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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview G-0027, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Harriet Herring, a research associate at the Institute for Research in Social Science and professor in the sociology department at the University of North Carolina, recalls her early life and experiences studying labor in North Carolina mill towns in the first half of the twentieth century. The bulk of the interview focuses on Herring's efforts to study the high turnover at cotton mills and the industry's resistance to her investigations. Some recollections about Herring's family and eminent sociologist Howard T. Odum might also be useful for researchers.
Harriet Herring, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, recalls her efforts to study labor at North Carolina mill towns in the first half of the twentieth century.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
As I said a while ago, I don't know whether we're Scotch-Irish or Irish. I'll ask this niece of mine; I don't know why I didn't think to ask her the other day when she was here. And I'm sure she has gone all the way who the first ones were. I used to hear all the time when I was growing up that we had a land grant from the king of England, and I had heard dates from the late sixteen hundreds to 1772. Well, I didn't think that even George III would be giving a land grant to anybody in North Carolina in 1772—things were warming up a little too much! But I found that a descendant in another branch of the family had a copy of the grant—not the land that I grew up on, but where a cousin of mine and his father and grandfather grew up. And it was up near Lagrange. And it told even about a creek and everything, you know—just exactly. So some of us got here by that time anyhow. And I think it must have been that some of them lived in this county, as a matter of fact, because my grandfather, I reckon it must have been in, say, 1828 or something of the kind, he bought a farm down where I grew up. Well, there must have been about fifteen hundred acres. No, it was more than that, because he had four children and they each had about five or six hundred acres. And it was on the Neuse River, and it had a creek flowing through it. Then two of his four children, my father and an aunt, lived on theirs, and the other one sold hers to the two of them, and married a man from Greene County and came back. So I can't tell you exactly when I started, but I know it was a right good while: about four or five generations back.
How far was your family place from Kinston?
Well, three miles now
Did you have all brothers, then, or did you have any sisters from the first marriage?
Well yes, but the last one I just barely remember when she got married. I
remember we had a fence/down the width of the house and everything down
to the road, which wasn't as far then as it is now (they've straightened
the road—it had a loop in it). Anyhow, I knew there was stuff going on
around, you know, and somebody looked out the window and said, "Oh,
there comes the bride and groom." We had a gate there because they
turned the horses in there sometimes. I looked out there and I said,
"Oh, it's / Don Uzzle (that was her beau, you know; he'd been coming
there). It's nobody but Don Uzzle." That's the way I greeted him.
Fortunately /
I wanted to ask you about your father's background. He grew up there on that land that he later farmed?
Yes. You see, he had part of my grandfather's place, that he bought when
he moved from Greene County. And there was a house on it. Here's
Beautiful.
Was that a house for a plantation at one time?
Well, there were two houses on that, and Grandfather lived in the one that was sort of up the hill from there. While he built the house, it's still standing. It's changed hands two or three times, but ours hasn't changed hands. Anyway, the big trees and those barns and everything were as good as I could make them; I couldn't make them around in a circle and keep them their right size.
Did your father attend college?
Oh no, there weren't any colleges. You're asking both mother and father,
I suppose? Well, my father went, a little while anyhow, to academies.
Especially a man teacher would have an academy, and have two or three
teachers to help. And that went on to all of my half sisters and
brothers too. But by the time I came along there were—though I went to a
four-month school until I went to Kinston to what was called the high
school (seventh, eighth and ninth grades were high school). And until I
went there when I
Well then, he ran what seems like a very large farm.
Well, it was only about six hundred acres, something like that.
What did he plant primarily?
Mainly cotton. He wasn't very keen about tobacco because it ate up timber too fast. But my brothers before he died did begin raising a little tobacco. A lot of people had been raising tobacco for quite a while, and he just saw that price floating away, you know. Of course they had a very valuable thing there in it; it was saved until fairly recently.
Was he fairly successful as a cotton farmer?
Well, cotton prices were awful low: seven and eight and ten cents a pound, I remember. What is it now, a dollar?
About, I think, yes.
Generally, a little above or a little below and so on. I remember as a
small child my father came home from town (that's the only way he knew
what the price of cotton was for the day, you know). And he said to my
mother (he was talking about the price of cotton), "I believe it'll go
to five cents." And I said, "Oh, Daddy, a bale?" And so they at least
got a laugh out of that, you know, because they had fifty bales of
cotton. He had a gin, and he would gin his own cotton. And then you know
what he did with his seed? He cracked them so they wouldn't come up and
used them for fertilizer; that was before they were using oil, cotton
seed oil.
Was your father interested in politics?
Well, not a great deal. He didn't talk politics very much. But you must remember my father was—well, let's see—I guess he was fifty-eight when I was born. By the time I was acquainted with him he was elderly, and his health got not so good. And so I don't know that he'd ever been very greatly interested in politics. But he always voted; I'd hear him talk about voting ("Time to go vote," and so on). And he talked politics with one of our neighbors, the one who bought most of the rest of the farm and lived there. As a matter of fact his descendants still live there, the third generation of them.
What were his views on political issues?
Well, I was too young when my father died to pay much attention to what they were saying about it. I just knew they were talking politics.
How old were you when he died?
Well, let me see: I was born in '92, and he died in 1906.
Fourteen, right. Were you in some kind of community where your farm was? I mean, did you have a church that you went to? Was there a group of people that you pretty much knew?
Well, there was a little Methodist church about two miles from us, and
these people who came and bought the farm of my uncle were Methodists.
But my mother and father happened to be Baptists, and so we had
Well, about the same. Her father didn't have as much land as my
grandfather did. And he was younger; had young children. And he was
killed in the Civil War. A sister of his insisted on taking my mother
over to live with her (there were five other children). After she went
over there
Why did she only go for one day?
