Growing interest with organizing southern labor
Harry Ward's assistant, Jack McMichael, had the strongest impact on Burgess. Through McMichael's influence, Burgess became aware of his middle class status and came to eschew the typical path of labor movement orientation by going southward. To Burgess, southerners' frank articulation of the South and northerners' prototypical types of people increased Burgess's interest in the South.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with David Burgess, September 25, 1974. Interview E-0001. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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How did you perceive the conflict between Harry Ward and other professors
at Union?
- DAVID BURGESS:
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Well, I think I was influenced by Jack McMichael, the assistant to Ward
at Union. Jack came out of the Student Christian Movement.
- BILL FINGER:
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The what movement?
- DAVID BURGESS:
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Student Christian Movement. He was in China in '37, and he was sort of
the darling of Mrs. F.D.R. at that time. I had fought the Communists at
Oberlin, very hard, partly because I couldn't make up my mind about
Spain, later because I was shocked by the German-Russian pact
- nonaggression pact - in 1939. I saw what they did
to students. I had some friends killed in Spain, and I just didn't like
their absolutism, and I could not stomach the noncritical attitude
towards Russia that was represented in Harry Ward at that time. And Jack
was almost an apologist for Russian power as such. In addition to the
question of war, I saw the Communists switch after June 20, 1941 when
Russia was invaded from a "phoney war" position, to a
position against all strikes in American industry during World War II. I
said, "Things don't change that quickly." So I think
it's that background, both in college and after college, that made me
very skeptical of Communists and the absolutism of Harry Ward. I think
Harry Ward was at that time almost a spent force in Union. He didn't
pull much weight. This was during the war years. However, I think that I
was influenced by Jack McMichael in terms of the realization that I was
from a middle class family, and that I had to expose myself to southern
culture. Therefore I didn't want to go in the conventional labor
movement in the East and the cities of the North. The South was a more
challenging situation.
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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Why did you view the South as . . . ?
- DAVID BURGESS:
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I think I read W. J. Cash's book, The Mind of the
South. I was very influenced by that. Later I read
Southern Politics by V.O. Key and I read
some other things. I was a friend of Alexander Heard (now Chancellor of
Vanderbilt University) in Washington together in '39 and '40. I liked
the South. I liked southern people. I found a naturalness, frankness,
even in bigots that I didn't find, say in somebody from cities of the
North. Also I think that the fact that I went to prep school for one
year before I went to Oberlin really turned me off with what we call the
establishment," Wall Street types, Long Island types . . .