Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  As soon as I returned to Congress, on January 6, 1932, I rose to impeach Andrew W. Mellon for high crimes and misdemeanors. The Republicans were so shocked and confused, they didn’t stop me. I got an hour’s time on the floor. I spoke of the conflict of interests. He owned banks, stocks and everything else, and here he was heading the Treasury. It was made a violation a hundred years ago for a Secretary of Treasury to even own a Government bond.

  They voted to refer the proposition to the Judiciary Committee. I sat on one side of the long table by myself and Mr. Mellon and his twelve lawyers sat on the opposite side. The most high-prices lawyers in the United States, the best money could buy. I had a rough time for a couple of weeks. But I was always able to fall on my feet like a cat, because I had the information. I had it documented. I knew what it was. They didn’t. See, these high-prices lawyers, the higher they’re priced, the less they study. (Laughs.)

  At the end of two weeks, it was Mr. Mellon’s turn to be on the witness stand. The committee recessed until one thirty that afternoon. Well, about twelve thirty, the papers came out with huge headlines: “Mellon Resigns, Appointed To The Court of St. James.” Some members of the committee wanted to impeach him anyway. LaGuardia was one. But the argument was made: Why take up time? He’s not only out of office, he’s out of the country. So they just let it go. They destroyed all the papers.

  What papers? Your documents … ?

  Why, certainly. Stolen from my office. They robbed my office time and time again. They had people up there in corners, where they could see anybody that went in and out of my office. They’d even go in at night. In the morning, I’d find papers piled in the middle of the floor. I’d try to get the officers around here to do something about it, couldn’t get them to do it.

  Which officers?

  The security officers around Washington. The Treasury has some. Also the White House and the FBI type people… .

  And it’s all gone?

  Listen, there’s none in the Treasury. There’s none anywhere. The truth is Mellon didn’t resign. He didn’t want to leave that office. He was willing to buck it. He thought he had enough money to win. But this was the beginning of the campaign where Hoover was gonna face Franklin D. Roosevelt. He knew he had to get Mellon out of office. He accepted a resignation that had not been tendered. It was the most courageous thing Hoover ever did.

  While he was taking the oath as Ambassador, Mellon told a newspaper friend of mine, “This is not a marriage ceremony; it’s a divorce.” They put him out. For all effective purposes, he was impeached. Hoover gave him a pardon in the middle of the trial.

  Weren’t there pressures to defeat you during the Thirties?

  Why, certainly. About every three or four elections, they’d lower the boom on me. They could see I was givin’ ’em trouble on their city-slicking deals. I pictured them as money changers and was after them with sharp sticks. (Laughs.) They come in, spitin’ me back. I had a lot of hard races. The big business fellas didn’t need me. They got their own paid people around here. They threw plenty of money around and begin to get very popular.

  We have two Governments in Washington: one run by the elected people—which is a minor part—and one run by the moneyed interests, which control everything.

  Like the farmer down in Texas. He had a few oil wells. He began buying up all the land around the rivers. Folks got terribly wrought up about it. Him buying up all the land in the country. He let ’em know he wasn’t buying up all the land. He just wanted to buy that land that adjoined his’n. (Laughs.) That’s what we had. A few fellas that was buying up all the property that adjoined theirs.

  It was the big ones closing in on the little ones for the kill. At one time, they thought they’d get a dictatorship here. General Smedley Butler was picked out to be the leader. He was gonna be their man on the white horse. They were gonna close in and take this country over. And they come darn near doing it. They just picked the wrong man.125 They’ll get this country in that position again if they can.

  You worried about it?

  Yeah, I’m worried about that. A dictatorship could spring up here over night, if this country got so bad. If another Depression came, we’d have a revolution. People wouldn’t take it any more. They have more knowledge. The big ones, they’d be looking for somebody that’d have the power to just kill people, if they didn’t agree. When John Doe begins to get up, they’d just go down and shoot him… .

