by Studs Terkel
The conservatives lost because they didn’t know how to support a statesman. They only knew how to buy Senators and Congressmen. When the real crisis came, we had no one to defend the cause, because the man that can be bought isn’t intelligent enough to think for himself. His footwork is too slow.
I remember saying to the Republican leaders personally—in the days of the Mellons—we’re willing to split the Roosevelt vote, but we can’t promise to lose. Our man is becoming so popular so fast, he might win. Jim Farley said if Huey hadn’t been killed, he would have been President of the United States.
When Georgia was upstaging Louisiana and wouldn’t let us into the football conference, Huey threatened to impose an extra penny, tax on Coca-Cola. The Cannons, who own Coca-Cola, run Georgia. Naturally, Louisiana was brought into the conference.
Everybody came to us. The most subtle, the most cunning Communist leaders on the face of the earth, from Moscow and New York, visited us. They knew we were sincere friends of the people. They wanted to sell us on the Marxist philosophy. The moment we repulsed them, they called us Fascists. The moment we repulsed the reactionaries, we were called Communists. We were dealing with men who felt other men should go to work for a dollar a day and go to church in overalls.
We think our Congressmen pass laws and levy taxes. That is done by the money changers. We raise interest from four percent to six, six to eight, eight to ten. A conservative insurance company tried to persuade people out here to finance enterprises at twelve percent. When I was a boy, they’d shoot the three balls off a man’s store and put him in jail for that. (Laughs.)
“You say money changer, and they think you mean Jew. The word anti-Semite is a dirty word given to people who take issue with aggressive Jews. My theory is the aggressive Jew is not an honest representative of his community. If I were to attack Rap Brown, would you accuse me of being anti-Negro?141 I don’t think the Jews should control Palestine any more than they should control New York. I don’t mean they should be driven out. Not one ounce of their liberty should be affected. Their citizenship should not in any way be jeopardized, but they shouldn’t control everything, either… .”
“Here we have these liberal regimes. Yet it’s the greatest tyranny man has ever known. Cannibals are swallowing cannibals and dinosaurs are swallowing dinosaurs. The conglomerates. Under the leadership of the great impoverished statesmen like Harriman, the Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Roosevelts (laughs),142 we have developed the most super-monopolistic octopus of the human race today… .”
Huey Long died in my arms. We were walking through the hall, and this man shot Huey. The boys killed the killer, before he turned loose on the others. He missed me.
It was the largest public funeral in history. It took three acres of ground just to lay the bouquets. They came from everywhere on the face of the earth. There were people backed up eight miles on the other side of the Mississippi, couldn’t get across the river.
I sat down beside the bed and wrote the eulogy by hand. Later on, I had it photostated.
It concludes: “His unlimited talents invariably aroused the jealousies of those inferiors who posed as his equals. More than once, yea, many times, he has been the wounded victim of the Green Goddess; to use the figure, he was the Stradivarius, whose notes rose in competition with jealous drums, envious tom-toms. His was the unfinished symphony.” 143
He recounts his one-man efforts, after Huey’s death, in battling the Long machine—“the aggressive pigs in the trough.” It was their compact with New Dealers that most incurred his wrath: the promise of several millions to be spent in the state, withheld during Huey’s life—on the condition of their backing Roosevelt in the 1936 convention…. “Out of the nine men in the machine, I was the only one who refused. I arose in the meeting and said I had catapulted to prominence on the wet grave of Huey Long. There was nothing they had I wanted. So those others, who hadn’t reported their income taxes, who had stolen money, were coerced by the Internal Revenue Department and lined up. I coined the term: The Second Louisiana Purchase.
“I went to the people. It was one of the most dramatic nights in Louisiana history. I took the last dollar I had and bought time on every radio station in the state. I announced I was going to speak in the plaza and seventy thousand people came out. I spoke past midnight. I talked about the blood of Huey Long sold on the auction block. It was months before the crooks dared leave their homes or drive through the country, because of what people heard me say that night.”
Many believe that Huey Long was largely responsible for the quick passage of the Social Security Act… .