I don't know why they even sent one day. I said, "Why?" Well, school started and so she started too, you see. I'm sure this aunt simply. . . . She had one daughter, and I'm sure, I know from things my mother said that she was simply a servant in the house, you see. And her father was dead and her mother's health was bad; she didn't have anybody to. . . . Some of your questions here, you can see, didn't fit my situation at all.
Right. Did your parents ever say anything about the Civil War, about their attitudes toward what it was like then? Did they feel any animosity to the North? What did they feel about that kind of situation?
Well, there were bywords to talk about "damn Yankees", you know, and that sort of thing. But as far as I could see any real bitterness was over by then. See, it had been a full generation; I was just late coming along!
How did your mother, though, feel about her father's loss in the war?
Well, I mean, everybody had somebody lost in the war. There wasn't any family around that didn't have somebody lost in the war.
How did she meet your father?
Well, this aunt lived not very far from my father. And then
To raise all the rest of the kids.
How old was she when they married?
Well I never did know just exactly. You'll think I'm awfully uncurious
that I didn't ask, but she was grown and getting ready to get married
when I first became really conscious of her. I don't know, but she must
have been quite small
So some of your father's older children must have been about the same age as your mother.
Yes. Well this first girl, the oldest one, the girl that got married not too long after he did, must have been not more than a couple (two or three) years younger than my mother, than her mother-in-law. Then she was glad to get away from the mother-in-law.
No, not at all. See, there has always been a great deal of men marrying
if they lose their wives; they'll get married again and have two
families. So it was so common that I suppose it just wasn't. . . . And
some of them were really quite devoted to her, and some of the others
(particularly two husbands). . . . Well, my father, when the girl
married, he gave her a farm somewhere wherever they wanted it (of course
they usually
Were your parents really interested in education?
Oh yes. My mother in particular, because she had none. I've thought about
it a lot of times since: it was amazing how interested she was in the
newspapers and in magazines and books and all. Of course we didn't have
an awful lot of books, because we lived too far from town to go get one
from the very small town library, and
Did she want you to have a good education?
Oh yes.
I asked if she ever did any work for women's suffrage?
Oh, it wasn't even talked about; didn't hear the term 'til I was grown and in college.
Well, who would you have in it? Three families there that you visited
with; the rest of them were
We had, let's see, seven tenant houses; had that many black families. And you asking here about servants. Somebody in one or another of those families, when they were bargained with it was understood that somebody was going to do the laundry, and they did the laundry. And they helped with housecleaning and so on. But we didn't have a servant that came in every day. I didn't know but two families in my whole neighborhood who had; and one of them didn't have one all the time, but the other one, he had. Incidentally, this Mr. Kennedy had some of the land that belonged to Henry Herring of several generations back; it had been changing hands and he got it. And both of them had money besides a good-sized plantation, and had no children. My father with eleven to give some education to, you see, made a difference.
Exactly. Well then, were all of the tenants black?
Oh yes.
You didn't have any white tenants at all?
No. They would refer once in a while to when (I've forgotten
Did the tenants stay for a long period of time on the land, or did they tend to come and go?
Well, some of them were second generation. Joe Brown, for example: his mother had lived on the farm. He was raised on a farm, and they didn't forget it. And, of course, when I was young you were still in the period when somebody would tell you that "My husband belonged to your grandfather." And then they expected a little more consideration, you know. You'd run into that quite often.
So your grandfather did have slaves also?
Oh yes. Because, you see, he didn't die until really after the Civil War.
He had to be pardoned because he was a slave owner before he could ever
vote again, you see. I had some occasion to look up cotton mills and the
textile industry, and went through a lot of things. What do they call
that set of books on the Civil War? Rebellion Records:
you can tell who put that out, can't you? Congress authorized a printing
of all the correspondence that they got between generals, between
governors and everything. I was looking up things. An index helped to
get it, but I browsed and ran into a letter from a governor (his name
will come to me in a minute; he was a sassy sort of fellow). He was a
governor before the war and then was a governor again afterwards. I ran
across some of his correspondence between him and the confederate
government. And he was telling them how he
Oh, Zebulon.
Yes, Zeb Vance. But it sounded so disrespectful until this great respect,
you know
But your father's father didn't fight in the war? He stayed on his plantation during the war?
My grandfather? Oh yes, he was too old for it. See, my father was born in 1834, born before Victoria came to the throne. You're talking about things a long time ago when you go to my father. My age plus his makes a long time, you know.
Well, a few, not too many. As I say this Brown, the one I remember, he
lived there for years and years. Now, for instance, there's a black man
up not far from Kinston who cures very good meat, hams. Mary gets her
ham from him every once in a while, and she stopped by there. The first
time I went there with her she told him that I was her father's sister.
And he said, "Yes. When I was first married I went there to live with
Mr. Henry and Mr. Beck." I said, "Well, that's the reason you know how
to cure good hams." He said, "Yes, Mr. Henry taught me how to cure good
hams." But he hadn't ever belonged, but he had that very early
connection with the family.
What was your relationship with the children of the tenants?
Oh, I was crazy about them. See, I had nobody of my own to play with, and
especially after this white tenant family moved. I'd run away; I've been
switched for running away. One family didn't live very far, and there
weren't any real small children there. And I could get by with running
away and going over there. Sometimes my youngest brother'd be sent over
to fetch me home, and I was sitting there eating collards and cornbread
with them.
So you did have some kind of childhood contact with black people.
Oh mercy! They came up every day twice a day to get the mule (three times, four times a day) and bring the mule back at lunchtime to feed, and then bring him back at night, you know. I'd see the black people and I would dash out to talk to the children.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Well, there were two or three families that would come back and forth, you know. He and his family stayed on for years and years. But I lost contact with them because I was away too much.
Did your mother ever have any help, did any of the women ever help your mother with the children? Did you have a nurse or anything?
