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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 wa