Touch and Go (18 page)

It's not that FDR himself was so brilliant, but he surrounded himself with people of vision: Hopkins, Tugwell, Frances Perkins as Secretary of Labor, Harold Ickes, who said of Thomas Dewey, “He looks like a bridegroom on a wedding cake,” and Henry Wallace.

For the first two terms, Wallace was Secretary of Agriculture. He came from a family of longtime Republicans who had a populist sensibility. Wallace was a farmer and a brilliant agronomist who invented hybrid corn. That made him wealthy, but that didn't change him. When he had lunch he'd ask, “You got any rat cheese?”

Roosevelt appointed Wallace as his vice president in 1940. While Wallace was vice president he traveled around the world. When most vice presidents travel, they visit the mayor, the big shots and industrialists. Wallace was likely to go to the public library to look something up. So he's somewhere in Bolivia or Argentina, gets
off the train, no bodyguard, and has a look around. He sees a field, pulls up some of the wheat or corn and feels it, smells it. He speaks Spanish, and he says to the farmer, “This is good. Where did you get this? How do you do that?”

He leaves and the farmer says, “Who is that guy? He sounds like a very good farmer.”

“Oh, that's the vice president of the United States.” That was Henry Wallace.

Wallace was a key figure in the New Deal because he had all these ideas about improving farming methods and equipment. Having traveled, he'd picked up a thing or two and had some understanding of the rest of the world.

It was Wallace who created the RA, under the Department of Agriculture, and along with the WPA set up these camps for the migrant workers. The camps were in particular parts of the country. In fact, there was a black camp. John Beecher, a progressive Southern poet and a descendent of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was in charge of a camp that had only black sharecroppers. They ran it and ran it beautifully.

In the novel
The Grapes of Wrath
, Tom and Ma Joad, like thousands of other Okies, make the long trip to California hoping to get jobs picking crops of some sort. On the road they're humiliated and beaten up by vigilantes, by the growers, by the Legionnaires. Suddenly they come to a camp. They think it's just another jungle camp, but it isn't, a sign says: RESETTLEMENT ADMINISTRATION, HENRY WALLACE, SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE. An actor made up to look like FDR, wearing a pince-nez, says, “This is your camp.”

Tom and his mother look at each other: “What do you mean, our camp?”

“You and your colleagues who have come here are going to run this place. You people choose your committees. If someone is drunk, you kick him out. There are showers and ladies' auxiliaries, and we try to find you jobs. But mostly you decide what's going on.”

Tom says, “Why aren't there more places like this?”

The guy says, “I wish I could tell you.”

A man I call Paul Edwards in
Hard Times
describes how, as young men, he and his brother rode the freight trains going east, looking for work. They once found themselves on a fruit train, and because they were starving, they ate oranges until they couldn't open their mouths anymore. Now and then there was a kindly railroad bull, but in the main the bulls just beat them and kicked them off. One day the train stops, the bulls come and say, “Everybody off!” Paul thinks, “Oh, God, here we go again, to the jail for vagrancy.” And instead, these are social workers, working for the federal government.

The men are taken to this big camp and there are clean cots and clean linens and towels and soap and breakfast waiting—cereal, coffee, scrambled eggs. And Paul's little brother, who was about sixteen, says, “Where are we?”

Paul says, “We're in heaven.” They find out this is part of the New Deal, the National Youth Administration (NYA). (Every state had one; in Texas, the head of it was a young guy named Lyndon Baines Johnson.) They realize then that something new is going on: a government that cares. All this was happening under Henry Wallace.

The RA is the group, in addition to the WPA, that set up these camps. Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Ben Shahn, and Walker Evans, among the best of our photographers, were all part of the RA, and of what it later became, the Farm Security Administration (FSA). When we see the portraits made by Dorothea Lange, that famous shot of the mother and two kids, and the work of the others, all this came out of the New Deal.

John Steinbeck might not have written
The Grapes of Wrath
were it not for the government. Steinbeck went to C.B. Baldwin of the RA and said, “I need somebody to be my guide, someone who can tell me how they lived, what they thought, the pea pickers, the fruit pickers.” And so a man named Tom Collins was assigned to him.

