Hard Times (79 page)

Harry Bennett, chief of the service department.

Efforts were made from the beginning by the UAWU to interest the young workers. Bowling leagues, baseball teams and bands were organized. “We hoped for about eight teams, we ended up with ninety.” There were five hundred applicants for the eighty-piece band. Uniforms, caps and shirts with UAWU insignia were issued.

“I think he brought them in to show a philanthropic attitude. He also brought in a lot of deaf and dumb people and other handicapped. I signed up a good number of them. We had somebody who could talk on his fingers to them.”

The circumstances of the Republic Steel Massacre were recreated by Meyer Levin in
Citizens
, a novel in which Dr. Andreas is the principal character.

A professor at the University of Chicago. He was an outspoken dissenter on many issues of the day.

I sat in the gallery that evening. During Sandburg’s incantation, in which he seemed to be improvising a poem, a few of my neighbors, among whom were steel workers, became impatient: “Get goin’, get goin’, for Chrissake!” They were shushed by others, in shocked stage whispers: “That’s Carl Sandburg. Quiet, please!” Came the response, low and hurt: “I don’t give a fuck who it is, he’s holdin’ up the works.”

An adjunct of the University of Chicago at the time.

Chairman of the board of the mail-order house Montgomery Ward in 1944. He became involved in a dispute with the Federal Government. He insisted his company was not involved in war work and thus ignored the rules of the War Labor Board. The plant was seized and Avery, refusing to leave, was carried out by two soldiers.

At the time, a highly advanced progressive school, headed by Flora Cooke, a friend of Jane Addams.

Insull, in the Twenties, was the leading patron of Chicago’s opera company. The Auditorium Theatre, built by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, considered one of the finest opera houses in the world, had been its home. It was restored and reopened in 1967.

Win Stracke was a young member of the chorus of Max Reinhardt’s
The Miracle.
It was performed in Chicago during the 1926-27 season at the Auditorium. During a rehearsal, “Morris Guest, the impresario, walks on the stage, arm in arm, with Samuel Insull. Guest pointed out these huge pillars, he’d say ‘Now these are replicas of the huge columns in the Cathedral de Notre Dame, and that window is an exact copy of the rose window of the Köln Cathedral.’ And Insull said, ‘‘The originals?’ I can remember thinking how culturally stupid were men of finance. It was reflected later on in the Opera House.”

A company known, aside from its industrial products, for the sponsorship of cultural enterprises.

A no-longer-existent Loop restaurant featuring excellent German cuisine and wines.

Copyright 1931 by De Sylva, Brown & Henderson, Inc. Copyright renewed, assigned to Chappell & Co., Inc.

For many years one of Chicago’s leading night clubs.

One of the features of A Century of Progress (Chicago’s World’s Fair), 1933 and 1934.

The Paramount Club. “Mildred Harris Chaplin was playing there with me. She said one night, ‘I want you to meet a sweet and lovely man.’ In the ladies’ room, a girl said, ‘You’re certainly in high society tonight. Machine Gun Jack McGurn.’ I left my coat and ran back to the hotel and locked myself in. Wow!”

Of Balaban & Katz, owners of a chain of movie theaters.

“I read of the Negro girl, found in the alley, frozen to death. They brought her back to life after her heart had stopped beating.”

A celebrated club, bearing another name.

The celebrated fight promoter who became head of the Madison Square Garden Corporation.

A Chicago gangster who was killed by the rival Capone-Torrio group in 1924. His funeral was attended by 40,000 “mourners.”

Tex Rickard’s successor.

A Chicago sports promoter of the time.

A pseudonym for a celebrated gambler of the Twenties and early Thirties. He is still alive.

Another renowned gambler of the time.

William Hale Thompson, three-term mayor of Chicago.

A gambler and fixer of reknown. He was involved in the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

Smith & Wesson, revolver manufacturers.

It was alleged that he was one of Capone’s executioners in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. He was killed in a bowling alley in 1936, on the eve of St. Valentine’s Day.

M. M. Neely, Governor of West Virginia, 1941-1945.

“Several hundred autopsies have confirmed that many miners die of heart failure when coal dust clamps the small arteries in their lungs in a stiff unyielding cast which eventually puts a critical load on their hearts.” Robert G. Sherrill,
The Nation
, April 28, 1969, p. 533.

A “rube” vaudevillian, best known for “The Specialist,” a routine based on outhouse humor.

E. Haldemann-Julius blue books. They were sold for a nickel or a dime: philosophical, political, scientific and literary classics.

Rural Electrification Administration.

Captain Joseph Patterson, the Colonel’s cousin, publisher of the New York
Daily News
.

His were primarily non-political cartoons. His most celebrated, “Injun Summer,” has been reprinted every season for many years.

EPIC (End Poverty In California) was the symbol of Sinclair’s candidacy.

Dorothy Comingore, a former film actress (
Citizen Kane
), recalls, “I saw heaps of oranges covered with gasoline and set on fire and men who tried to take one orange shot to death.”

Rexford G. Tugwell is one of the original members of Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust” along with Dr. Means’ colleague, Adolph A. Berle.

William H. Woodin.

Cordell Hull.

Rexford G. Tugwell, Under Secretary of Agriculture. It was he who suggested Henry Wallace as Secretary of Agriculture. A political scientist: “Rex was my intellectual mentor.”

The Mayflower Hotel was a favorite gathering place for the lobbyists of various interests.

