[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

HARRIET HERRING:

As I said a while ago, I don't know whether we're Scotch-Irish or Irish. I'll ask this niece of mine; I don't know why I didn't think to ask her the other day when she was here. And I'm sure she has gone all the way who the first ones were. I used to hear all the time when I was growing up that we had a land grant from the king of England, and I had heard dates from the late sixteen hundreds to 1772. Well, I didn't think that even George III would be giving a land grant to anybody in North Carolina in 1772—things were warming up a little too much! But I found that a descendant in another branch of the family had a copy of the grant—not the land that I grew up on, but where a cousin of mine and his father and grandfather grew up. And it was up near Lagrange. And it told even about a creek and everything, you know—just exactly. So some of us got here by that time anyhow. And I think it must have been that some of them lived in this county, as a matter of fact, because my grandfather, I reckon it must have been in, say, 1828 or something of the kind, he bought a farm down where I grew up. Well, there must have been about fifteen hundred acres. No, it was more than that, because he had four children and they each had about five or six hundred acres. And it was on the Neuse River, and it had a creek flowing through it. Then two of his four children, my father and an aunt, lived on theirs, and the other one sold hers to the two of them, and married a man from Greene County and came back. So I can't tell you exactly when I started, but I know it was a right good while: about four or five generations back.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

How far was your family place from Kinston?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, three miles now [laughter] . We used to call it four miles to Kinston. I date back to when you didn't even have sand unknown roads;

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you had sand. My mother and father, in the spring if it wasn't going to be too hot and it wasn't too dry, they would go to church in Kinston; they belonged to church there. But otherwise you just went through sand that covered the wheels of the buggy, you know, covered well up in the spokes. You had to walk a horse; once in a while a place to trot him a little, you know. So I always went along, because I was the youngest, you see. My father was married twice, and he had children by his first wife, and then married my mother and started all over again. And I was the last one of eleven, so I could sit on a little stool like that in the foot of it, you know. So I would get to go to Sunday School. I thought it was great to go to Sunday School and get colored picture cards. [laughter]

NEVIN BROWN:

Did you have all brothers, then, or did you have any sisters from the first marriage?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well yes, but the last one I just barely remember when she got married. I remember we had a fence/down the width of the house and everything down to the road, which wasn't as far then as it is now (they've straightened the road—it had a loop in it). Anyhow, I knew there was stuff going on around, you know, and somebody looked out the window and said, "Oh, there comes the bride and groom." We had a gate there because they turned the horses in there sometimes. I looked out there and I said, "Oh, it's / Don Uzzle (that was her beau, you know; he'd been coming there). It's nobody but Don Uzzle." That's the way I greeted him. Fortunately / unknown they stopped me; I didn't greet him that way. I said "bridegroom" or something.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

I wanted to ask you about your father's background. He grew up there on that land that he later farmed?

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes. You see, he had part of my grandfather's place, that he bought when he moved from Greene County. And there was a house on it. Here's

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a picture (I'm not a good drawer; I had a little effort at doing some canning and I drew this for my label). The road came from out here, you see. The road was, see, here, and then divided and went one side of the house and the other went around it. And this was trees. There were first elms in the yard and then walnut trees in the middle, two rows of walnut trees, and beyond that a row on each side of pecan trees leading down to the highway. We remodeled the house in 1929, and its roof just came slanting all the way. We put in those windows to get circulation (of course we've got air conditioning now, and it would have been just as well to have been the other way). Of course these are the various outbuildings; they come around like this, you see.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Beautiful.

NEVIN BROWN:

Was that a house for a plantation at one time?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, there were two houses on that, and Grandfather lived in the one that was sort of up the hill from there. While he built the house, it's still standing. It's changed hands two or three times, but ours hasn't changed hands. Anyway, the big trees and those barns and everything were as good as I could make them; I couldn't make them around in a circle and keep them their right size.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did your father attend college?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh no, there weren't any colleges. You're asking both mother and father, I suppose? Well, my father went, a little while anyhow, to academies. Especially a man teacher would have an academy, and have two or three teachers to help. And that went on to all of my half sisters and brothers too. But by the time I came along there were—though I went to a four-month school until I went to Kinston to what was called the high school (seventh, eighth and ninth grades were high school). And until I went there when I

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was fourteen I had been to school four months a year.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Well then, he ran what seems like a very large farm.

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, it was only about six hundred acres, something like that.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What did he plant primarily?

HARRIET HERRING:

Mainly cotton. He wasn't very keen about tobacco because it ate up timber too fast. But my brothers before he died did begin raising a little tobacco. A lot of people had been raising tobacco for quite a while, and he just saw that price floating away, you know. Of course they had a very valuable thing there in it; it was saved until fairly recently.

NEVIN BROWN:

Was he fairly successful as a cotton farmer?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, cotton prices were awful low: seven and eight and ten cents a pound, I remember. What is it now, a dollar?

NEVIN BROWN:

About, I think, yes.

HARRIET HERRING:

Generally, a little above or a little below and so on. I remember as a small child my father came home from town (that's the only way he knew what the price of cotton was for the day, you know). And he said to my mother (he was talking about the price of cotton), "I believe it'll go to five cents." And I said, "Oh, Daddy, a bale?" And so they at least got a laugh out of that, you know, because they had fifty bales of cotton. He had a gin, and he would gin his own cotton. And then you know what he did with his seed? He cracked them so they wouldn't come up and used them for fertilizer; that was before they were using oil, cotton seed oil. [laughter] So anyway, I had been used to the bales; they were just rolled out in front of the gin. And we children in the neighborhood as we gathered, or any cousins or nieces or nephews that I had (I was a great-aunt when I was twelve years old, you see; my father's older children married and had children, and they

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visited a great deal), we'd go out and jump from one bale to the other, you know, and have games (who could get on the most, or whatever). And that's the reason I measured cotton in terms of bales. So I think they felt better when they thought at least they didn't have to sell it for five cents a bale.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Was your father interested in politics?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, not a great deal. He didn't talk politics very much. But you must remember my father was—well, let's see—I guess he was fifty-eight when I was born. By the time I was acquainted with him he was elderly, and his health got not so good. And so I don't know that he'd ever been very greatly interested in politics. But he always voted; I'd hear him talk about voting ("Time to go vote," and so on). And he talked politics with one of our neighbors, the one who bought most of the rest of the farm and lived there. As a matter of fact his descendants still live there, the third generation of them.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What were his views on political issues?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, I was too young when my father died to pay much attention to what they were saying about it. I just knew they were talking politics.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

How old were you when he died?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, let me see: I was born in '92, and he died in 1906.