No, I don't remember having one. When she had two or three that were
stepping-stones she may have, and probably had some of the older girls,
you know. But by the time I came along, you see, there was five
I see. You said that someone came in to help her with the cleaning and that someone else did the laundry. Did she have a cook? Did someone do the cooking?
Not very much. If my mother was feeling bad she'd have her come in and
help when she needed her. But, as I say, these people who had cash as
well as land, they had not only a cook and maids (a maid or two), but
also a phaeton with a driver and two horses.
Well, she tended a garden because she wanted to. I mean, the men plowed (my brothers or my father); I barely remember my father ever plowing, because the boys were big enough to, plowing the rows and planting. But she often planted. And of course she and I gathered the vegetables a great deal. Sometimes some of the colored ones would be there to help with that, especially if you were going to do some preserving or something, not as a regular thing.
How old were you, then, when you left the farm to go to college? Did you go to Meredith College from the farm? How old were you at that time when you left to go to Meredith?
Well, I left in 1909. I went to college in 1909, and I was born in '92.
So you were fifteen years old then when you went to Meredith?
Yes, I was fifteen years old when I went to Meredith.
What led you to go to Meredith College? Was somebody here that influenced you in school, that had you go there? Or what was the attraction of Meredith at the time?
Well, I suppose it was just because, although we didn't go too regularly
(not every Sunday) to church, our connection was with Meredith, and you
heard them talk about it a lot, you know, and all. And at that time
Women's College was about the only. . . . Well, there was little old
College up in the northeast corner; it's still there. (I taught there
for two years, incidentally.) It called itself a college, but it was
really just an academy, you know; I don't know that it even called
itself a college at the time. But girls came as far as from Texas to go
there, because there were no schools for girls (I imagine they were
people who have moved to Texas, you see). But there just weren't any
schools. My older brothers and sisters went to an academy in Kinston
that a man ran, and he had one or two teachers help him. I don't
remember how many of them went off to school. I know one went to a
technical school in Baltimore, and I think Sally went somewhere to
boarding school. But you didn't say you were going to college until
about the time I got to the stage of going to college. And of course
Meredith had to have elementary courses; it had eighth and nin
Before we talk about the years that you were at Meredith, I wanted to ask just a couple of other questions about before you left home. Was the church an important part of your family's life when you were growing up?
Well, important enough to make an effort to go when the weather was good. With the sand and the heat and so on you didn't go too regularly, but it was fairly important.
What about at home? Did you have family prayers or anything?
No, we didn't have family prayers—just a blessing at the table.
What did religion mean to you as a child? Was it important to you?
Well, only moderately so, I should think. I think it probably seemed more important to me when I went to Kinston to high school, because I spent the week with a family that lived just diagonally across the street from the church. And you went every time the bell rang, you know; they made us go. I got pretty bored with that. Then, of course, at Meredith you had to go to church a certain percentage of the time. You had a certain percentage of Sundays off, that you didn't have to go. So we went to church regularly then, and Sunday School. Some of it was almost taken for granted that you went, both when I was going to high school and staying with the Pridgens or at college.
Would you describe your family as being in any way non-traditional?
No, I think we were very like everybody else around—
They were the unusual ones, not you.
We weren't unusual; they were the ones that were unusual
Do you have any idea, thinking about your family background, of what led you into the kind of work that you eventually went into?
No. I tried to think about why I happened to get into this and that since
I got this list. I don't know, it was quite accidental. The reason
Were there any particular teachers who influenced you at Meredith?
Well, the history teacher did. And she was a New Englander and had been to Radcliffe—but that was incidental, my going on account of her. But she did have a great deal of influence on me; she was an excellent teacher. I also had at Meredith the poorest I ever had, and Miss Smith was one of the best I ever had. Just to show how accidental, almost. . . . I was taking this course in American history, and about that time was when Frederick Jackson Turner's emphasis on the West and the development of the country was a new thing. And I remember reading that essay, and I wanted to take some more American history. So he had moved from Wisconsin to Harvard during the interval after he wrote that; and so I went to Radcliffe mainly to study with Frederick Jackson Turner.
Hmm, that's interesting.
Oh, I didn't realize that.
Did you get to study with him?
Oh yes, I had his regular course on the building of the West. I got very
interested in a project that I wanted to sort of pursue. (I came back
and worked for two years and then went back, you remember—you seem to
have gotten some way or other everything I've done!) He didn't give but
that one course on the West, the development of the West, and I don't
know if he gave any other course over at Harvard or not. I was an
individual student of his the next year I was there. I had an interview
with him about every two
What did you think about him as a teacher?
Oh, excellent. Of course he's been gone so long, as young as you are you wouldn't hear anybody speak of him.
No.
Oh, he was an excellent teacher.
I guess the only thing now recently has been this new biography by Ray Allen Billington, who was a student of his also, I guess.
I haven't read that.
It's just been recently. And apparently it talks about him as a teacher too, and how fine he was.
Well, what did he do? What was the kind of thing that you liked especially about his teaching? Just his personal abilities, or
Well, he was a very charming person, and he just had so much more
information on it than he could give to you. You just felt there was
banks and banks back of it. And he had just thousands (well, I reckon
not thousands, but it must have been) of maps and charts and things
showing movement of people, and what proportion were foreigners and what
proportion were old Americans moving West and all of that. And it was
just fascinating to me, because, I mean, it was like having a history
book that had all those maps and
It sounds like he was a very approachable person.
Oh very, yes; he was charming.
Did you do any writing when you were. . . ? Did you start putting together any of your own research?
Oh no. I wrote term papers
Well, I don't know. We had organizations; we had two societies, and sometimes we debated with each other.
What kinds of things did they debate?
Oh gosh, I can't even remember now: some political thing that was up at the time, I'm sure. And there were other kinds of programs. Some people would make readings or whatever.
