Hard Times (59 page)

 

As A PERSON, my father is a good person. He means well. His motives are all of the highest. He feels sincerely that the way you do good for the people of the world is to expand welfare capitalism.
¹⁴⁸
The important thing to understand about a man like my father is that in a society like this, whether a person is a nice guy or a bad guy, is irrelevant. People play certain roles. It’s not so much their attitudes as the roles they play. Although he’s the kind of guy you wouldn’t mind having dinner with, he plays a bad role in this society.

I’m sure the Depression was important in molding my father’s life. A lot of older people look at young people today and say, “Those punks, they never felt the Depression. Look at the things they’re doing.” I don’t think this attitude makes any sense. My brother and I grew up with a certain kind of history, and he grew up with another. I don’t condemn him for his experience. I condemn him for the role he plays today.

In the Depression, people were up against the wall. Fear. So when you’re up against the wall like that, any kind of solution is grasped at. In the case of those people, it was military spending, war.
¹⁴⁹

We didn’t see the Depression. We have grown up in a time when going to school is like going to a factory. It’s not totally parallel: we are materially privileged. But the conditions students face are increasingly like Depression factory conditions. We’re not treated as intellectually curious beings. We’re being manufactured. We’re being channeled for certain roles. We’re lined up, sorted into jobs … as well as being kept off the job market as long as possible. So growing up becomes a later and later thing.

Because of their education and the nature of communications, many young people identify with the other people of the world. We had grown up in a post-Depression, affluent society feeling this is the way it is everywhere. Then came the rude awakening: two-thirds of the world is starving and exploited by the same corporations that run our universities. My father is a member of the board of a leading university out here. He’s also a board member of a bank that does lots of business with South Africa.

He’s a philanthropist in many ways. That, too, is part of the approach of the individual who has made it. This is part of the whole psyche of competition: I made it—now I can help others. What competition really means is: there is a stacked deck. Some people will fight against others for a few crumbs, while the guy with the stacked deck makes most of it.

My father does want to understand us. He wants to think we’re following the values he taught us. But when what we do becomes more than a childish pastime, he feels threatened. He can’t really face it, because what we’re saying is: We want to build a society in which roles like his are no longer possible.

(Softly.) He used to tell me that of all his kids—there are five of us—I could have been the one to make it. Perhaps even his successor as president of the conglomerate. He always felt I had the brains and drive to be a ruler. I think he’s disappointed in me. I don’t think he’s quite given up hope that I’m going through a stage and will come out of it….

Much of his ambition, drive and energy comes from the Depression, I’m sure. But I also have a lot of energy and I did not have that experience.

He always downgraded campus radicals in the Thirties. He called them a minority—psychologically disturbed young people….

 

POSTSCRIPT:
Peter has since become one of the leading spokesmen of the Weatherman faction of SDS.

WHEN I attended Berkeley in 1936, so many of the kids had actually lost their fathers. They had wandered off in disgrace because they couldn’t support their families. Other fathers had killed themselves, so the family could have the insurance. Families had totally broken down. Each father took it as his personal failure. These middle-class men apparently had no social sense of what was going on, so they killed themselves.

It was still the Depression. There were kids who didn’t have a place to sleep, huddling under bridges on the campus. I had a scholarship, but there were times when I didn’t have food. The meals were often three candy bars. We lived communally and I remember feeding other kids by cooking up more spaghetti than I can ever consider again.

There was an embarrassment at college where a lot of the kids were well-heeled. I still have a resentment against the fraternity boys and the sorority girls with their cashmere sweaters and the pearls. Even now, when I lecture at colleges, I have this feeling about those terribly overdressed kids. It wasn’t a hatred because I wanted these things, but because they didn’t understand what was going on.

I was a reader for seven courses a semester, and I made $50 a month. I think I was the only girl on the labor board at Berkeley. We were trying to get the minimum wage on the campus raised to forty cents an hour. These well-dressed kids couldn’t understand our interest. There was a real division between the poor who were trying to improve things on the campus and the rich kids who didn’t give a damn.

Berkeley was a cauldron in the late Thirties. You no sooner enrolled than you got an invitation from the Trotskyites and the Stalinists. Both
were wooing you. I enrolled at sixteen, so it was a little overpowering at the time. I remember joining the Teachers Assistants Union. We had our own version of Mario Savio. He’s now a lawyer specializing in bankruptcies. We did elect a liberal as president of the student body. It was a miracle in those days.

The fraternity boys often acted as strikebreakers in San Francisco—the athletes and the engineering students. And the poor boys were trying to get their forty cents an hour. The college administration could always count on the frat boys to put down any student movement.

It’s different today, the fraternities and sororities having so much less power….

 

I SET OUT for the University of Kansas on a September morning with $30 that I’d borrowed from my local bank. I had one suit and one necktie and one pair of shoes. My mother had spent several days putting together a couple of wooden cases of canned fruits and vegetables. My father, a country lawyer, had taken as a legal fee a 1915 Buick touring car. It was not in particularly good condition, but it was good enough to get me there. It fell to pieces and it never got back home anymore.

I had no idea how long the $30 would last, but it sure would have to go a long way because I had nothing else. The semester fee was $22, so that left me $8 to go. Fortunately, I got a job driving a car for the dean of the law school. That’s how I got through the first year.

