On Growing Up Tough: An Irreverent Memoir

by Taylor Caldwell

  Our first victim was old Mr. Hurtz, head of the Hurtz Business School in Buffalo. Mr. Hurtz had a big crop of white hair, a knowledgeable eye, and a kind smile. I hit him for a contribution For the Allies. He pulled his immense white mustache and studied me. “Why?” he asked.

  “It’s Christian,” I replied. Mr. Hurtz informed me he was not a Christian. He smiled. “I guess it’s a good idea,” I said.

  “Why?” he repeated. “They’re always fighting over there, anyway. I was born in Russia, and so I know. You’d better keep out of it, sweeties.”

  Marvelous advice. Mr. Hurtz was far more intelligent than the Boys in Washington, though I did not know it at the time. He shook his head at me. He said to Irma, “Do you know what that war is all about?”

  “No sir,” she answered.

  “Nobody else does,” said Mr. Hurtz, “though everybody pretends to. All right girls, here’s a dollar. I just hope it doesn’t do any harm.”

  I’m sure it did.

  Irma and I collected thirty dollars, a fortune in those days, and I don’t know how we managed it. We did have thoughts of taking a small commission, say twenty percent, but Irma finally decided against it. “We must Sacrifice,” said Irma, which just goes to show she was a born victim.

  It was shortly after that when my pastor decided that the ladies of the parish—which included girls like Irma and me—should roll bandages for the Allies. As Irma and I had a good thing in the neighborhood, doing heavy chores other children wouldn’t do, and getting paid decently for it, we balked. We had no time, we said. The pastor gazed at us reproachfully. “Don’t you want to do your share?” he asked. We did not. We just wanted to be left alone, and work. “Selfish. Un-Christian,” said the pastor. Irma and I, being very young then, had visions of hellfire. Irma had no history of marrons glacés in her past, as I did, she confided to me privately. “The boys are bleeding Over There,” she said. “At least we can roll some bandages for them.”

  Remembering old Mr. Hurtz’s wise remark, I said, “Why should they bleed, or fight?”

  “Well, anyway,” said Irma.

  You will see she had a bad influence over me, for somehow I found myself rolling bandages alongside her. I never quite forgave Irma for that. Irma could roll like mad; I was more languid, resenting the nickels and the dimes I was losing every hour. Then Irma’s mother taught her to knit, and inevitably Irma was knitting sweaters, but I could never learn to knit, thank God. By this time the First World War was a tremendous bore to me and I was not in the least uplifted by drums, banners, and bugles. Wilson was orating, but I never read his speeches. I began my first anti-war novel, which, however, was not published for nearly twenty-five years. Mr. Hurtz’s bland cynicism had had its immortal effect on me. I read sections of my manuscript to Irma, who listened intelligently, but she always sighed and said, “Well, anyway. I guess nobody will ever know what it’s all really about.” Nobody ever did; and she was quite correct.

  When I was sixteen I was working twelve hours a day, most of the time; six days a week, most of the time. I had exactly two dresses to my name, and one pair of shoes—the war wasn’t over yet and Papa’s firm was still not getting decent dyes from American manufacturers, and things were Tough. Came Christmas, and the boss suggested to me, and the male and female workers in his factory, that we each contribute something for Our Worthy Poor. (He was very well-off, himself.) I told him that I knew all about the Poor. They neither plowed nor did they spin. The whole damn country was getting worked up, at that time, over Our Unfortunate, who were comparatively prosperous, a number buying cars, something which my own father did not have.

  The boss looked at me formidably and said, “Do you have any idea, Miss Caldwell, a well-fed woman like you, what it means to go hungry?”

  “Usually,” I said. It was always a toss-up with me for either lunch, fifteen cents, or carfare home, a matter of some eight miles, and even in the snow, too.

  “I think,” said the boss, with a dangerous look, “that you’d better give me a quarter, at least.”