How many students were at Meredith when you were there?
I should say around between four hundred and five hundred, but quite a
number of them were preps, you see. See, the high schools, you couldn't
go from Kinston and get into Meredith. I barely did; one reason was
because I had one very good teacher in the last year, a very good
English teacher. She was really the only one. The other one made you
write a one-page theme
Are you still in contact with any of the friends you had at Meredith?
Very few of them. When I first left Meredith, whenever I was handy I would go over to commencement. But after I went to Chapel Hill the commencements nearly always came at the same time. And I knew a lot of people coming back for there, you know, and so I kind of got out of the habit of going over. So I really haven't. . . . A few of the people that I knew, but as contacts with Meredith I haven't had a very great deal.
What is the name of the woman history teacher who influenced you so much?
Mary Shannon Smith. She was a Bostonian, and she gave the impression (she didn't say she belonged to the . . . what is it?). . . .
Brahmans, Boston Brahmans?
Proper Bostonian. I'll show you a cover on a paperback book that looks not unlike Miss Smith. And after I learned a little more about the composition of Boston's population I wondered where she got that middle name.
I don't believe that they had forgiven each other enough, gotten friendly enough to name the children for them unless they were kin to them, do you?
No, I don't think so.
No.
Very suspicious.
Was there a YWCA group at Meredith?
Oh mercy yes. My roommate and I, I was president of the student government and she was president of the YWCA. And I was editor of the Annual—see, they had small classes, and a lot of people had to do several jobs. They got to calling our room "the capitol," because I was president of one thing and she of the other main thing.
Who was your roommate?
Gertrude Horne. She married—can't remember her husband's name now—and
lived in Roxboro. I haven't heard from her in two or three years. Her
health wasn't so good the last few times I heard from her. Her father
was a candy manufacturer, and he would send us a barrel of apples every
year when he'd go up in the mountains. And he sent us a box of candy
every now and then, consisting of a box this long, this wide and this
thick
Mainly just the religious. They had prayer meeting every morning, and then they had a meeting every Sunday night.
Did you participate in all of that?
No, not nearly; I went once in a while.
Did they do any interracial work?
No.
Were they interested at all in the industrial problems?
Oh no. They were interested in college.
Not particularly; I don't know of any. You saw what there was to take: "What can I take now?"
Did they have sororities when you were there?
Dear me, no. I told you, we had five Sundays a year off from going to church (Sunday school and church).
Is this when you started hearing about women's suffrage?
No. You had one in connection with my mother. Even those great beginners way back hadn't begun to pipe out then. We never heard hardly anything about it; I can't remember anything particularly.
Anything about women's rights?
I don't remember its being discussed in college.
Was Meredith a very sort of protective environment? Did you have to be chaperoned all the time?
Of course Wake Forest was nearby. But they couldn't have dances on their campus at that time, so they would come to a hotel in Raleigh and have a dance. And the Meredith girls, if they had permission from their mothers, could go to the dance, but they had to have a chaperone, you see. And if they went to any affair (unless it was a relative) they had chaperones.
What about if girls went out together? Did they have to have a
Oh you could go downtown by yourself, yes.
Did you date a lot in college?
Oh dear me, no. I was born an old maid!
Oh yes.
Did you continue to be close to her when you were in college?
Well, she died my senior year in college. But she liked to hear about everything that was going on there, you know.
Was she very happy for you getting a chance to go away to school?
Well, it had just always been so assumed, I don't know whether she had any specific happiness or not. It had just been assumed that I'd go to college.
Did you ever have any contact with or hear about the Settlement House movement or the Women's Trade Union League?
Oh yes, I had heard about it. One friend of mine who lives now in Franklin, Virginia (she was a good friend of mine), we wanted a course in sociology. And the only person there that could teach it was the dullest, I think really the poorest teacher I ever had, not even barring all the ones I had in the little four-months brown, unpainted school—I'll tell you, most of them didn't have what we'd call a high school education, you know. And he was worse than that, although he was one of the very few on the faculty that had a PhD degree: the dullest man in the world. But he was the only one that could teach a course in sociology.
And what was his name?
And it really wasn't a course in sociology; it was a course in social problems. But we didn't know the difference then, so we took it. And you know what he did (don't let the thing record this into it; you won't put it in or anything)? When he came to . . . what's the word, people who have houses and they go to them?
Prostitution?
Prostitution, all that whole spate of problems, that was treated in a
long chapter in the textbook that he had us get. When we approached that
he had to be absent the next time the class met (it met three times a
week, you see). He had to be absent, so we were to study that ourselves.
Now that's the kind of person he was.
Yes, but I don't know whether he has died or not, so I won't give it.
Well, I knew by then that I was going to Radcliffe. I wanted to go study with Mr. Turner, and I wanted to take some more history.
But you didn't go straight there; you went to teach for two years.
Yes.
In Scotland Neck then?
Well, three years, really. No, wait a minute. I taught one year—and
here's an instance of what I said about accidental. When I came back
from Radcliffe, you see, in 1914, school wasn't over there until the
middle of June. When I got back here there wasn't anything to do but
teach, you see. I was sort of looking around, and this good friend of
mine in
What was the teacherage?
The teachers in the public school had a house all of them lived in.
Not like a boarding house?
It was sort of a boarding house, yes—dormitory kind of a thing, you see. And I didn't have to live in that. And then in the meantime I had known Mr. Lyonberry, who had been principal of a preparatory school at Winover. Two of my brothers went there, and then I had known other people who went there, and I had been there to commencements. He was acquainted with me, so he asked me to come up there. Well, I couldn't teach history, which I considered my major. I took some English—well, I had to take a lot of English and history both at Meredith, you see, because there wasn't a great deal else. The science wasn't very strong. And I had taken some English at Radcliffe, because I knew I couldn't get a masters in one year nohow, you know. I had to teach English, I guess it was, because somebody already had the history to teach. So I taught the English—and quoted Kittridge to beat the band! You don't know Kittridge. Do you know the name Kittridge? Do you?
