Hard Times (48 page)

Well, this woman was determined to get real milk for her baby. She raised all the cain she could, until the top supervisor agreed to let her have a quart. When they handed it to her, she got back as far as she could and threw it up against the wall—Pow!—and smashed it. This was the kind of spirit, you see. Not unlike the kind of thing you see today amongst the black people. But it was white people then, principally. They seemed to be the most militant ones—at least down South.

As an administrator, I worked with Rex Tugwell’s rural resettlement programs. Rex had written, when he was an undergraduate in Columbia, a poem in praise of socialism. They kept dragging up this undergraduate poem on Poor Rex. You recall how viciously he was attacked? Actually this program, of which I was a charter employee, wasn’t as radical as I would have liked it to be.

It was a stop-gap, dealing with rural problems. Grants-in-aid, to small
farmers, so they could hold on and continue to produce crops. I managed a group of five of these communities.

I switched to the migratory labor program. I set one up in Florida for migratory farm workers, who at the time were poor blacks, displaced sharecroppers from Georgia and Alabama. Also displaced whites who had been, largely, packinghouse workers.

We built a hospital, clinics, community centers, schools and a number of temporary camps. They were at least better than the grass huts, tree houses and all those terrible barracks in which they were living.

I was down in the same area last winter, almost thirty years later. I found those “temporary” camps still standing there, deteriorated and disintegrated. In one place the ground had dropped ten feet. These places were way up in the air, on piles, because the land had subsided. In 1968, they were still living in these camps we had built in the Thirties.

 

 

No. When the war came along, all the domestic programs were swept under the rug. They turned our migratory camp over to the local communities. The kind of thing we hear so much about today: local control. So the local people got hold of it….

We had built a big hospital in the Everglades for the black people. There wasn’t a hospital bed for fifty thousand people, not one. They had all kinds of things wrong with them, and there was nowhere they could go, so we built a hospital. It was the first thing of its kind the Administration had ever done. It was designed primarily for the black people.

The minute it was turned over the locals, in the days of the war, they evicted all the black people. They repainted the hospital inside and out and made it a white hospital. I was talking recently to one family in the black camp—in those days they kept everything separate. The black camp is still a black camp, and the white camp is still the white camp—still segregated.

They told me down there, this last winter, they’re not allowed to have community meetings any more—or any kind of self-government that they had. They didn’t even have dances any more in the community centers we had built for them. They were run by white managers and white deputies and all this sort of thing. The very thing we had been trying to get away from, a generation later had been reinstated.

The migratory labor program was the most advanced thing I encountered in the whole Administration. The resettlement communities were more paternalistic. They carefully selected families, according to criteria handed down from Washington. In the camps, we had to rely on the people to do it. So they made all the ordinances, and they ran all the camps and did a much better job than the bunch of bureaucrats.

(Half-tells, half-muses a poetic remembrance.)
They were living on the canal banks in stinking quarters and barracks, sometimes thirteen people in a room. Or in tarpaper huts, in shelters in the weeds. Every morning before dawn, they climbed onto trucks, bound for the bean fields. Where all day, everybody that could pick, down to five or six years old, picked. Kneeling in the black Everglades mud. It would be dark night again when they got back to quarters. And all night long the gyp joints stayed open, where whiskey, dice and women ate up the earnings of the day.

That was the white growers’ idea of how to hold labor: Keep the Negroes broke, they said. Instead of a church or a school, the grower would build a gyp joint at the center of his quarters. To get back at night what he paid out in the day.

When the Government came in and started to build a model camp for the Negroes, with screened shelters and shower baths and flush toilets, and an infirmary, a community center, a school and playgrounds, laundry tubs and electric irons—the growers raised hell. What was the Government’s idea anyway, ruining the rental value of their canal bank quarters? And fixing to ruin their labor with a lot of useless luxury? Besides, the Negroes wouldn’t use the camp. They liked to be dirty; they liked to be diseased; they liked to be vicious.