Beanie Baldwin said, “What I did was probably illegal, but we
helped him and Tom Collins with a buck or two.” Here's a case where the government helped subsidize one of America's classics.

Steinbeck dedicated the book, not only to his wife, but also to Tom Collins. Steinbeck's wife asked me to write the introduction to the fiftieth anniversary issue of
The Grapes of Wrath
. While I was working on it, Congressman Joe Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy's son, called me to come visit the farmers of Iowa. Here it is the 1980s, and you've got farmers who are starving. You saw the Depression in the Iowa countryside: the topsoil worn out, dust, towns with FOR SALE signs everywhere. You'd see a mangy little dog running around, the only inhabitant of twenty or thirty streets.

I ran into a farmer named Carroll Nearmyer, who could have been Pa Joad, his despair was so deep. He had a revolver at his side. He was prepared to kill himself. The circumstance was a replay of the Great Depression. But never once did you hear the word “Rea-ganville” in the eighties as you heard “Hooverville” in the thirties.

 

 

HENRY WALLACE was the heart and soul of the New Deal. He said of the twentieth century, “Let this be the century of the common man.” He fought for Social Security, for the right to organize in plants. The big shots hated him because he was giving people a sense of their own power.

The New Deal really ended when the war began, when Roosevelt said to the two wonder boys of the Democratic Party, Tommy Corcoran and Ben Cohen: “Boys, Dr. New Deal is over, Dr. Win-the-War is in.” From then on there were all kinds of compromises to cooperate with the big boys, the industrialists.

Roosevelt appointed Wallace as his vice president in his third term, indicating that he might want Wallace to succeed him as president. But by the end of his third term Roosevelt was already very ill, and it was at the 1944 convention that Wallace was robbed of the vice presidency. That's when a group of political bosses went into action—Ed Kelly of Chicago, David Lawrence of Pennsylvania,
Frank Hague of New Jersey, and Bob Hannegan, chairman of the National Democratic Committee.

By this time, Henry Wallace had become known as being too soft on the Soviet Union. Also, he was anti-agribusiness, although that word wasn't used then. The bosses were out to get him. They hated him because he represented the radical idea of people having a stake in things, having ownership. They called him a dupe of the Communists.

The '44 convention was in Chicago, and, thousands of people had come into the convention hall. All the galleries and most delegates were for Henry Wallace. All that had to happen was for someone to say, “Henry Wallace for VP,” and the place would have gone up for grabs. And Henry Wallace would have been president when Roosevelt died.

What happened? Claude Pepper, a senator from Florida, very progressive, was about to go to the podium to nominate Henry Wallace. As he came toward the podium, two political thugs took him by the arms and marched him away, led him off the stand. He couldn't make the speech. The chairman bangs the gavel. Roosevelt was on his way to Pearl Harbor during the convention and Bob Hannegan, the Democratic chief, had gotten something in writing from Roosevelt, a weary, worn out, dying man, saying he'd accept either Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, or Harry Truman, an unknown little hack from Missouri, as his vice president. Truman it was.

The Cold War came into being in 1944–45, when our former ally, the Soviet Union, began to be regarded as our enemy. Truman was talking bellicose, belligerent talk. Not that Stalin was any bargain. That's when those most committed to the New Deal decided to back Henry Wallace as the Progressive Party candidate for president in 1948. It was a populist party, and of course, we were all tarred with a red brush; the newspapers and radio were absolutely brutal. It's true there were Communists connected with the party. But they didn't determine Wallace's thoughts and speeches and
policies. In spite of the Cold War, most Democrats wanted Wallace as their next presidential candidate, according to a Gallup poll in early 1946.

Pete Seeger was part of the Henry Wallace entourage that traveled to the South. Beanie Baldwin went along, as did Palmer Weber, a wonderful Southerner, who made all kinds of dough on the stock market and gave it to the Progressive Party. So here's this group traveling down South and they would play only at integrated events. Oh, it was dangerous. Aubrey Williams was driven out of town, hit with rocks. The vice-presidential candidate, Glen Taylor, the senator from Idaho, got the hell beaten out of him. But that group broke the color line. The Henry Wallace Southern campaign is the first group ever that did not play before a segregated audience, the first since the Reconstruction.