  What were your relations with Roosevelt during the Depression?

  I liked him very much. There was an air of optimism. When he got in—getting the fat cats out, getting the money changers out. But he was wrong on the veteran’s pay. He was against it, too, Roosevelt. I didn’t bother him because I knew Congress was gonna have to pass it.

  They had a leadership conference at the White House. The New York Times had a headline: “Patman At White House On Program.” They had a “must” list on the agenda. Defeating the so-called bonus bill was on the “must” list. I think Roosevelt honestly felt it would cause inflation. He was budget-conscious, too. But he had to change. He realized the facts of life.

  Do you have the feeling that you’ve been pretty well kept out of the news these past thirty years or so … ?

  Why, certainly. I should have been chairman of this committee twenty-five years ago. But they kept me off on account of that fight for the veterans. They knew I knew too much about the money business. They didn’t want a man like that.

  Oh, I made news when I authored the Full Employment Bill. They called me a Communist, a Socialist and everything else. But we got the bill through. They all now recognize it as a good bill.

  When I get kind of low, I’d think about a verse I learned at one time, when everybody was fighting me. It went something like this:He has no enemies, you say,

  My friend, the boast is poor.

  He who hath mingled in the fray

  Of duty that the brave endure

  Must have foes.

  If he has none,

  Small is the work he has done.

  He has hit no traitor on the hip,

  Has cast no cup from perjured lip,

  Has never turned the wrong to right,

  He’s been a coward in the fight.

  I’d often repeat that, you know. (Laughs.)

  POSTSCRIPT: “I live near the Water Gate Inn, but I’m not in that fat cat area. (Laughs.) They pay a half million dollars for condominiums down there. Of course, they have to pay ten or fifteen thousand dollars a year just to keep the corridors clean. From my apartment, I can see where the Cabinet lives.” (Laughs.)

  Peroration

  Colonel Hamilton Fish

  His office is on the far side of the lobby: a downtown Manhattan hotel. Once upon a time, it may have been deluxe, many, many years ago. Elderly people, a few, are seated in this bleak anteroom.

  Inside the office, it is cramped with mementoes of better days: a bust of Alexander Hamilton; the face of Lincoln; autographed photographs of Warren Gamaliel Harding, Calvin Coolidge, General Douglas MacArthur and Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen; and the adjacent bookshelf on which are sprawled numerous works dealing with military matters, a photograph of himself: a bareheaded young football player, Harvard, ’08, Walter Camp’s choice as All-Time, All-American tackle.

  The Colonel, tall, lean, remarkably vigorous for his years, crosses his legs. His eyes half-closed, he appears to be addressing multitudes.

  THE FIRST BILL I introduced in Congress was in December, 1920. It was a bill to bring back the body of the Unknown Soldier. It was signed by Woodrow Wilson, the last piece of legislation he signed. That’s almost fifty years ago. There were at least fifty thousand people there….

  As a World War I vet, did you have any thoughts concerning the Bonus March of ’32?

  I was always for the veteran. Veterans elected me. Those young fellows in those days knew how to fight—I I wasn’t connected at all with the Bonus March. It was ill-advised and caused a political issue,
which it never should have. I was for a bonus certificate. I wasn’t for these handouts. There were extremists on this Bonus March. They love to be in a march. They got a whole lot of extremists down there and they caused trouble. I kept away from it.

  I was chairman of the first committee to investigate Communist activity in the United States. It was known as the Fish Committee. It only lasted one year, from ‘30 to ’31. We didn’t go after personalities. We didn’t send people to jail or anything like that. Congress can’t send people to jail, anyhow. We did go after their organizations, to warn the American people. It was educational.

  We had only $25,000 to make the investigation. Now they give ’em three or four hundred thousand. We didn’t even need the twenty-five thousand, because the four other members were also lawyers. Our $25,000 included traveling expenses and so on. I think I’m the first member of Congress, and perhaps the only member of Congress, that ever returned any fund allotted to committees. I returned $5,000.