Modern politicians would like to romanticize things. Social Security is the substitute for the real thing. Henry Ford, for instance, never believed in charity. He believed in a job rather than a pension.
Yet … why was a man like Henry Ford so fond of you?
Henry Ford wasn’t entrenched wealth. He turned a bolt into a nut, a nut into a fender, a fender into a car, and a car into a genius-like formula. That is American wealth. He wasn’t part of a combine designed to destroy everyone else. He wasn’t part of the money market.
I gravitated to Detroit and started the Christian Nationalist Crusade. Frank Murphy was coming up fast. He played possum while the CIO destroyed Mr. Ford’s factory.
You came to Detroit just about the time the CIO was being organized … ?
Oh, I was for organized labor. For years, I was an honorary member of the American Federation of Labor. But I believed that labor was moving in the same direction as capital—toward giant monopoly.
“I came so completely into the confidence of Mr. Ford that he specified: Everyone who sold merchandise to the Ford Motor Company contribute to the Christian Nationalist Crusade. We were seeking to enlighten all schoolteachers, all clergymen, all public officials.
“Then one day I was waited on by Mr. Ford’s personal secretary, my personal friend. He said he’d been waited on by a personal representative of the White House and that unless Mr. Ford withdrew his support of me, they’d seize the factory and operate it in the name of the wartime emergency… .”
In 1942, he ran for the United States Senate in Michigan. He came within twenty thousand votes of winning the Republican nomination. “Both parties united against me.” But not Henry Ford.
The time came for a coalition of the people—1936. There were three big mass groups: Huey Long’s following, Doctor Townsend’s and Father Coughlin’s. I was instrumental in effecting this coalition.
Townsend was a sincere, good, unselfish man. I was in Washington when they were crucifying Townsend—the wolf pack. They called in a bunch of neurotic women to testify against him. Hired perjurers, they tried to say it was a racket. They had a Roman holiday with the old man.
I said, “Doc, they’re going to destroy you. You treat them with courtesy. You should hold them in contempt.” He had two or three hangers-on, who were turning pale. They’re the ones who watch over the dues. (Laughs.) I said, “I would stand up, pronounce my contempt, walk out and defy them to come and get me.” He said, “If I had a young man like you beside me, I’d do it.” I said, “You’ve got him.”
So the stage was set. We didn’t tell any of those shortstops there, it would scare ’em.
The old man stood up. He pronounced judgment and contempt on the whole Congressional committee. He defied the gavel. I just took him by the arm, and we ran out. In the meantime, I was in touch with Henry Mencken. I told him I’d kidnapped the old man and would bring him to Baltimore: “Find a place to hide him.”
Mencken was delighted. We hid him for three days in defiance of the committee. The sympathy for old people was such that if any Congressman had offered a motion to cite him for contempt, he would have committed political suicide. If I may say so, that was the budge that made the Townsend movement a political factor.
He asked me to speak at his convention in Cleveland. You can hardly realize how the multitudes moved.144 It was a Populist movement.
The little machine makers who organized the program said the meeting must be unbiased. We must have a Republican, a New Dealer and so forth. I was scheduled to speak at ten thirty. The Roosevelt friend was set for eleven thirty, and the Republican for twelve thirty. So I spoke for three hours. (Laughs.) Every time the chairman made a move toward me, the crowd wanted to lynch him.
Recalls Mencken: “Twice at Cleveland [author’s note: the other event, the Coughlin convention], I saw the rev. gentleman torpedo even the press stand. In that stand were journalists who had not shown any human emotion above the level of cupidity and lubricity for twenty years, yet he had them all howling in ten minutes….”
Everybody was hungry when I was through. The meeting was over before they got to anyone else. Of course, Dr. Townsend loved and revered me in those days. Later on, we had a little quarrel. I felt as he grew old and vegetated, he was exploited. But I respected him to the very hour of his death.
In the meantime, Father Coughlin had developed a great following. He asked if I would deliver the principal address at his convention, aside from his own. The gathering was as big as Townsend’s. At the baseball stadium in Cleveland.
