Hard Times

by Studs Terkel

  There were three reasons Roosevelt wanted war. One: you had ten million Americans unemployed after six years of the New Deal. The other one: to be a war President, you became a great man overnight. And then, he hoped to put through a United Nations, of which he would be the author—and the uncrowned ruler of the world. With his dreams, I could speak at length. But that’s another matter.

  Roosevelt would have gone down in history as a great President after the first two terms. But he made a mistake, going for the third term. Jim Farley and all the rest fought it. His tragic mistake was when he was a sick and dying man, caved in, mentally and physically, and he insisted on a fourth term. “I’m the indispensable man.” All that bunk.

  He had all this fanatical, radical legislation introduced. They were not based on American customs. They were all Socialistic, and Socialism always fails. I know as much about this as anybody, ’cause I debated Norman Thomas, whom I have a very high idea of, at least ten different times.

  Of course, Socialism has tremendous ideals. If everybody was an angel, Socialism would be wonderful. If everybody worked for everybody else and for themselves and for the country, it might work. But it’s never worked in any big country. Maybe a small country of five million….

  I’m for the right of everybody to speak: Democrats, Republicans, left, right, freedom people, extremists, so on. The only thing Communism fears is the word “freedom,” and they fear that like the devil is feared by Christians. HR 2290 was the best report ever written on Communism. I’m only sorry I didn’t keep that $5,000 and spend it to print a million copies.

  POSTSCRIPT: “Al Smith was a very dear friend of mine. He loved this country, and he hated Communism. I was asked by Republican leaders if I would go down and see Al Smith at the Empire State Building … and ask if he would run on the Republican ticket for the United States Senator against his old friend, Robert Wagner. It was shortly before Al’s death. Much to my surprise, he said, ‘You know, Ham, I’d like to run and beat Wagner. I would like to go to Washington and as a Senator, get up and oppose all the New Deal Socialistic legislation. And ridicule it. And I can do it.’ ” It was a matter of Smith’s failing health, apparently, that kept him from making the race. “And he said, ‘My heart is not as strong as it should be. And I have a very good job here, $50,000.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Al, as far as the job is concerned, we’ve been in touch with Mr. DuPont, who pays the salary, and he will continue the salary, regardless.’ ” The Colonel withdrew the request: “Because I, too, believed he could be elected. But not at the expense of his life.”

  Scarlet Banners and Novenas

  William L. Patterson

  He is seventy-seven.

  “My mother was born a slave in 1850. As the War Between the States seemed inevitable, her grandfather sent his white family to Massachusetts and his black family to California. My father was a West Indian.”

  After graduating from law school in California, he signed up as a third cook on a steamship: ultimate destination—Liberia. While pausing in London, he met George Lansbury, the old Labour Party M.P., who urged him to return to America because “it was there the great struggle would develop.”

  In New York, he passed the bar, with an assist by Henry L. Stimson. Within a short time, his was the leading Negro law firm in the city. He became interested in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. “Most of the young Negro lawyers did not see any connection whatsoever … but I asked myself what was the purpose of practicing law when social issues arose and I played no part….”

  As a member of a delegation to Boston to protest the execution,129 he met Ella (Mother) Bloor and other Communists. “They were very solicitous of my welfare. It was for me an experience with a new type of white American. However, it was when Mother Bloor linked up the Sacco-Vanzetti case with the oppression of the Negroes, I was struck by the clarity of her cause. I gave up the practice of law and joined the Communist Party.”

  For three years, he studied in the Soviet Union at the University for Toiling People of the Far East. Most of the students were young Asians, though there were “one or two Africans.” He returned to America in 1930.

  FOR A SHORT TIME, I was an organizer in Harlem. It was an interesting period that gave rise to the Negro literati. James Weldon Johnson was around. And, of course, one of the great men of the century, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois. Professor Alain Locke of Howard … and young Negro writers following the path blazed by money-mad white writers. Two exceptions were the poets, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes.

  I was asked by the Party to go to Pittsburgh to take charge of a new school there—of miners and metal workers. It was in the heart of the Depression. Unemployed Councils and hunger marches were organized.

  I’d been arrested in a demonstration in which a thousand Negroes and whites had carried the furniture of an evicted white family back into their home. In the trial, I defended the other arrested men, as well as myself. The jury brought out a verdict of not guilty.

  I was arrested while speaking to black and white miners in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. On one occasion, there was talk of lynching me. White and Negro workers placed their picket line around the prison and marched all night.

  On another occasion, I was thrown into jail without any charges being made. At twelve o’clock at night, gun thugs came to my cell, saying they were going to transfer me to another jail. I knew the town had only one jail. I thought this was it.

  I was put into a Ford, and we started out of town. The three men began to talk among themselves in a language I did not understand, but which I recognized as Slavic. I asked them in Russian what they were going to do to me. They were very much surprised in hearing a black man talk Russian. We began to discuss my stay in Russia.

  We soon came to a wooded section in the road. The car was stopped, and I was told to get out. I thought I’d be shot trying to escape, as the charge was usually made. But one of them kicked me, and they drove off.

