Touch and Go

by Studs Terkel

  HENRY WALLACE was the heart and soul of the New Deal. He said of the twentieth century, “Let this be the century of the common man.” He fought for Social Security, for the right to organize in plants. The big shots hated him because he was giving people a sense of their own power.

  The New Deal really ended when the war began, when Roosevelt said to the two wonder boys of the Democratic Party, Tommy Corcoran and Ben Cohen: “Boys, Dr. New Deal is over, Dr. Win-the-War is in.” From then on there were all kinds of compromises to cooperate with the big boys, the industrialists.

  Roosevelt appointed Wallace as his vice president in his third term, indicating that he might want Wallace to succeed him as president. But by the end of his third term Roosevelt was already very ill, and it was at the 1944 convention that Wallace was robbed of the vice presidency. That’s when a group of political bosses went into action—Ed Kelly of Chicago, David Lawrence of Pennsylvania, Frank Hague of New Jersey, and Bob Hannegan, chairman of the National Democratic Committee.

  By this time, Henry Wallace had become known as being too soft on the Soviet Union. Also, he was anti-agribusiness, although that word wasn’t used then. The bosses were out to get him. They hated him because he represented the radical idea of people having a stake in things, having ownership. They called him a dupe of the Communists.

  The ’44 convention was in Chicago, and, thousands of people had come into the convention hall. All the galleries and most delegates were for Henry Wallace. All that had to happen was for someone to say, “Henry Wallace for VP,” and the place would have gone up for grabs. And Henry Wallace would have been president when Roosevelt died.

  What happened? Claude Pepper, a senator from Florida, very progressive, was about to go to the podium to nominate Henry Wallace. As he came toward the podium, two political thugs took him by the arms and marched him away, led him off the stand. He couldn’t make the speech. The chairman bangs the gavel. Roosevelt was on his way to Pearl Harbor during the convention and Bob Hannegan, the Democratic chief, had gotten something in writing from Roosevelt, a weary, worn out, dying man, saying he’d accept either Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, or Harry Truman, an unknown little hack from Missouri, as his vice president. Truman it was.

  The Cold War came into being in 1944–45, when our former ally, the Soviet Union, began to be regarded as our enemy. Truman was talking bellicose, belligerent talk. Not that Stalin was any bargain. That’s when those most committed to the New Deal decided to back Henry Wallace as the Progressive Party candidate for president in 1948. It was a populist party, and of course, we were all tarred with a red brush; the newspapers and radio were absolutely brutal. It’s true there were Communists connected with the party. But they didn’t determine Wallace’s thoughts and speeches and policies. In spite of the Cold War, most Democrats wanted Wallace as their next presidential candidate, according to a Gallup poll in early 1946.

  Pete Seeger was part of the Henry Wallace entourage that traveled to the South. Beanie Baldwin went along, as did Palmer Weber, a wonderful Southerner, who made all kinds of dough on the stock market and gave it to the Progressive Party. So here’s this group traveling down South and they would play only at integrated events. Oh, it was dangerous. Aubrey Williams was driven out of town, hit with rocks. The vice-presidential candidate, Glen Taylor, the senator from Idaho, got the hell beaten out of him. But that group broke the color line. The Henry Wallace Southern campaign is the first group ever that did not play before a segregated audience, the first since the Reconstruction.

  I was rather deeply involved in this scene. I became an emcee of many Progressive Party events here in Chicago. Zero Mostel was at one of the big gatherings and did a routine called, “Who’s going to investigate the man who investigates the man who investigates me?” It was a takeoff on J. Edgar Hoover.

  At the 1940 convention, a Chicago politician had put a microphone in the cellar and all over the hall you’d hear, “We want Roosevelt!” I stole that and used it in the 1948 Progressive Party Convention in Chicago. “We want Wallace!”

  The war ended, there was Hiroshima, and then came the 1948 election. The pundits expected Dewey to win. Henry Wallace ran as a third-party candidate for peace; he wanted to work for peace all over the world. Strom Thurmond ran on an outright racist ticket. Truman had been thinking about resigning after his political boss in Kansas City, Missouri, was indicted for corruption: “They just indicted my boss, Tom Prendergast.”