I was rather deeply involved in this scene. I became an emcee of many Progressive Party events here in Chicago. Zero Mostel was at one of the big gatherings and did a routine called, “Who's going to investigate the man who investigates the man who investigates me?” It was a takeoff on J. Edgar Hoover.

At the 1940 convention, a Chicago politician had put a microphone in the cellar and all over the hall you'd hear, “We want Roosevelt!” I stole that and used it in the 1948 Progressive Party Convention in Chicago. “We want Wallace!”

The war ended, there was Hiroshima, and then came the 1948 election. The pundits expected Dewey to win. Henry Wallace ran as a third-party candidate for peace; he wanted to work for peace all over the world. Strom Thurmond ran on an outright racist ticket. Truman had been thinking about resigning after his political boss in Kansas City, Missouri, was indicted for corruption: “They just indicted my boss, Tom Prendergast.”

Senator Burton K. Wheeler said, “Don't you dare resign.” Truman stayed in the race.

So, here's Harry Truman with a nothing campaign. One of his advisors, a lawyer and Washington operator named Clark Clifford, as
brilliant as he was crooked, suggested that Truman follow Wallace's platform on the matter of minimum wage, the right of labor to organize, Social Security. In other words, Clifford suggested that Truman steal Wallace's domestic platform, and he did. Truman made several good speeches about labor, and that's how the phrase, “Give'em hell, Harry!” came into being.'Cause here he was hitting the big shots he'd never even touched before. So Wallace really helped elect Truman. Harry Truman did not win despite Wallace, as has been the received wisdom of the day. He won
because
of Wallace.

In the last week of the campaign, when Tom Dewey still looks like a cinch, the networks allow the top three candidates air time. Dewey, the Republican candidate, is very confident. He makes a speech for about fifteen minutes on NBC election night. Most of the big actors of the time were for Truman, who appeared on CBS. The emcee was Melvyn Douglas, and among the stars of the show were Frederic March and Florence Eldridge and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, there to sing Harry's praises. The exceptions were Katharine Hepburn and Orson Welles. There was another Wallace voter, not in the film industry but in his own way celebrated. Albert Einstein.

My friend Lew Frank, who was one of Wallace's aides, asked the musicologist Alan Lomax and me to produce Wallace's program for ABC. The stars of the show were Henry Wallace and Paul Robeson. Woody Guthrie was due to be on, but he was sick with Huntington's by that time. Instead, we had a couple of white circuit riders singing hymns.
²⁶

I'll never forget going into that building, where many of the radio studios were. It was a busy studio, and there were hundreds of people milling around, actors waiting to audition. We walked in as a group—Henry Wallace, Paul Robeson, Lew Frank, Alan Lomax, me. As soon as the crowd saw Robeson, they dispersed as though
the Red Sea had parted. I was reminded of the spiritual, “ 'Gyptian army got drownded.”

The program was in the main these two guys: the white Midwesterner, representing rural America and the hope of little farmers; and the son of a Baptist preacher whose grandfather was a slave, who had become an athlete, an actor, a singer. I remember Paul Robeson coming up to us saying, “Boys, do you mind if I change one of the songs? Instead of ‘Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel,' I'll do ‘Scandalize My Name.' ” It was a funny parlor song. He wanted to show his humor.

At that time his name was poison. You know about the Peekskill Riots, the overturning of cars, the rock throwing? It was in upper New York State, near Poughkeepsie. Paul Robeson was there singing; that was enough to raise the blood pressure of every professional patriot. People going there, performers, others, had their cars smashed. The police watched and had a good time either doing nothing or taking part in the hooliganism.

So, here's Robeson wanting to sing “Scandalize My Name.” “You call that a brother? No, sir! You call that a sister? No, sir! Scan-dalizin' my name!”

Henry Wallace had an easy way of talking, but he was used to addressing crowds. I went up to Wallace, who was sitting down at the mike. I squatted down, and I said, “Mr. Vice President, make believe you're addressing one person: that old farmer having a hard time, or that lost young family in a big city who don't know where to turn. Be very intimate. The way President Roosevelt sounded during his fireside chats.” I remember saying that.