NEVIN BROWN:

Fourteen, right. Were you in some kind of community where your farm was? I mean, did you have a church that you went to? Was there a group of people that you pretty much knew?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, there was a little Methodist church about two miles from us, and these people who came and bought the farm of my uncle were Methodists. But my mother and father happened to be Baptists, and so we had

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to go to Kinston for church; we didn't have a church out there. We would have a preacher once in a while. The Woods, who lived up there where my uncle had lived, had him very often, because there weren't very many families and it was a very scattered neighborhood. As a matter of fact, up until about the time I was ready to start school there were (let's see) the Hills and the Woods and the Dardens and the Parrotts and us: there were five families that had from two to four children in school. And they paid a teacher for a nine-month school. And then when they got a little beyond where that kind of teacher was they'd go off to boarding school or somewhere, you see. I went through half a year under that basis. By that time three of the families had moved, and in the other ones the children had all gotten older. So I began going four months a year. I once in one of these borrowing jobs in Washington had to fill out some kind of a temporary thing, and they asked a question that I'd never heard put that way before, "How many years of elementary school did you have? Calculate nine months to the year." Well, I figured it up, and I had done more years in college than I had in elementary school—as you go spread them over, that took two and a half years, near about, to make one year. And I began to think when I got to figuring it and turned it in, "They just won't believe this." I wouldn't myself!

MARY FREDERICKSON:

[laughter] I wanted to ask you about your mother's life. What kind of family was she from?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, about the same. Her father didn't have as much land as my grandfather did. And he was younger; had young children. And he was killed in the Civil War. A sister of his insisted on taking my mother over to live with her (there were five other children). After she went over there

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her mother's health got bad, but she didn't go back. I don't know why, but I gathered from what she said that her aunt (my great-aunt) promised to send her to school. And she went one day and never went any more. She taught herself to read and was a great reader; she just read all the time, when she wasn't working in the house or in the garden.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Why did she only go for one day?

HARRIET HERRING:

I don't know why they even sent one day. I said, "Why?" Well, school started and so she started too, you see. I'm sure this aunt simply. . . . She had one daughter, and I'm sure, I know from things my mother said that she was simply a servant in the house, you see. And her father was dead and her mother's health was bad; she didn't have anybody to. . . . Some of your questions here, you can see, didn't fit my situation at all.

NEVIN BROWN:

Right. Did your parents ever say anything about the Civil War, about their attitudes toward what it was like then? Did they feel any animosity to the North? What did they feel about that kind of situation?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, there were bywords to talk about "damn Yankees", you know, and that sort of thing. But as far as I could see any real bitterness was over by then. See, it had been a full generation; I was just late coming along!

MARY FREDERICKSON:

How did your mother, though, feel about her father's loss in the war?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, I mean, everybody had somebody lost in the war. There wasn't any family around that didn't have somebody lost in the war.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

How did she meet your father?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, this aunt lived not very far from my father. And then

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when he was widowed, why, he had to have a wife, didn't he?

NEVIN BROWN:

To raise all the rest of the kids.

HARRIET HERRING:

[laughter] Yes. His youngest child was quite young.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

How old was she when they married?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well I never did know just exactly. You'll think I'm awfully uncurious that I didn't ask, but she was grown and getting ready to get married when I first became really conscious of her. I don't know, but she must have been quite small unknown Well, let's see, my mother had four and he had eleven in all. One girl got married not too awfully long after her father did (the oldest girl). That's what made me a great-aunt at twelve years of age, you see.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

So some of your father's older children must have been about the same age as your mother.

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes. Well this first girl, the oldest one, the girl that got married not too long after he did, must have been not more than a couple (two or three) years younger than my mother, than her mother-in-law. Then she was glad to get away from the mother-in-law.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

[laughter] Did your mother ever talk about the difficulty of coming into that kind of a family and being an "instant mother" to all of these children?

HARRIET HERRING:

No, not at all. See, there has always been a great deal of men marrying if they lose their wives; they'll get married again and have two families. So it was so common that I suppose it just wasn't. . . . And some of them were really quite devoted to her, and some of the others (particularly two husbands). . . . Well, my father, when the girl married, he gave her a farm somewhere wherever they wanted it (of course they usually

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married somebody that didn't live more than twenty miles away). And of the boys, one got in a fever to go out west. He went to Montana (that was being settled then); he was going to run a commisary there. So he took his heritage and went off to Montana. But he didn't stay but a few years and he was back. Then he lived there the rest of his life at Kinston and was a very successful contractor, although I think he must have been a genius at building because he didn't have anything except. . . . You see, at the time he was there they had a teacher for this family, and so they had more schooling than I had out in the little brown, unpainted schoolhouse. But he really was very good at that. He built the first concrete block house in Kinston. It was a new thing, you know, and he had to make the forms and everything. So he knew his business, if it was learned—I'm sure he didn't learn it in college. One of them did go to a technical college in Baltimore, one of the boys; he was very much mechanically minded.

NEVIN BROWN:

Were your parents really interested in education?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh yes. My mother in particular, because she had none. I've thought about it a lot of times since: it was amazing how interested she was in the newspapers and in magazines and books and all. Of course we didn't have an awful lot of books, because we lived too far from town to go get one from the very small town library, and unknown borrow books and so on.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did she want you to have a good education?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh yes.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

I asked if she ever did any work for women's suffrage?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh, it wasn't even talked about; didn't hear the term 'til I was grown and in college.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

[laughter] Did she ever participate in the women's club movement or anything like that?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, who would you have in it? Three families there that you visited with; the rest of them were unknown tenant farmers, what were white. Most of them were black. See, the combination of white and black on the same plantation didn't work very well. If a person had white tenants he had white tenants, but very few. Now there was one family that the daughter in that my age, we were great friends, and I was quite disturbed when they moved, you see. I mean, people stayed in their houses, I thought; they were born there, they ought to stay there.