  The Unemployed Councils were a creation of the Communists, though in the main their composition was made up of non-Communists. I recall men and women being shot, engaging in these activities. There were hundreds charged with sedition, conspiracy, on one pretext or another. But it was a period of great schooling.

  Many times, the Councils started at a meeting in which it was proposed that delegations be sent to City Hall or to the state assembly—demanding food and work. These committees would come back and report to their community. Out of these events, came the Unemployed Councils. There followed the idea of hunger marches. To city halls, to city councils. I led one of a few thousand into Uniontown. When we arrived, the cossacks were there in great number. I mounted the steps and began to speak. In a short time, the city council and the mayor came down and called a meeting. A delegation went into the City Council. I spoke for them. They immediately voted $6,000 for relief. It was a small amount, but it was a small town.

  “Roosevelt emerged to talk about the necessity of giving people relief. One thing that many do not recall was his statement that he was out to save capitalism from itself. He did. With his WPA’s and his PWA’s, he brought back a measure of stability to American society.

  “However, many illusions arose. Roosevelt carried out, in a very adroit manner, a program in which he doled out hundreds of dollars to workers, while millions were given to banks, the railroads and other industries. As contracted to Hoover, he did, in fact, offer a New Deal to working people.”

  What do you feel was the Communists’ role in the emergence of the CIO?

  “John L. Lewis has stated it more clearly than anyone else. Without the organization ability of the Communist Party, the CIO might never have come to life. Youth today has no comprehension of the tremendous role played by the Communist Party in that period. It forced the Roosevelt Administration to carry through some of the Social Security measures.”

  Wasn’t the idea of black nationhood suggested, for a time, by the Communist Party … ?

  “During the late Twenties, the
concept of self-determination arose, as a means of sharpening the struggle. The rights of Negroes to have a part of the United States in which they constituted a majority. There were separatist movements at the time. They were sharply challenged by DuBois. Black Americans are not Africans. To consider themselves so would be to surrender their heritage to the very forces which have been their greatest oppressors.

  “Black power today is self-determination in a new form: autonomy of the black ghetto. It must be a positive force. Where it creates the idea of separatism, it must be combatted.”

  I had been in Pittsburgh only a short time when the Scottsboro Case broke. In April, 1931, nine Negro lads were arrested, and the trial took place in Scottsboro, Alabama. They were riding a freight, seeking work. Some were seeking hospital care, which they could not get in their home town. It was a freight train going from Tennessee to Alabama, in which a large number of white lads, who were also jobless and penniless, were moving restlessly from one place to another. When the lads were arrested, both white and black were charged with vagrancy. Until the sheriff found out there were two white girls, in overalls, on the same train.

  Under pressure, the girls were forced by the police to say they had been raped by the nine Negro lads. Both these girls had been forced, by economic conditions, into prostitution at an early age.

  He received a call from New York that the International Labor Defense (ILD) was undertaking the defense. The secretary of the organization was going to Europe with Mrs. Wright, the mother of one of the boys—to mobilize international sentiment in their behalf. He agreed to become acting secretary of the ILD.

  I immediately sought the services of Samuel Liebovitz. He was one of New York’s leading criminal lawyers and he had never lost a death case. He told me, “I’ll bring these boys back and throw them in your lap.” I told him, “No, you won’t. These are political prisoners. They are arrested and being tried for a purpose … to terrorize the Negro people.”

  Liebovitz handled the case in a masterly fashion. The freight train on which these lads were riding had forty-nine cars. Liebovitz had a replica made of this train, every car placed in the position it originally occupied. In the trial, he forced the complainants, these two girls, to show what car the rape had taken place in. He showed the judge that this car had been full of gravel, that the gravel had come up to the level of the car’s sides. Had these girls been raped, their backs would have been lacerated….

  Judge Horton reversed the conviction. He fairly analyzed the evidence and showed that much of it was inadmissible. And yet the case of the Scottsboro Boys lasted for seventeen years, from 1931 to 1947. That’s when the last of them, Heywood Patterson, the most outstanding and courageous of these lads, was released.

  It was a cause célèbre, which brought into action millions of people all over the world. And led me, inexorably, I think, to see the role of the American Government in the persecution of the Negro people. The case went twice to the United States Supreme Court. There was evidence, both in law and in fact, sufficient to enable the court to dismiss the case. Instead, on each occasion, these boys were sent back to go through the torture and agony of their prison life, and the racist persecution to which they had been subjected. I began to see clearly this conspiracy to perpetuate racism as an institution in our life.

  Didn’t one of the girls eventually become a witness for the defense?

  One of the most interesting features of the case. It showed the tremendous power of struggle to awaken both the consciousness and understanding of people. Ruby Bates, one of the young white girls, was a remarkable person. She told me she had been driven into prostitution when she was thirteen. She had been working in a textile mill for a pittance. When she asked for a raise, the boss told her to make it up by going with the workers. She told me there was nothing else she could do.

  After she had been going with the white workers, the police called her in. They didn’t want to arrest her for prostitution, but she had to have what they called Nigger Day. On a certain day, she had to go with black workers, so if they wanted to charge a black man with rape, to organize a lynching bee, they would have a man who could not deny he had gone with her.

