account of having servants. See, I had a yard man and a wash lady and a nurse and a cook. You know, it just seems impossible to think that here on $6500 you would have . . . I think he finally got raised to $7500 by the end of the first year, but that's the way you lived. By this time I had gotten to be a real New Dealer.
Oh, I thought the New Deal was the most marvelous thing in the world. And I had met Aubrey Williams and Anita. You see, they lived in Arlington not very far from us. And I had met them, and we used to go over there on Sundays.
Now what did he do in the New Deal at that point?
Harry Hopkins was head of the WPA, and he was the assistant administrator of the WPA and he also got to be head of the NYA. The Williams had all these boys, you know; they had 4 boys, and they lived in Arlington County which was several miles from where we lived, but on the Virginia side. They had an old house. And they'd have these parties on Sunday. Oh, all kinds of people would come out. Anita was a wonderful cook, and a beautiful woman. I don't know if you've ever seen her or not. She's one of the prettiest women I ever saw. She was a real beauty, too, if you know what I mean, had perfect bone structure. And Aubrey was very gracious and funny and hospitable. His boys were attractive, and they'd have a bright fire, delicious food and drink. People would love to gather at the Williams' on Sunday afternoon. I met a lot of the New Dealers through that. And then I remember meeting Helen Gahagan Douglas there for the first time. She was another of the great beauties. She looked like a Greek goddess; she was just gorgeous. She was a sweet person, too, and very nice. Cliff was very admiring of her.
Was she married to Melvin Douglas at the time?
Uh-huh, yes. Then Pete Seegar I remember meeting there. Well, I'd met Pete first at the Highlander Folk School when he was a boy out of Harvard. Alan Lomax was there. You see the Seeger family lived in Washington.
Alan Lomax was where? At the Williams or at Highlander Folk School?
Well, I met him at the Williams. I met Pete first at Highlander. But they would bring their guitars there, and that was the beginning of the great folk music.. You see Alan Lomax's father was head of the folk music division of the Library of Congress, and Pete Seeger's father was head of the whole music division of the Library of Congress, I believe, I'm sure he was. Anyway, Pete and Alan were the founders of the folk music revival. Taping hadn't come in then; I don't think they even had electronic taping then. But they would go all over the country. When I first saw Pete, he had acne and a dirty sweatshirt on and a pair of dirty jeans and he'd left Harvard and he was going all over the country with a guitar collecting folk music. I just adored him from the very start. He's another pure character that I never had anything but praise and love for. I think he's a wonderful person. But they would come out to the Williams and play folk music. And then there was another place we got to go. Some beautiful girls rented a house next to us on Seminary Hill, and one of them married Tom Eliot.
She married Tom Eliot?
Congressman, he was a congressman from Massachusetts. He was the grandson
of the president of Harvard. Her name was Lois, heavens she was one of
my best friends and I can't remember what her name was before she
married. But anyway, there were 7 or 8 of them that rented this house
for the summer, and they were very attractive, very pretty girls. They
all had jobs in the New Deal in one way or the other. Through them we
got to know a lot of the younger kind of New Dealers, like Jim Rowe and
Jerry Reilly —and he married one of these girls. There were just all
sorts of young men that were coming out to visit these girls. And they
would have square dances. There was lots of music there.
And I thought the WPA and feeding the starving people . . . And then Clark Foreman appeared on the scene, and he was working in the Interior Department trying to find Negroes jobs. Well I had known him at Harvard, you see, and this was a big change in Clark. When I had known him he'd had no interest in those things at all that I knew of. So through him—you remember Will Alexander?—so I got to know some of the people in the agricultural division.
Anyway I got to know a lot of these people in Washington who were in the
New Deal, so I decided I wanted to do something. I had servants; I could
leave the children at home for a morning or an afternoon without feeling
any sense of great guilt. So I volunteered to be a worker in the women's
division of the Democratic National Committee. And I asked Sister and
Hugo if they thought that was all right. And they thought that was a
good idea. There were two very nice southern girl named May Thompson
Evans from North Carolina—she was working in the Women's Division. And
then the head of it was named Dorothy McAlister—she came from Milwaukee,
and her husband later became a judge, and she was an awfully nice woman.
Two or three times a week I'd go down to the Women's Division of the
National Democratic Committee, and I was a volunteer; I didn't get paid.
And I'd clip newspapers and answer the telephone and do whatever
volunteers were supposed to do. But it was lots of fun because Mrs.
Roosevelt would come in quite often. There would be all kinds of women
coming through. What they were trying to do at that time was to . . .
The Women's Division of Democratic National Committee was trying to put
into effect what they called the 50-50 plan, which is that all the
Democratic
Was that considered a radical proposal?
Oh, God, yes. I should say it was. Because in the southern states there was not a single woman on a single Democratic committee. The Democratic National Committeewomen were usually sort of pretty southern women that wore big hats and would sing Dixie.
Whose idea was this, the 50-50?
Well, Mrs. Roosevelt and there was somebody named Molly—what was her name; she came from New York state—and Dorothy McAlister and May Thompson Evans, all these women that were working in the Women's Division were working on the 50-50 plan. So they were particularly worried about the South because there were no southern women on any Democratic committee, I mean local, city, state, anything. They were just completely outside. So they got particularly worried about the South. So they made quite a study of it. They said that the thing that was wrong was the poll tax. The poll tax in all the southern states, you see, had been put on after the Populist uprising, around 1900, when they disenfranchised the Negroes by the white primary and by the poll tax, but they also disenfranchised the poor whites. You see, no women voted. Women didn't start voting until 1920. Very few women voted because if a man, a poor tenant farmer if he had scraped up a dollar and a half to pay his poll tax, he sure as hell wasn't going to pay a dollar and a half for his wife. And they never had any money. And then in Alabama you know, the poll tax was retroactive. If you started voting when you were forty-five, you had to pay 35 dollars because you had to pay back every year you'd missed.
Was it retroactive in a lot of other southern states?
Well, it was retroactive in Virginia for three years back, but in Alabama
it was retroactive from the time you were 21 years old. Now I think the
highest proportion of voting was in Texas, which was about 31%, but then
it got down to 12% in Mississippi. Now this was the proportion of people
who voted of voting age; this wasn't the proportion of population. This
was the people who were eligible to vote over 21. So the South was just
run by an oligarchy composed of
Well, one day I went down as my volunteer to the Democratic National
Committee, and everybody looked like there was a death in the family,
and it seems that the chairman of the Democratic National Committee,
Jim—the big Irishman who later got to be head of the Coco-Cola Company;
he's still alive; he was the campaign manager for Roosevelt—Farley, of
course. Jim Farley was a great, big overpowering fellow from New York,
you know, big Irishman and very genial and all the men were crazy about
him. His wife never did come to Washington. They'd come from very humble
origins, and she was very sensitive. She came to Washington one time and
gave a party and nobody came or something happened; I never was invited,
so I don't remember.
Because of the poll tax, not because of the 50-50?
They weren't going to pay any attention to that anyway, particularly when
women didn't vote, not enough to make any difference. But he was getting
terribly upset about the poll tax because it was kind of catching on. No
bills had been introduced, but it was beginning to sort of catch on. So
now we come up to the year of '36, when Roosevelt won by the greatest
majority in history. I don't know whether Lyndon Johnson got a bigger
vote in '64 or not but anyway in '36 Roosevelt won his second term for
President by the biggest majority at that time had ever been known. He
won every state except Maine and Vermont, I believe. And in the
meantime, you know, the Wagner Act had been passed to unionize the
South, I mean people could unionize. It was part of the NRA, you know,
section 7a. But then when the NRA was declared unconstitutional, they
saved the Wagner Act—he was a senator from New York. That was passed,
which meant that they set up a labor board, you know, and people could
organize without being beat up or put in jail like Bull Connor did. So
the South was awfully agitated about that because you see cheap labor
was their great selling point, to industry, to come down where you've
got cheap Anglo-Saxon, happy, powerless people to work for you for a
whole lot less than they would in New York or New England. And a
Ed Smith, Cotton Ed Smith, said, ain't no nigger never worth more than
50¢ a day. And he was having trouble with all the southerners in the
Congress and Senate anyway. And a lot of them you see were the heads of
the committees, they were the big shots. So he sent word through his
wife. I don't think Farley ever gave us enough attention to come down
and see us in the Division; he went to Roosevelt. Mr. Roosevelt told
Mrs. Roosevelt all those women down there to cool it, to lay off the
poll tax. Well, we had a real indignation meeting, you know. We really
were perfectly indignant about it. Anyway we had this big indignation
meeting. So this was in '36. He had just won the election. In the
meantime you know, he'd lost the Supreme Court fight, about enlarging
the Supreme Court, because they'd also been blocking his measures. So he
launched the famous purge; you remember the purge? He decided that he
himself would go out—he'd won this tremendous victory—and he would go
out and he would try to defeat some of these people who'd been blocking
all his programs. I think he defeated O'Connor in New York; I think he
got him beat. But he came South, and the first one he attacked was
Senator George of Georgia. And he made that famous speech I believe at
Millegeville, near Warm Springs, where he had his winter place there.
And it was the greatest gathering you could imagine of people. And he
said, with Senator George sitting right on the platform, that—you see,
Fascism was rising in Europe then, there was Mussolini and the Spanish
War was going on then and of course Hitler was rising in Germany. So
Roosevelt—it's really one of the greatest speeches of all time— said
that fascism and feudalism were very much the same. Constitution, would never put his name in the
paper as Clark Howell Foreman; he always called him Dr. C. H. Foreman.
They stayed down there several months. Oh, it was just swamped, I mean,
all their old friends, the Piedmont Driving Club and all the people he'd
grown up with and gone to the University with wouldn't have a thing to
do with him. No, he was on the wrong side. And Clark, I wish you could
have interviewed him about his experiences there. They were rough; and
Marian came from Canada, and she had such exquisite manners. She was so
gracious. So they had a rough time of it. Anyway, all the southerners he
tried to beat, Cotton Ed Smith and Senator George, I don't know whether
he took on Bilbo then or not— anyway, they all won. They won
overwhelmingly. The purge was a total failure as far as the South was
concerned. In the meantime the labor unions were having a terrible time.
They were being beat up and put in jail and held incommunicado, and Bull
Connor would just throw them in jail and hold them there for six or 8
months—they never would see anybody. A lot of them were killed; nobody
knows how many were killed.
This is the steelworkers organizing in Birmingham?
Yes, but not only in Alabama; it was all over the South. And this was the
time of the textile strikes
And how much of this were you hearing at the Women's Democratic Division?
Oh, well, I was hearing a lot of it there, but it was all over you know. This was a great crisis, because Roosevelt had put his prestige on the line to change the South, to try to get rid of this bloc that was defeating him on all of his measures, you see. Then Hugo Black came up with the idea of the wage and labor act, which put a ceiling under wages at 25¢ an hour. Well, that just nearly drove people into spasms because they were paying them 10¢ an hour in the turpentine camps and on the sharecroppers and the day labor particularly in the Black Belt with the Negro, you know, 50¢ a day was the going wage there. You see, it was the resistance of the Old South against all this stuff coming down South, paying people good wages and having unions; the Negro would get big ideas. The whole thing was that after the Civil War the sad thing was that the South attracted industry on the basis of cheap wages. There used to be advertisements in all the papers, you know, about the contented . . . low wage, white, contented labor.
Well, in any case—
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Well in any case
Now you're still working daily?
I'm not working daily. I used to go down and volunteer. By that time I had two children; I had three because Lucy had come along by that time. So I had three children; I wasn't quite as free. I still had help, but I wasn't quite as free.
I don't know whether we went back to this meeting the women had after Farley passed the word down.
We just had this meeting. So we discussed an idea of setting up an independent committee to abolish the poll tax. It never came to anything out of the Democratic Committee, but the idea was we would set up an independent committee. But then what happened was that after Roosevelt had been beaten so badly in his purge and after the labor unions were having such a hard time—that's when Ida Sledge got run out of Mississippi and Joe Gelders got beat up.
Well, then the La Follette committee began to investigate the violations of the Wagner Act. Bob La Follette was from Wisconsin, the son of the old Bob La Follette and he was a friend of Sister's and Hugo's and I had met him several times there at dinner, and I thought he was an awful nice fellow—had an awfully nice wife. So I got absolutely absorbed in the La Follette committee. I would go up every morning and stay there all day long, because they were investigating the violations of the Wagner Act, and Harlan County and the steel workers and the automobile workers. This book of Jeremy Brecker's has some of it in it. But there was terrible violence and fires and Pinkertons and detectives and arsenals. All of this was new to me, you know. I had seen the poverty in Alabama, but never the violence. I had never seen, and I was just terribly shocked at this. And then when they got to the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company in Birmingham, Alabama, then I really was just shocked out of my mind.
See, I had never known Joe Gelders, although he had been in college with Cliff at the University of Alabama. But you see he had come down and was head of something called the Southern Civil Rights Committee, who tried to get prisoners out of jail.
What do you mean when you say "he had
He was teaching at the University of Alabama, teaching physics. And when the depression came, he was completely unpolitical. He was married to Ester Frank, who was a beautiful girl from Montgomery—she taught English. And they were a very popular young couple at the University of Alabama, but both of them totally unpolitical. Joe had been raised in Birmingham; his father was quite a wealthy man. He had a brother named Lewis Gelders, whom I'd gone to school with all my life, who married one of the Gussen girls. Mrs. Gussen was quite a famous character in Birmingham. She was a music teacher. But Lewis married one of the Gussen girls, and Joe married Ester Frank from Montgomery. And then they had a sister named Emma, who married one of the Sterns from Anniston. They were a wealthy family, and Emma had gone to Smith. She was older than I was, but Emma Gelders was extremely bright, and she belonged to a group of girls in Birmingham who were older than I was. We always called them the Bluestockings because they'd all been graduated from college, Mary Parkland, Martha Toolmin, and Amelia Worthington. And they discussed books. And they were suffragettes, too! They believed in women's suffrage. And so I knew them, but I didn't know them well. Anyway, Joe Gelders and Ester were down at the University. And when they began the program—this was a New Deal program, too—when Henry Wallace got to be with the Agriculture Department, they began to kill the pigs and plow up the corn and cotton to raise the prices. You see the price was down to nothing. So they destroyed, you know, pigs; they killed them. And they plowed up cotton; they plowed up the corn. But Joe Gelders, who was totally unpolitical, he saw all around him in Tuscaloosa people starving, you know, and nothing to wear, and living just barely from hand to mouth.
See, I cannot describe to you young people about the rickets and pellagra
and the worms and the hookworm, because you say you've never seen it.
Well, I saw it and he saw it: people who were just on the last go-round.
When you see a child that's shaking all over with rickets because they
don't get any protein, it's a pretty horrible sight. See, I saw all
that—I told you before—when I worked in the Junior League
And that's from hookworm?