His associate, the other assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture.

He had an occasion to visit “Cotton Ed” Smith, U.S. Senator from South Carolina, a vociferous opponent of many New Deal measures. Apropos of nothing, the Senator told him: “You seem like a nice, intelligent young man. I don’t know why you work for the Government. Get out where you can make an honest living.”

President of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU).

It was now called the Farm Security Administration (FSA). “Rex left, I guess, in’37. He became the chief target of the anti-New Dealers. I think he felt his usefulness had been impaired. I’m also sure he was tired.” Dr. Will Alexander succeeded Tugwell.

See John Beecher, p. 277.

“He sent me a letter of congratulations when I was appointed administrator of Farm Security.”

“In states like Alabama, the tax would amount to as much as $40. It was a bar to poor people voting, particularly Negroes.”

Roosevelt’s press secretary.

Head of the Historical Division of the Resettlement Administration. “He’s the guy responsible for these magnificent photographs.”

Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Treasury.

Alfred E. Smith, in 1928, running for President against Herbert Hoover, failed to carry New York State.

Cordell Hull, Secretary of State during Roosevelt’s first three terms.

The Jim Farley Story
, by James A. Farley (New York, McGraw Hill, 1948).

J. Hamilton Lewis, pink-whiskered, pearl-gray-spatted fashion plate, was a Democratic Senator from Illinois.

Political boss of Kansas City for many years.

The conversation took place before his appointment by President Nixon. He was at the time Chairman of the Board of the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Senator from Virginia; Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

It’s completely autonomous. Of course, it’s a creation of Congress and its members are appointed by the President, but it has an air of independence few other agencies have, because we’re not under the General Accounting Office. There has been a continuous battle. Congressman Wright Patman believes the board should be under Governmental control.”

Dos Passos was covering the Republican and Democratic conventions for
The New Republic.

See Cesar Chavez, p. 53.

Secretary of Treasury from 1921 to 1932.

In his autobiography, John L. Spivak, a journalist, recounts his investigation of the matter. During his visit to Butler’s home, the General … “an extraordinary man, described ‘what was tantamount to a plot to seize the Government, by force, if necessary.’” In 1935, “Butler, on a national radio hookup, denounced the Congressional Committee for suppressing parts of his testimony, involving the names of important men.

“Roger Baldwin, who did not look with friendly eyes on communists because they denied free speech and free press, issued a statement as director of the American Civil Liberties Union: ‘The Congressional Committee investigating un-American activities has just reported that the fascist plot to seize the government … was proved; yet not a single participant will be prosecuted under the perfectly plain language of the federal conspiracy act making this a high crime. Imagine the action if such a plot were discovered among Communists!’

“Which is, of course, only to emphasize the nature of our government as representative of the interests of the controllers of property. Violence, even to the seizure of government, is excusable on the part of those whose lofty motive is to preserve the profit system… .” From A Man In His Time, by John L. Spivak (New York, Horizon Press, 1967), pp. 329-30.

Congressmen Joseph Martin and Bruce Barton, Republicans.

Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s tart-tongued Secretary of Interior.

Robert Jackson, Roosevelt’s Attorney-General; later Associate Justice of the Supreme Court; eventually, the United States’ judge at the Nuremberg Trials.

He was in a demonstration on Boston Common. Upton Sinclair, in Boston, describes “how the mounted police tried to ride me down and chased me on horseback.”

John Wexley’s
They Shall Not Die
, a play based upon the case. Ruth Gordon enacted the role of Ruby Bates.

Two Catholic journals: the first, a lay monthly; the other, a Jesuit weekly.

A German ocean liner, bearing the swastika.

In 1935, during the Ethiopian War, Fascist Italy was collecting gold, silver and copper. In exchange for their wedding rings, women received steel rings, inscribed: “Gold to the Fatherland.”

Machines for harvesting and threshing wheat.

Big Bill Heywood, a top leader of the IWW.

It was, once upon a time, one of Chicago’s finest restaurants.

In 1935, he was assassinated by Carl Austin Weiss in the capitol building at Baton Rouge.

Dr. Arthur J. Altmeyer. He was Commissioner of Social Security for a number of years.

CWA (Civil Works Administration).

“Below the Mason-Dixon Line, all preachers are called ‘Doctor,’ whether they’ve been to school or not.”

“Nigger, as used down South, wasn’t a dirty word. Today we can’t even say ‘chiggers,’ we say ‘chigg-roes.’ ” (Laughs.) “Now we have to say ‘black,’ don’t we?”

“The only way they could fill the football stadium was for Huey to attend the game. In one case, he agreed on condition that the newspaper, begging him, cancel Westbrook Pegler’s column. Pegler started out as a Gerald Smith hater and Huey Long hater. Later, he turned on the Roosevelts. A few years ago, in Tucson, he said, ‘The greatest mistake in my life was not joining Gerald Smith 25 years ago.’

“I used to have a lot of fun with Eleanor myself. I said she was a very generous woman. She left her teeth at the Elks’ Lodge. (Laughs.) I used to talk about the children. We were raised up to believe that if you married cousins, the children would be silly. It was never more graphically demonstrated than with the Roosevelt family. (Laughs.) When Eleanor came back from the South Seas and said the boys in the hospitals looked sad, I said, ‘If I looked up into a puss like that, I’d have a relapse.’” (Laughs.)