  I had, alas, eaten lunch that day at a little shop down the street, and had no money at all. Payday was three days off. Then my slow Irish anger burned, and again I remembered my shattered cello and the loss of my sweets. “I’m the Worthy Poor myself,” I said. “I don’t have a cent, and you won’t be deducting anything from my pay, either, or I’ll call the police.”

  Of course, I lost my job immediately, but I found a better one three hours later. Irma’s influence over me was practically over. But not quite.

  Twelve years later the Roaring Stockmarket crashed, and all the world-be millionaires with it. Among the “victims” who had lost even their unmentionables in the Crash were two ladies in their thirties who had been operating a very lucrative lunchroom and delicatessen. On paydays I was sometimes extravagant enough to buy a quarter of a pound of ham from them and sometimes even some doughnuts, but that did not happen often. They each had a splendid car, fine clothing, took holidays in Florida—a place I could only dream of, enviously—and were Highly Invested, they told me with happy smiles, in the Stock-market. “Fifty thousand dollars—me!” one would sing to those less affluent. “And I started with only five hundred! Just piled up!” They put nearly all their profits onto the paper ones they already had. “We’ll be millionaires, soon!” they caroled. “We’ll retire to Paris. Maybe. Paris in the spring!”

  But the Market crashed, and suddenly there was a worldwide Depression, and the delicatessen ladies were penniless, the mortgage on their shop and apartment was due, their customers were no longer coming in and spending five dollars at a time, and the register had stopped tinkling. The shop closed. Four years went by. My husband had five dependents and had just had a fifteen percent cut in salary—courtesy of Roosevelt. Again, things were Tough. I started to think of leaving my two young children alone and getting a job to help out. (Of course, we had never been able to afford a car or a holiday.) Then one dismal winter morning the doorbell rang and a very prosperous looking lady was on my doorstep, clad warmly in a nice fur coat. She beamed at me, adjusted her hat, and informed me she was “collecting.”

  “For what?” I asked. Her face seemed vaguely familiar.

  “To tell you the truth,” she said, “for my sister and me. We lost everything in the Crash. We’re on Relief.” She sighed. “We can hardly get by, and we get only fifty dollars a week from the city, and we can’t get along on it. Victims of the Depression, you know.”

  Fifty dollars a week. That was just about what my husband was netting then, and there were five of us living on it—and not on Relief, either.

  The woman was staring at me. “Say, don’t I know you?” she asked. “Aren’t you Mrs. Caldwell’s daughter—don’t remember your married name.”

  I recognized her then. She was the “Paris in the spring” lady. “You got it good, here,” she said with envy, and held out her hand, palm up, demanding. Did I shut the door in her face, as any sensible young woman would have done, remembering? No, indeed. My silly heart burned with pity for her, and I gave her the dollar I had been hoarding. She stared at it with disdain, turned and walked down the stairs. I looked through the window. She drove away briskly in her car. With my dollar.

  I remember this, when I pay my taxes for the War on Poverty, Operation Headstart, the Peace Corps, and all the rest of the Great Society—and for the Underprivileged and Underdeveloped Emerging Nations, and foreign aid for the Communists and Socialists who “never had it so good” as they do now—at your expense, and mine. Then, of course, there have been all those damnable wars to pay for, and probably more to come, to keep “the workers prosperous” and to “expand our dynamic economy.”

  We real victims are now allegedly fighting a war to “stop Communist aggression” in Asia. But in the meantime our tax dollars go to help support England’s Welfare State, and England is doing a very sharp business, indeed, with our “foes” in Cuba and Vietnam, and so is Russia, the recipient of billi
ons of our hard-earned money, and all our other dear enemies. We are victimized in our work, through taxes, and through the blood of our sons and grandsons, and we who have had three wars in one generation to remember are sick to death of it all in our hearts and our souls.