From hookworm. They were so diseased and lazy. Everybody said the
southerners were so lazy; they didn't like to get out and work. Well,
they had hookworm and they had all these parasitic diseases and
nutritional diseases. You never saw them. And you never saw the children
in the mill villages that worked in the cotton mills. You see it took
me—I was twenty-odd years old before I waked up to it and it was right
around me. And of course you never saw it. But after I did see it, it
got me stirred up. So Joe Gelders saw all this and he got terribly
upset. It was just the irrationality of killing pigs when people were
hungry and plowing up cotton when they didn't have anything to wear. And
you know they were burning wheat in the Midwest. It was the destruction
of things trying to raise the price. So he didn't know a thing about
economics. He had never read a book on economics in his life. So he went
to the library and began to read economics. And he started out with Adam
Smith, I think. Anyway, he went right on through. He read all the books
he could find on economics. He read the Beards, you know, Charles and
Mary Beard. He went right on through the economics shelf. So finally he
got to the socialists, the Webbs. Did you ever try to read the Webbs
book, from England? They were Fabians. Well, he read the Webb book. I
read them in Wellesley, and they were hard reading. But they stirred me
up a little bit there, but not much. But anyway, he
Was he still in Tuscaloosa at the time?
Sure, he was still teaching at the University. He was just converted by reading these books. He never met a Marxist in his life, or a socialist either.
He was not even in the Party at this time?
He never knew there was a party. He never heard of it. You know, he was
just completely blank. He read it, and he decided that this was the
answer to poverty—socialism, or Marx and Engels anyway. It was all
theoretical, you see, because he had no contact. The idea of people
killing pigs and burning up cotton and corn when people were starving;
well, it's rather simple to comprehend that something's wrong anyway. So
Joe began having these meetings at his house. And the next year they
told him they didn't want him to come back. Well, he was very much
surprised. Now I may not have all this straight, but this is my
understanding of it. So he went up to visit his sister, Emma Gelders,
who married one of the Sterns from Anniston, and he was a very rich
man—Roy Stern—I mean he had a big salary. He was a lawyer. They lived on
Long Island someplace, and they had a big house. They had two girls,
Barbara and Ann. So they were very conservative kind of
intellectual—kept up with everything but not radical in the least. So
Joe began to take courses and he looked up the Communist Party and he
got in with the radicals in New York at that time—made contacts with
them. So they told him—and of course I don't know who he dealt with; all
of this is just hearsay—I mean knowledge from my own personal
standpoint. But I know he did get in contact with the radicals in New
York. Now he always said he never actually joined the Communist Party,
in that he was a card-carrying member—maybe they thought it was better
for him not to. Anyway, they told him the best thing he could do was
come South and try to help these
He's now up in New York with his brother-in-law, Roy Stern.
And his sister Emma. So he stayed there that summer. I didn't know him and I don't know how long he stayed in New York. He stayed in New York several months. Anyway, he came down here . . . I think it was part of the Labor Defense League in the National Labor Defense League, but they didn't call it that; they called it the Southern Civil Defense League, or something like that. It was to defend the people who were being put in jail.
And Gelders worked for that?
Yeah, he was head of it. He had an office, in Birmingham.
And then his wife in the meantime had been fired from the University, or left—I don't remember if she was fired or what. And she came and worked with him as his secretary. And they were always bringing lawsuits. He was part of Ted's [Rosengarten] book; he's mentioned in there, you know, as having come down in that case of the sharecropper in Tallassee.
In any case, these people who—one of them I met years later; I met him
in—it was a strange coincidence. He was Don West's brother-in-law. He
was married to one of Don West's sisters. And he had come down here as
an early Communist organizer and was thrown into the jail in Bessemer
and beat up terribly and had tuberculosis. And then he was sent out to
Colorado. And I forget even how I met him. It must have been
Now this is the late 30's?
No, no, this is about '36 or '37.
Why do you think Gelders had not heard more about the Party since the Party did have people down here during that time?
He came from wealthy, rich people—his father made a lot of money. He was
a very successful businessman. He hadn't ever come in contact with any
radicals in his life, I don't suppose, just like me. And you see I was
all confused about Communism and Bolsheviks. They called Hugo Bolshevik
all the time because he represented the labor unions, and I just took it
as a matter of course that if you belonged to the labor union you were a
Bolshevik. All the time Hugo was running for the Senate, you see, in '26
he was being called the Bolshevik, and all the people were coming around
trying to tell Daddy and Mother not to let Sister marry him because he
was a Bolshevik—he represented the labor unions. So I just naturally
assumed that anybody that was a union member was a Bolshevik. I didn't
know what a Bolshevik was exactly. He [Joe Gelders] had no contact with
steel workers or coal mining people or working people. You see we lived
on the
All of this is told in great detail in the La Follette Committee Report on the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. You have to read that. I can give you my impressions, but all the details are in there. Anyway, during one of the Lafallette Committee hearings I heard all this about the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company and Joe Gelders and about how he'd been beaten up. And he wasn't there, but this was an account—he was still in the hospital because what happened was he crawled to the road someway and a man picked him up and took him to the hospital in Clanton, Alabama. And then some of his relatives, his wife's relatives, came and got him and brought down to Montgomery and he stayed here for quite a while to recuperate. But then he went back and took up the job again of being head of . . . He was sick for a long time, you know, recovering from this. So during the La Follette hearings, I heard all this about the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company. Then there was a lot about an organization of businessmen who'd formed a Defense Committee. Whether they were behind the beating or what, I don't know. But anyway, they had formed a Defense Committee against these outside agitators. Most of these men were names of people I knew, fathers of friends of mine. So I immediately got all excited and sent off telegrams and letters and said, I have heard your name mentioned in this hearing and I am sure it couldn't be true. I had very embarrassed letters in reply. But you see they were fighting against the unions coming in. They were terrified of the unions. Whether they were behind the beating or not, I don't know. Or whether that was done by the police department of the TCI, or what, I just don't know.
This was the first time you'd heard Joe Gelders' name was in the La Follette Hearings?
That's right. Well, you see, I'd gone to school with his brother, and I knew his sister. I knew who he was.
So when his name came up, you knew who he was?
Yeah, but I had never laid eyes on him. I could place him, but I didn't know who he was. So later on in that summer, we came back home to Alabama for a visit. You see we'd come home once or twice a year to see our families, and I went to see him. He was in the telephone book. I called up and asked if I could come by to see him, because I was really horrified at this. And I wanted to meet him and see what in the world a guy like that was who would . . . So I went up to this old office in an office building down town, and there his wife was, this pretty girl, Ester, who's still pretty. She lives out in California now. She's still living, but I don't know what they've done with all the material Joe had, if they kept it or not.
The one that was here, was that his grandson, or Emma Gelders' grandson?
That was his sister's grandson, Emma Gelders married Roy Stern, and she
had a daughter
Were your father and mother still living in the house on Niazuma Avenue at the time?
Yes. Mother had melancholia then. She had a terrible depression. A woman lived there with her, and Daddy lived there. Daddy had lost everything in the world he had then except that house.
Was he working on one of the New Deal programs then?
Yes, he was working on one of the New Deal programs, but it was a small salary. But it was enough to keep them going. And we helped them out when we could. He'd lost all the plantation; he'd lost all the Birmingham real estate; he'd lost . . . Everything in the house was so heavily mortgaged that it finally went, too. Well, I went back to Washington. Nothing had been done about the poll tax. It was still in this state of abeyance as it were, because the Democratic Women had been refused to work on it.
So then Cliff and Lister Hill and John Sparkman and Clark Foreman and Tex
Goldschmidt and Abe Fortas and all the southern New Dealers belonged to
something called the . . . I forget the name of it, but they'd have
dinner together once a month and talk about the South. After the
miserable failure that Roosevelt had made in his purge of the South,
Clark Foreman and another fellow there in Washington, a very bright
fellow named Jerome Frank, they had the idea that a pamphlet The
South: Economic Problem Number One. And Cliff has an article in
there on credit, and he wrote the letter that the President signed. It's
kind of a collector's item now. I'm sure I have one. Cliff used to give
them out to people. Anyway, they wrote the pamphlet, and they mostly
wrote it in my living room and they were always fighting each other.
Arthur Raper, you know, there were a lot of people from the South that
wrote it. There were a lot of young southerners.
Was Aubrey Williams on it?
I don't think . . . Aubrey was too busy. He might have attended a few
meetings. They wrote this pamphlet called The South:
Economic Problem Number One. It was all about the South and the
lack of credit and the state of affairs and so on. Here I'm trying to
get the two groups together. Here was this New Deal group of young
southerners working mostly in my living room at night, or sometimes down
at Lowell Mellett's, who lived right down the road. The New Dealers had
begun to move into the neighborhood then, and he was a dear friend. He
worked in the White House, and he was head of this national Emergency
Council, which was a sort of publicity arm of the New Deal. So they sold
the idea of this pamphlet to the President and to Lowell Mellett. And
they had articles on agriculture and industry. It was a kind of
manifesto of what had to be done in the South. It's really very good.
It's still good. OK, we've got this young group of southerners writing
this pamphlet in my living room.
So in the meantime the labor union people were having more and more
trouble. In the meantime I had met Mr. John L. Lewis, and I told you how
I met Mr. John L. Lewis, didn't I? Anyway, I met Mrs. Lewis at a tea
party, and she invited me to come and visit and I did, and I met her
daughter Kathryn and we got to be good friends. The first thing Mr.
Lewis said to me when he heard my name; I never will forget, he said,
Durr, Durr. Cliff was with me. Mr. Lewis had very good manners and
always talked in that Shakespearean basso profundo voice. They had this
beautiful old house in Alexandria
This is Tape 2
Well anyway, Mr. Lewis had bought this beautiful old house in Alexandria which had belonged to the Lees. He banked with the Bryants. They had a big bank in Alexandria, and they were kind of leading citizens, rich citizens, of Alexandria, Virginia. And he was on the Board of Trustees of the Episcopal Theological Seminary. The Bryants were kind of the big shots.
And Mrs. Bryant had been a Mason, and they had lived in the big old Mason
house that was down the street from where we lived. She was the
granddaughter of the Mason who went to, you know, in the Confederacy,
with Slidell to England, you remember. And she was also the descendent
of the Mason that lived down on the river, author of the Virginia Bill
of Rights, wasn't he? George Mason? Anyway they had an old
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
So Ida Sledge was working there for the IGWU?
She was the one I've told you about that had gone to Wellesley and began to work for the ILGWU in Baltimore and they sent her down to Mississippi, because she came from Mississippi. They had the idea, the unions did, that if native southerners came down here, they wouldn't maybe have as much trouble as outsider agitators, as they were called. Ida got run out of town twice, out of Tupelo, once in her nightgown. They came and got her. She had a tough time. I have a lot of the articles that came out about it in the papers.
She's also in Lucy's book. I remember than.
Lucy Mason wrote a book herself? I must have read that, but I can't remember.
To Win These Rights.
In any case, Miss Lucy and Joe Gelders got together, in Mississippi, I
think. See, here was Joe Gelders living in Birmingham trying to protect
the rights of these organizers and get them out of jail and keep them
from being beat to death and held incommunicado. And here was Miss Lucy
who was the CIO representative in Atlanta. But I think they met in this
trouble in Tupelo, involving Ida Sledge and Jimmy Collins. And Joe was
an extremely lovely fellow. He was tall and thin. He looked like a kind
of a Jewish prophet in a way, in that he had a very sensitive face and a
very strong face, the combination of both strength and beauty. And he
was an absolutely honest man. I never met a person in whom I had greater
faith or trust. And he really was devoured. You see he'd had a
conversion almost after this killing of the pigs and things; he felt
like all the suffering . . . You see the thing that made the depression
so awful was that it was not a depression of scarcity—it was a
depression of glut. In other words, there was too much of everything. Do
you get my
It wasn't spread out?
Well, I mean there was too much wheat, too much corn, because people couldn't buy it, you see. Like Abyssinia or Ethopia or a country that has just nothing to it much except some sand and desert and some few little patches, when the people go hungry there you can understand. The Sahara Desert or these poor people there, you know you're always seeing their pictures. But here in this great rich country, these people were starving to death and having rickets and consumption and hookworm and pellagra, because there was just too much. It was the idea of people starving in the midst of plenty. So Joe had become obsessed; really, he was a flaming torch of anger and also of determination to set it right. So he and Miss Lucy got together over there in Mississippi. And she had known Mrs. Roosevelt in her days of the YWCA and women's works and things like that. So she and Joe decided that they would go up to Hyde Park where the Roosevelts were then staying and see if they would organize in the South some sort of an association or meeting or have a meeting and bring together the New Deal elements in the South, the labor unions, the people who were benefitting by the New Deal, like the WPA people, and . . . So they did. They went up to Hyde Park and they got Mr. Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt to agree to have a meeting. Now this was in 1937, I believe.
So Hugo had been put on the Supreme Court that year. Hugo was put on in
1937, as I recall, or '38. But anyway, Hugo had defended Roosevelt's
Supreme Court plan. Roosevelt put him on the Supreme Court and he also
wanted a liberal southerner, you see. He changed the whole context of
the Democratic Party by getting rid of these reactionary southerners,
because he said the Democratic Party was just stymied. Everything they
wanted to do, you see, these southerners who were head of the
congressional delegations, I mean the committees, stymied him. When they
came back through, going South, they stopped in Alexandria, where Miss
Lucy Randolph Mason was staying with her sister, Mrs. Bryant, who was
the social leader of Alexandria and had the lovely parties. And they
Had the meeting place been set at that time?
No, this was all in the very early stages. So in the meantime, I told Joe
and Miss Lucy about this group of people, you know, Cliff was a member,
that had written this pamphlet, The South: Economic Problem
Number One, and I told them to get in touch with them, you know
Clark Foreman and all those people, Frank Graham, Arthur Raper, all the
North Carolina people. So they did. So they had the first meeting of the
Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama, in
November or the fall of 1938. Well, in the meantime, I still worked with
the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, though not as
often as I had been. But they sent me as a delegate. I was a delegate
from the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee. Then
they asked Cliff to make a speech on credit; you see, he was still with
the RFC. And he has a piece in this The South: Economic
Problem Number One on credit. So all these various groups just
sort of came together; there was the labor group that Miss Lucy
represented, of all people, and that Joe represented, and then there was
the New Deal group, Cliff
Now who else besides Lucy Mason and Gelders sort of worked on the planning?
It was all planned down here in the South. I wasn't in on the earlier
planning. The only big part I played was getting Miss Lucy and Joe into
connection with Cliff and Clark Foreman and all that crowd that had done
The South: Economic Problem Number One. So all
these things came together, you see. The meeting was announced. Hugo
Black was going to be a speaker, and Mrs. Roosevelt was coming and
Aubrey Williams was going to make a speech. So I came down and Cliff had
been at a meeting of the American Bankers' Association in Texas. Mr.