  Senator Burton K. Wheeler said, “Don’t you dare resign.” Truman stayed in the race.

  So, here’s Harry Truman with a nothing campaign. One of his advisors, a lawyer and Washington operator named Clark Clifford, as brilliant as he was crooked, suggested that Truman follow Wallace’s platform on the matter of minimum wage, the right of labor to organize, Social Security. In other words, Clifford suggested that Truman steal Wallace’s domestic platform, and he did. Truman made several good speeches about labor, and that’s how the phrase, “Give’em hell, Harry!” came into being.’Cause here he was hitting the big shots he’d never even touched before. So Wallace really helped elect Truman. Harry Truman did not win despite Wallace, as has been the received wisdom of the day. He won because of Wallace.

  In the last week of the campaign, when Tom Dewey still looks like a cinch, the networks allow the top three candidates air time. Dewey, the Republican candidate, is very confident. He makes a speech for about fifteen minutes on NBC election night. Most of the big actors of the time were for Truman, who appeared on CBS. The emcee was Melvyn Douglas, and among the stars of the show were Frederic March and Florence Eldridge and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, there to sing Harry’s praises. The exceptions were Katharine Hepburn and Orson Welles. There was another Wallace voter, not in the film industry but in his own way celebrated. Albert Einstein.

  My friend Lew Frank, who was one of Wallace’s aides, asked the musicologist Alan Lomax and me to produce Wallace’s program for ABC. The stars of the show were Henry Wallace and Paul Robeson. Woody Guthrie was due to be on, but he was sick with Huntington’s by that time. Instead, we had a couple of white circuit riders singing hymns.26

  I’ll never forget going into that building, where many of the radio studios were. It was a busy studio, and there were hundreds of people milling around, actors waiting to audition. We walked in as a group—Henry Wallace, Paul Robeson, Lew Frank, Alan Lomax, me. As soon as the crowd saw Robeson, they dispersed as though the Red Sea had parted. I was reminded of the spiritual, “ ’Gyptian army got drownded.”

  The program was in the main these two guys: the white Midwesterner, representing rural America and the hope of little farmers; and the son of a Baptist preacher whose grandfather was a slave, who had become an athlete, an actor, a singer. I remember Paul Robeson coming up to us saying, “Boys, do you mind if I change one of the songs? Instead of ‘Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,’ I’ll do ‘Scandalize My Name.’ ” It was a funny parlor song. He wanted to show his humor.

  At that time his name was poison. You know about the Peekskill Riots, the overturning of cars, the rock throwing? It was in upper New York State, near Poughkeepsie. Paul Robeson was there singing; that was enough to raise the blood pressure of every professional patriot. People going there, performers, others, had their cars smashed. The police watched and had a good time either doing nothing or taking part in the hooliganism.

  So, here’s Robeson wanting to sing “Scandalize My Name.” “You call that a brother? No, sir! You call that a sister? No, sir! Scan-dalizin’ my name!”

  Henry Wallace had an easy way of talking, but he was used to addressing crowds. I went up to Wallace, who was sitting down at the mike. I squatted down, and I said, “Mr. Vice President, make believe you’re addressing one person: that old farmer having a hard time, or that lost young family in a big city who don’t know where to turn. Be very intimate. The way President Roosevelt sounded during his fireside chats.” I remember saying that.

  Wallace did the
best he could. It was arranged so there was a dialogue and then individual soliloquies of white and black America. It needed no narrator. Robeson spoke of his beginnings and his father, and then recited that soliloquy from Othello. It worked out just right. Unfortunately, there’s no script of it available, nothing. I think there was a recording, but no one knows where it went. It was a wonderful program, a memorable one.

  On that last night, obviously, millions of voters for Wallace, whatever, two, three million, switched and voted for Harry Truman—“Give ’em hell, Harry.”

  Truman had been attacking Wallace as a Communist sympathizer, an agent of Russia. Wallace wanted peace in the world, and there couldn’t be peace unless there was peace between the two superpowers. Stalin was a butcher and a bastard. You can’t defend that, of course.