  We have been victimized for tens of millions of “victims” all over the world, who are sassy and fat now and hate our guts. Washington is threatening us with a tax increase to “cool inflation,” and we who are middle-aged, or old, are still desperately working to get a little ahead. But we’ll find ourselves stripped of our substance—again—and our grandsons will be fighting more wars.

  A few weeks ago, a grieving thirty-nine-year-old grandmother said to me, and her fifty-year-old mother, “My Roger is fighting in Vietnam, and we don’t know what it’s all about. What did you do, Mother, and you, Miss Caldwell, to stop all this in your own generations?”

  We did all we could, we told her, and it was no use at all. Governments are too powerful for the individual, and governments are ruled by men who promise the worthless everything and threaten the hard-working with more confiscations of their fruits. That’s how politicians get elected. We are as much victims as she is, we informed her. We worked and we studied and we struggled and we prayed—and we were treated with contempt by government for being such slobs. We ought, we said, to have sat down on our rumps, like millions of others, and insisted that our fellow Americans support us. In that way we’d have brought the country to crisis long ago—and that might have been a good thing. It would have shaken the lice out of the woodwork a couple of generations ago, and perhaps have cleaned Washington once and for all of the “brotherly lovers” who have now brought us to disaster. We are guilty, yes. We worked, and permitted our “government” to rob us.

  Somewhere, we let the “victims” victimize us. Our government—God save the mark!—insists on “aiding” every lazy and “backward” or “underdeveloped” nation in the world. We must “spread democracy,” even if other peoples neither want nor understand “democracy.” As Mark Twain said, “Must we go on conferring our civilization upon the peoples who ‘sit in darkness’ or shall we give those poor things a rest?”

  How about giving the decent American people a rest, too, from taxes and wars and the Poor, and the creeps and the Underprivileged, Culturally Deprived and Disadvantaged, and telling the whole damn bunch of those “victims” to spit on their hands and go to work—or starve?

  Every once in a while—not often enough, alas—the victims get their bellies full of “victims.” Then something happens, something that need not have taken place had the victims not permitted, for too long, their governments to victimize them. “Beware of the anger of a patient man,” the old aphorism warns. Could it possibly be, please God, that us victims have finally become angered?

  17 On Hippies

  To understand the lawlessness, hatred for society, criminal tendencies, and revolt against authority, and the violence and hysteria of the hippie/yippies, it is necessary to study the causes, and the causes go back to their grandparents and their parents of over thirty years ago—long before this generation was born. I have studied those grandparents and those parents during their joyfully riotous heyday of the years of Roosevelt’s War, and I, and millions of other concerned people, were very troubled and apprehensive then. We voiced our concern and were laughed down. We knew America was sowing the wind and would reap the whirlwind in this generation.

  A prominent sociologist I know informed me recently that the offspring of conservative, law-abiding and decent parents—and grandparents—of the middle class often “revolted” and disagreed with their families, not to the extent of hippiedom, but in dissatisfaction and grumbling. This was quite normal and even healthy, said the sociologist, for youth always thinks it is superior to its forebears. Later, in their early twenties, the younger generation faces reality and settles down and becomes solid citizens.

  But the hippie is entirely different. His grandparents and parents and himself were always, from the very beginning, in total accord with each other, and, in fact, the grandparents and parents are the main inciters today of lawlessness in their offspring!

  There is no quarrel among them, just as there is no quarrel between the hippie and so many of the “liberal” faculties of colleges.

  So, let us go back thirty or more years, when the grandparents of these riotous youths were themselves young and their to-be parents in elementary or the first years of high school. The Great Depression had been on for a decade, and the main sufferers had been the semi-skilled or unskilled workers, the majority of them decent poor people. But there was an element among them that was cunning, greedy, envious, incipiently lawless and usually not very intelligent and not very interested in bettering themselves. These latter had never adjusted to society, had never been industrious, had never been ambitious. But—while we were ostensibly still “neutral,” they found themselves in war factories in America, and for the first time in their unproductive and careless lives they were receiving what they called “our big checks.”