Jesse Jones had taken Cliff down to Texas to this meeting of the
American Bankers' Association. But he stopped off on his way back from
Texas. And one of the speakers was going to be Mr. Dodd, who'd been the
Ambassador to Germany, you know, Martha Dodd's father, Bill Dodd's
father, and who'd been the great historian, you know. He's the one who
taught Dr. Bond, Horace Mann Bond, who said he was the greatest teacher
he ever had. He'd been a great professor at the University of Chicago
and he'd been sent to Germany as the Ambassador. And he was the first
one, you know, who began to tell people how awful Hitler was and the
danger of Hitlerism and the Nazis. Nobody believed him, you know. So he
was invited to be a speaker. Oh, I tell you the person who got it up and
who was the secretary of it was a fellow named H. C. Nixon, who taught
at Vanderbilt. And he was the secretary of it and he wrote a book called
Forty Acres and a Mule. He came from over in
Jackson, Alabama. He was the nicest kind of a fellow. He was the
secretary of the committee that planned it. He was the kind of the
organizer. His name was H. C. Nixon; I met his son several years ago and
he's a lovely fellow, too. I don't know where he is now. But he had a
job at Vanderbilt I believe. He taught there, and he wrote a book Forty Acres and a Mule, a pretty good book I thought.
He was a lovely
So I got there. Cliff, you see, was going to meet me from Texas and that
afternoon on Sunday we went down to the Municipal Auditorium in
Birmingham and they had the first meeting. There was a woman named
Louise Charlton—I think she was an assistant to bankruptcy or something.
She'd been active in organizing it. Now Mrs. Roosevelt had insisted—this
is what I understand—Mrs. Roosevelt was the one that insisted that
blacks be included. And Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune was kind of her
emissary. You ought to get some of this from Dr. Gomillion, because he
would know more than I do about how the blacks got into this. Certainly
the Democratic Committee had nothing to do with the black vote at that
time. So we met in the Auditorium and oh it was a love feast—there must
have been 1500 to 2000 people there from all over the South, black and
white, labor union people and New Dealers and Dr. Frank Graham and all
these nice men from the University of North Carolina. Then Miss Lucy was
there. Just a big huge crowd of people. The proceedings are somewhere.
They had a lot of preaching and praying, singing, you know, at southern
meetings you always have a lot of preaching and praying and hymn
singing. And then they elected Frank Graham as chairman. He got kind of
queasy, too, later on about Communism, particularly when they defeated
him for the Senate, you know, on this. It was a lovely meeting; the
whole meeting was just full of love and hope. It was thrilling; it was
really marvelous. And Dr. Graham made the most beautiful speech. He was
a lovely, lovely man. He was another one of these pure men, if you know
what I mean. So he
He didn't insist that the blacks sit in the back, though?
No, he gave them a whole side, but if anybody crossed over that side,
they were going to be arrested. And so the policemen were all around the
inside of the hall watching everybody to see that they didn't integrate.
And in the meantime the Ku Klux Klan or whoever it was that was the
chief instigator of the resistance had gotten a woman named—she was a
kind of a bad character round town who did dirty work for the . . . she
said she was head of the Democratic white women. I think her name was
Brown. But anyway they came out in the paper with all this terrible
goings-on down there. And she began the whole line about how the black
men and the white women were undoubtedly spending the night together.
You know, it was just that nasty, cesspool, vicious kind of stuff. So
then on Monday Mrs. Roosevelt arrived. So she was ushered in with great
eclat. And everybody clapped and clapped and clapped and clapped. So
Mrs. Roosevelt got a little folding chair and put it right in the middle
of the aisle. She said she refused
And the workshops also had to be segregated?
Had to be segregated; policemen followed us everywhere, everywhere. The churches had to be segregated. Everywhere you went had to be segregated. And of course the Tutwiler Hotel was where a lot of white people were staying, and that was completely segregated. The only thing I remember that happened particularly during the day, maybe it was Sunday night, was that Mrs. Charlton, Mrs. Louise Charlton, who had been one of the organizers, who was presiding temporarily until Dr. Graham got to be elected president . . . She called on Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune, and she called her Mary; she said, Mary, do you wish to come to the platform, or something. And Mrs. Bethune got up—did you ever see her? You know she looked like an African queen; she was a very large woman and homely, if you know what I mean, but she had an air of grandeur and she always carried a stick that President Roosevelt had given her engraved with her name on it; she was very proud of that stick. So Mrs. Bethune got up with that stick and she said, my name is Mrs. Bethune. So Louise Charlton had to say Mrs. Bethune, will you come to the platform. Well, that sounds like a small thing now, but that was a big dividing line. A Negro woman in Birmingham, Alabama, called Mrs. Bethune at a public meeting. So Mrs. Bethune was very eloquent as always. This was on Monday. Well, they had meetings all that day and Cliff came in and he did his article on credit. And then I went to the meeting on the poll tax, on the franchise and the vote. It was all broken up into working things.
So Monday afternoon Hugo and Cliff, ah Hugo and Sister got in, you see
they'd come down from Washington. Hugo was going to speak on Tuesday
night, but they'd come down on Monday. And they had come down on the
train with Dr. Dodd,
I think in the earlier segment you said he got up to speak and his mind went blank on the stage.
It was something like that, but I know they had to lead him off the stage. It was a very tragic thing, terribly sad because he'd been . . .
What was Dodd's first name?
William Dodd. You ought to hear Julian Bond talk about him sometime, or
Dr. Bond in his books. He was a great professor at the University of
Chicago. That book that Dr. Bond wrote, his Ph.D. thesis called "Negro
Education in Alabama," I believe he wrote under the guidance of Dr.
Dodd. And it's really a great book, too. You must read that because
that's really a wonderful book—Julian's father. So we come to Tuesday.
And this awful Mrs.—what was her name? The papers were still coming out
with these terrible attacks on us. All sorts of people were attacking
us. Of course the police were still following us every step. So Aubrey
came in to make a speech. He was a very jolly, funny fellow, always
cracking jokes. And some fool reporter cornered him and said, is this
going to be a revolution? And Aubrey said something like, some silly
remark he made which had nothing . . . something like, the more the
better, you know, or I hope so, or some phrase, some absolutely,
idiotic, dumb, silly, funny remark. He thought he was just being funny.
He was just replying to this reporter's idea of revolution. So Hugo was
going to speak the next night and Mrs. Roosevelt. That was Tuesday
night. The only active Communists I met there were Jane and Dolly—I've
told you about
You had already been to Highlander at this point?
No, I never had been.
So did you meet Miles or Jim at this meeting?
No. I suppose they were there, but I didn't meet them.
You were mainly meeting the people . . .
From Washington, the people I knew from Washington. But mostly I was
concerned with this poll tax business, because the whole group of these
1200 people when they finally met the main thing they wanted was to get
rid of the poll tax, the vote—that was the first resolution. They had a
million resolutions on credit and on agriculture and this, that, and the
other, but the main thing was the right to vote. To get rid of the poll
tax, and to get rid of the registration laws, to get the right to vote.
So they met, and we formed a subcommittee of the Southern Conference on
Human Welfare on the poll tax, and Maury Maverick of Texas was the
president. I don't believe Maury was there thought, I believe we asked
him out to . . . He may have been there; I can't remember whether Maury
agreed to be president in Washington or in Birmingham. Anyway, he agreed
to be the president. You know who he was, the
There is a great correspondence between you and him.
I just adored Maury. He'd been hurt in the war you know. He had a lot of
pain and trouble in his back—been severely injured in the first world
war. Anyway, Maury was elected president, I was elected vice-president,
and Joe Gelders was elected secretary of the anti-poll tax committee of
the Southern Conference on Human Welfare. Frank Graham was elected
president of the Southern Conference. And I cannot for the life of me
remember who was elected secretary of the Southern Conference.
I was under the impression Joe Gelders began working full-time for the SCHW after '38 and he may have been the secretary.
He wasn't, though. He was the secretary of the anti-poll tax committee, but I don't think he was secretary of the Southern Conference. I think it was Alton Lawrence. Alton Lawrence was working for the CIO then, with the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. I think he was the one, but you can check that with. . . . Jim's got all those minutes and recordings and things. I've got a lot of stuff here if I could have time to look it up. Looks like every time . . . there just seems to me so much goes on.
It's not a figment of your imagination!
Anyway, I think Joe came up to Washington and we got Maury Maverick to
agree to be president of the anti-poll tax committee. And I went back
and reported to the Democratic ladies, you know, of the Women's
Division, that we had formed this anti-poll tax committee of the
Southern Conference on Human Welfare, and we were going to work with
whoever wanted to work to remove the poll tax. Any group that wanted to
join in was fine. Oh, I didn't finish about Aubrey—Aubrey making this
absolutely silly remark, joking about "the more revolution the better"
or
What was he doing at the time?
Well, he was a reporter for the paper. He had a column in the paper in
Birmingham. He was married to Rose Smith, who was one of the leading
families of Birmingham. John Temple did a perfectly beautiful job; I'll
never forget it. He later on became just the most rabid anti-New Dealer,
the most rabid anti-Democrat you've ever known in your life. And Hugo
made a very great speech quoting from Thomas Jefferson. We had a copy of
his speech; I don't know whether it's worn out or where it is. But he
never mentions anything but Thomas Jefferson; he's speaking through
Thomas Jefferson as the great southerner. And he really did make a great
speech. And it's all couched in the words of Thomas Jefferson. So that
was the end of the meeting. And the whites
Were there many blacks there?
Oh yeah. Not as many blacks as whites, but a whole lot of them there. You have to ask Dr. Gomillion about the black representation because . . . But that was the end of the meeting. I can see it now: white on one side and black on the other and Mrs. Roosevelt and Hugo standing on the platform both making speeches. Mrs. Roosevelt made a good speech too that night.
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
Well, soon after this meeting was over Joe Gelders came up to Birmingham to get some one to introduce a bill in Congress to abolish the poll tax. And that was part of the resolution, decision, too. And Maury Maverick, as I said, agreed to be the president of the committee, but he got beat for Congress soon thereafter and became mayor of San Antonio. But we had got ahold of—you don't remember Pat Jackson, do you? Well, he was very friendly to Joe and he helped him, too, and they got a fellow named Lee Geyer from California. And he agreed to introduce a bill to abolish the poll tax. He was in the House. And he agreed to let us use his office as sort of a place to work in. Well, Mr. Geyer was a lovely man. The trouble was that he had cancer of the throat. It was just beginning. But he was a lovely man. And his nephew was his secretary, and we used his office. You know Joe had gotten Mr. Geyer and then he went back down South. I was stupid; I didn't even know how to mimeograph, or anything. We decided to get out a news sheet. And then we had to arrange the hearings. Well, Hatton Sumners was the head of the Judiciary Committee, and this bill came under his jurisdiction. And he was from Texas, you see. So we had a hearing. Hatton Sumners of Texas, he was an old man and he was very much opposed to it. But he had the hearing; he was forced to have the hearing someway. Maury Maverick testified. I think Clark Foreman testified. I can't remember all the people that testified. I know we were treated in a very hostile way by the committee, particularly by old man Hatton Sumners, who was just burning with rage and indignation at the idea of this bunch of upstarts. We tried to have mostly southerners, you see. And I think Miss Lucy testified. I don't believe I testified. I may have testified; I can't remember it. I think they thought I might get mad or something. I don't remember testifying.
After the Southern Conference meeting, you had gone back to Washington;
had you set
Well, I told you we set up an office in Lee Geyer's office, but not until Joe had come up and gotten Lee Geyer to introduce the Bill.
But did you work out of that office pretty regularly?
Oh, yeah. I'd go two or three times a week. Not every day but two or three times a week. I'd go real often, and Joe used to, when he was in Washington. Then Pat Jackson gave a cocktail party to raise a little money to keep Joe going. Joe didn't have any money. And this other thing he'd been with, this Southern Civil Rights, civil liberties, whatever it was, folded up. So Joe really had no money at all, and I remember one morning I went down to Lee Geyer's office in the House Office Building and he was sitting on the steps of the capital. He'd been sitting there all night; he didn't have any place to sleep even. You know, we lived way over at Virginia. But he stayed a great deal with us, too. Cliff liked him very much. They used to have long arguments, you know, because Joe was more radical than Cliff. But they had a great deal of respect for each other. I mean, Joe was no problem in the household. He was very gentlemanly person, had lovely manners, but we were hard up. I do remember Pat Jackson gave us a cocktail party for him. That helped some; we got a little money that way.
Now was he active in the Party at that time?
Honey, I haven't the slightest idea. You see the Party . . . If Joe was working with the Party, it was completely . . . He wasn't an open member.
You see the whole thing had been such a big conglomeration of people. And
as I say the only actual Communists among these 1500 people—there may
have been some that were Communists that I didn't know about—was Jane
and Dolly and Rob Hall. And Rob Hall, as I told you, is now a
Rockefeller Republican. And both Dolly and Jane are dead. Of course
there was a big fight that was going on between the socialists in
Arkansas, you know, the sharecroppers, and the ones here in Tallapoosa
County, who were Communists. There were undertones of that because I
remember this guy I never cared for—a big socialist—McAlister. He came
and asked me one afternoon to take me home. You know, he was warning
Socialists and Communists were the same thing to me. As far as I was
concerned, they were both Bolsheviks. The fact is, as I say, I thought
everybody who was a member of a union was a Bolshevik. You know I was so
at the point of political ignorance at that point, that all these
divisions. I still thought in terms, you know, of the New Deal and the
people fighting the unions and fighting the poll tax. But all this
intricate stuff about who was a Trotskyite and who was a
You had to learn.
I learned. It used to bore me to death, because as I said I always felt
exactly like, are you going to get to heaven by dipping or sprinkling or
total immersion. You know I'd been brought up in that all my life, so it
seemed to me exactly the same thing. I didn't see any difference in it
at all because here they were talking about building a new society a
utopia where everybody would have peace and plenty and love each other,
you know, like heaven. But by God if you weren't dipped, you'd never get
there. If you were sprinkled, you wouldn't get there. Or total
immersion. Or then there used to be the foot-washing Baptists, do you
remember that? If you didn't have your feet washed, you'd never get to
heaven. You see, having been brought up in the Presbyterian Church, you
know, and going through all of Daddy's troubles about Jonah and the
whale and walking on the water. I must have irritated them very much
too, because I thought a lot of it was very amusing. I used to think it
was a joke. I really
Tell me what you mean by that.