Yes, just the name.
Just vaguely.
He's known even in England. You know the story they tell about his going
over there and going to one of those old libraries at one of the
universities—I don't know which now. He said he wanted some
information
Yes.
And then you came back?
Went in the fall if 1913.
So you graduated from Meredith in the spring of 1913.
Yes.
And that fall you went to Radcliffe. And then you came back in June of 1914.
And taught at Scotland Neck.
For. . . .
Just one year. But I didn't like that. Well, of course, a girl who
graduated from Meredith the next year I was at Radcliffe, she and I both
were new, and the students just really rode you, you know, if you were a
first year teacher. I didn't like that.
Well, what it like to be in a. . . ? That was sort of a small community, wasn't it?
Yes. A lovely community, a lot of perfectly charming people in it. I knew a number of them, because a number of them had gone to Meredith.
But you generally didn't like the experience of the. . . .
Oh, I had some charming little students. I remember two or three little
girls and several boys that were just as bright and sweet and
Was this like a public academy, or was it a private school?
Oh no, no, it was just the town high school.
It was the town high school, OK. Then what did you do the next year?
Well, two years, you see, I stayed at Murfreesboro at—what's the name of the school there?
Chowan?
Chowan.
Chowan. And that was after the Scotland Neck?
Yes.
How did you get the job at Chowan?
Well, as I say I knew Mr. Lyonburg from a contact with him, and somebody told him they thought maybe I would go there.
Then in 1918 you went back to Radcliffe?
Well, I guess it was 1918 wasn't it? Yes, because that was the year of the flu epidemic. No!
Oh, was that 1919?
1919 was one. Well, I've got the dates mixed a little, because I went to. . . . You sure that was the first one? You know there were two years: the first one was terrible, the next one wasn't quite so bad.
I'm trying to think. Edward Kidder Graham of UNC died in one of them; I forget which one it was.
Then the man who took his place died the next year in the next one.
That's right; OK, you're right then. 1918 and 1919 then; I think you're right.
Well, anyway, I went. And I went to Bryn Mawr. I had finished my masters at Radcliffe, you see, that spring.
Wait. I'm sorry, I just want to get it straight. You had finished the masters the first year you were at Radcliffe?
No, because I went that one year and came back and taught, you see, at
Scotland Neck and at Chowan, Murfreesboro. Then when I went back the
next year and I got out. . . . Incidentally, we talk about a lot of it
was accident; it was an accident that I got invited to go to the Bryn
Mawr thing. I wanted to do some statistical comparisons such as Mr.
Turner had been doing, and that was the year that I saw him every week,
you see, or every two weeks—had a conference with him. And he said, well
he didn't know much about sort of doing that statistical stuff. "But
I'll tell you who. You go to see Miss Ann Besantson." She was working on
her PhD and almost had it, and had done a lot of statistics. And he
said, "Go and talk to her and ask her about how to do this." So I went
to see her. And then that spring (that summer, really) I didn't even
graduate at Radcliffe, because I had to leave to go to Bryn Mawr before
commencement. She had invited me to come. She had been employed to come
down to Bryn Mawr—they had gotten a grant. The name of the department
was the Corolla
So it was almost completely by accident that you went into personnel work?
Yes. And the accident of having Mr. Turner refer me to Miss Besantson. She saw I was interested, so then when she was invited to go down there to take up this. . . .
She asked you to come with her.
You see, at that time not many plants had personnel departments at all. The foreman did the hiring, or the superintendent. And a grand flurry of it had come along, and they were just pleading for people who knew anything about it. And so this course. . . .
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
I wanted to ask you about when you left North Carolina for the first time and went to Radcliffe, what it was like. Was it a big change to go from rural North Carolina to live in Cambridge?
Well, the biggest change was having everybody . . . you would realize they were making you talk to hear you talk.
As a southerner.
I just talked so southern, you see. Radcliffe had very few southern girls in those days. The next time I went (what was I out, three years or two—-I've forgotten). . . .
Three years, I think.
. . . I was in a graduate house then, and there were several southerners. As a matter of fact, when I got back some of them said I talked like a Yankee. And I said, "Well heck, I reckon it's just involuntary self-protection." Because I'd catch them making me talk, you know.
Did you like it in Boston?
Yes, very much. And I went to plays and I went to symphony and everything happening in Boston.
Did you ever think of staying there permanently?
No, not really. I did realize there wasn't anything I could do but teach. I filed with a teachers' thing there, but I never did press it. I just had one notice from them, and by that time I came on back home.
You say people asked you to talk because you were a southerner. How did they react to you as a southerner in Boston?
Well, I was in Cambridge, you see, and it was in a dormitory. And it happened that I was in an unusual situation, because they had just opened a new dormitory. Practically all of us were either graduate students or freshman. And the dean said later that she had wondered what would happen in that combination. But we got along fine. And there were two almost middle-aged (it seemed to me then) women, sisters, that were studying there, and they in particular loved to hear me talk southern.
There was no sense of you being singled out as being different or not as smart? Did they expect you to be somehow very different because you were from the South? Did they take you out as a student?
Oh yes, they took me as a student, but I was a new kind of specimen they
hadn't ever seen before, hadn't been in daily contact with—I imagine
they'd seen a tourist or something, you know. But those two elderly
women (they were elderly to me then—the younger one was a little older
than you, and, you see, I wasn't too far out of college), by george,
they just thought everything I could tell, when I said something
differently from the way they pronounced it or the emphasis or
something. . . . No, they were very friendly and very kind; they were
awfully nice. I didn't have a bit of trouble
What was involved in the course that you took at Bryn Mawr?