We had, let's see, seven tenant houses; had that many black families. And you asking here about servants. Somebody in one or another of those families, when they were bargained with it was understood that somebody was going to do the laundry, and they did the laundry. And they helped with housecleaning and so on. But we didn't have a servant that came in every day. I didn't know but two families in my whole neighborhood who had; and one of them didn't have one all the time, but the other one, he had. Incidentally, this Mr. Kennedy had some of the land that belonged to Henry Herring of several generations back; it had been changing hands and he got it. And both of them had money besides a good-sized plantation, and had no children. My father with eleven to give some education to, you see, made a difference.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Exactly. Well then, were all of the tenants black?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh yes.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

You didn't have any white tenants at all?

HARRIET HERRING:

No. They would refer once in a while to when (I've forgotten

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the last name, but the man and his two children were Dick and Bink, and there was something else that rhymed with that) there were four of them that stayed on the farm for a year or two. But they weren't very satisfactory; didn't mix well with black tenants. So a person would have one or the other.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did the tenants stay for a long period of time on the land, or did they tend to come and go?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, some of them were second generation. Joe Brown, for example: his mother had lived on the farm. He was raised on a farm, and they didn't forget it. And, of course, when I was young you were still in the period when somebody would tell you that "My husband belonged to your grandfather." And then they expected a little more consideration, you know. You'd run into that quite often.

NEVIN BROWN:

So your grandfather did have slaves also?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh yes. Because, you see, he didn't die until really after the Civil War. He had to be pardoned because he was a slave owner before he could ever vote again, you see. I had some occasion to look up cotton mills and the textile industry, and went through a lot of things. What do they call that set of books on the Civil War? Rebellion Records: you can tell who put that out, can't you? Congress authorized a printing of all the correspondence that they got between generals, between governors and everything. I was looking up things. An index helped to get it, but I browsed and ran into a letter from a governor (his name will come to me in a minute; he was a sassy sort of fellow). He was a governor before the war and then was a governor again afterwards. I ran across some of his correspondence between him and the confederate government. And he was telling them how he

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couldn't make every mill (North Carolina had a few cotton mills then, and of course they were in great need of cloth for the soldiers). . . . There was protesting letters, and he answered. And he said he had let such-and-such a proportion and they just had to have it. "I am your humble servant, Vance;" Vance was his name.

NEVIN BROWN:

Oh, Zebulon.

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes, Zeb Vance. But it sounded so disrespectful until this great respect, you know [laughter] , realizing he was writing to the president of the Confederacy.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

But your father's father didn't fight in the war? He stayed on his plantation during the war?

HARRIET HERRING:

My grandfather? Oh yes, he was too old for it. See, my father was born in 1834, born before Victoria came to the throne. You're talking about things a long time ago when you go to my father. My age plus his makes a long time, you know.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

[laughter] So some of the tenants on your plantation had actually been there, their ancestors had been there during the Civil War?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, a few, not too many. As I say this Brown, the one I remember, he lived there for years and years. Now, for instance, there's a black man up not far from Kinston who cures very good meat, hams. Mary gets her ham from him every once in a while, and she stopped by there. The first time I went there with her she told him that I was her father's sister. And he said, "Yes. When I was first married I went there to live with Mr. Henry and Mr. Beck." I said, "Well, that's the reason you know how to cure good hams." He said, "Yes, Mr. Henry taught me how to cure good hams." But he hadn't ever belonged, but he had that very early connection with the family.

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But the ones that had belonged to you reminded you. Especially one (I despised her, she was so hateful), she just was such a tease. But otherwise she was forever reminding you that she worked for us for nothing, you know—worked for my father for nothing.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What was your relationship with the children of the tenants?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh, I was crazy about them. See, I had nobody of my own to play with, and especially after this white tenant family moved. I'd run away; I've been switched for running away. One family didn't live very far, and there weren't any real small children there. And I could get by with running away and going over there. Sometimes my youngest brother'd be sent over to fetch me home, and I was sitting there eating collards and cornbread with them. [laughter]

NEVIN BROWN:

So you did have some kind of childhood contact with black people.

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh mercy! They came up every day twice a day to get the mule (three times, four times a day) and bring the mule back at lunchtime to feed, and then bring him back at night, you know. I'd see the black people and I would dash out to talk to the children.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, there were two or three families that would come back and forth, you know. He and his family stayed on for years and years. But I lost contact with them because I was away too much.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did your mother ever have any help, did any of the women ever help your mother with the children? Did you have a nurse or anything?

HARRIET HERRING:

No, I don't remember having one. When she had two or three that were stepping-stones she may have, and probably had some of the older girls, you know. But by the time I came along, you see, there was five

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years' difference (or was it seven years' difference?) between me and my youngest brother. So I trailed around behind my mother all the time; didn't have to have a nursemaid.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

I see. You said that someone came in to help her with the cleaning and that someone else did the laundry. Did she have a cook? Did someone do the cooking?

HARRIET HERRING:

Not very much. If my mother was feeling bad she'd have her come in and help when she needed her. But, as I say, these people who had cash as well as land, they had not only a cook and maids (a maid or two), but also a phaeton with a driver and two horses. [laughter]

MARY FREDERICKSON:

[laughter] My goodness. What was your mother's life like, do you think, on this really large farm? Did she work outside? Did she keep a garden?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, she tended a garden because she wanted to. I mean, the men plowed (my brothers or my father); I barely remember my father ever plowing, because the boys were big enough to, plowing the rows and planting. But she often planted. And of course she and I gathered the vegetables a great deal. Sometimes some of the colored ones would be there to help with that, especially if you were going to do some preserving or something, not as a regular thing.

NEVIN BROWN:

How old were you, then, when you left the farm to go to college? Did you go to Meredith College from the farm? How old were you at that time when you left to go to Meredith?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, I left in 1909. I went to college in 1909, and I was born in '92.

NEVIN BROWN:

So you were fifteen years old then when you went to Meredith?

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes, I was fifteen years old when I went to Meredith.