  But had Wallace won, there might have been no Cold War, might have been no McCarthyism. It would have been a different world, a whole change in temperament—things like universal health care, labor rights to organize. Perhaps even peace in the world. Perhaps. My hope was factor to my mad prophecy—the dream of a Wallace presidency.

  16

  Are You Now or Have You Ever Been . . .

  If ever there was an experience that altered my life, not simply in a political way, but in every aspect, it was the Great American Depression. I was there watching what hard times did to decent people. The great discovery is how they behaved during a specific issue, not what they were labeled. It was easy to call somebody a Commie, or a Red, or a Fascist for that matter. It’s how that person behaved at a certain moment that counted.

  I remember the generosity practiced by those with little. A guy would leave to get on the streetcar and he’d pass another guy a cigarette, or, getting off, would hand someone else his transfer. There were these little things. There’s the innate decency of human beings. But when your livelihood is at stake, it’s you or the other guy, not you and the other guy.

  In The Grapes of Wrath, sharecropper Muley Graves is being forced off his land; a young man in goggles seated on a Caterpillar tractor is about to knock down his house. Muley, in a gesture of resistance, raises his rifle toward the tractor.

  “You touch my house with that Cat and I’ll blow you to kingdom come.”

  The man raises his goggles and declares, “You ain’t gonna blow nobody nowhere. In the first place, they’ll hang you and you know it. Next day they’ll send someone to take my place.”

  Then Muley recognizes him. “Why you’re Joe Davis’ boy. How can you do this to your own people?”

  The man on the tractor says, “I got a wife and kids to feed. Everybody else, they can look after their own selves. . . . Now go on, get out of the way!”

  When, fifty years later, I visited that fourth-generation Iowa farmer and his wife facing the same foreclosure troubles, Muley’s words echoed. With the bankers breathing down their necks, Mrs. Nearmyer, fretting over the effect of the times on her small daughter, asked the same question that Muley Graves does. “Whenever the deputy came to take our stuff away from us, I asked him, ‘How can you go home and face your family?’ I happen to know he has an eight-year-old girl too. I said, ‘How can you sleep tonight, knowing that someday this could be you? You don’t have to be a farmer. This is not just a farm crisis.’

  “He said, ‘If I don’t do it, somebody else would be here. To me, it’s just a job.’ ”27

  I SHALL NEVER FORGET an assemblage known as the Workers’ Alliance, sometimes called the Unemployed Council. Always labeled as Commies and Reds. These groups were in certain of the big cities, among them Chicago and New York.

  The bailiffs were very busy evicting people, sometimes three or so families a day. For the most part, the bailiffs weren’t bad guys and hated their work dispossessing others. They’d arrive during the day to take the furniture out of the homes of people being evicted—removing bedsteads and kitchen tables and even the toilet seats, everything but the kitchen sink. They’d take out the furniture and shut off the electricity and the plumbing. This happened more often in the deeply poverty-stricken neighborhoods, but I read of it in the papers every day.

  When the bailiffs were done evicting people, the sidewalks would be full of furniture and clothes and pots and pans. At the end of the day, as soon as the bailiffs quit, a group of guys would come along.

  It is true that the Communist Party formed the basis of the Workers’ Alliance. They were full of unemployed craftsmen; among them were electricians, carpenters, plumbers, and gas men. They would put the furniture back in and restore all of the utilities. They’d keep doing that until the bailiffs finally got tired, and in many cases, the bailiffs got so tired, they quit.

  That was how some of the people acted at that time. If one tried to be doctrinaire and impose his Communist philosophy on another, that was something else. You weren’t needed. Out. No other matters counted at that moment but that the people needing help were helped.

  Hundreds of miles away, in Montgomery, Alabama, Virginia Durr suffered a similar discovery as a member of an organization known as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. This relatively small group was composed of people fighting segregation, most of them white.28

  Civil rights activists were always accused by certain forces of being Communist. During the 1940s, there was a witch hunt, and Virginia was called to testify as an unfriendly witness before the Eastland Committee. Senator Jim Eastland, an avowed racist and the boss of Sunflower County, Mississippi, had set up his own Un-American Activities Committee.