One day I was out at Royal Oak. We were discussing a tour. Out of the clear sky, Coughlin’s door opened, without a knock. There stood Bishop Gallagher, his superior. Beside him stood the proverbial Prelate—tall, wide-brimmed black hat—serious, pallid, no color. As though he were about to announce the Governor had denied clemency.
Gallagher tapped Coughlin on the shoulder and said, “Come with me, Charlie.” They were gone about twenty minutes. Coughlin came back as white as my shirt. He said, “The arm of Jim Farley is long. I’m finished. Our Church has always wanted an ambassador, but Protestant America won’t give one to the Pope. The Vatican is willing to settle for a Fraternal Delegate. Mr. Roosevelt has served notice there will be none, unless I am silenced.” He never spoke out again.
Imagine a man, who had been speaking to twenty million people every Sunday, imagine such a man being silenced. What frustration!
So I was left alone. Huey Long was dead. Doc Townsend was dead. Coughlin was silenced. General Wood lost himself in his business. Lindbergh told me, “I don’t know how to fight Walter Winchell and those others….” But that didn’t stop me. My background wasn’t that of a pantywaist. I’ve been mobbed and rotten-egged. Once in lower Louisiana, I grabbed a heckler by the collar, drew him up and held him through the entire speech. Every time I’d make a point, I’d shake him. (Laughs.)
Did I ever tell you about that time in Georgia? A state with a lynching tradition. I was going to speak in a nearby town. We set up the sound equipment in front of the courthouse. Here came the mob. All the little farmers were there, all the little rich. The backbone of America are these little rich.
They grabbed the cable of our sound truck, threw it over the limb of a tree and screamed, “Hang the son of a bitch!” I stepped into the shadows of a store building. The sound men all ran and hid. The mob released the brake and the truck wound up somewhere in a ditch. They began to yell: “Where is he? Where is he?”
I jumped up on a big square of cement and I yelled at the top of my voice: “Here I am. The man that touches me touches a man of God. Who dares be the first?” (His voice breaks; with difficulty he stifles a deep sob. Across the room, his wife weeps softly. A long pause.) They went away.
A few nights later, I got a phone call about three o’clock in the morning. The voice said, “I am the man that led the mob. I’m a member of the state legislature. Mr. Smith, I am convinced you’re a good man. If I can’t have your forgiveness, I won’t sleep another night.” Isn’t that something?
POSTSCRIPT: From the airport at Fayetteville to Arkansas Springs is a stretch of some fifty miles. On the car radio was a continuous flow of hymns—the singers all white—interspersed with commercials. At no time was a black face visible, during the drive. Of young people, there were remarkably few, aside from little children in the company of their pilgrim parents.
The Circuit Rider
Claude Williams
His resemblance to the poet, Ezra Pound, is startling.
“I’ve been run out of the best communities, fired from the best churches and flogged by the best citizens of the South.”
He was born and raised in the hills of western Tennessee, “so far back in the sticks they had to pump in daylight to make morning.” He began as a fundamentalist, preaching “to save their never-dying, ever-precious souls from the devil’s hell eternal.” He drilled himself in chapter and verse.
After four years in the town of Lebanon, as an evangelist, he was invited to the Vanderbilt School of Religion. It was a seminar for rural preachers. The teacher who most influenced him referred to Jesus as Son of Man—“he cleared the debris of theological crap and let Him rise among us as a challenging human leader.”
I ASSUMED the pastorate of a Presbyterian church in Rome, Tennessee. I took as my text: “Go ye into the world and preach the gospel to every nation.” We must treat everybody as persons. An elder said to me that night at dinner: “Preacher, do you mean that damn burrhead is as good as I am?” I answered, “No, but I mean to tell you he’s as good as I am.” So I had to find another pulpit.
At Auburntown, I said, “Friends, I’ve enjoyed this pastorate and the people, but I must tell you I think of God as a social being. The Son of Man is worthy of discipleship and the Bible is a revealing book of right and wrong.” After that revival meeting, I had to find somewhere else to go.