NEVIN BROWN:

What led you to go to Meredith College? Was somebody here that influenced you in school, that had you go there? Or what was the attraction of Meredith at the time?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, I suppose it was just because, although we didn't go too regularly (not every Sunday) to church, our connection was with Meredith, and you heard them talk about it a lot, you know, and all. And at that time Women's College was about the only. . . . Well, there was little old College up in the northeast corner; it's still there. (I taught there for two years, incidentally.) It called itself a college, but it was really just an academy, you know; I don't know that it even called itself a college at the time. But girls came as far as from Texas to go there, because there were no schools for girls (I imagine they were people who have moved to Texas, you see). But there just weren't any schools. My older brothers and sisters went to an academy in Kinston that a man ran, and he had one or two teachers help him. I don't remember how many of them went off to school. I know one went to a technical school in Baltimore, and I think Sally went somewhere to boarding school. But you didn't say you were going to college until about the time I got to the stage of going to college. And of course Meredith had to have elementary courses; it had eighth and nin unknown grades. Well, as a matter of fact, I guess it had tenth grade, because the schools in Kinston didn't have but the nine grades. And I was conditioned on everything when I went there; had to work off the conditions, you see.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Before we talk about the years that you were at Meredith, I wanted to ask just a couple of other questions about before you left home. Was the church an important part of your family's life when you were growing up?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, important enough to make an effort to go when the weather was good. With the sand and the heat and so on you didn't go too regularly, but it was fairly important.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What about at home? Did you have family prayers or anything?

HARRIET HERRING:

No, we didn't have family prayers—just a blessing at the table.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What did religion mean to you as a child? Was it important to you?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, only moderately so, I should think. I think it probably seemed more important to me when I went to Kinston to high school, because I spent the week with a family that lived just diagonally across the street from the church. And you went every time the bell rang, you know; they made us go. I got pretty bored with that. Then, of course, at Meredith you had to go to church a certain percentage of the time. You had a certain percentage of Sundays off, that you didn't have to go. So we went to church regularly then, and Sunday School. Some of it was almost taken for granted that you went, both when I was going to high school and staying with the Pridgens or at college.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Would you describe your family as being in any way non-traditional?

HARRIET HERRING:

No, I think we were very like everybody else around— [laughter] as I say, except the Kennedys, and they had a phaeton and two horses to drive.

NEVIN BROWN:

They were the unusual ones, not you.

HARRIET HERRING:

We weren't unusual; they were the ones that were unusual [laughter] .

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Do you have any idea, thinking about your family background, of what led you into the kind of work that you eventually went into?

HARRIET HERRING:

No. I tried to think about why I happened to get into this and that since I got this list. I don't know, it was quite accidental. The reason

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I went to Radcliffe was that, well you see, Meredith had a rather limited scale, and you were required to take a certain amount of science and math and that sort of thing. Then the only other things that really attracted me very much were history and English.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Were there any particular teachers who influenced you at Meredith?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, the history teacher did. And she was a New Englander and had been to Radcliffe—but that was incidental, my going on account of her. But she did have a great deal of influence on me; she was an excellent teacher. I also had at Meredith the poorest I ever had, and Miss Smith was one of the best I ever had. Just to show how accidental, almost. . . . I was taking this course in American history, and about that time was when Frederick Jackson Turner's emphasis on the West and the development of the country was a new thing. And I remember reading that essay, and I wanted to take some more American history. So he had moved from Wisconsin to Harvard during the interval after he wrote that; and so I went to Radcliffe mainly to study with Frederick Jackson Turner.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Hmm, that's interesting.

NEVIN BROWN:

Oh, I didn't realize that.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did you get to study with him?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh yes, I had his regular course on the building of the West. I got very interested in a project that I wanted to sort of pursue. (I came back and worked for two years and then went back, you remember—you seem to have gotten some way or other everything I've done!) He didn't give but that one course on the West, the development of the West, and I don't know if he gave any other course over at Harvard or not. I was an individual student of his the next year I was there. I had an interview with him about every two

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weeks; I went to his office and in the library. I had a little booth upstairs in the library and he had an office. And I went there and reported on what I had been reading and so on, and he would suggest other things. I went about every week or two, and sometimes spent as much as an hour going over things that I had worked on; and he suggested supplementing them, and so on. That was very delightful.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What did you think about him as a teacher?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh, excellent. Of course he's been gone so long, as young as you are you wouldn't hear anybody speak of him.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

No.

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh, he was an excellent teacher.

NEVIN BROWN:

I guess the only thing now recently has been this new biography by Ray Allen Billington, who was a student of his also, I guess.

HARRIET HERRING:

I haven't read that.

NEVIN BROWN:

It's just been recently. And apparently it talks about him as a teacher too, and how fine he was.

Well, what did he do? What was the kind of thing that you liked especially about his teaching? Just his personal abilities, or

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, he was a very charming person, and he just had so much more information on it than he could give to you. You just felt there was banks and banks back of it. And he had just thousands (well, I reckon not thousands, but it must have been) of maps and charts and things showing movement of people, and what proportion were foreigners and what proportion were old Americans moving West and all of that. And it was just fascinating to me, because, I mean, it was like having a history book that had all those maps and

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charts in it. He brought them and would hang them up all across the room, you know, every morning when he'd come in for his lecture.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

It sounds like he was a very approachable person.

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh very, yes; he was charming.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did you do any writing when you were. . . ? Did you start putting together any of your own research?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh no. I wrote term papers [laughter] . I had economics with Edwin Gay; he was in economics, and I had a course with him. He was a very good teacher; I had economics with him, Financial History of the United States, for example—one cheerful-sounding course!

MARY FREDERICKSON:

[laughter] Again, I don't mean to keep backing up, but I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about what it was like when you were at Meredith. What did students do? What were the main activities the students were involved in?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, I don't know. We had organizations; we had two societies, and sometimes we debated with each other.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What kinds of things did they debate?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh gosh, I can't even remember now: some political thing that was up at the time, I'm sure. And there were other kinds of programs. Some people would make readings or whatever.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

How many students were at Meredith when you were there?

HARRIET HERRING:

I should say around between four hundred and five hundred, but quite a number of them were preps, you see. See, the high schools, you couldn't go from Kinston and get into Meredith. I barely did; one reason was because I had one very good teacher in the last year, a very good English teacher. She was really the only one. The other one made you write a one-page theme

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about every three weeks; she made you write a one-page theme every day, and a longer one every week. And that's the only reason that it didn't take me five years to go to Meredith, because I was put on condition on everything, you know. And worked them off somehow or other [laughter] .

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Are you still in contact with any of the friends you had at Meredith?

HARRIET HERRING:

Very few of them. When I first left Meredith, whenever I was handy I would go over to commencement. But after I went to Chapel Hill the commencements nearly always came at the same time. And I knew a lot of people coming back for there, you know, and so I kind of got out of the habit of going over. So I really haven't. . . . A few of the people that I knew, but as contacts with Meredith I haven't had a very great deal.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What is the name of the woman history teacher who influenced you so much?

