Touch and Go (19 page)

Wallace did the best he could. It was arranged so there was a dialogue and then individual soliloquies of white and black America. It needed no narrator. Robeson spoke of his beginnings and his father, and then recited that soliloquy from
Othello
. It worked out just right. Unfortunately, there's no script of it available, nothing. I think there was a recording, but no one knows where it went. It was a wonderful program, a memorable one.

On that last night, obviously, millions of voters for Wallace, whatever, two, three million, switched and voted for Harry Truman—“Give 'em hell, Harry.”

Truman had been attacking Wallace as a Communist sympathizer, an agent of Russia. Wallace wanted peace in the world, and there couldn't be peace unless there was peace between the two superpowers. Stalin was a butcher and a bastard. You can't defend that, of course.

But had Wallace won, there might have been no Cold War, might have been no McCarthyism. It would have been a different world, a whole change in temperament—things like universal health care, labor rights to organize. Perhaps even peace in the world. Perhaps. My hope was factor to my mad prophecy—the dream of a Wallace presidency.

I
f ever there was an experience that altered my life, not simply in a political way, but in every aspect, it was the Great American Depression. I was there watching what hard times did to decent people. The great discovery is how they behaved during a specific issue, not what they were labeled. It was easy to call somebody a Commie, or a Red, or a Fascist for that matter. It's how that person behaved at a certain moment that counted.

I remember the generosity practiced by those with little. A guy would leave to get on the streetcar and he'd pass another guy a cigarette, or, getting off, would hand someone else his transfer. There were these little things. There's the innate decency of human beings. But when your livelihood is at stake, it's you
or
the other guy, not you
and
the other guy.

In
The Grapes of Wrath,
sharecropper Muley Graves is being forced off his land; a young man in goggles seated on a Caterpillar tractor is about to knock down his house. Muley, in a gesture of resistance, raises his rifle toward the tractor.

“You touch my house with that Cat and I'll blow you to kingdom come.”

The man raises his goggles and declares, “You ain't gonna blow nobody nowhere. In the first place, they'll hang you and you know it. Next day they'll send someone to take my place.”

Then Muley recognizes him. “Why you're Joe Davis' boy. How can you do this to your own people?”

The man on the tractor says, “I got a wife and kids to feed. Everybody else, they can look after their own selves. . . . Now go on, get out of the way!”

When, fifty years later, I visited that fourth-generation Iowa farmer and his wife facing the same foreclosure troubles, Muley's words echoed. With the bankers breathing down their necks, Mrs. Nearmyer, fretting over the effect of the times on her small daughter, asked the same question that Muley Graves does. “Whenever the deputy came to take our stuff away from us, I asked him, ‘How can you go home and face your family?' I happen to know he has an eight-year-old girl too. I said, ‘How can you sleep tonight, knowing that someday this could be you? You don't have to be a farmer. This is not just a farm crisis.'

“He said, ‘If I don't do it, somebody else would be here. To me, it's just a job.' ”
²⁷

 

 

I SHALL NEVER FORGET an assemblage known as the Workers' Alliance, sometimes called the Unemployed Council. Always labeled as Commies and Reds. These groups were in certain of the big cities, among them Chicago and New York.

The bailiffs were very busy evicting people, sometimes three or so families a day. For the most part, the bailiffs weren't bad guys and hated their work dispossessing others. They'd arrive during the day to take the furniture out of the homes of people being evicted—removing bedsteads and kitchen tables and even the toilet seats, everything but the kitchen sink. They'd take out the furniture and shut off the electricity and the plumbing. This happened more often in the deeply poverty-stricken neighborhoods, but I read of it in the papers every day.

When the bailiffs were done evicting people, the sidewalks would be full of furniture and clothes and pots and pans. At the end of the day, as soon as the bailiffs quit, a group of guys would come along.

It is true that the Communist Party formed the basis of the Workers' Alliance. They were full of unemployed craftsmen; among them were electricians, carpenters, plumbers, and gas men. They would put the furniture back in and restore all of the utilities. They'd keep doing that until the bailiffs finally got tired, and in many cases, the bailiffs got
so
tired, they quit.