Well, it turned out to be a course in personnel management. This woman, Miss Besantson, had charge of it really; one or two others were sort of economic courses, you know. But she farmed us out; I worked in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company for six weeks. Miss Bysanson went up and made the contacts to place all of us, some in Philadelphia. I was in New Haven, and fortunately they put another one with me. And we ran into a woman when we were looking for a room that teachers used (they wanted to sublet it). And the owner of the house and the one who lived downstairs was the dietician at Radcliffe when I was there, and she lived in our hall. So I went right to a friend, you see, there; had a grand time.
What did you do at the Winchester Repeating Arms Company?
I worked on a different machine twice a week. I worked in the drawing
room, and the drawing room has had a different connotation to me ever
since. The drawing room was where they make cases for the cartridge. It
starts off a round of brass, and they cut it, but it's real thick. And
so then they had a machine that drew it (that was the drawing room)
longer and longer every time it went through a different one of these
machines to make the cartridge. And then finally somebody had a machine
that put a shoulder on it, you know. Then finally somebody put the
powder in and sealed it. But there were all different operations. This
drawing, there were about six or seven drawings, and it had to be
annealed (brass if it's been bent, it has to be heated again or it will
break—it will make it brittle—to keep it flexible). You had a dial and
these little rounds (I was running ones about just right to go on my
little finger). And you wiggled your finger
Yes. You see, I didn't tell you about her; you aren't interested in her especially, are you? She was a Nova Scotian who had taught in Nova Scotia. And it was about the time that so many Nova Scotians were coming down to Boston. And she was the eleventh person hired by the Gilette Razor Company.
This was Ann Besantson?
Yes. Pretty soon she was hiring all the new help; it was expanding very
rapidly. I don't know how many others, but the extremes were
What was she getting a PhD in?
Well, in economics, supervising labor.
What were her basic ideas about labor and about personnel, and about scientific management?
Well, of course, scientific management was in its very height right then. That couple (what's their name?) Lillian and somebody Gilbreth, and two or three other people.
Yes, Frank.
She was interested in that, but she'd already seen it from the beginning, you see. As I say, she was the nineteenth person hired by the Gilette Razor Company.
How long did you stay at Bryn Mawr and do all of this work?
Well, by the time we finished the course the war had ended, and so it
wasn't so handy to get jobs. If we had started six months earlier we
would have gotten out and everybody would have been grabbed up as they
came out of the door, you know. As it was we had to wait around. And
finally a Bryn Mawr alumna got acquainted with some of us. She knew this
company that made men's underwear: well, as a matter of fact, they spun
their yarn and also all the way down to putting the buttons on the
shirts and trousers and so on. She knew both of them; it was a Jewish
firm and she was Jewish. They employed about a thousand people, and it
was getting fashionable to set up a personnel department, you know. And
labor turnover was so high it was taking so much of
This is at the Roxford Knitting Mill in Philadelphia?
Roxford Knitting Mill in Philadelphia, yes. And so I went and lived in a boarding house, roomed in one place and ate in another, and took a streetcar down one street and the streetcar back up. That's my closest to being a real town worker, you know. Although I had to go out; I had a driver to take me around looking for workers. By that time people were scarce, you know: everybody was employed in the war, and they hadn't lessened their numbers so much. So they'd go through there. They did have a register of an address and card for them: that's all they had for personnel. And the foreman would look over the names of people who had worked for them; then I'd go at night and visit them to try to get them to come to work. I rode all over Philadelphia.
My word!
You never saw such places as I went into, trying to get them to come. But not very many came. Then I went there in March, I guess it was.
Of 1919?
It must have been '20. Then it began to get so that you just had them
floating in all the time, because there was a little depression there
for a short time. Then Mr. (I started to say his name, but I won't
This was the foreman or the head of the mill?
No, this was the head of it. He gave me as an assistant one of the most competent secretaries in the institution. She was the secretary to the sales manager, and he had so much typing and dictation to take that she had trouble with her arm, and so she wanted a transfer. Of course I was glad to get her: she knew the company and all that. But it turned out (she told me this herself; I was going to New York and I stopped by Philadelphia and visited with her—we were very good friends) that he had promised her that job. And they hired me, who knew how to set up (or thought I knew how to set up, he thought I knew how to set up). . . . I set up one, after a fashion. Anyhow, he told me along in the late fall that business was getting bad and he was going to have to discontinue the personnel department. So I came back to North Carolina. She told me that he had promised her that when he transferred her to be my assistant.
Did she eventually get the job, take the job over?
Yes, she took it over. But it didn't last; it lasted a year or two, I guess. But they finally did go into bankruptcy.
How many people were in that program at Bryn Mawr that you were in?
Well, I guess those of us that went down there in June, we decided it was probably nineteen, right? When did the war end?
November of 1918 was when the war ended, yes.
Well, we went in June and there were about thirty, between twenty-five
and thirty. And then a new group was chosen and came in when school
opened. And that's when we got back (we had had about two weeks'
vacation, and I came to North Carolina) and registered we were handed a
paper that said that we were (what do you call it? you can't go
anywhere,
Quarantined.
Quarantined; we were quarantined.
Were most of the thirty people women?
Oh yes, they were all women.
They were all women. Did you ever meet M. Carrie Thomas at Bryn Mawr?
Oh, she was president.
Right.
Oh, she was president when Woodrow Wilson taught there, and she and he fought.
Did you know her?
Yes, I knew her.
What was she like?
Oh, short and stubby and just as bossy as anybody could be, as Woodrow Wilson could be. She was really a charming person. She had this industry group over to her house for dinner, and after dinner she said, "Go in and we'll all talk. Now you sit in that blue chair over there, because your pink dress will look so pretty in it." And she settled everybody. And then she said, "Now what would the graduate students like to talk about? I suggest that we talk about so-and-so." Just like that, you know.