HARRIET HERRING:

Mary Shannon Smith. She was a Bostonian, and she gave the impression (she didn't say she belonged to the . . . what is it?). . . .

NEVIN BROWN:

Brahmans, Boston Brahmans?

HARRIET HERRING:

Proper Bostonian. I'll show you a cover on a paperback book that looks not unlike Miss Smith. And after I learned a little more about the composition of Boston's population I wondered where she got that middle name.

HARRIET HERRING:

I don't believe that they had forgiven each other enough, gotten friendly enough to name the children for them unless they were kin to them, do you?

NEVIN BROWN:

No, I don't think so.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

No.

HARRIET HERRING:

Very suspicious.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Was there a YWCA group at Meredith?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh mercy yes. My roommate and I, I was president of the student government and she was president of the YWCA. And I was editor of the Annual—see, they had small classes, and a lot of people had to do several jobs. They got to calling our room "the capitol," because I was president of one thing and she of the other main thing.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Who was your roommate?

HARRIET HERRING:

Gertrude Horne. She married—can't remember her husband's name now—and lived in Roxboro. I haven't heard from her in two or three years. Her health wasn't so good the last few times I heard from her. Her father was a candy manufacturer, and he would send us a barrel of apples every year when he'd go up in the mountains. And he sent us a box of candy every now and then, consisting of a box this long, this wide and this thick [laughter] , with several boxes in it and some in sort of paperish bags or something, you know (that was cheaper candy). And well, we often caught somebody coming out of our room when we'd go up there. We met one one day when the barrel of apples was there; she didn't have anything to take as many apples, so she'd pulled up her skirt and used that—of course skirts were longer than they are now.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

[laughter] I wanted to ask you about the YWCA. What kinds of projects did they have? What was their program like?

HARRIET HERRING:

Mainly just the religious. They had prayer meeting every morning, and then they had a meeting every Sunday night.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did you participate in all of that?

HARRIET HERRING:

No, not nearly; I went once in a while.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did they do any interracial work?

HARRIET HERRING:

No.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Were they interested at all in the industrial problems?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh no. They were interested in college.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

[laughter] Was there something called the Vocational Guidance Committee at Meredith?

HARRIET HERRING:

Not particularly; I don't know of any. You saw what there was to take: "What can I take now?"

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did they have sororities when you were there?

HARRIET HERRING:

Dear me, no. I told you, we had five Sundays a year off from going to church (Sunday school and church).

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Is this when you started hearing about women's suffrage?

HARRIET HERRING:

No. You had one in connection with my mother. Even those great beginners way back hadn't begun to pipe out then. We never heard hardly anything about it; I can't remember anything particularly.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Anything about women's rights?

HARRIET HERRING:

I don't remember its being discussed in college.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Was Meredith a very sort of protective environment? Did you have to be chaperoned all the time?

HARRIET HERRING:

Of course Wake Forest was nearby. But they couldn't have dances on their campus at that time, so they would come to a hotel in Raleigh and have a dance. And the Meredith girls, if they had permission from their mothers, could go to the dance, but they had to have a chaperone, you see. And if they went to any affair (unless it was a relative) they had chaperones.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What about if girls went out together? Did they have to have a

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chaperone?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh you could go downtown by yourself, yes.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did you date a lot in college?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh dear me, no. I was born an old maid! [laughter]

MARY FREDERICKSON:

[laughter] I wanted to ask you about your relationship with your mother when you were in college. Did you have a close relationship with your mother?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh yes.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did you continue to be close to her when you were in college?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, she died my senior year in college. But she liked to hear about everything that was going on there, you know.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Was she very happy for you getting a chance to go away to school?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, it had just always been so assumed, I don't know whether she had any specific happiness or not. It had just been assumed that I'd go to college.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did you ever have any contact with or hear about the Settlement House movement or the Women's Trade Union League?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh yes, I had heard about it. One friend of mine who lives now in Franklin, Virginia (she was a good friend of mine), we wanted a course in sociology. And the only person there that could teach it was the dullest, I think really the poorest teacher I ever had, not even barring all the ones I had in the little four-months brown, unpainted school—I'll tell you, most of them didn't have what we'd call a high school education, you know. And he was worse than that, although he was one of the very few on the faculty that had a PhD degree: the dullest man in the world. But he was the only one that could teach a course in sociology.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

And what was his name?

HARRIET HERRING:

And it really wasn't a course in sociology; it was a course in social problems. But we didn't know the difference then, so we took it. And you know what he did (don't let the thing record this into it; you won't put it in or anything)? When he came to . . . what's the word, people who have houses and they go to them?

NEVIN BROWN:

Prostitution?

HARRIET HERRING:

Prostitution, all that whole spate of problems, that was treated in a long chapter in the textbook that he had us get. When we approached that he had to be absent the next time the class met (it met three times a week, you see). He had to be absent, so we were to study that ourselves. Now that's the kind of person he was. [laughter]

MARY FREDERICKSON:

[laughter] That's great. What was his name, do you remember?

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes, but I don't know whether he has died or not, so I won't give it. [laughter]

MARY FREDERICKSON:

[laughter] At the end of college when you graduated from Meredith, where were you in your own thinking what about/your own future would be like?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, I knew by then that I was going to Radcliffe. I wanted to go study with Mr. Turner, and I wanted to take some more history.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

But you didn't go straight there; you went to teach for two years.

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

In Scotland Neck then?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, three years, really. No, wait a minute. I taught one year—and here's an instance of what I said about accidental. When I came back from Radcliffe, you see, in 1914, school wasn't over there until the middle of June. When I got back here there wasn't anything to do but teach, you see. I was sort of looking around, and this good friend of mine in

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Scotland Neck got after the principal there and told him that I might be available. So I went up there and interviewed with him. And she said I could live with them if I would go there; wouldn't have to live in the teacherage.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What was the teacherage?

HARRIET HERRING:

The teachers in the public school had a house all of them lived in.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Not like a boarding house?