I come to grief because of a trip I made to Waveland, Mississippi. In 1928. An interracial meeting. I was together with black people for the first time in my life. At the table I was aware of food sticking in my throat before swallowing it. A friend taught me to emphasize the “e” in Negro—to avoid old terms like “nigra,” “uncle” and “auntie.” I went down to preach to a black church. There were some whites sitting to one side. As the people came out, an old black man was the first I shook hands with. This was in violation of all my upbringing.
I was recommended to a little church in Paris, Arkansas. It was a coal-mining town. They were trying to organize against all odds. We staged a strike and won. As soon’s it happened, I began to get money from Moscow. (Laughs.) But I learned this “money from Moscow” spent quicker and bought less than scrip coupons at a plantation robbersary—that’s the real name for commissary.
Miners began to come around, from as far as thirty miles. They built the thing with their own hands. We thought of building a proletarian church and a labor temple. I canceled my insurance policies to buy the cement for the foundation—they quit paying my salary. From fifteen active members, we now had over a hundred. One of the elders, a merchant, was furious. “You’ve got these cantankerous miners—these blather-skites.” They accused me of Red-ism and corrupting the minds of the youth. I lost my church. The presbytery met and “dissolved the relationship of the Reverend Claude Williams and the church for the good of the Kingdom of Heaven.”
We went down to the town theater for Sunday services. It was filled. Many young people, miners and unemployed. This was ’32, ’33. Black people were coming to my home for conferences. Someone said, “You ought to pull the shades down.” I said, “No, I want to pull the shades up and let the hypocrites see brotherhood being practiced.” I was pretty rash.
The church was $2200 behind in my salary. I refused to leave the manse. They evicted me and sued me for the interest on the money they owed me. One official was the editor of the local paper, the Paris Express. We called it the Paris Excuse. One was an insurance salesman and another was a retired colonel, who painted his house red, white and blue. So I was driven out and went to Fort Smith.
We staged a hunger march, a thousand or more. The Mayor sent word: The march won’t be held. I sent word back: This is America. The march will be held. He said, “We’ll turn the hose on you.” I said, “You do your duty, and I’ll do mine.” While we were in the opening prayer, th
ey swarmed down on us. A lot of us landed in jail. The vigilantes were on me pretty regularly. So in the spring of ’35, I went to Little Rock.
I worked with black and white unemployed. And taught at the first school of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. In June of ’36, I went to Memphis to prepare a funeral for a black sharecropper who had been beaten to death. His body disappeared. I went to investigate.
Before we got to Earle, Arkansas, five deputies were waiting for us. They took me out of the car. They got me down, four men held me down. This man had a little four-inch leather strop. He was a master. He gave me about sixteen licks. The woman with me kept count. They made a jelly out of me. Then they said, “Let’s get some of that fat woman’s butt.” They applied the lash to her—five or six licks. They were careful not to damage her hose, as they led her through the barbed wire. They didn’t know whether to dump me in the river or let me loose. They made me sign a statement that I hadn’t been hurt. When I refused, they said, “If you’re not through, we’re not.” I signed. They couldn’t use it because it was an admission that they’d had me. They took me to Highway 70 and headed me for Birmingham. A car followed me for miles. I got away from ’em at Brinkley.
That was my real induction. I learned it’s one thing to preach radical from the pulpit—people will come to atone for their wrongs by enduring a radical sermon—but when you identify with the people in their battle that’s when “you get your money from Moscow.” I’ve been in this fight for forty years. I’ve spent many a night behind the barbed-wire fence.
“I was defrocked in 1934. But in ‘42, the Presbyterian people asked me to go to Detroit because of so many southerners there in the auto plants. The established church couldn’t reach ’em. I was to be industrial chaplain. They wanted me to put my feet on the desk and get a $5,000 expense account. But I got there out among the people. That’s when the presbytery people began to get complaints. G.L.K. Smith and Carl McIntyre and some of the others put so many pressures on, they fired me.