I mean the teachings of religion, not Jesus Christ and Judaism, every
religion that you know, even the Asiatic religions or any religion that
I've ever studied. When I was at Wellesley, you know, you had to take
Bible, and you studied comparative religions. This was part of the
required course. But it seemed to me the essential point of every
religion that I've ever studied is to treat each other . . . you know,
the golden rule, treat people like you want them to treat you. But it
seems to me that is the essence of religion, is to treat other people as
you would have them treat you. Well, very few people ever accomplish
that, but I think the theology, whether the Buddha has four arms or two,
or whether you bathe in the river or whether you have foot-washing
Baptists. Why up there in Mentone, Alabama you see I'd gone to the Holy
Roller meetings, and I'd seen people let themselves be bitten by snakes
and picking up hot lamp chimneys and drinking poison green. You know we
used to go to these Holy Roller meetings up there all the time, just as
a joke really. It was all these crazy country folk from way back in the
mountains. We would sit there, and they'd let themselves be bitten by
snakes. You never saw them handle the snakes? Scariest thing you ever
saw. Scared me out of my wits. I'd get out of there as quick as I could
when they started handling the snakes. The idea was that the spirit of
God was with you and nothing would hurt you. And the snake couldn't bite
you and hot lamp chimney couldn't burn you and the poison green couldn't
poison you. And then they'd get the jerks. They'd dance before the Lord,
you know. They'd have these movements where they'd get up and dance.
Have you ever seen them roll? You know they would finally get so
possessed
You think that was the only time of year they did that?
That was the only time I was there. You see I was at Mentone. I'd go to Mentone State June, July, and August, maybe a little bit in September. But Holy Roller meetings never would start until the end of the summer because everybody was working, you know, in the cotton or the corn crop. What I was saying was, the divisions in the Christian religion have, I think, obscured and ruined almost, very badly hurt the meaning of Christianity, of all religions. Every religion that you look into is really founded on a worship of one god who is the father of all mankind and the idea is to treat each other like you'd like people to treat you. Now that's my idea of religion. But you see being brought up in the Presbyterian Church, and my father a preacher and having him thrown out of the church because he didn't believe in Jonah and the whale or walking on the water. You know, I just couldn't ever believe that you got to heaven because you told your beads four times or because you had your feet washed or because you were sprinkled or dipped or totally immersed. Did you ever believe it?
No, I don't think so.
Well maybe you did, but anyway so much of the political agitation that
goes on today seems to me very much like the great fights in . . .
instead of the fights being in the church whether you're going to get to
spiritual heaven and be sitting on the right hand of god and you know
play the harp and forever live in bliss. You know we saw last night on
the TV that movie on King Henry VIII. Here was this old brutish lecher
changing the whole church and changing all the rules of the church just
so he could get another wife. But my point is that today I think people
don't believe as much, I mean a lot of people don't believe as much as
they did that after you die you're going to heaven if you do right and
tell your beads
Let's go back, though, to the Southern Conference meeting. Were you aware of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union being at that meeting. Did you meet H. L. Mitchell and Butler and any of those people?
Well, I think I did but I don't remember it. I don't remember any of that particularly. See, I was really concentrating on this poll tax and getting the vote and getting the women to vote. I had a lot more, as time went on and I had such a good husband, a lot of my feeling about the position of southern women kind of . . . I'm for it, I mean, but I don't see how those same passionate feelings about it. But as I grew up I really had passionate feelings about the way southern girls were treated and the position I was in and if you were smart and went to college it was supposed to be bad for you because men liked dumb women, you know. My aunt, I remember, would say, don't discuss books with boys now that always scares them off.
Let's go back to the meeting now. What else can you remember about that meeting?
Well, I just remember . . . I remember Clark Foreman being very active.
Alton Lawrence was elected the secretary. Alton was a young fellow from
North Carolina, I believe, who was going into the ministry at the
University of North Carolina and then he went into the labor unions and
we was working for the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, which was a
kinda of a left-wing union. He was a very sweet fellow and he married a
girl who was off a picket line. She was a very firebrand, you know,
union girl. And then I think he got to be the secretary. Or maybe it was
a boy named Howard Lee from Arkansas. He was a great admirer of Mrs.
Roosevelt's, and he finally shot himself; did you know that? Committed
suicide and had her picture
Now was Tex Dobbs at the Birmingham conference?
I believe he was but I don't remember him. Southern Youth Conference.
Helen Fuller was very active in that, but she'd dead now too. Do you
remember her; she was with the New Republic for so
long. She got drinking pretty bad, I'm afraid. Well don't put that in
because poor Helen had a hard time. No, you see I was mostly . . . In
the first place, some of my old friends, I remember, took me out to
lunch, and they gave me, well, Virginia, you go back to Washington and
leave us with all this. It won't be long before we can't walk on the
streets, you know . . . They really were scared to death.
Of black people?
They were scared to death of the whole Southern Conference. They were scared to death of all these unions. They were scared to death of all these unions. They were scared to death of everything being changed. And they were blaming me for it. It was tough.
There was a lot of strong union participation in it?
Oh my yes. John L. Lewis, you see, had come in and gotten . . . Miss Lucy, you see, was representing John L. Lewis, and she'd gotten all the unions in there.
There were union people there from all over. And there were the Negro
people there. The leader of the union people was Bill Mitch, who was the
head of the United Mine Workers in Birmingham—he was one of the main
people in it too. He'd gotten his orders from Lewis. But you see the CIO
was just coming South and
Isn't his son one of Hugo Jr.'s law partners?
Yeah, but they fell out I think. They've split up. That's when Hugo went to Miami. I don't think he's active very. But Donald Comer even came to those meetings and General Persons of the First National Bank. It started out being, you know . . .
General who?
Persons. He was the president of the First National Bank at that time, in Birmingham. It was a very broad group of people. Then after all the attacks on us and this vicious woman—whose name I can't remember.
Donald Comer was a textile . . . ?
Yeah, he was head of the textile union, I mean of the textile work, the Comer Mills. He was one of the greatest industrialists in Alabama. But he had been sort of New Dealish. And General Persons, you see, they had gotten the money for the bank. So there was a good deal of support. And there was a lot of support for doing away with the unequal freight rates. So there was a strong . . . But they all fell away in time. But Alton Lawrence fell away too. You know he's got a shop in Birmingham now. Some people say it's on account of his wife. She got scared to death. Alton . . . I just don't know what the reasons are. I think maybe it was his wife. Anyway I know he just stopped having anything to do with anybody that'd ever been in the union movement even. He just fell out entirely.
How did you feel? Talk some about the way you reacted to the big meeting and seeing everybody like that, whether or not you were scared by the fact that Bankhead didn't come that night.
John Bankhead's not coming didn't bother me. I was scared in a way. But I
was thrilled. It was like a revival meeting, you know. It was like a
—they used to call them, you know, it was a love meeting. All of a
sudden you felt like you were not by yourself. There were all these
other people with you, you know. It was a feeling of joy, of being
thrilled. After all, you know, when you have the wife of the President
of the United States and
Well, now what came up there about the laws; was there any move to . . . pass a resolution?
Oh yeah, there were a lot of resolutions. There was a lot of agitation and resolutions passed about that, about, you know, the segregation. But the main, the driving energy behind it all were the unions. You see, the unions were coming South and people were being organized into unions. And they thought that all the fighting against them and all the being put in jail and held incommunicado and being killed and beaten and all was due to the fact that the sheriffs and the police and everybody else, they were not accountable to them because they didn't have the vote. So the idea was to get the vote, to get some power.
I suppose the thing in my life that has been the hardest to accept and to
rationalize and to be cheerful about—I try to make the best of it—is the
fact that after all the struggles we did to get the vote and after all
the struggles we did to get women to vote, we got Lurleen Wallace and
George Wallace. I mean here the people of the South were freed, they did
get the right to vote. The black people got the right to vote, the white
people got the right to vote. And even they come down and illiterates
got the right to vote, under these federal laws. And who do they elect?
They elected some of the sorriest characters in the world. This has been
the thing that I've had to cope with as well as I possibly can. I hate
to think the southern people are just naturally stupid. But it seems to
me that for generations they just cut their own throat. They just seem
to have a perfect genius for cutting their own throats. Here they march
off to the Civil War not owning a slave, you know, and millions of them
go off and get killed. For what? You know, because somebody else could
own slaves and have a big white plantation and be rich. And what was it
to them? Not a damn thing, and yet they go off and die for it. Well,
they're doing the same thing; here they get the vote; they're free. And
who do they vote for. They vote for George Wallace or they vote for
I don't have one.
Well, you've got to have some. I mean, there must be some reason for it. Do you think it's because they just get the wrong information? Anyway, if you had the rich and the poor. Say the rich voted for one group, and the poor. But it's not that at all. The poor vote for the rich. And this is the thing that I think makes it so puzzling about the South: that is the poor man will vote for the guy that representing the rich man and fooling him by saying he's for them when he's not for them at all.
It obviously has a lot to do with education. People get the vote but then they don't know how to use it. It's manipulative; it's bought.
Yes, but there're millions and millions and millions of people in the
South. Now they're free. The women are free to vote. And the men are
free to vote. And the blacks are free to vote. Eighteen-year-olds are
free to vote. I think it's because people are beginning . . . I think
they are confused and maybe they're ignorant. But I think people have
lost faith in democratic government. I don't think that they think it
makes any difference who you have, that you're still going to have a few
rich men controlling everything anyway. I mean I don't think . . .
they've gotten to the point where they think democratic government is
useless; they're helpless with it. This is the sad thing, I think. They
don't think there's any use in voting. When you fight, bleed, and die to
get the eighteen-year-old vote and about 2% of them vote. No, I think
we're living in an age where between the movies and the TV and the
papers and all, the people want a decent life. In other words, they want
a house and they want an automobile and they want good medical service
and they want good education. They see all
Well, I pretty much agree. I think people just feel absolutely powerless. And the vote doesn't mean that much.
Well, that's what I feel. You know you go out and urge them to vote, and they say, what good does it do? Now the unions . . . Meany'll get up there and make a speech about the unemployment, this, that, and the other. But I can't see the unions all exercised about all the people that are out of work. I haven't lost faith. But there's a reason and that is that I think people will eventually wake up. I think it takes such terrific suffering to make them wake up. It's what I feel so bad about in this country: I think it's going to have to get so much worse before it's going to get better. And my fear is we're going to become a corporate state with just tremendous repressions. And how long that will last, I don't know. I have no idea. I just wish I knew. Cliff, you know, had much more faith in people. He had a faith in their intrinsic goodness, or their intrinsic worth, if you know what I mean. You see, he thought I was a snob, and you think so too I think, a little bit.
Sometimes.
What he thought was that I wanted to help people. I really hated to see people suffering. I wanted to help people. But he thought that I really still believed that some people were a whole lot better than other people. And he didn't think it was so much on a class basis. He didn't think it was because of money or clothes or social position, but he thought that, you know ignorant people and people who had had no education and who I thought acted in a dumb way. He thought I was contemptuous of them. This is something I have to check in myself.
Well, I don't think it's contemptuous to ask why. It seems to me that all you do is question.
Well, he had more faith actually in people than I do. And he had much
more tolerance of them. I'd say, well, why in the name of God would he
do anything as stupid as that? You know go and vote for this Dixon
fellow, this Republican, you know who's absolutely nothing, a tool of
whoever pays him, whether
Because Richard Nixon makes them believe that he's for the little man.
How could he have made them believe that?
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
[October 16, 1975] At the end of the last taping you had just finished covering the Southern Conference for Human Welfare meeting in Birmingham, Alabama.
We went on back to Washington, of course. It wasn't
He was from Chicago, wasn't he?
Chicago. And he made a great fortune in something—Chicago Tribune, because when I was there this summer, I was sitting
there eating lobster, and Jessie apologized to a great degree because
the money came from the Chicago Tribune. But she said
her great, great grandfather bought the Chicago Tribune, bought shares in it to support Lincoln. But the shares
are still there, and they're worth a great deal of money. Anyway, the
Maverick family, Maury wasn't scared of hell or high water. He was a
very bumptious guy; I don't mean bumptious in the sense of being
unpleasant, but you know, he was full of vim and vigor and he wasn't
scared of anybody. So he got old Hatton Sumners to hold the hearings.
And you know the evidence was all there—the fact that not more than 12%
of the voting population voted in Virginia and 13% in Mississippi,
maybe. You must get hold of Jennings Perry's book, where he was all the
figures in it. You know Jennings Perry of Nashville, don't you. You know
he for a while was president of the anti-poll tax committee and he wrote
a book on the fight against the poll tax, which is very good. It never
got much coverage, but it's called The Right to Vote,
I believe. Anyway it's an extremely good book. I had a letter from
Jennings yesterday. Try to keep me to the track, because you know I go
off on these sidelines. Let's not go into Jennings.
The point I'm making is, the facts were absolutely incontrovertible. That
is, that since the disenfranchising provisions of the early 1900's
starting with Mississippi, that the vote in the South had gone down,
down, down—both black and white. The South at this time, which was about
1938, you see, was just absolutely, had this extremely small vote. The
defense of the people who were arguing against all this was that people
in the South just weren't interested in voting. They just didn't care
about it. You know, there was just a complete lack of interest. I'm sure
this was 1938; I haven't gotten that date mixed up. But I don't think
the hearing was actually held until sometime in 1939. Anyway, Hatton
Sumners never would have them printed. Clark Foreman testified and Maury
Maverick testified, and a whole lot of other people testified. But
Hatton Sumners never would print the hearings. They just absolutely
refused to print the hearings. And Hatton Sumners was a man of so much
prestige and power in the House, you see. You see the southerners
controlled most of the big . . . they'd stayed there so long doing to
the fact that they had this small vote. They stayed there forever and a
day and so they got old and older and older. They were 70 and 80 and on
and they'd just been in Congress 30 and 40 years. And they just ran the
show. So we never got that one printed. Well, Lee Geyer would make
speeches in the House for it. We were still working out of his office.
The thing that helped us a great deal was, up above us in the building
the old House Office Building, was the Tolan Committee. Now that was the
committee of Congress that was investigating agriculture and Appalachia
and poverty. There were a lot of really brilliant young fellows on it
who were just out of school and were very full of zeal. They were really
dedicated. They were going to eradicate Appalachia's, the poverty of
Appalachia. And I believe Tolan himself came from West Virginia. He was
a
So gradually around the anti-poll tax office of the Southern Conference, there grew up quite a group of people. There was a very attractive, brilliant boy from Ohio named Fred Sweet. And he's dead now. Oh, I wish I could remember their names. If I could get the Tolan Committee names they'd come to me because they all helped out.
Did Fred Sweet work on the Tolan Committee?
I think he did for a while, but he was a very good writer and he could write very well. We would send out this anti-poll tax news, you know, far and wide. And then we would go and see the congressmen.
And I was younger in those days, considerably younger, you can imagine. Let's see, this was 1938, so I was about 35. I was a good deal better looking than I am now, too. So I was subjected for the first time to the senators and the congressmen. You know... well, we won't get into that. You know to be a senator or congressman you had to have a rather large ego because it takes an awful lot of work and strength and vitality and insult and vigor.
Well now, let's do get into that. What would happen when you'd go to their offices?
Well, frequently they'd chase you around the desk.
Literally?