HARRIET HERRING:

It was sort of a boarding house, yes—dormitory kind of a thing, you see. And I didn't have to live in that. And then in the meantime I had known Mr. Lyonberry, who had been principal of a preparatory school at Winover. Two of my brothers went there, and then I had known other people who went there, and I had been there to commencements. He was acquainted with me, so he asked me to come up there. Well, I couldn't teach history, which I considered my major. I took some English—well, I had to take a lot of English and history both at Meredith, you see, because there wasn't a great deal else. The science wasn't very strong. And I had taken some English at Radcliffe, because I knew I couldn't get a masters in one year nohow, you know. I had to teach English, I guess it was, because somebody already had the history to teach. So I taught the English—and quoted Kittridge to beat the band! You don't know Kittridge. Do you know the name Kittridge? Do you?

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Yes, just the name. [laughter]

NEVIN BROWN:

Just vaguely.

HARRIET HERRING:

He's known even in England. You know the story they tell about his going over there and going to one of those old libraries at one of the universities—I don't know which now. He said he wanted some information

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on so-and-so about Shakespeare. "Oh, I'm sorry. The only person that can tell you, that can talk to you about that is a man named Kittridge at Harvard." He said, "Well, I happen to be Kittridge himself."

MARY FREDERICKSON:

[laughter] Well, I'm a little confused about the chronology here. You went to Radcliffe for a year in 1914?

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

And then you came back?

HARRIET HERRING:

Went in the fall if 1913.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

So you graduated from Meredith in the spring of 1913.

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

And that fall you went to Radcliffe. And then you came back in June of 1914.

HARRIET HERRING:

And taught at Scotland Neck.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

For. . . .

HARRIET HERRING:

Just one year. But I didn't like that. Well, of course, a girl who graduated from Meredith the next year I was at Radcliffe, she and I both were new, and the students just really rode you, you know, if you were a first year teacher. I didn't like that. [laughter] .

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Well, what it like to be in a. . . ? That was sort of a small community, wasn't it?

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes. A lovely community, a lot of perfectly charming people in it. I knew a number of them, because a number of them had gone to Meredith.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

But you generally didn't like the experience of the. . . .

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh, I had some charming little students. I remember two or three little girls and several boys that were just as bright and sweet and

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everything as they could be. But some, just because we were new they ragged us all the time, you know.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Was this like a public academy, or was it a private school?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh no, no, it was just the town high school.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

It was the town high school, OK. Then what did you do the next year?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, two years, you see, I stayed at Murfreesboro at—what's the name of the school there?

NEVIN BROWN:

Chowan?

HARRIET HERRING:

Chowan.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Chowan. And that was after the Scotland Neck?

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

How did you get the job at Chowan?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, as I say I knew Mr. Lyonburg from a contact with him, and somebody told him they thought maybe I would go there.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Then in 1918 you went back to Radcliffe?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, I guess it was 1918 wasn't it? Yes, because that was the year of the flu epidemic. No!

NEVIN BROWN:

Oh, was that 1919?

HARRIET HERRING:

1919 was one. Well, I've got the dates mixed a little, because I went to. . . . You sure that was the first one? You know there were two years: the first one was terrible, the next one wasn't quite so bad.

NEVIN BROWN:

I'm trying to think. Edward Kidder Graham of UNC died in one of them; I forget which one it was.

HARRIET HERRING:

Then the man who took his place died the next year in the next one.

NEVIN BROWN:

That's right; OK, you're right then. 1918 and 1919 then; I think you're right.

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, anyway, I went. And I went to Bryn Mawr. I had finished my masters at Radcliffe, you see, that spring.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Wait. I'm sorry, I just want to get it straight. You had finished the masters the first year you were at Radcliffe?

HARRIET HERRING:

No, because I went that one year and came back and taught, you see, at Scotland Neck and at Chowan, Murfreesboro. Then when I went back the next year and I got out. . . . Incidentally, we talk about a lot of it was accident; it was an accident that I got invited to go to the Bryn Mawr thing. I wanted to do some statistical comparisons such as Mr. Turner had been doing, and that was the year that I saw him every week, you see, or every two weeks—had a conference with him. And he said, well he didn't know much about sort of doing that statistical stuff. "But I'll tell you who. You go to see Miss Ann Besantson." She was working on her PhD and almost had it, and had done a lot of statistics. And he said, "Go and talk to her and ask her about how to do this." So I went to see her. And then that spring (that summer, really) I didn't even graduate at Radcliffe, because I had to leave to go to Bryn Mawr before commencement. She had invited me to come. She had been employed to come down to Bryn Mawr—they had gotten a grant. The name of the department was the Corolla unknown Graduate Department of Social Economy and Social Research; that's the name of the department I went to. They put on this course, and it turned out to be a course in personnel training. And Miss Besantson was asked to come down and run that part of it for Susan Kingsbury She was a great old fighter. She was kind of like Miss Smith: wore flat shoes and everything. So that's how I got into the personnel business.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

So it was almost completely by accident that you went into personnel work?

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes. And the accident of having Mr. Turner refer me to Miss Besantson. She saw I was interested, so then when she was invited to go down there to take up this. . . .

MARY FREDERICKSON:

She asked you to come with her.

HARRIET HERRING:

You see, at that time not many plants had personnel departments at all. The foreman did the hiring, or the superintendent. And a grand flurry of it had come along, and they were just pleading for people who knew anything about it. And so this course. . . .

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

MARY FREDERICKSON:

I wanted to ask you about when you left North Carolina for the first time and went to Radcliffe, what it was like. Was it a big change to go from rural North Carolina to live in Cambridge?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, the biggest change was having everybody . . . you would realize they were making you talk to hear you talk.

NEVIN BROWN:

As a southerner.

HARRIET HERRING:

I just talked so southern, you see. Radcliffe had very few southern girls in those days. The next time I went (what was I out, three years or two—-I've forgotten). . . .

NEVIN BROWN:

Three years, I think.

HARRIET HERRING:

. . . I was in a graduate house then, and there were several southerners. As a matter of fact, when I got back some of them said I talked like a Yankee. And I said, "Well heck, I reckon it's just involuntary self-protection." Because I'd catch them making me talk, you know.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did you like it in Boston?

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes, very much. And I went to plays and I went to symphony and everything happening in Boston.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did you ever think of staying there permanently?

HARRIET HERRING:

No, not really. I did realize there wasn't anything I could do but teach. I filed with a teachers' thing there, but I never did press it. I just had one notice from them, and by that time I came on back home.

