Hard Times (80 page)

“It was a political speech to himself,” said Senator Russell Long. “He anointed himself as Huey Long’s successor. He made a great impression.”

“In those days, I spoke at the Rose Bowl to 110,000 people. Think of that.”

For fifty-six years, he served, in sequence, as reporter, editor and president of the Kansas
City Star
.

Senator William E. Borah of Idaho.

In 1937, there had been clashes at the River Rouge plant between the service men at Ford, who had been holding out against the CIO, and UAW organizers. The La Follette Committee held hearings, subsequently, and confirmed the union’s charges of company violence.

“It’s a funny country. If you call it by its right name, you’re branded a radical. In most countries, people name their economic system. We should talk about our economic system as capitalism, as others call theirs socialism. Then you either defend it or attack it. We use the parliamentary name, democracy, rather than the economic name, capitalism. That’s a product of our public relations drive… .”

“It may be that many contradictions in our society have been resolved by New Deal legislation and other stop-gap measures, as well as union bureaucracy. This may stop much militancy. But this country can no longer be defined by geographical borders as it was before the Depression and World War II. You’ve seen the Chase Manhattan ad: Our Man in Rio. Our man everywhere. It’s a world-wide system, and it’s breaking up. In places like Vietnam—and Guatamala and Mozambique…. Whether a revolution takes place here or not, it will affect us. Capitalism ain’t what it used to be….”

Joe Louis regained the heavyweight championship of the world from Max Schmeling, by virtue of a first round knockout. Date: June 22, 1938. Previously, Schmeling had K.O.’d Louis in the twelfth round. Date: June 19, 1936.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Secretary of Treasury.

Ben, a nineteen-year-old college student: “My grandfather owned a car, but it never left the garage. He had it jacked up for two years. Gasoline was just too expensive. He told how he polished the car once a week. How he took good care of it, but he never drove it. Couldn’t afford it.”

One of the Federal Arts Projects (WPA) under the auspices of the New Deal. “It was an idealistic concept to encompass the whole country—to make the unemployed actor an entertainment worker. To do his share.” It employed not only legitimate theater actors and dancers, but vaudeville and circus performers as well.

T. S. Eliot’s
Murder in the Cathedral
was the most celebrated case in point.

Documentary theater, based upon circumstances and controversial issues of the time:
Triple
-A Plowed Under
concerned the New Deal’s farm program;
Power
dealt with rural electrification;
Third of a Nation
(a phrase taken from the F.D.R. Inaugural Address of 1937) commented on the housing crisis.

The Jolson Theater was larger than the Maxine Elliott.

Veteran character actor.

An expensive dining room-club in the Plaza Hotel.

“You prime tobacco when you pull the leaf off the stalk. It may have thirty-five or forty leaves. You take the leaves off the bottom, ’cause it matures there first….”

Music Corporation of America.

Black Theaters, featuring live artists. The films were merely stage-waits.

New York
Daily News
.

Publisher of the paper.

A couple of years after its Broadway opening, the play came to Chicago. “We opened to rave notices. They carried me down the aisle on their backs, the audience did. Opening night in Chicago was just the greatest opening night I’d ever known. A couple of months afterwards, I was in California. I heard, over the air, we were closed by Mayor Kelly. He exercised his power capriciously in revoking the theater’s license. As I understand it, Mrs. Kelly walked in with her priest, and she was offended by it.” The case was in the federal courts; a District Court decision in favor of Kirkland; a reversal by the Circuit Court of Appeals … , “so we moved down to St. Louis. We kept our full company on full salary in Chicago for five or six weeks, waiting for a decision….”

One of the first public housing projects in Chicago. It was open for occupancy in the spring of 1938.

Miss Wood was subjected to violent attack for insistently pursuing this policy, particularly by local and state politicians.

An association of black lawyers.

Popularly known as the “West Side Bloc,” celebrated for its close syndicate connections.

Michael (Hinky Dink) Kenna, alderman of the First Ward for almost half a century, and Matthias (Paddy) Bauler, alderman of the Forty-third Ward, forever and ever, it seemed.

Sylvester Washington, a black policeman, celebrated and feared on the South Side. He had a reputation as trigger-happy.

Beverly Hills. A middle-class suburb on the Far South Side.

Landlord of the building.

A precinct police station. The busiest in the world, then.

She attended numerous poor people’s conventions in the Thirties.

The landlord’s building custodian.

John M. Smyth Co., one of the better furniture stores in Chicago.

He services engines at the end of a run.

Hereafter referred to as the ILD.

An adjunct of a Chicago jail at the time.

“I was also engaged at that time in organizing the Consumers Union. Our idea was to help people of what we now call the inner city to buy more intelligently. Advertising was even less regulated than it is today. Merchants were on the make. Now, Consumers Union, still a worthwhile organization, serves the middle class well. But I’d like to think some day it will get into the ghettos and do some real work.”

Women’s Christian Temperance Union; headquarters, Evanston.

Chicago’s open market area; gradually disappearing as expressways converge upon it.

Though he carried the belt, during the conversation, his little boys ran under and around him, delightedly, unafraid.

The majority of patrons at his liquor store are black.

Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago; mentor of Horace Cayton.

His impressions of this incident appeared as an article that year in
The Nation.

An annual parade on the South Side, sponsored by the Chicago
Defender
. It was a feature for children. Merchants and social clubs of the area would have floats.

“Mrs. Mary Eggleston’s apartment at 1449 E. 65th Street is without heat in Saturday’s near-zero temperatures because the building’s owner hadn’t connected a furnace…. For warmth, Mrs. Eggleston and her four children wear sweaters and overcoats and huddle around a kitchen range…. There used to be five children, but 14 year old Nadine died Monday. She had sickle anemia and her mother thinks her death was hastened by the cold … ‘the doctor told me to keep her warm… .’” (Chicago
Daily News
, January 25, 1969)

“They were laying that track from Fifty-first and South Park to Cottage Grove and none of the colored boys was workin’. And some of ’em said, ‘What the hell are we gonna do?’ So one of the fellas, said, ‘Follow me.’ So they fell in line right there on Fifty-first Street, and that gang of men walked up to them fellas that were working and take the shovels away from them. And told ‘em to get the hell outa there. They’d taken them jobs, they been workin’ on the surface lines ever since …” (Clyde Fulton, an eighty-five-year-old black man, recalling the early Thirties)

An office building in the Loop, since torn down. Many lawyers had their quarters there.