No, sometimes just literally. You'd see this large mountain of a man rise
up, coming towards you, and you'd back toward the door. They were all
men of strong sexual urges I would say. But you know you really couldn't
take it personally because it was rather universal. And you didn't feel
like you were being particularly distinguished for any unusual charms or
beauty. It was just that, you know, you were female. But that was
something that you had to get used to. And fair game, absolutely. Well,
I was protected in a way, more so than some of the other girls who had
rather more disastrous experiences because you see I was Hugo Black's
sister-in-law and Clifford Durr's wife. Well, Clifford Durr you see was
on the RFC and on the FCC in both of which positions he could refuse or
give a radio station or a TV grant or a loan of money. So that was
considerable restraint. And I don't say that every single congressman
and senator's office
And by this time the Southern Conference had had another meeting the following year after the '38 one, which must have been '39, in Chattanooga. And at that time this tremendous fight had broken out between the isolationists and the interventionists. So that meeting was just really fighting between the interventionists and the isolationists, people wanting to go to war with Hitler and the ones that didn't. I was one of the ones that wanted to go to war with Hitler.
Did it split the Conference badly?
Well, yeah, there was a lot of bad feeling, but the strange thing was, I
took Kathryn Lewis down. You see, I'd gotten to be a good friend of hers
by that time, John L.'s daughter. And she had gotten out all the miners
to come and vote against any interventionist resolution. But they were
bored to death with all the kind of wrangling that went on. So when the
time came to vote, I believe the interventionists won. But Kathryn and I
argued the matter at great length, but of course she was an
isolationist. Her father was a great friend and follower of Mr. Wheeler.
It shows you how they split things, because you know that was the
senator from Montana, Burton Wheeler, who had been a great liberal in
his youth and who had fought the Anaconda Copper Company. And his
daughter Frances Wheeler got to be the secretary of the anti-poll tax
committee. She was our first secretary. And the way we got hold of her:
her sister was a friend of mine, lived right near me. And Frances was
looking for a job; she'd just gotten out
Why was John L. Lewis opposed to it because Wheeler was opposed to it? What's the connection?
Well, he and Wheeler were like this; both of them were isolationists.
They were against the United States getting involved in the Second World
War, you see. They were both very strong isolationists. They both played
around, you know, they were very much opposed to Roosevelt. They were
just both of them despised and hated Roosevelt. After '36, you see, John
L. Lewis thought after he'd given all that money to Roosevelt that
Roosevelt was going to do what he said, but he didn't. And so he and
Roosevelt became very bitter enemies, John L. Lewis and Roosevelt.
Burton Wheeler was a great enemy of Roosevelt's and he was also an
isolationist. The isolationist interventionist thing did begin to split
the Southern Conference but I was still, you know, hell bent on the
anti-poll tax thing. So Frances Wheeler got another job and then there
was another very nice girl who came in there—I can't remember her name
now; it'll come to me. And by this time we were getting some support.
You see, John L. Lewis was supporting us then and giving us money, the
anti-poll tax fight. And the CIO unions were giving us money and
support. I remember having a very nice conversation with Sidney Hillman,
who gave us money and support. And the Maritime Workers—Joe Curren was
head of it. He was a devout Catholic. But he gave us support, so much
money. They gave us so much money a month, you know. And then John Abt
was head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, I mean the general
counsel, so he got us some money from the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.
They were very nice. And we got money from some of the AF of L unions
but not very much. See, they were so mad about, they hated Lewis so.
There'd
But Lee Geyer died. He finally died of this cancer of the throat. And then the big question was, who to get to sponsor the bill. By this time you see we had a board, composed of . . . the labor unions were supporting us, and the NAACP, and the Negro Elks, and a lot of the Christian organizations, the church organizations, the Methodists and the Baptists. You see on Capital Hill there was a real big lobby group, that lobbied all the time. Of course it wasn't so big on those days as it is now, I'm sure. And all the liberal organizations, like the Quakers and the Baptists and the Methodists and the NAACP and Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune's organization—the Council of Negro Women. And the newspaper men—they were our great allies and helps. A lot of us would have lunch together every day. It was lots of fun, one thing, you see, because the Hill was a lot of fun. The funny stories and what was happening on the Hill and the struggle between the isolationists and interventionists. And then see most of the liberals were interventionists until then they had the great split you know when they had the Nazi-Soviet pact, and then a lot of the extreme left-wingers went over on the other side. And then that developed into real fights, I mean yelling and screaming and almost tearing each other's hair out. But the Hill was a very lively place in those days and loss of fun. And I can't remember all the names of the newspaper men that helped us—oh, Izzy Stone of course. Izzy was absolutely wonderful. And he was working for the Nation, the PM then. Izzy was a great newspaper man, as you know. You see the TV and radio hadn't come on then, and there weren't a lot of TV and radio people about. It was the newspapers.
What kind of support were you getting in Congress at this time?
Well, it was still in a state of flux. We were trying to get . . . You
see what we were representing in the Board of the Southern, I mean of
the Poll Tax Committee—and by the way at one meeting, whether it was in
Chattanooga or in Nashville, I believe, they, we decided to make the
National
Now was that why you separated the poll tax committee from the . . . ?
No, it was just . . . The poll tax committee had gotten bigger than the
Southern Conference. In other words, the National Committee against the
poll tax was a national organization by that time and much larger
because the labor unions realized that they were not going to get
anywhere in the South until they got their people to voting. Then the
church people thought it was the right thing to do. And the NAACP and
the Negro organizations had joined us. Of course they thought the
Negroes were held in bondage until they got the vote. And a lot of the
women's organizations—the only one that never would support us at all
was that women's group or women's party or something. They never would
help us at all. They were all—Alice Paul and all those women. They were
just—I don't know what made them the way they were because they wouldn't
do a thing for us, thought we were totally unimportant. They were
working to get women's rights. It was that bill, you know, under the
constitution, to give equal rights to women in everything. I
Who were the civil rights organizations that you were in touch with at that time?
Well, there was the NAACP. There was a Negro Elks; they were powerful. Then there was the ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union.
Who were some of the leaders in these groups that you came into contact with?
Well, Morris Ernst was the one I had the most trouble with. He was a
lawyer from New York and an extremely brilliant fellow who had the great
reputation for being a great civil liberties lawyer. And he was active
in the ACLU. So I had never met him and he called me up one day and said
he was down from New York and that he knew some friends of mine that I'd
been at Wellesley with named Hellman, Jane Hellman. So he asked me out
to lunch. A very charming fellow and he'd come from Alabama and his
people had come from over here in Demopolis. They came from Germany, you
know, and landed I think in Savannah or New Orleans. Came from Demopolis
or Uniontown. They're kin to Marie Pake. Well she's a great friend of
mine. She's kin to all those Morris Ernst's family. She's from
Montgomery. I didn't meet Morris Ernst through her. He came to see me to
warn me against the infiltration of the Communists. And that we never
would get anywhere unless we got rid of . . . Oh my Lord, he had a list.
Of course Joe Gelders. If we had anything to do with Joe Gelders we were
ruined, you know. Joe was in the Army at the time, I believe. But in any
case he was just absolutely livid on the subject of Joe
Who was the head at the time?
His name was Greenblass or Greengold, I forget it. Anyway you know they all worked down there. They all spoke very strong accents and they'd learned their trade in Europe. They just gave us a little money by the way, maybe 25 dollars a month or something like that, because they thought it was a good cause. The head of it was a Communist. And well, Morris Ernst couldn't have anything to do with them. And then there was something called the Cooks and Stewards, I believe, the Marine Cooks and Stewards. For some reason I never heard of them. But they were dangerous, and Morris Ernst had to get rid of them. In fact, Morris Ernst . . . we had to get rid of about everybody on the Board. I mean, about half of them, to suit him. I said to him, look, we've only got one rule and that is that everybody that supports the anti-poll tax bill can send a representative to the board, and that's our rule, and that's the only rule we've got. So we're going to stick by it. Oh, he said that the ILGWU, Dubinsky would give us a lot of money if we'd get rid of these other people. Dubinsky never had given us any money. But he knew Dubinsky very well and so Dubinsky would give us a lot of money if we'd get rid of all these other people. Well of course he was dealing with somebody who was pretty dumb, you know, about all the distinctions in the unions in New York. I really wasn't up on the latest factions. And it irritated me considerably. I can just remember getting really irritated. But we never got any money from Dubinsky, never gave us a dime.
And that's because you were hobnobbing with the Communists?
Well, we were hobnobbing with . . . As I say, the head of the Furriers
was a Communist. And I believe the head of the Marine Cooks and Stewards
was, as I recall. And then in the Maritime Union there was a West
Indian, and his name was Ferdinand Smith, and he was a Communist. They
threw him out later on, you know, when all the big splits came. He was a
very gentlemanly man, very nice man.
Now Lewis at this point wasn't bothered about the Communists?
He was using them. He wouldn't let them in the union. You know there was a very strong bar against Communists in the union, that is in the Mine Workers. But there were a lot of young Communists at that time. You see there was the depression, was still going bad, and a lot of people, young people particularly, thought the capitalist system was done for. And so Communism was the new rising form of government, and they were dedicated like the civil rights workers were, so Lewis was cynical enough just to send them South and let them be the kind of shock troops, anyway let them be killed and beat up and put in jail and do all the dirty work, you know.
Well, one of the things that saved me, in a way, from being involved in
all this was that as I said, my life was lived on so many different
levels. On my personal life, I lived at the Virginia Episcopal
Theological Seminary. I went to the Virginia Episcopal Theological
Seminary every Sunday for church. I belonged to the Ladies Auxiliary. My
children played all around the grounds. These were the Virginia
gentility, if you know what I mean. So my personal life was based on a
neighborhood and a group of people who couldn't have been less radical
in any way, shape, or form. And they were lovely, sweet, Christian
people, but they were not engaged in any—well, the New Deal
was still a radical thing to them. And of course they had no Negroes at
the Seminary, and they had no Negro students you know. So then, through
Cliff being on the RFC and then on the FCC, he was always in a position
to do people big favors or not do them big favors. In other words he had
power, the power to give them loans or not loans, or give them a radio
frequency or
There was Burton Wheeler, who was an isolationist. He was also head of the Senate committee on communications, you know; I forget the name of it. It was the thing that controlled the FCC, controlled transportation and communication of all kinds. And there his daughter, who was at odds with her father, who was secretary of the poll tax committee. Well, you can see things in those days were pretty mixed up. We're about 1939 now. I'm trying to stick to this one main line of what happened to the poll tax, because if I went into all of the side lines, we'd be here forever. By the time Frances Wheeler . . . we had gotten this office, you see, through her, in the railway building, where the railway unions had their headquarters. Because Burton Wheeler, you see, was head of the committee in the Senate to control the railroads. And the man that was head of the railroad union . . . he was a lovely man; he came from Colorado. And they got out a paper every month. Anyway, he gave us all this space in this railway building free on account of the fact that Frances went and asked him and he was a geat friend of her father, Burton Wheeler. So we had offices and telephones. They would print out sheets, and they were for us, were behind the anti-poll tax bill. They were just perfectly lovely to us. They couldn't have been any nicer. But a big trouble developed, which I think I told you about. The whites wanted the Negro firemen fired because they wanted their jobs. This is too complicated about when they changed to diesel engines there was a big fight in the unions getting rid of the Negro fireman who had been shoveling in the coal. So a lot of the railway men, particularly the southern ones, would come in to the railway office and see all these Negroes working at typewriters, and working on the anti-poll tax bill and being there as representatives of organizations, and they wouldn't like it. And they complained about them using the bathrooms, same old thing, you know. They didn't like that. So we had to move out finally. It made it so disagreeable for the people who were giving us these free offices.
I still want to get these other organizations in,
Clarence Mitchell was one of them, and then there was another sweet fellow—I can't remember his name now, and he was very nice to us. But they just were 100% for us, and they couldn't have been better.
Did they do a lot of lobbying?
Oh yeah. Oh, yes they always came to the board meetings. And then there was Mrs. Bethune, you see, was the National Council for Negro Women—she always came or sent a representative—
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
You were talking about Mrs. Bethune.
Well, Mrs. Bethune had formed something then called the Council of Negro Women. And either she came or sent a representative. And often she would come herself. And she was a tremendous help to us because she had very close affiliations you see with Mrs. Roosevelt, and with Mr. Roosevelt, too, but more with Mrs. Roosevelt, I think. And so she would help us get up money. She was a marvelous woman and a great help to us. I told you about Mrs.—the lady that was head of the Republican women there, came from Memphis, my grandfather was her guardian—Mrs. Mary Church Terrell. Well Mrs. Mary Church Terrell you see was head of the Republican Women and Black Republican Women and she lived in Washington for—she was nearly 90 then. She was a remarkable woman; she was a great help to us. She was very, very helpful to us. And then there was the Negro Elks. They were very helpful to us. And there were a lot of Negro church organizations that sent representatives and sent money. But the money, the strongest amount of help and support came from the labor organizations. And I got to know some of them very well.
How much of the politics of the various organizations would overlap? For instance, how much were the civil rights organizations pushing for integration affect the union. And did you get into a lot of—the railway workers and the firemen is a good example.
Well yes, it was beginning to come. But of course we got into the
firemen's fight very directly because they made this big fight about
having all these black, Negroes—they didn't say—the niggers taking up
the space in the bathrooms and all. And there was one particularly nasty
man whose name I forget, came from Alabama. And he made more trouble
than anybody. They were trying to get rid of the Negro firemen because
the railway unions who represented them were encouraging us by giving us
all this free office space and putting our paper . . . But the issue
came down to, the flash point was the
But by and large, was the coalition between the civil rights people and the labor people at that point pretty strong?
Oh yes. And it was the Roosevelt coalition, if you know what I mean. The
coalition that had been in the Southern Conference. And the bonds—there
was beginning to be terrible friction—but they were still solid, if you
know what I mean. There was, you see, the White House support, great
gentlemen like the fellow from Raleigh—Daniels—he was working in the
White House. You know, his father was the secretary of the Navy. They
owned the Raleigh News-Observer. And he was working in
the White House then as one of the White House attaches, or one of the
White House aides. He's written a lot of books; he had a wife that
writes real funny books. He would come down to get a list of people who
were pro and con. Or we'd get a call from the White House: do you know
how so-and-so stands? I tell you we had an absolute faith in our own
government in those days, at least our Roosevelt administration. There
was Mrs. Roosevelt working for us and Mr. Roosevelt working for us, and
Tom Cochran working for us and Ben Cohen working for us and Ed Pritchard
working for us. We were invited to the White House for lunch. We'd say,
Mrs. Roosevelt, we're trying to get Claude Pepper to take on—you see
George Norris got beat by some undertaker from out there in Nebraska and
we were trying to get Claude Pepper to take on the job of representing
the bill in the Senate. It was just, you know, it was heaven to be
young, as they say, and it was also heaven to be just across from the
White House and have Mrs. Roosevelt have us all to lunch. And she have
people like Barry Bingham, who was a big shot, you know, or Mark
Ethridge. They all supported us. Maury and Barry were just wonderful to
us. We had the White House behind us; we had the government behind us, I
mean the administration. So we really were riding high, wide, and
handsome. Then the next thing that happened, we got Claude Pepper to
represent us in the Senate, to introduce the bill, which he did year
after year after year.