When the growers saw the Government was going ahead anyway, they said: You’ll have to hire a bunch of camp guards, white guards, and have them control the camp with clubs and pistols or the Negroes won’t pay the rent. Or they’ll stop working entirely and they’ll take the camp to pieces.

I was there. I was in charge of the camp. When the day came to open, we just opened the gate and let anybody in that wanted to come in. No hand-picking, no references or anything like that. It was enough for us that a family wanted to live there. We didn’t hire white guards, either, and nobody carried a club or a pistol in all that camp that held a thousand people.

We just got them all together in the community center and told them it was their camp. They could make it a bad camp or they could make it a good camp. It was up to them. And there wouldn’t be any laws or ordinances, except the ones they made for themselves through their elected Council. For a week, they had a campaign in camp with people running for office for the first time in their lives. After it was over, they celebrated with a big dance in the community center. Nobody got drunk or disorderly and nobody cut anybody with a knife. They had themselves a Council.

The Council made the laws and ordinances. The Council said nobody’s dog could run around loose, it had to be tied up. The Council said a man couldn’t beat his wife up in camp. And when a man came in drunk one night, he was out by morning. The Council said people had to pay their rent and out of that rent, came money for baseball equipment, and it kept up the nursery school.

Finally, the Council said: It’s a long way to any store. And that’s how the Co-op started, without a dollar in it that the people didn’t put up.

Some of the men and women on that Council couldn’t so much as write their names. Remember, these were just country Negroes off sharecrop farms in Georgia and Alabama. Just common ordinary cotton pickers, the kind Lowndes County planters say would ruin the country if they had the vote.
(He opens wide his half-shut eyes.)
All I know is: My eyes have seen democracy work.

IN THE LATE TWENTIES, the farmers were in distress because all the money went to Wall Street. They were using it up there, manipulating. They were not using money out in the country. The same thing’s happening right now—a repeat performance of the ’29 deal. Less than two hundred men are controlling everything—the fixing of interest, bonds, everything. Members of Congress just don’t step on the toes of these bankers.

That’s Why in May, 1929, I introduced the first bill to pay three and a half million World War I veterans cash money, direct from the United States Treasury. It took from then till 1936 for these veterans to be paid—$1,015 each, on the average. They wanted to rob ’em on interest rates. The way they treated those men… . They didn’t want to pay ’em their money. It was adjusted pay, really. Remember, the army only paid $21 a month. In June, 1932, the House passed the bonus, but the Senators resented the pressure and voted against it. Those poor fellas, instead of doing something rash, why, they’d sing “America.”They took it.

 

 

Why, certainly. They brought a donkey on top of a freight train from Texas up here to my office. They educated him, they taught him tricks and things. They wanted me to run for President. I said, “No, let’s just get this thing paid.”

There was twenty thousand here at one time. I addressed them out there on the Capitol steps.

Who were the so-called bonus marchers? They were lobbyists for a cause. Just like the ones in the Mayflower Hotel. They didn’t try to evict them. When the poor come to town, they’re trouble makers. Why, certainly. They step on the grass and they’re put in jail for stepping on the grass. The Mayflower crowd, they don’t have any problem at all. They’re on every floor of every building of Capitol Hill all the time.

The marchers were good, law-abiding citizens. They built these lodgings down here from waste paper and boxes and things. They had lots of streets and everything. Like Resurrection City. Those buildings were burned down by the army, the military, under the direction of Mr. MacArthur and Mr. Eisenhower. Mr. MacArthur was strutting down the street just like it was a big parade.

The next morning, after driving them out, using tear gas, you’d see little babies and mothers on the side of the road… . There was never such a horrible thing happen on earth as that. They killed some of the veterans. They all ought to have been charged with murder. These people had as much right to be lobbying here for their cause as the Mayflower crowd.

Andrew Mellon
¹²⁴
was opposed to any payment. He said it would unbalance the budget. They always talked that way. Some of them called it the ‘boodget’ (laughs)—unbalance the boodget. That’s what led me to go after him. I’m against a few people taking advantage of privilege, using it for their own selfishness and punishing other folks.

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

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

 

 

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.

 

 

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.