Oh yes, she was head of the Corolla
You said it before
Something social research, I think it is.
Social Economy and Social Research, yes. And Miss Besantson went to the University of Pennsylvania shortly after that because, you see, the program was finished. But they had three different groups: my group, that came in June, and then the group that came with school (and they got a late start; well, of course they could do this talking to them, but they couldn't go out working), and another one in January, at semester. And those are the only three by that time there were; they nipped it off, you know.
Did you ever know Hilda Smith? Was she there at that time? Hilda Livington Smith?
Well, her name sounds sort of familiar, but I can't place it.
She was dean of women at Bryn Mawr.
Well Helen Taft was dean when I was there.
And then later Hilda Smith worked for the WPA and with Harry Hopkins.
I don't place her. I know that Miss Taft, she was the one that introduced
Miss Thomas, Dr. Thomas, President Thomas (you didn't say "Doctor," you
said "President"); had a throne-like chair all carved up and everything
and you were ushered in. You had appointments; you knew you were to see
her. She met every student this way. And she had a low chair (not a
stool, really, but a little chair) at her knee. "Would you sit there,
Miss Herring? Oh tell me this," she said, "you're from North Carolina."
And I said, "Yes." "Tell me this: do they have as big families in North
Carolina as they used to have?" And I said, "Well, President Thomas, I'm
the youngest of eleven." "Oh," she says, "This is wonderful!"
When you left Philadelphia, then you came back to North Carolina,
Yes. Well, that's when I made the. . . . Where did you find out about that survey in Kinston?
In the Sociology Department they have a whole file of information about you.
Gosh! I've got to go up there and clear that out!
I wanted to ask you about why you decided to come back to North Carolina.
Well, I didn't have a job there. And, you see, the college had stopped that course six or eight months before; didn't even take in the last group that they accepted.
But did you come back to a specific job?
No. I just came home. I had three brothers here, all married and all had a family, so I just came. I don't know how anybody at those mills in Kinston heard anything about that I had had any personnel experience; but anyway one of the men was a good friend of my brother's, and he found that I was home. So he asked me to come down and talk to him about it. They were having a great deal of turnover (of course everybody was), and having difficulty getting enough workers. They had two mills: a knitting mill and a spinning mill. They decided that there ought to be people in Kinston other than the mill village. Of course, if you lived in a mill house any potential worker was supposed to work for them. Anyhow, he seemed to think that if I'd go around (or somebody'd got around) and tell them something about the work and how long it would take to learn to spin or to knit or whatever. . . .
You were going around within the mill village in Kinston?
No, I didn't have to go there, you see. They worked because they lived in the house. So we chatted about it, and between us we decided that it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to make a sort of a survey in the general area, people of about the same income, you see, as the mill workers. And so I did. And it was really very—he didn't get his money's worth on that, because they just wouldn't work in the cotton mill.
Was it because of pride?
Yes. Cotton mill workers were a stage lower.
What were they doing?
Most anything. Somebody might be a carpenter in the family, or somebody a plumber or something. I don't remember. But anyway, as I say, he didn't get his money's worth out of it.
You couldn't find any workers
But I learned to spin in the process.
You did work in one of his mills?
One of my propositions was that I wanted to know something about what the
work in the mill was. I never got a chance to work on the machines at
Roxford, because I was to set that up. But I had my assistant work on a
machine for some weeks, 'til she could do any—well, she didn't try all
the operations, but two or three different operations—so she'd know what
it was like, and what the machines were like, and what it was to sit
there for the hours and turn off those things, you see. I wanted to
learn some of the processes, so part of my bargain was that I would
learn to spin. And I was taught by a girl (we got to chatting and we got
very friendly). . . . Incidentally, one of the little Polish girls that
I worked with at Remington—
Winchester?
. . . Winchester, we got to be quite good chums. But anyway, this girl and I turned out to be exactly the same age: we had the same birthday the same year. And she had worked in that mill twenty years.
And this was about 1920 or '21, so she was. . . .
This was in 1919.
Yes. Well, she was born in '92, you see. I'd seen children working in mills and all that, and read about it and all, but nothing ever brought it home to me. And I thought that I had traveled to California and came back through Canada and stopped at various places, and I'd been to college (three colleges) and all that, and she'd been in there spinning all that time.
What did that do to your image of workers in general? What did you feel about workers in general before that time, and did that experience change your attitude to them?
Well, I suppose that I knew so little. We knew the cotton mill people there, you know; and they were called . . . what did they call them, "fuzzy heads" or something or other, because of the lint. It was linty in them then and all. I guess I just, like any farmer's daughter, thought a mill was a pretty bad place, you know.
You never had really had any contact, had you, when you were living on your father's farm?
Oh mercy, no, no. I went to high school, and all the people I knew were friends of these people that I lived with, you see, and people that my parents knew in church (some of them, and some others).
Where had most of the mill workers who lived in Kinston come from?
Well, from the countryside. Now you wouldn't find that farther west; they'd come from Virginia. Now when I did personnel work in Spray and all that I'd ask, "Where were you born?" "Pittsylvania County, Pittsylvania County," you know, up in Virginia, most of them—thousands of them.
But most of them from the Kinston area had just come off the land. Were they white tenants on the land then?
Yes, they were all whites. The mill didn't employ any blacks except in—well, I'm sure they had some if they had any dyeing, and probably had them in the early stages of spinning, what they called "breaking" (they loosened up the bales and run it through the first rough processing; that's heavy work, and they nearly always had blacks on that back then).
How did you get the position as the community worker in Greensboro?
I've been trying to remember who told me about that, or who told Mr. Causy about me, since I saw you all had that in there. Where did you get that?
The same place.
I tell you, I've got to go up there and clear their files.
