by Studs Terkel
The profound tragedy of William Jennings Bryan was the conflict between his secular and religious beliefs; yet, he himself saw no such struggle. Even today, due in no small part to the success of the play and film Inherit the Wind, a great many of us see a fool KO’d by a witty man. He, as a mere congressman, three times candidate for president, represented the small, beleaguered farmers, those up against it. He fought against the Gilded Age robber barons, the corporate bigwigs, with an eloquence rare, and fervor unending, his battle waged in so soaring a manner that he caught fire as the populist hero of working stiffs everywhere. Remember, too, that he turned down President Wilson’s offer of Secretary of State; in fact, he resigned on learning that Wilson was planning entry into World War I. His lucid eloquence, seemingly improvised, has hardly been matched.
Though to many of the intelligentsia (what a lovingly sadistic time H.L. Mencken had with Bryan) and the urban “learned,” circumstances meant one thing; for the poor, bedraggled farmer, who sang “Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow,” circumstances meant something else.
Now, some eighty years gone by and we still have a problem with creationism, without determining where the ache lies.
There were more country songs written about Bryan than about Abe Lincoln; at least twenty-five. Just about every country-song bard had one, including Vernon Dalhart, whom my father and I heard so often on the crystal set. Surely, you of an age remember “The Prisoner’s Song”—“Oh, I wish I had the wings of an angel, over those walls I would fly.”
Here’s a Carson Robison song, written in grief shortly after Bryan’s death. Years later, I heard a kid sing a few stanzas of this one in a Pennsylvania town, Girard.
Oh, the folks in Tennessee are as faithful as can be,
And they know the Bible teaches what is right.
They believe in God above and his great undying love,
And they know they are protected by his might.
Then to Dayton came a man with his new ideas so grand
And he said we came from monkeys long ago.
But in teaching his belief, Mr. Scopes found only grief
For they would not let their old religion go.
Oh, you must not doubt the word that is written by the Lord,
For if you do your house will surely fall.
And Mr. Scopes will learn that wherever you may turn
The old religion’s better after all.
WHAT EXCITED MY FATHER MOST was that we were one block away from Lindlahr, the hospital where Eugene B. Debs, his number-one hero, was spending his last days. Debs was visited by those who were to us the celebrities of the time: Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Ida Tarbell. Often we’d take a slow walk and hang around the corner outside Lindlahr, just as young groupies later waited for Mick Jagger, wondering who of our favorite muckrakers would be there. The irony was, Debs was no longer there. He had been moved to the hospital in Elmhurst, where he died.
Unfortunately, neither my father nor I knew too much of Bryan, being most ignorant of the farmers’ trials and tribulations. Oh, we knew the phrases “Crown of Thorns,” and “crucified on the Cross of Gold,” but that’s about all. It was Gene Debs whose glory possessed Sam. Of course, he knew the statement old Gene made on the day of his conviction for treason. Remember that? Oh, Jesus, how could you? Your grandmother had hardly been born. It was in Canton, Ohio, in 1916. Debs was challenging Wilson’s plan to enter World War I. As he was sentenced to Atlanta Penitentiary for ten years, Gene spoke up: “While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
It was President Harding, a Republican political toy, who, as one of his first acts in office, granted Debs his pardon. It so happened that the genial Harding and Gene were mutual admirers of the film cowboy hero Tom Mix. Was that a factor in Harding’s inviting Debs to the White House? In fact, he not only invited Debs. He ordered Harry Daugherty, his attorney general, who escaped prison himself on a technicality, to put Debs on the train without a guard. Woodrow Wilson, our professorial chieftain, was a movie fan, too. According to Eric Foner, the American historian, Wilson found Birth of a Nation “as awful as lightning, but unfortunately true, quite true.”
Eugene Salvatore, in his biography of Eugene Debs, reveals to us the deep affection and love Debs’ fellow inmates of Atlanta felt for him, and what happened during his farewell as his old buddies met him at the Atlanta gates.