  I’m sorry I did it now. Because I would have liked to use the whole amount to have our report printed by the hundreds of thousands. HR 2290 is still the best report—it’s only about sixty pages—is still the best report on Communism in America.

  I wrote and got through a bill creating the Un-American Activities Committee, which came a few years later, chairmaned by Mr. Dies of Texas. I have a letter from him. It’s interesting, because Congressmen are prima donnas. They like to claim credit for everything for themselves: that he was responsible for the investigation of Communists, and so on and so on. But in fairness to Dies, he was certainly not, in this case, a prima donna. Because he sent me this letter, unsolicited, in 1962, from Texas.

  In a ringing voice, he reads the letter. Tribute is paid him for his pioneering efforts and the information he provided Dies “… all records which our government had seized had mysteriously disappeared. I was able to get invaluable help from the work you did….”

  What did Congressman Dies mean … about the files disappearing?

  What he said was the files were destroyed under orders from Roosevelt. I don’t claim Roosevelt was a Communist. I don’t even say he was pro-Communist. He was a Socialist. He said: Some of my best friends are Communists. Imagine the President of the United States saying that! And then going over and selling out to Stalin. What I wanted to do was to encourage Hitler to fight Stalin. Let them fight it out. And let the free nations sit down on the sidelines, just egging them on and saying: A plague on both your houses.

  Dies did a very good job. Why do you think we have so little Communism in America today? Actually it’s less than one percent, Communism in America. With fellow travelers, it’s a little more, with extremists and others. Now why is this a fact? Because the Un-American Activities Committee—American labor took it up, the American Legion took it up—all the patriotic groups. If it hadn’t been for that, you’d have had ten percent Communists. We’d all have hell to pay in this country here today. We’ve got enough troubles already.

  After Dies, came McCarthy, maligned, practically crucified and almost killed. He was hated because he was so fearless. He’s still hated because they tortured the truth about him. Whether he’ll ever get credit, I don’t know. Although McCarthy is probably our most hated man in recent history, he always had the majority of the people with him—from Cardinal Spellman down. They spent millions to destroy this man. They destroyed him by putting through that censure resolution in the Senate. I’d like to have been at the Senate at that time, because I’ve always been able to talk, I’d a’ given them hell. They killed him, you know, they killed him. They began to gang up on me first. Then they ganged up on Dies. And they ganged up on McCarthy a hundredfold. What they didn’t do to him was a shame.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt … I represented, of course, the district which he came from, Hyde Park, Dutchess County. I represented it in Congress for twenty-five years, ten years before he was elected President, until the next fifteen years, until he practically died. I was never beaten in that district.

  Roosevelt did his best every time to defeat me in Congress. He spent a great deal of money with the columnists and the radio commentators. He would rather defeat me, I think, almost than be elected himself.

  It developed on his part, a good deal of bitterness. ’Cause I criticized him openly. Never personally himself. I always denied he was a Communist or a pro-Communist and so on. I’d say perhaps he was a Socialist, but if he wants to be one, he has a right to be one. He became bitterer and bitterer.

  He really began to hate me. I had nothing against him. 1 don’t belong to that school of Republicans that go around calling names, a lot of bad names. I fought him aboveboard, and I’m not sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t fight him harder than I did, because he did a great deal of harm to this country. It will take us maybe a hundred years to live it down.

  It was very amusing. He’d send in “must” legislation—some radical measure. I’d get up—I got along pretty well with the Democrats—I’d offer an amendment to the bill, which would really destroy it. And it carried. He’d have his leaders up there the next day: “What’s the matter with you people here? What’s the trouble?” And they’d say: “Mr. President, that’s your own Congressman that offered that amendment.” They say he almost had apoplexy, almost died. And they’d come back to me, all these Democratic leaders—I knew them well—and laughing, saying, “You almost killed the President. He was trying to put the blame on us, and we put it on you.” They’d say, he nearly dropped on the spot. This happened a half a dozen times, not once.