Do you remember the first year he did it?
I think it was about 1939. Anyway, Claude was just absolutely marvelous. He was a wonderful orator. He'd come from Ashland, Alabama, where Hugo Black had come from you see. He and his wife Mildred were great friends of Sister and Hugo's. And Mildred was very social-minded; she loved fashionable society. I never saw them very much out in society because Cliff and our friends were not the same. But Claude was a really great man. He was a great orator and very honest, very brilliant fellow. And I have never known why he didn't—of course he had some awfully dirty deals done to him in Florida—but I never felt he rose to his full potential. He rose to a pretty high potential. He spoke at Cliff's funeral, you know, I mean at the memorial service. But he's been a devoted friend, and he's a man that I have the highest admiration for. And you see he had gotten rid of the poll tax in Florida, and it had helped him get elected, so this was not an issue that was going to hurt him in Florida, you see.
Then we began having a lot of trouble in the House because the board—you
see the board at this time was all these unions and the Negro
organizations, the black organizations, and the church organizations,
you know, all kinds of organizations, all the lobbying organizations in
Washington—or a great many of them. Now the question was, who to get to
introduce the bill in the . . . And they had a meeting, and the CIO guy,
who was a lobbyist on the Hill and his name was Clifford McAvoy. He was
a very nice fellow indeed. He's now dead. He was a very sweet fellow. He
had come from some very distinguished family in New York, that had been
distinguished politically and also socially. And I remember one of the
things that people had against him was that he wore a derby, that was
supposed to be a tremendous sign of swank in those days and they thought
a lobbyist for the CIO to wear a derby was very, very—the union people
thought that was just awful. The CIO, through Clifford McAvoy, suggested
we get this fellow named Baldwin, who had just been elected to the
Senate. He was from what they called the silk stocking district and he
was a Republican. You see by that time the House was not so heavily
Democratic, and the Republicans were helping us a great deal quite
And then we heard that a man named Vito Marcantonio, who represented the
Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and the American Labor Party—he
was elected on all three slates—that he had a bill. Well, I won't go
into Marcantonio and how he blew up at us. It ended up with Vito
Marcantonio introducing the bill. We became great friends in spite of .
. . Because I also became a great friend of his wife, who is a lovely
lady, whom he brought down to Washington. She was a tall New England
girl. Anyway I became devoted friends to Vito Marcantonio and oddly
enough, he and Cliff did too because they had a passion for Jefferson.
They would quote Jefferson to each other by the—Marcantonio
had all Jefferson and all Madison. He was both radical and democrat—I
mean democratic in his views. And he was a very attractive man. He was
small, you know, and very Italian and extremely vehement. Of course he
was considered to be the big radical in the House. So a lot of people
were scared to death for Marcantonio to introduce the bill. But you see
they never could get it out of committee. They would have to sign it
out. And we passed it. Marcantonio got it through the House time and
time again—I can't remember how many years he got that bill signed out
of committee and passed through the House. Well, you see a lot of
Republicans backed it because it'd create friction within the Democratic
Party. I mean, it wasn't all just pure idealism at all. But then it
would always get filibustered to death in the Senate, you see. So then
we get up to the time when the war is starting and big fights between
the isolationists and the interventionists you see. And I was a big
interventionist you know; I was all for intervening. And that created .
. . Decca, you see was
But you were sort of a key figure.
I was a key figure, yes. And I think I did a lot of good.
Does that mean that all the different factions would come to you?
Sure.
At one time or another so that you were sort of buffeted between them?
Yes, sure, that's right. But the point was that I myself had no power. No organization power except through Hugo or through Cliff. But I never could have any power through Hugo because the last thing Supreme Court Justices' relatives can do is speak to them about a case, because they recuse themselves immediately and that means . . . If you were ever known to speak to your brother-in-law about a case that would be the worst thing that could happen. In fact Hugo's dinner parties, and Sister's, were pretty dull because nobody could talk about anything very much because they were always so afraid it would come before the Supreme Court. So we usually talked about roses and tennis. And sometimes Bill Douglas would get, he'd sing hymns, you know he was raised very strictly in the church and he had the most marvelous array of hymns he used to sing. But I myself as a person had no power in that I had no organizational power except through the Southern Conference and the poll tax committee, which were composed of disparate organizations. And I was a key figure, but I didn't have the money, I didn't have any power, I mean organizational power. The only power I had was I was friendly with a lot of people. I got on with them fairly well. I didn't get mad at them.
How were you doing in terms of learning all your political lessons, the battle between the Communists and socialists and all?
Well, I was very much taken aback by all the meanness that went on, the way people carry on.
I was for the Spanish War, I mean I was for the Spanish Republic. To me
that was a completely clear case of a legally elected government being
overthrown by a bunch of
Did you have respect for the Communist Party people that you knew?
Some of them I did and some of them I didn't.
How did you feel about Russia?
Well I thought Russia . . . As far as Russia was concerned I thought . .
. You see Litvinov had been trying to get the democracies to combine
against Hitler with Russia. And you see he got beat. I mean his whole
thing was beat. Now Litvinov was a perfectly lovely man. You see I knew
his wife. I told you about his wife staying next door to us. And she was
named Ivy Lowe. She came from England and she was a sister of David
Lowe, the famous cartoonist. Well Mrs. Ivy Lowe, or Mrs. Ivy Litvinov
was one of the most attractive women I ever met in my life. She was
rather stout and very funny and extremely brilliant. She was a very
harmonious character, and a person that I met only socially but I liked
a great deal. And I liked her husband very much the few times I met him.
You see I was invited . . . At that time in the social hierarchy you got
invited to the embassies as your husband went up the line. By this time
Cliff was on the FCC and we got invited to the embassies. In Washington
you go to the big official things in accordance with your husband's
position. I suppose there're some beautiful creature and charming people
that get in but usually it's very cut and dry. So when Cliff got on the
FCC and became a member of the FCC we got immediately on another list.
And on that list was the Russian embassy and the English embassy and a
whole lot of them. But Litvinov was very hard to . . . You must have
read about his fights in Geneva and trying to get the United Nations to
stop Hitler. In the first place I had come from almost perfect ignorance
of politics. In other words I knew Democrats and Republicans. But you
know I have always been more personal than ideological, if you know what
I mean. I like people for themselves more than I do . . . And sometimes
they change their opinions and take on what I think are crazy ideas but
I don't
So some of the Communists I liked and some of them I didn't like. There
was one from—he'd been a professor at the University of Johns Hopkins; I
can't remember his name now. He was an extremely sweet fellow. He was
always giving me these great heavy books to read by Kant, Immanuel Kant.
Well, I never could read them. They just didn't make sense to me at all.
He was trying to win me over to the cause of Marxism but he started me
out on Kant. Well, I can tell you starting out on Kant is something
that's mightly hard to understand and really never got very much out of
it. But he was a very sweet fellow, and I had him out to dinner. Cliff
and he got in several arguments, but you see it's something we haven't
had since the McCarthy days which was a feeling of absolute safety. You
see this is something that has come on since McCarthyism. I was an
American. It was my country. I had my administration in the White House.
The wife of the President was my friend. I went to the White House for
receptions. My husband was in the government. My brother-in-law was on
the Supreme Court of the United States. I mean I felt perfectly safe.
Who in the world could accuse me of any illegal or underhanded . . .
Everything was perfectly open and outgoing. People had different ideas.
You see I was either too ignorant or too safe. And I still went out in
Washington society to embassy parties and so on. I was safe. And I
really don't believe the country's ever felt that safe since
McCarthyism. I mean I think at that point when he began that crazy
business of accusing
You felt those arguments were the same as those you were hearing among the socialists and Communists?
Exactly, how are you going to get to heaven? And whether you're going to get there by foot-washing or by total immersion or by sprinkling or whether you can . . . You see when I was brought up the Catholic Church was supposed to be the whore of Rome. I remember that expression one time, the whore of Rome. I didn't know what it meant. And so I looked it up and I was quite confused, as you can imagine. But life in those days, it was after, the Second World War was over and we'd been through the depression. Things were getting better; they still were not very good, but things were happening you know and people were being fed and the land down here was being—the erosion was being helped and the boys were all planting trees and Aubrey Williams was head of the NYA and he was training all these people. There was a tremendous spirit of life and hope and advancement.
You had no inkling of what was to come? Did you have any hints at that time about what was going to happen?
Well now, we had some hints of it through Dies, Martin Dies. You see as
soon as the La Follette Committee got started and . . . Dies started up
a committee. And he was such a dumbell, you know, he was a big lunkhead
from Texas and I think old man Garner got him to start it up. And he . .
. There was terrible fighting in the unions like the Ford fights. But
Martin Dies was such a lunkhead, you know, he called Shirley Temple a
Communist. And this idiot from Alabama, Joe somebody, he came from
Gadsden, he was a congressman. He was on the Un-American Committee. WPA
had a drama section where unemployed actors could put on free plays. And
they were trying to get rid of her—I forget her name, Miss Hallie
somebody, Hallie Farmer or
But it got even more ludicrous later and yet people took it seriously.
Sure, because more people, by that time things had changed. You see, Roosevelt gave people a tremendous sense of security, you know, in spite of him getting sick and all, he was always laughing and telling jokes. Everytime he'd come on the TV he'd have that cigarette perched in the corner of his mouth. And if you'd go to the White House to a reception, you know, he'd be standing up—I don't know how he was supported, but he was smiling and shaking hands. It was a great feeling of security. The Depression was over. We had a man in the White House who was doing something. And he got elected and reelected and reelected. The people were behind him, you know. And of course I was crazy about Mrs. Roosevelt. I just thought she was great—all of her high-pitched voice—you know she took voice lessons finally. Unions were being formed and coming South. It was a great period. That's what I'm so sorry for you young people to have missed because here it was all through the thirties and even through the war you see we were winning the war. Of course we had backsets. But up until . . . Roosevelt died in '45. '33 to '45 until the time that he died the country was in a feeling of hope if you know what I mean. We were going forward. These irritations, all this Communist business . . . Well, I hate to put on record how provincial I was, but coming from Alabama you see I'd gone to Wellesley and I'd gone to the National Cathedral School. But I mean I'd had so little education in the real world, if you know what I mean. So for a bunch of unions in New York to be fighting each other over socialism and Trotskyism and Lovestoneism and Communism. Well it meant just exactly as much to me as whether you got saved by total immersion or dipping. I thought it was just as silly.
And I'd lived all my life in that, you see. I'd been to baptisms by the
score. I'd been people immersed and sprinkled and foot-washed; I'd
In the war effort.
That's right. So that's when Mrs. Roosevelt and I cooked up the idea of trying to get the poll tax abolished for the soldiers, which we did you know. And that's a long story in itself. You see in the First World War people were excused from the poll tax if they had been in the First World War, so we got a law through—and we did get all the help of Tom Cochran and Ben Cohen and all the Howard University people, Dr. Nabrid and Bill Hasty and Ed Pritchard again, all the brain trust people, kind of. They drew up this law which prohibited the paying of the poll tax for a soldier fighting overseas. Either this was at the beginning of the war or just before the war. But that law got passed. And John Rankin said that was the nose of the camel under the tent. He fought it, filibustered it and did everything he could to beat it.
When Roosevelt became Dr. Win-the- War,
I was absolutely, 100% for fighting Hitler from the very beginning. You see I didn't have any equivocations about it at all.
But you knew that it would put the poll tax on the back burner.
Well sure, but at the same time, what good would it do to have the right to vote if you had Hitler over here? By the time you'd been reading about children being burned up in furnaces and the death of all these millions of people and the terrible Jewish persecution. I mean, this seemed to be the one monster in the world that had to be fought. But I never did finish about Litvinov. You see, I didn't blame the Russians for making the deal with Hitler at all. I thought that was a perfectly, very expedient thing to do, to give them a little time because they must have had sense enough to know the Germans were going to get on them eventually. So it gave them maybe six months or a year to get prepared. But I did think it was awfully silly for the Communists over here to say that was a phony war, and the Russians were making a deal with Hitler because Hitler wasn't . . . It was just one of those things that I still think was just crazy. And I'll argue with anybody today about that. I mean I thought for the Russians to do it was fine. They could buy time by making a phony pact—which everybody knew was phony—and buy six months or a year. It was great. But you see what it was was . . . I tell you the best books to read on all of this are the books by George Kennan and Charles Bohlen. You know who George Kennan is; he's at Princeton how I think. He's changed by the way! I saw him on the TV the other night. He's no longer such a cold warrior. And then the ambassador to Russia—Bohlen. You see these are all anti-Communist people who are very bitter against the Russians. But you get a lot of information out of them as to why things happened and why certain things were done.
And then by that time you see Decca was living with me and Esmond had
gone off to the war, so I had a very direct interest in the war because
Esmond was fighting with the British and then he was killed you see. So
I had a very direct interest in the war itself. But all during the war
my mother was with me and my father was with me a good part of the time.
The four years of the war we kept up the poll tax office. The Southern
Conference met once or twice but everything was subordinated to the war.
I can remember we all had to go in carpools.
When was Lula born?
Lula was born after the war. Lula is 28 so she was born right after the war. But there was Lucy and Tilla and Ann. The house was just full of people. We had this Japanese couple you know that lived with us because Lowell Millett couldn't have them in his house because he was working in the White House. She worked for us; she took care of Decca's child, you know, Dinky Donk, the one that you know, Constantia. She was a wonderful, lovely, beautiful woman, just a wonderful character and half her family were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and she left us soon after that. She told me, she came and told me and she was weeping, and she said she thought we were very nice people and that she had been very happy there but she could not work for Americans for a while. She'd have to get back out. You know they just were obliterated. You just wonder why she didn't murder us in our bed.
How did they manage not to get put in a camp?
Well she had been born in Hawaii, so she had American citizenship. And he had been Lowell Millett's butler, and Lowell was in the White House, so I suppose he protected him. But the FBI came and checked on them every month.
How did you feel about the detention camps?
Well I thought the detention camps were terrible, but you know my brother-in-law Hugo Black voted for them.
Did you get into an argument with him about that?
I never argued with Hugo about his cases. He never liked his work on the Court being discussed at home. He may have discussed it with Cliff but he never discussed it with me.
Was he later sorry that he had voted that way? Did he ever regret that decision?
Not that I ever heard. Hugo wasn't much . . . Hugo was a very public man,
if
[END OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE B]
Well, I'll try to divert a little about safety. When you grew up, didn't
you feel safe? I mean, I was scared of snakes and runaway horses, you
know. But there really was nothing to be scared of in those days that I
can remember except hell. And I told you about how my mother dispelled
hell for me—told me that it didn't exist and it was ridiculous to even
pay any attention to it. I'm sure there
Well I did, but by the time I went to college it had all changed.