As they joyfully and tearfully embraced and fervently kissed one another, a low rumbling in the background intensified. Warden Fred Zerbst, in violation of every prison regulation, had opened each cell block to allow more than 2,300 inmates to throng to the front of the main jail building to bid a final good-bye to their friend. Turning away from the prison, Gene started down the long walkway to the parked car. As he did, a roar of pain and love welled up from the prison behind him. With tears streaming down his face, he turned and, hat in hand, stretched out his arms. Twice more, as he walked to the car, the prisoners demanded his attention. Twice more he reached to embrace them . . . 7
There is a grotesque epilogue to the story of Gene Debs and his life and meaning. The dean of the Yale Law School, who advised LBJ during his lowest days, the Vietnam War, continued as governmental wise man. He was LBJ’s coldest warrior during the Vietnam War. His name was Eugene V. Rostow. His folks were admirers of old Gene; so was he. Did the irony of this escape the former Yale Law School dean?
Some years earlier, at the Wells-Grand Hotel, a guest, Harold Hanson Utterbach, swears he attended Debs’ funeral; likewise that he had heard Bryan at his most eloquent at the Coliseum in 1896; and furthermore, that he saw Babe Ruth point to the right-field stands of Cubs Park in advance of the Bambino’s long-flying home run to that very region. I’ve a hunch he was a liar, but what the hell, his stories made the day go faster. This information was offered in 1936, about a year or so before we ceased our hoteliers’ life. I figured this one story might be truth; the arithmetic made sense. In any event, he was a fairly old gaffer and entitled to some poetic license. I know a little something about that.
I now roam back to the rooming house where the time had come for my father to demand a change in our lives. He could not spend his last days as an invalid. There was some work he had to do. My mother, astonishingly, agreed that a change was necessary. They decided on an amicable pro-tem split. My mother would join Meyer in New York and relax. My father, through a loan from his brother-in-law, raised enough to lease a men’s hotel in Chicago.
4
The Convention That Would Never End
A-la-ba-ma!Twenty-foah votes fo Un-da-wood! How clinically I remember the sound and slight fury of that voice of the Deep South. Translated into English, the single language we should all speak, as our self-proclaimed philologists demand, it was: “Alabama, twenty-four votes for Underwood.” His was, for 102 ballots, the first delegate’s voice to be heard during each session. I don’t know his name, simply that the same Southern voice spoke again and again. Tom Walsh, Senator from Montana, was the chairman of the 1924 convention. He was my hero. My elder brother had told me that Thomas Walsh, of the no-nonsense full black mustache, was the bête noire of Anaconda Copper, the corporation that ran Montana. So, too, it was with the junior senator from that state, his fellow populist, Burton K. Wheeler.
Let’s go back a bit. It is summertime, 1924, and the living is fairly easy. I am the guest at a resort in South Haven, Michigan. My mother insisted that I was suffering from something called rheumatic heart fever and that fresh air of the lake would help. As well as the good food. In fact, the favorite—the only—question my fellow guests put to one another was: “What’s for dinner?”
For some reason I cannot determine, even now, at ninety-four, what the attraction those radio voices had for me was. My interest in this convention simply happened because it was the same year that Senator Bob LaFollette was running for president on a Progressive Party ticket. Poetically
enough, Burton K. Wheeler was his running mate. It seems I was interested in how major parties ran things. While my contemporaries were outside in the hot sun splashing cold water at one another, I was glued to the slightly worn easy chair, mesmerized by those orotund voices. Remember now, this had been going on for some time—in fact, for my whole vacation. It didn’t bother me at all. It was in the nature of relief. Were it not for that delegate from Alabama and Tom Walsh, I’d be splashing water at another twelve-year-old and listening to my elders discussing their disappointment with the lunch they had just ravished, demolished, and consigned to their insatiable guts.
Intermittently, a well-appointed matron, for whom the least deadly of the seven sins was gluttony, would freight her way toward my throne. “You on a fast or something? If you don’t eat, you die.” I thanked her for her prescription as my attention wandered back to the Atwater-Kent and the prosecutorial voice of Tom Walsh.