  Ruby and I had an opportunity of speaking together. We brought her to New York, when she expressed a desire to tell her story, the true story. She met Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick. And I took her to see Elmer Rice, the playwright. When Wexley’s play130 appeared, she made a speech, and so did I.

  She told how she had been threatened with imprisonment unless she charged these boys with rape. She told how Victoria Price, the other girl, had been implicated in a murder charge, and how this threat of prosecution was held over her head. She told how the authorities promised to give Victoria a house in Scottsboro, if she testified as they wanted. Ruby found it impossible to be a party to a crime of this magnitude.

  Ruby Bates was a remarkable woman. Underneath it all—the poverty, the degradation—she was decent, pure. Here was an illiterate white girl, all of whose training had been clouded by the myths of white supremacy, who, in the struggle for the lives of these nine innocent boys, had come to see the role she was being forced to play. As a murderer. She turned against her oppressors…. I shall never forget her.

  Max Shachtman

  Formerly a Trotskyite leader, now a leading theoretician of the American Socialist Party.

  UNTIL THE CRASH OCCURRED, it was thought there was something unique about American capitalism. Even the radicals felt it. They were in bad shape. The Communists were wracked by internal strife. The Socialists were stagnating. Ford was paying his workers $5 a day—unprecedentedly high wages. It seemed the class struggle was coming to an end, and radicalism might disappear. But the 1929 crisis created a revolution in thought: it affected liberals and, in many cases, conservatives, as well as radicals.

  What was called the collapse of American capitalism had an enormously stimulating effect on the American Communist Party. It underwent two phases in the Thirties: the first five years of the decade; and the second. This phenomenon had something of a third phase, too.

  At the beginning, it purged itself. It has nothing to do with events in the United States. As always, in the case of the Communists, it reflected happenings in Russia. On the eve of “the collapse of American capitalism,” the CP expelled a group of us for espousing “the counter-revolutionary policies of Trotsky.” Other expulsions followed. The conflict resulted in at least a dozen different factions. This bewilderment kept the Party in a state of paralysis.

  However, the oncoming of mass unemployment, on a scale hitherto unknown in this country, enabled the Communists to organize the unemployed and stage vigorous protests. They were initially the leaders of this movement. In New York, at Union Square, they were able to gather as many as 100,000 people at a rally.

  Hoover was still President. Since he didn’t offer even the mildest form of amelioration for the unemployed, the Communist Party seemed to be riding high. But its success was illusory. At bottom, the unemployed worker was uninterested in communism. He was interested in one thing only: a job. The CP could involve him in demonstrations, but it couldn’t get him a job. It was the New Deal that subsequently did this—at least, for a few million.

  With the election of Roosevelt, the Party entered a new phase. It envisioned the complete decay of capitalism and the impending triumph of international proletarian revolution. It engaged in the most militant policies imaginable. Everybody to the right—and some to the left—of the Party was considered the enemy. Socialists became social fascists. They were more vigorously attacked than the real fascists. During the first New Deal period, Congress was referred to as the fascist Grand Council.

  Although it was of transitory nature, Communists were making progress among the unemployed. Unfortunately, they deepened the gulf between themselves and every other radical group in the country. “Red trade unions” were created. Their programs were revolutionary as all get out; their leadership was hot as a pistol. They
had only one defect—few members. Consequently, their reputation among trade unions became really bad. There are few crimes as great in labor circles as dual unionism: dividing the ranks of workers in their confrontations with employers.

  Nevertheless, capitalism looked pretty sick. Wide segments of the population were radicalized. In liberal and academic communities, Marxism, which had been considered passé, became popular again. There was more writing about Marxism—favorable, though not very perceptive, in many cases—during these years than at any other time in American history.

  In the late Twenties and early Thirties, thousands of young people had joined the Socialist Party. They kept pushing the Socialists further and further to the left, in many instances borrowing the jargon of the Communists. This led to a split. The right wing, many older Socialists, pulled out. Especially after the Detroit Convention of 1934, when a platform was adopted in favor of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

  These parallel developments among the Communists and the Socialists were influenced, aside from our domestic crisis, by two events in Europe.

  The first: the triumph of fascism in Germany. Hitler had overthrown the Weimar Republic, without any real resistance by the world’s two largest radical parties, outside Russia: the German Communist Party and the Social Democrats. They capitulated without firing a shot. There was conjured up a return to barbarism, in modern form, and the danger of a second world war. This was about 1933.

  The second event was the Russian Five Year Plan, inaugurated by Stalin. The world outside knew little of its details. Later, it learned of the horrors associated with it. But what stood out in the minds of ninety-nine out of every hundred of American radicals was this contrast: there was no smoke in American factory chimneys; there, production was going on like mad; everybody was working. And of all the great powers, it was Russia that was intransigently anti-fascist.

  Yet in spite of all this, radicalism did not take deep root in the United States. The Communist Party had added a few thousand members, but it was still insignificant in the political life of this country. Especially, when contrasted to the American Socialist Party at its peak in 1918. It had over a hundred thousand members.