  I remember seeing Durr’s name, and a picture, in the newspapers: The headline: SOUTHERN REBEL DEFIES EASTLAND. Picture Eastland, all three hundred furious pounds of him: “Are you or have you ever been . . .” In the wonderful photograph, Virginia sits in what is obviously a witness chair, legs crossed, powdering her nose. She will not satisfy her interrogator with a response. Senator Eastland is going crazy and finally orders her off the stand. The reporters surround her; they’re entertained by her actions. One asks, “What impelled you to defy this powerful man?”

  She says, “Oh, I think that man is as common as pig tracks.” Then she sighs, “Oh, I guess I’m just an old-fashioned Southern snob.” That’s the way she talked, and oh, she was a powerful presence.

  She made it clear to the senator that it didn’t matter what a person was labeled; all that mattered was what that person did under specific circumstances. In this case, the battle of the Southern liberals was to eliminate the poll tax that deprived so many African Americans of the right to vote. Among the members of her little group might have been one or two Reds. But that’s not what mattered to Virginia. How did a person behave on the issue of the poll tax? It was analogous to the work of the Unemployed Council.

  Her friend and fellow Southern Conference member, Joe Gelders, was a Communist who fought harder than anyone to eliminate the poll tax. In fact, he was tarred and feathered several times and regularly bruised for his efforts. He, much like the Unemployed Council people, acted on behalf of his fellow man.

  I first heard Virginia Durr speak at Orchestra Hall at a program against segregation during the forties, when it was not remotely fashionable to speak out on behalf of integration. The headline speaker was Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, a celebrated African American and a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. We’d all heard of Mary McLeod Bethune, but it was Virginia Durr who set everybody’s heart afire that day. She was dynamite—in her forties, lanky, Southern, colorful. I went backstage to shake her hand. “Thank you, dear, thank you,” she said, and put a hundred leaflets in my hand. “Now dear, you better hurry outside, pass those out quickly because Dr. Bethune and I will be at the African Episcopal church in two hours.”

  I dedicated my book Hope Dies Last to Clifford and Virginia Durr. Clifford Durr was a Birmingham, Alabama, lawyer, very soft-spoken, gentle, but strong and well known for defending political activists. At one time he was the head counsel for the Federal Communications Commission. Clifford was responsible for bringing
in the Blue Book, which ensured that public-service programs would be aired.

  During the New Deal, Virginia was the hostess who greeted all the young wives of representatives new to the capitol. Lady Bird Johnson loved Virginia Durr; Virginia was Lady Bird’s mentor when LBJ first came to Washington as a young congressman from Texas. During the Cold War and the McCarthy days, Clifford lost a number of different jobs and they were often down on their luck. When they were under attack, LBJ tried whatever he could to smooth things over.

  The Durrs were definitely not Communists, but they were not opposed to people who were Communists being in any organization of which they were a part. When Virginia ran for U.S. senator in Alabama on the Henry Wallace ticket, she said, “We’re for anybody who fights for civil rights. We don’t care what he’s called. If he’s a Communist, it’s OK, provided he doesn’t try to impinge his views on us.”

  Virgina wrote a book called Outside the Magic Circle. In the preface, I described the three ways she could have lived her life. She was the daughter of a preacher who lost his faith: He couldn’t believe that Jonah set up light housekeeping in the belly of the whale. I said that since she was part of a white, upper-middle-class society, she could have led an easy life, been a member of a garden or book club, and behaved kindly toward the colored help. Two, if she had imagination and was stuck in this nice, easy world, she could go crazy, as did her schoolmate Zelda Sayre, later the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The third is the one she took: She became the rebel girl and basically said, “The whole system is lousy and I’m going to fight it.” That’s stepping outside the magic circle.

  The Durrs were highly respected citizens of Montgomery until the fight to break segregation. They were friends of Myles Horton, who established Highlander Folk School, the first integrated school in the South since the Reconstruction, in Monteagle, Tennessee. It was primarily a school for adults who were organizers of labor and civil rights—white and black together. Myles was a Southerner who had studied theology at Vanderbilt and was brilliant as a teacher of adults. One of his influences was Paolo Freire, a great Brazilian educator who revolutionized the use of language. Certain words are key, words that arouse emotions because they resonate with peoples’ lives: Hunger. Cold. Equality. Justice.