Why did the contest last so long? There was a deadlock: William Gibbs McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law and the secretary of the treasury, versus Al Smith, the popular governor of New York. That Smith was the first Catholic ever put up for the presidency was the Roman candle that set off all those fireworks. The KKK was going crazy, white-sheeted all over the state of Indiana and a number of other border states.
The Teapot Dome scandal didn’t amount to much in the campaign. It had happened during the administration of Warren Harding.8
Calvin Coolidge, VP under Harding, did not appear involved. He was, in fact, not involved in much of anything. Thus, he had nothing to say. He is best remembered in history for his memorable decision to distance himself from the 1928 race for his party’s nomination. What school child doesn’t remember Cal Coolidge’s proclamation: “I do not choose to run”?
I shall always be that twelve-year-old remembering Tom Walsh, of the inflexible spine, who refused to “cool things down a bit.” He saw that the people who picked others’ pockets paid the price. Imagine how Tom Walsh as attorney general would have pinned down the Wall Street wise men, the Babsons, the others, and their waywardness—if not obtuseness—in impotently watching the free market fall so freely.
After the stock market crash, some New York editors suggested that hearings be held: What had really caused the Depression? The hearings were held in Washington. In retrospect, they make the finest comic reading. You read a transcript today and find them so unaware. The leading industrialist and bankers . . . they hadn’t the foggiest notion.
It was a mood of great bewilderment. No one had anticipated it, despite the fact that we had many severe panics in the past. The innocence of the business leaders was astonishing. There were groups at the time, arch-reactionary, almost Neolithic—the Liberty League, for instance. There was a bit of truth in it, but, by and large they were babes in the woods, or comedians . . .9
HOW CAN I FORGET an encounter with one of those Wall Street wise men? He was the Alan Greenspan of his day, though that may be going a bit too far. Sidney J. Weinberg, a senior partner of the Goldman Sachs Company, had served as an industrial adviser during the Truman and JFK administrations. Our conversation was in 1968.
“October 29, 1929!—I remember that day very intimately. I stayed in the office a week without going home. The tape was running, I’ve forgotten how long that night. It must have been ten, eleven o’clock before we got the final reports. It was like a thunderclap. Everybody was stunned. Nobody knew what it was all about. The Street had general confusion. They didn’t understand it any more than anybody else. They thought something would be announced.
Prominent people were making statements. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., announced on the steps of J.P. Morgan, I think, that he and his sons were buying common stock. Immediately, the market went down again. Pools combined to support the market, to no avail. The public got scared and sold. It was a very trying period for me. Our investment company went up to two, three hundred, and then went down to practically nothing. As all investment companies did.
I don’t know anybody that jumped out of the window. But I know many who threatened to jump. They ended up in nursing homes and insane asylums and things like that. These were people who were trading in the market or in banking houses. They broke down physically, as well as financially.
Roosevelt saved the system. It’s trite to say the system would have gone out the window. But certainly a lot of institutions would have changed. We were on the verge of something. You could have had a rebellion; you could have had a civil war.”10
OH, I ALMOST FORGOT. There was a third-party candidate. Here was one campaign in which Gene Debs did not participate. In 1920, he polled a million votes while still in Atlanta Penitentiary. There was the last of his five runs at the presidency.
Fighting Bob LaFollette was the Progressive Party candidate in 1924, for the job over which McAdoo and Smith were battling all through my “vacation.” Cal Coolidge was, of course, the Republi-cans’ mute candidate. As the spiritual goes, “He didn’t say a mum-blin’ word.” He didn’t need to. He was in.
There was my unforgettable meeting with ex-Senator Burton K. Wheeler. He had been Bob LaFollette’s running mate on the Progressive Party ticket in 1924, the year of the convention that never ended. Remember, this was before his bitter contretemps with FDR concerning Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court and his turn to the right. Remember, Wheeler had been the eloquent and bellicose crusader, along with Tom Walsh, against the Montana Big Boys.