NEVIN BROWN:

You say people asked you to talk because you were a southerner. How did they react to you as a southerner in Boston?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, I was in Cambridge, you see, and it was in a dormitory. And it happened that I was in an unusual situation, because they had just opened a new dormitory. Practically all of us were either graduate students or freshman. And the dean said later that she had wondered what would happen in that combination. But we got along fine. And there were two almost middle-aged (it seemed to me then) women, sisters, that were studying there, and they in particular loved to hear me talk southern.

NEVIN BROWN:

There was no sense of you being singled out as being different or not as smart? Did they expect you to be somehow very different because you were from the South? Did they take you out as a student?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh yes, they took me as a student, but I was a new kind of specimen they hadn't ever seen before, hadn't been in daily contact with—I imagine they'd seen a tourist or something, you know. But those two elderly women (they were elderly to me then—the younger one was a little older than you, and, you see, I wasn't too far out of college), by george, they just thought everything I could tell, when I said something differently from the way they pronounced it or the emphasis or something. . . . No, they were very friendly and very kind; they were awfully nice. I didn't have a bit of trouble

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with the Yankees.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What was involved in the course that you took at Bryn Mawr?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, it turned out to be a course in personnel management. This woman, Miss Besantson, had charge of it really; one or two others were sort of economic courses, you know. But she farmed us out; I worked in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company for six weeks. Miss Bysanson went up and made the contacts to place all of us, some in Philadelphia. I was in New Haven, and fortunately they put another one with me. And we ran into a woman when we were looking for a room that teachers used (they wanted to sublet it). And the owner of the house and the one who lived downstairs was the dietician at Radcliffe when I was there, and she lived in our hall. So I went right to a friend, you see, there; had a grand time.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What did you do at the Winchester Repeating Arms Company?

HARRIET HERRING:

I worked on a different machine twice a week. I worked in the drawing room, and the drawing room has had a different connotation to me ever since. The drawing room was where they make cases for the cartridge. It starts off a round of brass, and they cut it, but it's real thick. And so then they had a machine that drew it (that was the drawing room) longer and longer every time it went through a different one of these machines to make the cartridge. And then finally somebody had a machine that put a shoulder on it, you know. Then finally somebody put the powder in and sealed it. But there were all different operations. This drawing, there were about six or seven drawings, and it had to be annealed (brass if it's been bent, it has to be heated again or it will break—it will make it brittle—to keep it flexible). You had a dial and these little rounds (I was running ones about just right to go on my little finger). And you wiggled your finger

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like that to make them walk into a thing that was circling; it was a guide. One at a time, a hundred and twenty a minute: you wiggled enough to keep it busy at that. You were wiggling here to feed it into that thing, and this to keep them all in motion so they'd float in, you see. That was called the drawing room. And it went on: I reckon there must have been three or four hundred of those machines. You could speak, but you didn't hear yourself at all. A little Polish girl taught me—no, she wasn't the one; there was one in another job that I did that I thought I was being awful slow at. And she said (I was complaining about it), "Well, you're the best polisher I ever had." I was polishing screwtops for Springfield Rifles in that time. You had to hold it to an emory wheel which was whirring around, and the sparks just flew. Then you'd take it out of that and put another one in. Of course I was very slow at it. The person that was teaching me, I said, "I'm so slow at it! I didn't make but nineteen hundred all day." And she said, "Well, that's the most anybody's ever made here." [laughter]

NEVIN BROWN:

[laughter] What was the purpose of having you go to Winchester and learn all these things? To have you get a better sense for what people have to do in a factory?

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes. You see, I didn't tell you about her; you aren't interested in her especially, are you? She was a Nova Scotian who had taught in Nova Scotia. And it was about the time that so many Nova Scotians were coming down to Boston. And she was the eleventh person hired by the Gilette Razor Company.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

This was Ann Besantson?

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes. Pretty soon she was hiring all the new help; it was expanding very rapidly. I don't know how many others, but the extremes were

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hiring the help and testing the steel. She worked for them for quite two years, and then decided she was going to get an education. So she quit and went to Radcliffe, and was working on her PhD when Professor Turner sent me to her. That's why I say so many things were accidents, you see.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What was she getting a PhD in?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, in economics, supervising labor.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What were her basic ideas about labor and about personnel, and about scientific management?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, of course, scientific management was in its very height right then. That couple (what's their name?) Lillian and somebody Gilbreth, and two or three other people.

NEVIN BROWN:

Yes, Frank.

HARRIET HERRING:

She was interested in that, but she'd already seen it from the beginning, you see. As I say, she was the nineteenth person hired by the Gilette Razor Company.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

How long did you stay at Bryn Mawr and do all of this work?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, by the time we finished the course the war had ended, and so it wasn't so handy to get jobs. If we had started six months earlier we would have gotten out and everybody would have been grabbed up as they came out of the door, you know. As it was we had to wait around. And finally a Bryn Mawr alumna got acquainted with some of us. She knew this company that made men's underwear: well, as a matter of fact, they spun their yarn and also all the way down to putting the buttons on the shirts and trousers and so on. She knew both of them; it was a Jewish firm and she was Jewish. They employed about a thousand people, and it was getting fashionable to set up a personnel department, you know. And labor turnover was so high it was taking so much of

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a foreman's time too, you see: that's the reason that it really came in then. So she suggested to Miss Besantson and to Dr. Kingbury that I go and see them; so I made an appointment, went over, and he hired me. I found out later, well, I had to set up a personnel department there, you see.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

This is at the Roxford Knitting Mill in Philadelphia?

HARRIET HERRING:

Roxford Knitting Mill in Philadelphia, yes. And so I went and lived in a boarding house, roomed in one place and ate in another, and took a streetcar down one street and the streetcar back up. That's my closest to being a real town worker, you know. Although I had to go out; I had a driver to take me around looking for workers. By that time people were scarce, you know: everybody was employed in the war, and they hadn't lessened their numbers so much. So they'd go through there. They did have a register of an address and card for them: that's all they had for personnel. And the foreman would look over the names of people who had worked for them; then I'd go at night and visit them to try to get them to come to work. I rode all over Philadelphia.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

My word! [laughter]

HARRIET HERRING:

You never saw such places as I went into, trying to get them to come. But not very many came. Then I went there in March, I guess it was.

NEVIN BROWN:

Of 1919?

HARRIET HERRING:

It must have been '20. Then it began to get so that you just had them floating in all the time, because there was a little depression there for a short time. Then Mr. (I started to say his name, but I won't [laughter] ) had me in and said that they found that they were getting. . . . He gave me as my assistant. . . .