That was how some of the people acted at that time. If one tried to be doctrinaire and impose his Communist philosophy on another, that was something else. You weren't needed. Out. No other matters counted at that moment but that the people needing help were helped.

Hundreds of miles away, in Montgomery, Alabama, Virginia Durr suffered a similar discovery as a member of an organization known as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. This relatively small group was composed of people fighting segregation, most of them white.
²⁸

Civil rights activists were always accused by certain forces of being Communist. During the 1940s, there was a witch hunt, and Virginia was called to testify as an unfriendly witness before the Eastland Committee. Senator Jim Eastland, an avowed racist and the boss of Sunflower County, Mississippi, had set up his own Un-American Activities Committee.

I remember seeing Durr's name, and a picture, in the newspapers: The headline: SOUTHERN REBEL DEFIES EASTLAND. Picture Eastland, all three hundred furious pounds of him: “Are you or have you ever been . . .” In the wonderful photograph, Virginia sits in
what is obviously a witness chair, legs crossed, powdering her nose. She will not satisfy her interrogator with a response. Senator Eastland is going crazy and finally orders her off the stand. The reporters surround her; they're entertained by her actions. One asks, “What impelled you to defy this powerful man?”

She says, “Oh, I think that man is as common as pig tracks.” Then she sighs, “Oh, I guess I'm just an old-fashioned Southern snob.” That's the way she talked, and oh, she was a powerful presence.

She made it clear to the senator that it didn't matter what a person was labeled; all that mattered was what that person did under specific circumstances. In this case, the battle of the Southern liberals was to eliminate the poll tax that deprived so many African Americans of the right to vote. Among the members of her little group might have been one or two Reds. But that's not what mattered to Virginia. How did a person behave on the issue of the poll tax? It was analogous to the work of the Unemployed Council.

Her friend and fellow Southern Conference member, Joe Gelders, was a Communist who fought harder than anyone to eliminate the poll tax. In fact, he was tarred and feathered several times and regularly bruised for his efforts. He, much like the Unemployed Council people, acted on behalf of his fellow man.

I first heard Virginia Durr speak at Orchestra Hall at a program against segregation during the forties, when it was not remotely fashionable to speak out on behalf of integration. The headline speaker was Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, a celebrated African American and a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. We'd all heard of Mary McLeod Bethune, but it was Virginia Durr who set everybody's heart afire that day. She was dynamite—in her forties, lanky, Southern, colorful. I went backstage to shake her hand. “Thank you, dear, thank you,” she said, and put a hundred leaflets in my hand. “Now dear, you better hurry outside, pass those out quickly because Dr. Bethune and I will be at the African Episcopal church in two hours.”

I dedicated my book
Hope Dies Last
to Clifford and Virginia Durr. Clifford Durr was a Birmingham, Alabama, lawyer, very soft-spoken, gentle, but strong and well known for defending political activists. At one time he was the head counsel for the Federal Communications Commission. Clifford was responsible for bringing in the Blue Book, which ensured that public-service programs would be aired.

During the New Deal, Virginia was the hostess who greeted all the young wives of representatives new to the capitol. Lady Bird Johnson loved Virginia Durr; Virginia was Lady Bird's mentor when LBJ first came to Washington as a young congressman from Texas. During the Cold War and the McCarthy days, Clifford lost a number of different jobs and they were often down on their luck. When they were under attack, LBJ tried whatever he could to smooth things over.

The Durrs were definitely not Communists, but they were not opposed to people who were Communists being in any organization of which they were a part. When Virginia ran for U.S. senator in Alabama on the Henry Wallace ticket, she said, “We're for anybody who fights for civil rights. We don't care what he's called. If he's a Communist, it's OK, provided he doesn't try to impinge his views on us.”