  There was also a large element in the middle-class, too, of the same kind of mind and the same envy and resentment of people with better intellects and more ambition. They had, through inferiority of intelligence and drive, held only mediocre positions in the professions and in business. Rather than blaming themselves and their genetic inheritance, however, they blamed “society,” whatever that is. They, too, when Roosevelt managed to get us into the war, found their under-average abilities in demand as “administrators” in various government offices and even in business offices. To their joy they also received “big checks” for their slovenly work, but their envy and rage against “society” did not abate.

  They gave their distorted and sullen view of life to their children in elementary and high schools, and those children are now the parents of the hippie/yippies. For, you see, while virtue and good conduct are hard to learn and never too well regarded, lawlessness and hatred and rage are eagerly absorbed by the young. This is a fact of human nature which no realist can deny. Judeo-Christianity calls it “original sin.”

  The parents of the hippies—then in school—suddenly found themselves affluent through their war-working parents. They had never known luxuries before; they were not acquainted with moderation; they had never been disciplined. They roamed the streets shouting happily after school, their pockets filled with money. The characters of their own parents were too weak to impose authority on the young. So the parents of the hippies rampaged in movie theaters and on street corners and in schools, utterly out of control, though they did little of the violence their own children today are doing. They ranged through the shops in every city, buying heedlessly and extravagantly. Their own parents filled the saloons, roared the streets in new automobiles, crowded the restaurants and the shows, and were filled with euphoria. While young men died in Europe in the war and in the Pacific.

  These were the people who were horrified and frightened when the war ended in Europe in 1945. But Washington reassured them that it would be “years” before Japan surrendered. Both Buffalo’s newspapers carried that dispatch from Washington in their headlined accounts of Germany’s defeat in May 1945. So, the war-working grandparents of these hippies of today were placated. The war would go on indefinitely, young American soldiers would continue to die, and the “big checks” would be constantly forthcoming. No one carried placards pleading for peace and withdrawal. There were no riots on the campus, no protests, no “marches.” The war would go on.

  Then the war ended in August 1945 with Japan’s surrender, and immediately the grandparents of the hippie/yippies were more frightened and more dismayed than before. War production was cut down, though Washington, in August 1945, tried to reassure the “workers” that “there will continue to be bushfire wars to keep the war factories in production.” I have retained the clippings. Now, at that time, “Old Joe Stalin” was in great favor with our government. “I like Old Joe,” said President T
ruman, and this sentiment was happily echoed in Washington.

  Now, with whom were the “brushfire wars” to be engaged in? No one said. It was enough for the public, that war production would continue, and the “big checks.”

  During this time the decent and sober sector of the citizenry was alarmed at the antics of the school-attending parents-to-be of the present generation of hippies. But all our protests were met with shrieks from parents and teachers: “Our wonderful boys and girls! There is nothing wrong with them!” Lawless they were, self-indulgent they were, greedy and careless they were, grasping and envious they were, and rather stupid they were, and incipiently violent. But—they were “our wonderful boys and girls.”

  Most of them became “dropouts” from school, because they had neither the will nor the intelligence to continue. Their parents were being told that “prosperity was here to stay,” and they looked forward to decades of comfort, easy money, luxuries they had never earned, and perpetual “fun.”

  Many of us urged that they take up trades, seeing they could not really do academic work, which was then of high quality, or taught to earn a sober living. But again their parents and teachers screamed that these “wonderful boys and girls” should be “educated,” and in consequence the curricula of schools and colleges steadily went down to meet their inferior minds and abilities.

  A host of Communist-oriented “child psychologists” rose to declare that “environment” not heredity was “everything,” and that any young person could be college-educated, if teachers “cared” enough to “help” them. Teachers tried. God knows, they tried. I know many of them and I know how desperately they tried. It was useless. And the curriculum of every school went down and down, and the good teachers quit in despair, or miserably shrugged and waited for their pensions. They told me so.