MARY FREDERICKSON:

This was the foreman or the head of the mill?

HARRIET HERRING:

No, this was the head of it. He gave me as an assistant one of the most competent secretaries in the institution. She was the secretary to the sales manager, and he had so much typing and dictation to take that she had trouble with her arm, and so she wanted a transfer. Of course I was glad to get her: she knew the company and all that. But it turned out (she told me this herself; I was going to New York and I stopped by Philadelphia and visited with her—we were very good friends) that he had promised her that job. And they hired me, who knew how to set up (or thought I knew how to set up, he thought I knew how to set up). . . . I set up one, after a fashion. Anyhow, he told me along in the late fall that business was getting bad and he was going to have to discontinue the personnel department. So I came back to North Carolina. She told me that he had promised her that when he transferred her to be my assistant.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did she eventually get the job, take the job over?

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes, she took it over. But it didn't last; it lasted a year or two, I guess. But they finally did go into bankruptcy.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

How many people were in that program at Bryn Mawr that you were in?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, I guess those of us that went down there in June, we decided it was probably nineteen, right? When did the war end?

NEVIN BROWN:

November of 1918 was when the war ended, yes.

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, we went in June and there were about thirty, between twenty-five and thirty. And then a new group was chosen and came in when school opened. And that's when we got back (we had had about two weeks' vacation, and I came to North Carolina) and registered we were handed a paper that said that we were (what do you call it? you can't go anywhere,

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can't go outside the town of Bryn Mawr). The flu epidemic had busted loose.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Quarantined.

HARRIET HERRING:

Quarantined; we were quarantined.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Were most of the thirty people women?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh yes, they were all women.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

They were all women. Did you ever meet M. Carrie Thomas at Bryn Mawr?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh, she was president.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Right.

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh, she was president when Woodrow Wilson taught there, and she and he fought.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did you know her?

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes, I knew her.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What was she like?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh, short and stubby and just as bossy as anybody could be, as Woodrow Wilson could be. She was really a charming person. She had this industry group over to her house for dinner, and after dinner she said, "Go in and we'll all talk. Now you sit in that blue chair over there, because your pink dress will look so pretty in it." And she settled everybody. And then she said, "Now what would the graduate students like to talk about? I suggest that we talk about so-and-so." Just like that, you know.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

[laughter] Was Susan Kingsbury there at that time?

HARRIET HERRING:

Oh yes, she was head of the Corolla unknown Graduate Department of . . . what was the rest of it?

MARY FREDERICKSON:

You said it before [laughter] .

NEVIN BROWN:

Something social research, I think it is.

HARRIET HERRING:

Social Economy and Social Research, yes. And Miss Besantson went to the University of Pennsylvania shortly after that because, you see, the program was finished. But they had three different groups: my group, that came in June, and then the group that came with school (and they got a late start; well, of course they could do this talking to them, but they couldn't go out working), and another one in January, at semester. And those are the only three by that time there were; they nipped it off, you know.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

Did you ever know Hilda Smith? Was she there at that time? Hilda Livington Smith?

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, her name sounds sort of familiar, but I can't place it.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

She was dean of women at Bryn Mawr.

HARRIET HERRING:

Well Helen Taft was dean when I was there.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

And then later Hilda Smith worked for the WPA and with Harry Hopkins.

HARRIET HERRING:

I don't place her. I know that Miss Taft, she was the one that introduced Miss Thomas, Dr. Thomas, President Thomas (you didn't say "Doctor," you said "President"); had a throne-like chair all carved up and everything and you were ushered in. You had appointments; you knew you were to see her. She met every student this way. And she had a low chair (not a stool, really, but a little chair) at her knee. "Would you sit there, Miss Herring? Oh tell me this," she said, "you're from North Carolina." And I said, "Yes." "Tell me this: do they have as big families in North Carolina as they used to have?" And I said, "Well, President Thomas, I'm the youngest of eleven." "Oh," she says, "This is wonderful!" [laughter]

NEVIN BROWN:

[laughter]

MARY FREDERICKSON:

[laughter] Oh, that's incredible.

NEVIN BROWN:

When you left Philadelphia, then you came back to North Carolina,

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to the Pomona Mills in Greensboro? Was that where you first came?

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes. Well, that's when I made the. . . . Where did you find out about that survey in Kinston?

NEVIN BROWN:

In the Sociology Department they have a whole file of information about you.

HARRIET HERRING:

Gosh! I've got to go up there and clear that out!

NEVIN BROWN:

[laughter] They have several unknown things.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

I wanted to ask you about why you decided to come back to North Carolina.

HARRIET HERRING:

Well, I didn't have a job there. And, you see, the college had stopped that course six or eight months before; didn't even take in the last group that they accepted.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

But did you come back to a specific job?

HARRIET HERRING:

No. I just came home. I had three brothers here, all married and all had a family, so I just came. I don't know how anybody at those mills in Kinston heard anything about that I had had any personnel experience; but anyway one of the men was a good friend of my brother's, and he found that I was home. So he asked me to come down and talk to him about it. They were having a great deal of turnover (of course everybody was), and having difficulty getting enough workers. They had two mills: a knitting mill and a spinning mill. They decided that there ought to be people in Kinston other than the mill village. Of course, if you lived in a mill house any potential worker was supposed to work for them. Anyhow, he seemed to think that if I'd go around (or somebody'd got around) and tell them something about the work and how long it would take to learn to spin or to knit or whatever. . . .

MARY FREDERICKSON:

You were going around within the mill village in Kinston?

HARRIET HERRING:

No, I didn't have to go there, you see. They worked because they lived in the house. So we chatted about it, and between us we decided that it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to make a sort of a survey in the general area, people of about the same income, you see, as the mill workers. And so I did. And it was really very—he didn't get his money's worth on that, because they just wouldn't work in the cotton mill.

NEVIN BROWN:

Was it because of pride?

HARRIET HERRING:

Yes. Cotton mill workers were a stage lower.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

What were they doing?

HARRIET HERRING:

Most anything. Somebody might be a carpenter in the family, or somebody a plumber or something. I don't remember. But anyway, as I say, he didn't get his money's worth out of it.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

You couldn't find any workers [laughter] for him.

HARRIET HERRING:

But I learned to spin in the process.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

You did work in one of his mills?

HARRIET HERRING:

One of my propositions was that I wanted to know something about what the work in the mill was. I never got a chance to