Virgina wrote a book called
Outside the Magic Circle
. In the preface, I described the three ways she could have lived her life. She was the daughter of a preacher who lost his faith: He couldn't believe that Jonah set up light housekeeping in the belly of the whale. I said that since she was part of a white, upper-middle-class society, she could have led an easy life, been a member of a garden or book club, and behaved kindly toward the colored help. Two, if she had imagination and was stuck in this nice, easy world, she could go crazy, as did her schoolmate Zelda Sayre, later the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The third is the one she took: She became the rebel girl and basically said, “The whole system is lousy and I'm going to fight it.” That's stepping outside the magic circle.

The Durrs were highly respected citizens of Montgomery until
the fight to break segregation. They were friends of Myles Horton, who established Highlander Folk School, the first integrated school in the South since the Reconstruction, in Monteagle, Tennessee. It was primarily a school for adults who were organizers of labor and civil rights—white and black together. Myles was a Southerner who had studied theology at Vanderbilt and was brilliant as a teacher of adults. One of his influences was Paolo Freire, a great Brazilian educator who revolutionized the use of language. Certain words are key, words that arouse emotions because they resonate with peoples' lives: Hunger. Cold. Equality. Justice.

Highlander was burned down by the Klan, but it was reestablished in New Market, Tennessee, where it still exists. Martin Luther King Jr. went to Highlander. I was at Highlander once, very briefly. Pete Seeger went there a lot. Rosa Parks went there, too. For a time, she was the seamstress for Virginia Durr, and she often talked with her about the battle for equality. Virginia is the one who urged Rosa Parks to attend Highlander, after which she became secretary to E.D. Nixon, a former Pullman car porter who became the head of the NAACP in Montgomery.

All this played a role when Rosa Parks sat down and refused to get up on that bus. It was Virginia Durr who bailed Rosa Parks out of jail. It was Clifford Durr who represented Rosa Parks in Federal court after the Montgomery Bus Boycott—arguing that the Montgomery ordinance segregating passengers on city buses was unconstitutional.

The night the Selma-to-Montgomery march ended at George Wallace's mansion, he was furious. Wallace underwent a change after he was shot, but back then he appeared on TV naming the subversives responsible for all the troubles. Half of them were sitting in the Durr living room watching the news. History has shown these people to have been visionaries; they've been referred to as the prescient or prophetic minority. Virginia Durr fit that description especially well.

S
everal years after the Wallace campaign, the subject of Communism resurfaced. When
Studs'Place
ended, it was a crisis. We knew it was going to happen. We just knew. I wasn't scared, but I certainly wasn't looking forward to it . . . well, the truth is, I was a little scared, sure.

By this time McCarthy was in full flower and the Cold War was at its most frigid; this was the time of the Hollywood Ten. But I'm like a rubber ball. Nelson Algren called me the India Rubber Man. Years ago there was a fighter named Johnny Risko, knocked down but never knocked out—he'd be knocked down and bounce up again, like an India rubber ball. That's me. Bill Coffin once said of me in a letter to a friend: “How is the perdurable Studs?” Isn't that a great word? Would that it had been so; I was fading fast.

During the blacklist, you're not working for a time, you start thinking maybe you ain't got something you thought you had. I knew my work troubles were for political reasons, but the situation seemed somewhat hopeless. There's something that's interesting psychologically, moments when you feel self-doubt: that is, was your talent there to begin with? Maybe you're not that good.

Win Stracke and I talked about those doubts because
Studs'Place
wasn't the only Chicago TV show dropped. Win had a popular children's show called
Uncle Win's Animal Playtime
. It was set in a pet
store; he'd make up words to the tunes of old folk songs and sing to the animals. Dean's Milk was the sponsor. The show was doing beautifully. The fans and the sponsor were delighted. Then one day they dropped it, just boom.

Win got it from all directions. He'd been singing at fourth Presbyterian Church, the classiest of them all. He was their pride; he knew every hymn of John Wesley's, German
Lieder
, you name it. One day, Win is picketing a certain firm during a strike. He gets a call from the pastor: “Win, we're so proud of you, but we're going to have to let you go. I suggest you go to another city, change your name, and start over again.”