And you see all our, both our familes on his side and on my side had come over here in the early 1700's you know and had fought in the Revolutuionary War. We had a sense—which I still have—that I owned the country; it's mine, you know. This is something that may be an arrogant way to feel. I own it; it's mine. There may be things that make me mad, and I want to change it, but it's my country. And this is my State. This is my county. As Cliff used to say, this is my side of the street. In other words you felt, you know, you had a solid base. You didn't have a feeling of floating in mid-air; you had a solid base of reality to sit on—which may or may not have been the real reality, but that was the base you stood on. So when I got to Washington and through the poll tax began to deal with all these various people who were at odds over various questions—Communism or Trotskyism or Lovestoneism or socialism of Fabianism—you know, it didn't affect me very much at all.
It just didn't mean anything?
Very little. It made me mad if they interfered with what I was trying
I used to enjoy Marcantonio because he had the same feeling, that they
all were so funny and a bunch of—well I won't repeat all his words. But
Marc used to think it was awful funny if somebody on the floor of the
House of Congress would make a violent anti-Communist speech like Martin
Dies or something of that kind, he would arrange to have Martin Dies
called to a telephone, and some voice would say, this is
Do you remember any more stories about him?
Oh heavens yes, I can remember thousands, but that would take a book in
itself. You see I met him when he was first so rude to me and flew up
and said, I was going to get that fancy-pants Baldwin or we were. And
what the hell did he care about a little committee called the National
Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, that it was going to be his bill and
he was going to get it through and so on and so forth. And he did you
see. He made everybody else withdraw, because you see he was elected on
the Democratic, Republican, and American Labor Party ticket. He was
elected on three tickets. So he got everybody else to withdraw. He was a
super politician. The people in the House liked Marcantonio. They may
have called him a red, you know, and a wop and all like that, but they
liked him. He'd take us to lunch at the cafe—the poll tax girls you
know, all these volunteers—and he'd introduce us to everybody and there
would be a lot of joking. And you'd have him out to dinner. I remember I
had spaghetti. I thought since I was having Vito Marcantonio and his
wife, who was this tall New England girl, that I would have spaghetti,
you know, like somebody having me and having fried chicken. Well, he was
so funny because—I thought it was pretty good spaghetti—he ate it and he
said, now Virginia, that
Is she still alive?
Oh, no, Miriam didn't live very long after that. She had an awful rough time. She worked in the Bellevue Hospital, some job under a false name.
They didn't have any children?
No, they never had any children. But she was 100% loyal to Marcantonio. It was such a curious marriage, you know, but it was one that seemed to work very well.
And then his secretary was such a delightful person. Marc always had, he surrounded himself—this was an old maid school teacher from New England; she was named Miss Johnson. I forget her first name, but she was his secretary. She was a friend of Miriam's I think; they'd been to school together or something. Anyway, she was about the properest and primmest New England old maid you ever saw. So people would come in there, you know, to fuss at Marc or to have a row with him or something and be met by this icy New England prim old maid. Miss Johnson was absolutely loyal to him you know, 100%, too. So he surrounded himself with—both his wife and his secretary were just the most proper New England ladies you can possibly imagine. And then there was another girl who worked in his New York office. I can't remember her name. She died of cancer. She ran his office. You see he had a New York office where all the people came with their problems. And she was a very attractive girl. She died of cancer. You know I must be getting old; but you know I have known a whole lot of people. I knew her so well and admired her so much. I tell you who we can find out all about her from is Luke and Ruth Wilson. They were great friends of Marcantonio's, too. They were great friends of this girl who ran his New York office. Marcantonio was a complete politician, but he believed that a politician was based on honor. Now this is the highest form, to me, of politics. He believed that in politics a man's word had to be his bond and that when politics got to the stage where people lied to each other and you couldn't trust a man's word anymore, that it was just chaos. He and Cliff got along extremely well because they both had the same idea of truth and honor and democratic government being based on truth and honor.
Did you have anything to do with the southern
Did you ever have to deal with Dies or with Rankin or with any of the people that were opposed you so politically?
Well, I had to deal with that Jim Eastland. I told you about taking the
sweet southern ladies in to see him. Well, I had to deal with him. You
see these women, the Women's Society of Christian Service of the
Methodist Church was one of our greatest supporters. Anyway, they are
very great church women. And there was a Mrs. Arrington in Mississippi
who was the head I believe of the Women's Society for Christian Service
of the Methodist Church. So she came to Washington and came by the poll
tax office, anti-poll tax office, and we'd had some correspondence with
them and they'd gotten some of our literature. And she had about 10, 8
or 9 women with her. And it was hot summer. And they were all dressed
like the ladies in Mississippi and Alabama dress, which I think is very
pretty, you know voile, light voile dresses, white shoes, white gloves,
white beads, white hat, and flowers on their hat. And all I thought
looked very lovely, all looking very Women's Society. So we told them
who to go to see. They wanted to go to the Methodist Building for lunch,
and we all arranged to go there for lunch. See the Methodist Building
was close by. And you know it was segregated for ages. They wanted to
integrate that. I think we tried to find some Negro girl, woman or girl
to take with us because the ladies from Mississippi wanted to integrate
the Methodist Building. They thought it was terrible the Methodist
Building wasn't integrated, and it wasn't for years and years. They were
really remarkable—I can't remember any of them's names except Mrs.
Arrington. But she was a very ladylike person. But they wanted to go to
see Jim Eastland. Now this is an absolutely true story, which is a nasty
story, but its a true story. So we went to his office and of course . .
. I didn't want to go with them. I knew what a cotton-mouth moccasion he
was, you know. And by that time I had come to absolutely hate his guts.
So I didn't want to go with them, but they insisted that I go because
for one thing they didn't know how to get around. So we walked in Jim
Eastland's office and his secretary, whoever he was, saw these nice
ladies from Mississippi all dressed up you know, and he ushered them
right in to Jim Eastland. There
And Bilbo, oh my God. It was just like a cesspool. It was just awful. All the idea that you give the blacks any rights at all and immediately one step from the school room to the bedroom, or one step from the polling booth. And of course the Mississipi ladies all explained it in terms that the white man had had relationships with the black women for so many years and that they naturally assumed that . . . However, you can read Faulkner and get the whole picture, but the point is, that's what he said, and I was there to witness it.
Did he know who you were when you came in with them?
I don't think he knew who I was. The only one who ever knew who I was was old McKellar of Memphis, and he knew who I was because you see—he chased everybody around the desk; that was no special honor—but you see he had been a friend of my uncle, who was a governor of Tennessee at one time, Malcolm Patterson. And then they split. Oh, he had a big diatribe against me in the Congressional Record. Maybe I can find it somewhere. But old McKellar you see . . . You know, as I said, these things didn't bother me. The idea of old McKellar calling me a tool of the Communist conspiracy didn't bother me in the least. I just thought he was an old fool you know and he was doing it because he'd gotten mad at Uncle Malcolm. You see I've always had a great way, as you know, which irritates people out of their minds, particularly people who . . . is reducing things to the personal. It used to irritate Cliff considerably at times. And it used to irritate Hugo a lot. For instance when I voted for Henry Wallace. I voted for Henry Wallace because I was crazy about Henry Wallace, but Cliff and Hugo voted for the Democratic Party and for Truman because they thought he could win and also they thought the other guy who was running against him, Dewey, well they thought he was no good at all. But you see they got furious at me for voting for Henry Wallace because I liked him so much.
That wasn't a good enough reason.
Why the Democratic Party, you've got to stick by the Democratic Party.
Oh, no, they never, Hugo never did forgive me for voting for
Did you ever have a personal encounter with Dies during that time?
Oh no.
Rankin?
Oh heavens no. I wouldnt have gone, touched them with a ten-foot pole. They were in there spewing forth nasty—like Bilbo. They were just so vile and vicious and common.
How did people like Sparkman and Lister Hill . . . ?
Well, I got along with them all right.
No, but how did they get along with the others?
Well, honey, they would say. Lister said to me, Honey, when you get the votes, I'll be for you. And like Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon would put his arm around you. You know Lyndon put his arm around all the girls anyway. But Lyndon would say, Honey, I know you're right; I'm for you. I know that the poll tax ought to be abolished, but we haven't got the votes. And as soon as we get the votes, I'll see that we do it. And he did you know. That was the surprising thing about Lyndon, when we got the votes, he did abolish the poll tax. You see Lyndon always thought in terms of you didn't have the votes. And Lister would say perfectly honestly, Virginia, I'd be for you if it wouldn't ruin me in Alabama.
But Lister Hill and Sparkman were New Dealers.
Oh sure.
But they weren't as vicious as later?
Oh they never were really vicious. They filibustered. They didn't go into
the nigger business of white women and the awful kind of cesspool stuff
that Rankin and Bilbo and Dies dragged out. And then I don't remember
Lyndon or Hill or Sparkman going into the thing about treason and
Communism and all that either. They would have filibustered, because
that's what they thought they had to do
Was he an early supporter of the poll tax?
Yes, he was great. You see Claude Pepper could support us because they'd abolished the poll tax in Florida. And Estes supported us, and it was during that period they abolished it by state action, you see. And Estes was a great supporter of ours. He was an awfully nice guy. He had a real pretty wife, red hair, she was Scotch, lot of children. Estes drank too much though. Died early I think on account of that. He was a very nice-looking fellow, very nice fellow, just lovely, brave guy, good guy, and he supported us. We didn't ever expect to get any southern support. When we got Claude Pepper and Estes Kefauver we thought we were just terribly lucky. I can't think of any southern senators or southern congressmen that supported us during that period. When Jim Folsom got elected governor of Alabama, he supported us, but he couldn't . . . He was trying to do it through the state. But he was against the poll tax.
Arnold Ellis came later?
He came later. He was for it I believe, but I never knew him. You see we were trying to . . . Of course the Byrds there in Virginia. Senator Byrd was 1000% against us. Carter Glass, oh and Howard Worth Smith—you know I lived in his district. He was like an old buzzard picking over a carrion. He was a horrible old man, I thought. He was always doing something; he was even against the whole New Deal. He was against everything.
You felt that you were in a position of power with the New Deal behind you. Did the southern congressmen feel that they were in a weak position? Were they fighting back or something?
Well they
They were trying to get industry all the time on account of cheap labor. Cheap labor was the great selling point of the South. Every southern state, every Chamber of Commerce, every corporation to get the South prosperous was cheap labor. They also were willing to take anything the United States government gave them.
You see this is what makes the South, as I have said, so schizophrenic
and so crazy. And this is why I think people go crazy. Here we have just
here in Alabama today, George Wallace, who takes every dime that he can
get out of the federal government and the people who follow him take
every dime they can get out of the federal government. Because you see
we get into Alabama at least twice as much money as we send out to the
federal government. In other words, the federal taxes that we pay in
Alabama are far less than the federal money that we get in. And of
course New York and Chicago or those places complain bitterly. The tax
money you see comes South. But the point is that . . . So everybody that
can get a federal grant in the South gets one, whether its Medicaid or
Medicare or unemployment or commodities. And of course all these
highways you see, they're built 10% with the state money and 90% with
federal money. All these great interstate highways and all the highways
you see are built with federal money. They fought bled and died for all
the federal military installations they could get. Right here in
Montgomery you know we've got two or three. Now this is the thing that
makes the South so schizophrenic is that they fight for federal benefits
all the time, and everybody that's elected they're going to get them
something, new school or something for them; at the same time the States
are wooing the big corporations to come down
Well, going back to the poll tax, during the war there was . . . we got rid of it for the soldiers, but hardly any of them ever voted. But then when they got back home, you see, they didn't have to pay a poll tax.
Do you remember the specifics of you and Eleanor Roosevelt planning that?
Uh, huh, I had some letters from her about it. But this was just this
afternoon just talking on the South portico after he said we had to have
win-the-war, we decided we'd get rid of the poll tax for the soldiers.
You see if I'd had any idea that I was doing anything historical, I'd
have kept a lot more than I have, but I've kept a lot of stuff. So when
the war was over. Roosevelt died, you see, and Truman came in. The poll
tax had barely limped along on a very limited basis, but we decided we
were going all once again to . . . We decided we'd revive it. So we had
a meeting. We got all the people together from the board. And by that
time Lewis and Philip
[END OF TAPE 4, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 5, SIDE A]
Well, Lee Pressman had been the general counsel for the CIO and he was a
very tall, good-looking fellow from New York and had a very beautiful
wife named Sunny and two very beautiful daughters. And he had helped us
a great deal in the anti-poll tax committee by getting money from the
unions and by getting money from the CIO and he was very close to Lewis
and to Murray too. And I remember during the height of Lee's fame, when
he was a big shot, I was up in New England—Sarah and I had taken a trip
up to see various people, one of whom was Bob Lamb, who represented the
Steel Workers. He'd been a Harvard graduate and he married; you know his
wife, when he died, married Corliss Lamont, and she just died last week.
Well, Bob Lamb's widow married Corliss Lamont after Bob Lamb died,
several years after he died. We were visiting the Lambs; we'd gone by to
see Bob and Helen Lamb up in New England. Sarah D'Avila, who was
secretary of the anti-poll tax committee. Frances Wheeler in the
meantime had gotten married and had gone off and Sarah had become the
secretary of the anti-poll tax committee. We just took a little trip and
went to several people we knew. It was hot and in the summer. The
children were down in Alabama or something. I don't know; we just took a
little trip, for about a week. So the Lambs told us, or we knew, . . .
You see Bob Lamb represented the Steel Workers. This was before the war.
Anyway, he said that Lee Pressman had a house in the vicinity. So we
called him up and told him we were going to come by and see him and
Sunny, you see we knew his wife too quite well. You see the New Deal in
those days was very much smaller than the great octopus they've got now.
And certainly everybody in the labor movement . . . Now Cliff never did
like Lee Pressman. He had had some experiences with him that made him
dislike him. He thought he was arrogant and went to Harvard and he was
always trying to lay down the law. He was on some commissions with him.
But I thought Lee was very nice because he helped us so much and got us
Now let's go back to this meeting where Hoyt Haddock came.
The Cold War had started by then and all the schisms had started. It drove you absolutely out of your mind. At that point it had come home to me. You see when the war was over we felt like we were on top of the world. Here we were, we'd defeated Hitler. We had defeated this great horrible monster. And Henry Wallace was talking about the brave new world, you know, and milk for the starving. And Wendell Wilkie was going around the world making speeches we were all in one world. There was a period there of euphoria, you know, when the Russians and Americans met on the Elbe and shook hands. The idea was that Russia would become more democratic and we would become more socialistic. And the two countries would be great friends and keep the peace in the world. There was a period of euphoria. But then you see the Cold War started almost immediately, and they cut off Lend-Lease you see, that was the first thing they did. All these devastated countries of Europe and Russia and England too, all of them who had depended on us to rehabilitate them—you see we cut off Lend-Lease, you know, and they had to pay for what they got or then under the Marshall Plan they had to . . .
Let's stay on this meeting.