Fast forward. 1978. Here I am in Washington, in the office of ex-Senator Wheeler. He, as is true of many former Washington politicos, had pursued a private law practice. The toll of the long years since 1924 revealed themselves in his weariness and wrinkles. His fire, though considerably banked, was still burning.
He knew I had been involved with the Progressive Party candidacy of Henry Wallace in 1948, thirty or so years before. He knew that his daughter, Frances, and her husband, Alan Saylor, had suggested this meeting. They had been devoted Henry Wallace workers. Wheeler at first appeared at loose ends, a touch lonely and out of it. He seemed to come alive again remembering his run with Bob LaFollette.
I remember telling Wheeler how my father and I had heard him speak at the Ashland Auditorium, about three blocks from our rooming house. It was a Sunday afternoon. And, he, Wheeler, to a twelve-year-old, was Demosthenes and Abe Lincoln rolled into one. And my father bought one of the gilded busts of Bob LaFollette that were selling at five bucks a copy. Behind that desk, Wheeler became a different man; the glow replaced the glower. He obviously got a kick out of his daughter and son-in-law still fighting for the Progressive cause.
I remember some of the senator’s tales out of school. Wheeler was on a roll. Corruption, especially being bought off by the corporate biggies, was a natural political syndrome. Our public servants had become the private servants of our CEOs. As I recall, Senator Wheeler was his younger self again, acting out those old-time encounters.
“Remember J. Ham Lewis of your state, Illinois? He grabbed me in the Senate cloakroom. Remember him?”
Of course. We called him Dr. Brush. He was my senator, and he had slaughtered Ruth Hanna McCormick, the colonel’s cousin, in the senatorial race of ’34. “Do you realize, Senator Wheeler, J. Ham was a dead ringer for Yellow Kid Weil, the master con artist?” As Louis Sullivan was Lieber Meister to Frank Lloyd Wright, the Yellow Kid was role model to all the imaginative youngbloods who wouldn’t hurt a fly, though they would skillfully relieve “the greedy who had too much.”
J. Ham and the Kid were each in a class by himself, well dressed. Oh, sure, there was Jimmy Walker, the one-time mayor of New York, and the Prince of Wales, who, with his great love, Wally Simpson, didn’t think Hitler was quite that bad. In any event, I’ll try to describe the Yellow Kid, and it could describe as well, spats and all, the august senator: a well-trimmed Van Dyke beard, a pince-nez, a pearl stickpin in a flash of tie, shoes that were far above Florsheim in style and value. Probably Italian. Each of them w
as possessed of a panache none of our young models in Gentlemen’s Quarterly could touch.
A long time went by before I ran into the Yellow Kid. Dog days for him. I knew it because I spotted a slight egg stain on his once-expensive jacket. It was on a streetcar that we met. His eyes were watery, he appeared weary; yet he was the same articulate, persuasive Yellow Kid Weil.
I’m still in Burton K. Wheeler’s office and he’s still, in memory, back in the cloakroom with J. Ham.
I had finished a hot assault on the big corporations that were short-changing all the hardworking people. Old J. Ham came up to me. He used to call out “Boy!” That made me mad. “Boy, give ’em the devil.” I said, “Won’t you make a speech on it?” He said, “No, I can’t. I represent a damn bunch of thieves, I tell you, who want to reach their hand in the public coffers and pull all the money out. My God, if I were a free man, I’d tear this thing limb from limb.” I was pretty much discouraged when the men in the cloakrooms would come up to me and say, “I agree with you!” Then go out and vote the other way.
I remember one piece of legislation I was interested in. It involved a challenge to the big money powers. A senator said to me, “I think you’re right. I’m gonna vote with you.” In the afternoon, he said, “I can’t.” “Why not?” “My bosses called me up. You’ve got one.” I said, “The only boss I got is the people.” He said, “Don’t give me that stuff. You’ve got a boss somewhere.”