What a pleasure it was to get a pound of hamburger, which you could buy for about five cents, take it up to the Union Pacific Railroad tracks and have a cookout. And some excellent conversation. And maybe swim in the Kaw River.

One friend of mine came to college equipped. He had an old Model T Ford Sedan, about a 1919 model. He had this thing fitted up as a house. He lived in it all year long. He cooked and slept and studied inside that Model T Ford Sedan. How he managed I will never know. I once went there for dinner. He cooked a pretty good one on a little stove he had in this thing. He was a brilliant student. I don’t know where he is now, but I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s the head of some big corporation. (Laughs.) Survival….

The weak ones, I don’t suppose, really survived. There were many breakdowns. From malnutrition very likely. I know there were students actually starving.

Some of them engaged in strange occupations. There was a biological company that would pay a penny apiece for cockroaches. They needed these in research, I guess. Some students went cockroach hunting every night. They’d box ’em and sell them to this firm.

I remember the feverish intellectual discussion we had. There were many new movements. On the literary scene, there was something called the Proletarian Novel. There was the Federal Theater and the Living Newspaper. For the first time, we began to get socially conscious. We began to wonder about ourselves and our society.

We were mostly farm boys and, to some extent, these ideas were alien to us. We had never really thought about them before. But it was a period of necessity. It brought us face to face with these economic problems and the rest…. All in all, a painful time, but a glorious time.

 

THEY GAVE me a $100 scholarship to the University of Virginia. That’s in 1931, which was damn good. And my mother gave me $100. I had a pair of khaki pants, a pair of sneakers and a khaki shirt. That was it.

The first year on the campus, I organized a Marxist study class. The students fell into two groups. About nine hundred of them had automobiles. About nine hundred had jobs or scholarships. The other nine hundred fell in between. We had real class warfare. The automobile boys and the fraternities—we had thirty-three little Greek palaces on fraternity row—they had charge of the student government. So I organized the other nine hundred, and we took the student government away from them and rewrote the constitution.

 

I spent half my time on radical activities. I was trying to organize a union in Charlottesville—and bringing Negroes to speak on the campus.
We had the first black man to speak there since Reconstruction. He was an old Socialist.

This threw the dean into a fit. He still believed in slavery. He forbade the use of any university building. I was then writing a weekly column for the campus paper. So I attacked the dean: “What manner of small-minded men have inherited Mr. Jefferson’s university?” (Laughs.) It was reprinted all over the Eastern seaboard. On the front pages of newspapers, including
The New York Times
. (Laughs.)

The president sent for me. He had a stack five inches high of clippings. He said, “Now look what you’ve done.” (Laughs.) I said, “It’s not my fault. The man’s been properly invited, he’s qualified and he’s going to speak at the Episcopal Church chapel.” The dean was one of the deacons of the church. So we had quite a time of it.

There were writings on the sidewalk of the university: “Down With Imperialistic War. Scholarships Not Battleships.” Again I was invited to the president’s office. He asked me if I couldn’t stop people from writing all over the sidewalk. I said to him: We’re perfectly willing to abide by a general rule. If the secret societies and fraternities aren’t permitted to write on the steps or sidewalks, we won’t either. So he walked me to the window and outside in great purple letters was the slogan: “Down With Imperalist War.” He said, “Couldn’t you
please
at least get the spelling right?” (Laughs.)

In 1935, we had the first official shutdown of all university classes for a peace demonstration. Guess who the featured speaker was? J. B. Matthews. He later ran the Un-American Activities Committee, as staff director for Martin Dies. He was the man who invented the complete file and cross-reference system, and the theory of associations and fronts and all the rest of it. A very remarkable fella. He started out as a Protestant minister, came to socialism and wound up with Martin Dies. Joe McCarthy was impossible without J. B. Matthews. And we shut down the university for him…. Oh, well….

I was a troublemaker then. (Laughs.) I wish I still were.

 

I SPOTTED this Studebaker in the window at Twenty-sixth and Michigan. So I says to May, let’s buy that car. So we just stopped in, give ’em $600, all we had with us, and bought the car. The sales manager—his name was Compton—I told him that’s the one we want. So we just had a couple of fellas push it out and put air in the tires and a couple of gallons of gas and away we went, down South Parkway. So we went all around, down Field Museum…. It was a six-wheel job.

The foreman down at Donnelly, he said, “You sure did your bit for the Depression.” He bought one, he bought a new Ford. I said, “If everybody would spend ten cents more a day than they ordinarily spent, we’d sneak out of this in a hurry.” (Laughs.) I said that. My theory, I felt that way. Because we were makin’ money. We never got laid off or nothin’. There was no cause to feel otherwise.

 

 

I really didn’t pay no attention to it. The way I looked at it, without advertising there’ll be no business, of any kind. And you can’t have no advertising without printing it. See what I mean?

 

 

It didn’t change mine. I never did spend money foolishly. Never drank very much, just a little bit here and there. But I was kind of liberal, too, in a way. Always tried to help the other fella. Never hurt me any.

I co-signed a couple of times for loan companies and things like that. Fact I did that for a fella in Fort Wayne, and he skipped out. And I had to pay it, $55. When my dad died in 1919, he was on a train going to Ohio. I wanted him buried with my mother. I always tried to help out the other guy.