The point was all this terrific fighting and infighting and Cold War and Communism and anti-Communism and traitors—it all started. And Cliff was dealing with it at the FCC. This must have been about '46, you see. It was right after the war, and Truman had come in. And we were trying to revive the poll tax committee. While the Cold War had started, it hadn't gotten to be so terribly vicious, but Hoyt Haddock came over with the message from Phil Murray that we had to get rid of all the left-wing unions, which were Harry Bridges' union, you know the Longshoremen, and the Electrical Workers' Union, and the Furriers, of course, because they were out-and-out Communists, and the Marine Cooks and Stewards. I can't remember the list, all the details of it, except we refused to it, at least we took a vote. And we said we were going to stick by the principles we always stuck by, which was that anybody that supported the anti-poll tax bill could come and be on the board and take part in things. Well, Hoyt Haddock said that no more money then from the CIO.
Was that an overwhelming vote?
Well, I don't remember the vote, but I remember the Negroes, the blacks all voted with us, and the church organizations and the civil liberties—they all voted with us. I still had a lot of support.
That was still considered sort of an inter-union battle then?
Exactly. So we refused to not allow these unions to come. In the meantime though you see, John L. Lewis had withdrawn his representative on account of Phillip Murray being in there. You see, he knew Phillip Murray wasn't any Communist, but he was so mad at Murray you see that he withdrew his representative. And then the AF of L withdrew their representative because they said Murray and the whole CIO was a bunch of Communists. It got pretty confusing there for awhile. But we mostly say it as a interunion fight, all of them seeking support.
So then we were desperate for money. We had no money, and the CIO had
said they weren't going to give us any more money. And the left-wing
unions had never given us very much and didn't have much. And they were
fighting for their lives at that point, you know. Anyway, we struggled
along for a few months there you know with just the support—oh, the
Negro Elks helped us out at that point; I remember that. They gave us
some money. But then I got a call from a Jewish fellow whose name I
can't remember, who
Then you see after that we all . . . The Southern Conference was still in existence then. And we all joined in with Henry, you know, with Wallace and got into the Progressive Party and followed Henry. And of course that split things still farther. We didn't win. That was the end of the poll tax committee. That was the last meeting.
What year was this?
That must have been about '47. It was before Henry ran; Henry ran in '48.
And I remember I began to throw all my enthusiasm . . . I think I was
pregnant with Lula then. I'd just had a . . . Well, that ended the
committee. And all the material and the letters, everything was . . . A
fellow named Coleman Rosenberger, who had worked with us—he was one of
the Tolan Committee boys. He went to work for George Bender, who had
been congressman, he was a Republican. And he helped us a great deal.
George Bender, he was a real nice guy. He was a great Taft follower. He
was a congressman from Ohio. So for a while Coleman Rosenberger stored
all this stuff in his basement and
And you know years later, it did take a long time, but it did finally
get abolished. You know it got abolished by a constitutional amendment.
It got abolished by constitutional amendment for federal elections only.
And then Lyndon Johnson abolished it in the voting rights act. So Lyndon
did do what he said he was going to do. You see Lyndon Johnson's voting
rights act got rid of all the impediments on the vote, if you remember.
You see it had been abolished in federal elections, and a lot of the
states then had begun to abolish it because it was very hard to hold a
federal election where you didn't have to pay a poll tax and a state
election where you did. And so a lot of the states had gotten rid of it.
But the heroes of that whole struggle . . . You see the Supreme Court
had turned us down two or three times and said it was a state issue. You
know you look back on that period and there were so many people that
it's just hard to, you know, I'd have to give you a long list. In the
Congress itself there was George Norris and Claude Pepper, they were our
main supporters in the . . . And in the House it was Marcantonio, Vito
Marcantonio, and it was Maury Maverick, and this Lee Geyer, who fought
to the very end with the cancer of the throat—he still made speeches
trying to get rid of the poll tax. So I would say they were the heroes
of the struggle in the Congress. And the main support we got was from
the unions, and that was mainly through Mr. Lewis and from Lee Pressman
and from Jean Cotton and the lobbyists for the various unions,
One of the main workers we had—this is such a funny tale, I can't help
but tell this, because it's so amusing. There was a little old lady
appeared, she was old, really old. She was you know elderly, 60's, 70's,
but had white hair. Her name was Sarah Rosenbaum. So she came in one day
and was a, to be a volunteer. We had lots of volunteers. I can't
remember all their names. So Sarah came in and she was just as cute as
she could be. And she would make us cocoa in the mornings on the
radiator. She was just as cute as she could be. She was Sarah Rosenbaum.
And the thing that was so funny, though, about her was that she had been
a Rostow. I'm trying to make it brief, but this is such a fascinating
story in view of the later events. So Sarah's family had come from
Lithuania or Latvia. There was a Jewish group that brought Jews over
here. They were having the horrible pogroms or something. So this Jewish
group settled this Rostow family near New Haven on a little farm. Well,
the old gentleman—these are stories I got from Sarah—her father, did
nothing but study the Talmud. He was a holy man, so he sat with his
yarmulke on and studied the Talmud. And he wasn't supposed to do
anything but that, what he'd been bred to do, he was a holy man. I don't
know whether he was a rabbi. The mother, she said, was a little bitty
woman, who was Polish, I believe. And she thought they would all starve
to death on this rocky farm unless something was done. So she got some
cows. And the children would have to get up at four o'clock in the
morning and milk the cows. Then they would take the milk, you know, and
come home in the afternoon and milk the cows and take the milk to the
neighbors. So she kept that whole family going on these few cows she
bought and on this little bit of a dairy. Sarah told about it with
greatest possible pride. What a marvelous person her mother was. It
turns out she was Gene and Walt Rostow's aunt, Sarah was. So Sarah was
an out-and-out
One girl who acted a secretary for a while was named Kit somebody, perfectly beautiful girl and I can't remember her name now.
[END OF TAPE 5, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 5, SIDE B]
Well, you asked me what the feeling in Washington was at the end of the
war. Of course the great emotional outburst came at the death of
Roosevelt. In spite of the people on the inside of the White House
knowing that he'd had a stroke and was ill, the
That all broke up on that day that Roosevelt—you know Woody Guthrie wrote
a song about it called "Singing in the Rain." Have you ever heard that?
Well, Woody Guthrie was a great friend of Pete Seegar's and he came out
of Oklahoma, I believe. He was
[Back to Woody Guthrie's song.]
Well, the thing was Russia had made a tremendous effort to get the
Western democracies . . . they had done that in the Spanish War, you
see, to get the democracies to fight Mussolini and Hitler in Spain. And
of course I was telling you yesterday about the Spanish War. There are
so many books written on the Spanish War. But the one by Ambassador
Claude Bowers. Claude Bowers put him down; he wrote the best book from
the American point of view. And he was the Ambassador to Spain and he
wrote a book on Spain. Nobody seems
But the effect of that was to isolate the American Communist Party even more?
Oh, it isolated it just terribly. And you see all these young people split up, all these young organizations that Mrs. Roosevelt had been nurturing, like the Young Southerners and the Southern Negro Youth Conference. They all split up. So they had this big meeting in Washington. The Stalin-Hitler pact was made I believe in the year '38.
In the beginning you talked about a meeting at the White House.
Well, the thing was that this was a meeting of all these young people Mrs. Roosevelt had nurtured. At the same time of the Hitler-Stalin pact. This was before the war, after Mr. Roosevelt said he had turned from Mr. New Deal to Mr. Win-the-War. And that's when he and Cliff and Abe and all were trying to get the aluminum manufactured, you know and the aircraft built, because they saw the war coming. So they had a big rally on the White House South . . . and Mr. Roosevelt came out with Mrs. Roosevelt and he gave them holy, unshaded hell. He called them . . . He said that for them to say that this Hitler-Stalin pact should be supported . . . It just created hell on earth.
Now who was at this meeting?
All these young people.
Invited there by Mrs. Roosevelt?
Sure. Tex Dobbs was one of them. He was the head of one of those organizations called I think the Southern . . . He was a good-looking boy from Texas. I told you about Tex a million times. And Polly Dobbs. Polly was from Alabama. This is what makes the United States so curious because when the war was declared finally Tex became one of the great heroes of the war and had a battlefield decoration. I think became a Congressional Medal of Honor winner. Anyway he became one of the heroes of the war. Then there's that boy from Arkansas, Howard Lee.
They were working in the Youth Organization of the Southern Conference?
Well, yes. I never knew exactly how close the ties were. Helen Fuller
was always fooling with that. She was at the New
Republic you know.
Now the Southern Negro Youth Conference was something different?
Yes, but they were affiliated, or they had meetings together, they got on
together. As I recall, this was the Southern Youth Congress or the
Southern Youth Conference. And Mr. Roosevelt came out on the South
Balcony and gave them unshaded hell. He told Mrs. Roosevelt not to have
them in the house anymore. At that point she said that they had fooled
her. That all the time she'd been so kind and nice to them and had them
sleeping there at the White House, that they had been underground
Communists and fooled her. And now that they had come out in their true
lights, she repudiated them. And Mr. Roosevelt repudiated them. So Woody
Guthrie wrote a song called "Singing in the Rain." Well it's one of his
famous songs, "we were sitting, singing, standing on the White House
lawn . . . " Woody Guthrie was on the left wing side. He was for the
Stalin-Hitler pact, or something. Well, if you get an account of his
songs, it's one of the most famous ones. Pete Seegar would know which
one it was. I don't remember Pete being involved in all this. He would
certainly know which one of Woody Guthrie's songs it was. I thing it was
called "Standing in the Rain," not Singing in the Rain but Standing in
the Rain. You see what I keep emphasizing is I knew all these people.
When they were on my side that was fine but I never was involved to the
point where . . . And we used to have these raging conflicts and fights,
but I never got so mad at them that I wouldn't let them spend the night
if they didn't have a place to stay, and
Entertainment?
Well, I went for entertainment more than spiritual refreshment, because I
never believed these big red sweating men up on the platform, you know,
who were always begging for money were going to get me to heaven. But it
was the thing to do. Didn't you go to revivals? Aubrey Williams was
brought up on revival meetings. He used to say that he'd always figure a
baby from the time of the revival meeting, because everybody would get
filled with the spirit of the Lord, you know, and get transported into
these great, tremendous storms of emotion. And then it was always so
surprising that nine months afterwards, there was just this great crop
of babies appeared. You see he'd come up in the age of revivals. Well,
my mother-in-law was a Methodist. And she used to tell me about the
great Methodist
Cliff, you see, was working day and night on this defense plant thing,
trying to get the country ready for war. And he had thought of this idea
of the government you know building the plants—it was his idea that they
got through Congress—the government would build the plants and then
lease them to MacDonald Aircraft or Lockheed, or whatever, who would
make the airplanes at a certain percentage. The title stayed in the
government hands. They would build the great big aluminum plant, say,
for Kaiser or for Reynolds. Hundreds of millions of dollars. And
Reynolds would come in . . . They had a tremendous need for aluminum you
see because the airplanes had to be built of aluminum, and malibdinum.
They would come in and run them and they would be paid a certain
percentage, a fixed fee, and then after the war was over, the government
owned these plants. Well, after the war was over, Truman came in you
see, and Eisenhower. They all just gave the plants to whoever was
running them. The government had paid for them, maybe they paid a few
cents on the dollar, but they just turned them over because they didn't
believe in any kind of government ownership at all you see. So all those
great plants you see were just turned over to the people who were
operating them, although
And then during the war, you see, the relationships with Russia were pretty close. They'd have big concerts—Russian and American concerts to raise money for the wounded or the Red Cross. And people like Mrs. Daisy Harriman and Mrs. Eisenhower would be chairman. And you can imagine. They would have Constitution Hall draped with the red flag and the U.S. flag. The Russians would sing and dance, and the Americans would sing and dance. All these fashionable people. So during the war Russia was very popular and quite fashionable. And Mrs.—the one that was so rich and had so many husbands, you know, the Post Toasties lady; she was the heiress of the Post Toasties. She had an enormous house and she'd been married a whole lot of times. Her husband got to be ambassador to Russia. Mrs. Margerie Post Toast . . . Mrs. Margerie Post, she was. You never heard of her? Good God Almighty! She had a daughter who was an actress was very pretty, I can't remember her name either. But anyway she would open her house to Russian-American things. I was invited once to be an aide or usher at some big Russian-American thing. Oh, Russia got to be very popular. I forget who the Ambassador was at that time. Maybe it was still Litvinov, but I doubt it. That was during the fighting, you know. And then you see the war was over, we had defeated Hitler. And then the Russians and the Americans met on the Elbe and shook hands. This was going to be a whole new day. Russia was going to become democratic, and American was going to become at least much more socialistic than it had been. But in the meantime, you see, the great moment of triumph came after Roosevelt died. But it was his death that really marked the end of the New Deal, if you know what I mean. And I can remember the day of . . . Of course I went into town, we went into town to see the funeral cortege—took the children. People were just lining the streets by the thousands and thousands all of them just dissolved into tears. And then he lay in state as I remember at the Capitol. And then he was buried up in Hyde Park.
Were you and Cliff personally distraught
Well we were as the President, but we were not distraught on a personal basis, because we'd never known him that well. In fact we'd only met him, you know, at big parties. We never were part of the White House entourage you see. We admired him as president. But he gave you a feeling of safety, which I've been trying to . . . You know as long as Roosevelt was there you felt like something was going to get done and things were going to be O.K. You had a mighty champion on your side. So then Truman came in and Cliff had known Truman fairly well because Truman was investigating some of the war industries to see if they were making too much money or grafting at all. He thought Truman was a nice little fellow, and smart, pretty smart. But he got on with Truman very well you know. It was only the loyalty order that broke him up with Truman, because he thought Truman was a nice little fellow, and he liked him. Anyway the war was over. So then here we were.
Cliff was on the FCC. It was during that period, of the war, that he
made the great fight for the educational TV. You see they couldn't build
any radio, couldn't use the steel and material to build any radio
towers. And FM had been invented, which is high fidelity, you know. So
he was able to get through, this section set aside of ultra high
frequency for the educational TV system, which he did. And that was a
big fight, too, but that's his book. He got it done. Mostly on the TV
the first things they had were women fighting in mud. It's the truth;
you never would believe it. See, industry gave Cliff an early TV set
because he was on the FCC. They weren't for sale then, but they wanted
him to watch the progress of it. And they had Mr. Howdy Doody on there,
which the children adored—kind of like Sesame Street, you know. But the
main thing was that they used to have women wrestlers wrestling in mud.
Don't ask me why that attracted people, but they did. We had people
over; you see it was an absolutely new thing you know and the neighbors
would come rushing over you know and the main entertainment was women
wrestling in mud. It was the craziest thing you've ever seen in your
life. And then they'd have some little news on there. It was a pretty .
. . The first TV was pretty awful. But one of the things that happened
during that period was, once again, the TV people had lobbyists. And
they were
END OF INTERVIEW