  I was on the radio at least ten or fifteen times a year, on the big radios. That’s what hurt him, ’Cause I’d accuse him: I accuse the President of this, of that, down the line. It infuriated him.

  Roosevelt never went out of his way to attack me personally. He did talk about “Martin, Barton & Fish” 126 and inferred we were reactionaries. That isn’t correct. I had voted for Social Security and the most progressive legislation. I always had the support of the American Federation of Labor. On social justice, I was left of center. He hired a columnist to attack me. Some of them absolutely slammed me, maliciously lied about me. Members of his Cabinet, like Ickes,127 were taking cracks at me. I naturally answered them. I spoke about Messrs. Jackson,128 Ickes and Roosevelt. I called them Three Blind Leaders. (Reads.)

  Three blind leaders, see how they run,

  They ran into a Depression

  Which they claim is a mere recession.

  Did you ever hear such deception

  By three blind leaders, see how they run,

  See how they squirm, see how they alibi,

  Those three blind leaders.

  When he first ran for President, I was very friendly with him. He ran on a very fine, middle-of-the-road or rather conservative platform. Perhaps the most conservative platform in history. My wife voted for him.

  I supported Hoover. They asked me if I would take my keynote speech down to Washington and show it to President Hoover. He read it and approved it, all except the provision about the liquor amendment. I had put in a paragraph in favor of light wine and beer. I’m afraid that his wife, who was a white-ribboner and a complete Prohibitionist, opposed that. He brought it back the next morning and he said, “You’ll have to delete that light wine and beer suggestion because I can’t approve it.” That changed the whole election, just that one thing. And, of course, the Depression.

  People were unemployed and they were blaming Hoover. But certainly it would have brought him millions of votes. He lost by probably ten million and he would have halfed it. That would have made a great deal of difference, but it would not have elected Hoover, because they absolutely sabotaged his constructive programs. It would have softened the Depression and would have solved the Depression. They sabotaged that deliberately, the Democrats in Congress. Roosevelt was in on it. He wouldn’t even confer with Hoover at the time. They wanted to continue this Depression so they could sweep the country. They wanted people unemployed, so th
ey could reap the whirlwind of votes. It was shameful.

  As soon as Roosevelt got in, he changed. He trampled his platform, brought into Washington a whole lot of young, socialistic, radical brain trusters, who sought to change the whole ideology of the United States. He had become finally an extremist.

  During the first hundred days, I voted for practically every recommendation made by Roosevelt. The real break between me and my constituent was on the recognition of Soviet Russia. He recognized Soviet Russia without any support whatsoever in Congress. All former Presidents, everybody was against recognizing Soviet Russia at that time. But he went ahead and did it by himself.

  Up to then, we had been on very friendly relations. He okayed a stamp for me, and Jim Farley, who was a friend of mine and has been ever since, put the stamp through. I had letters from Roosevelt thanking me.

  I broke with him, and began to be one of the leaders of opposition to the socialism of the New Deal and this big spending. There were ten million people unemployed all the time during the New Deal. That history has not been brought out clearly. Most of your historians of that period were New Dealers on the payroll. He had a hundred million dollars to spend without making an account. He gave large sums of money to his friends, who were authors and writers. Everything pro-New Deal was written and almost nothing against it. It’s changed a little bit since then….

  Warming to his favorite subject, he speaks of “Roosevelt determined on a pro-war policy. In the 1940 campaign, he made a pledge to mothers and fathers that their sons would not be sent to fight in any foreign wars. It was absolutely a dishonest, dishonorable, contemptible statement, because he had been planning to get us in all the time. The Germans didn’t want us fighting them, so they disregarded twenty or thirty attempts that we made to fight, attacking their submarines, bombing their submarines, giving away destroyers to England…. When he found he couldn’t get Germany to fight us, he turned and tried to get Japan into the war.”