Who was the man who hired you, Mr. Causy?
Causy, C-a-u-s-y. Well, he's dead now. And that mill went into bankruptcy
When you were there, or after?
No, no, a long time after.
What did he hire you to do?
Community work.
Had he ever had a community worker before?
Yes, he'd had one, and she had gotten married or something or
How did these people like Mr. Causy and the man in Kinston react when you said, "I want to learn to spin; I want to learn to weave?"
Oh no, I said, "I want to know what the people are doing." And absolutely, I never had anybody question why I shouldn't do that. I worked some, a little bit, in the mills when I went up to Spray, because I already could spin, you know. And so I'd stop and chat with somebody when I'd go in and interview people. I'd stop and chat with a spinner and I'd say, "Let me spin a little." And so there it would go. I never did weave enough to be good. I couldn't meddle with that; I might have thrown down part of the warp.
What did community work mean? When he hired you as a community worker, what exactly did he want you to do, or what did you do as a community worker in Greensboro?
Anything from visit the sick to have a club of mothers with a county
nurse come in and tell them about the importance of weighing the baby
and so on. I put on a community fair each fall the two falls I was
there. I
And all your work was within the mill village, then?
Yes.
Entirely.
But I refused to be limited to the mill village. As I say, I had this chance to work in the mill a little, so I knew some of them from working there; and then they'd see me at their homes and so on.
How large was the village that went with Pomona Mills?
Well, I don't know, but they employed about, I should say, eight hundred people or so.
Did almost all of them live in the village?
The majority, but not all of them. Some of them, much more than at Kinston, came in. You see, the mill didn't have as bad a name up that far as it did in Kinston.
Did you visit those people who lived in their own homes out from the village?
Not very many of them. I had a boys' club and a girls' club, and I borrowed from the. . . .
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE 1]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
. . . and some kind of a phonograph or noisemaker.
Did you have an active program? Did you have a lot of people eager to work with you? Was it hard to get close to the workers at Pomona?
No, no. Well now, there were a few that I never did get to come, women
who didn't work that I never could get. One, for example. . . . I got
the county nurse to come out once a month, and I'd try to get all the
mothers. I had a women's meeting some afternoon in the week, and had it
about
Well, on the eleventh one. . . .
Thought she already knew something; I think she did.
What did you do at the women's meetings the other weeks?
Well, sometimes I had somebody come and speak about something I thought they'd be interested in or something like that. But most of it was largely socializing, because they didn't do much visiting except to the person next door.
Were these women not working in the mill?
No, they were housewives, you see, that particular group were. Then I had young children from about ten or twelve to fourteen or fifteen; and the other hours and parts of the day I had boys and girls courting age, and that sort of thing. And I even had a boys' group; just boys came one evening. Everybody said I'd have trouble with them, that they'd get into fights, so I was watching out for that. When I began to see any kind of roughness I just sent both the boys downstairs (it was in a big hall upstairs). So I didn't have any trouble with discipline—didn't have half as much as I did in high school at Scotland Neck!
Probably had children too small, babies too small.
Did most of the women in the mill village work, though?
No, not nearly all. I had quite a group: oh, I would say I had thirty or forty that came, and then not nearly all of those that stayed home to keep their babies came.
Was the family wage not in effect at that time, or did the men make enough to support a family? Or did someone else like an older boy or an older girl work?
Well, it might have been that. Of course wages were low; they were lower in the South than they were any other place. But prices also weren't what they are now. Especially if they had two working (and you could tell by the furniture and their dress and everything),
How much control did the mill owner have on your work? I mean, did you have to report to somebody every week or every month about what you were doing?
No. If I decided I wanted to try something else, sometimes I talked to him, and sometimes I talked to the second man because he was so busy. And I was also interested in the inside of the mill, you see, and I didn't forget that. That's when I went out to Dinwiddie in Minneapolis to go to that training on labor problems, particularly foremanship and so on. And by George, I set up a class there and had the foremen one night a week for weeks and weeks, sort of telling them all I'd learned at Minneapolis.
What was that at Minneapolis? What lead you to go to that, and what was
it? Was it a conference, or a series of courses, or exactly what was
Well, it was sort of a gathering of people interested in labor problems. It was under the auspices of something in Washington; I can't remember now. Don't even remember the name of the man, but I know he was very good. And we had a woman who was some sort of labor official in Texas, and a man from Kansas that was evidently something nearing a personnel department in a plant. Had them from all over; there weren't but about thirty or forty, I guess, in it.
Did the head man at the mill send you there, or did he want you to go to this?
Well, I told him
What did they talk about as the most important labor problems?
Oh, you don't expect me to remember that from now, do you?
Well that, you see, goes up and down with the various cycles. They talked a great deal about training. And I know that then when I came back that fall I had a sort of a little seminar with the foremen for weeks and weeks. And they submitted to it; they were just as nice as they could be, you know, and had a grand time.
Well, they were more humane down here. They seemed to know their workers more. And I don't know, maybe it's because they had a village and they had contacts with them for various things. I don't know what the difference would be.
What do you mean more humane?
Well, their workers were people, you see, in these mills, and the superintendents and even the managers knew a lot of them personally.
That wasn't the case in Roxford?
Well, you see, they spread out all over a city and didn't have as much chance to; and usually just one in a family, and that sort of thing—I reckon that would make a deal of difference. But I think they were just friendlier people.
Were there more women in one place than the other?
Well, it depended on the operation. At Roxford, you see, except for the knitting and the dyeing it was mostly women, because it was seaming of one kind or another: putting on buttons or putting buttonholes or sewing up a seam or sewing cuffs on or sewing the collars on the sewing machine. And they were all women, so the majority of the thousand or so that worked in Roxford were women.
How did the employees at both Roxford and Pomona feel about the employers? Was there any difference in the way they viewed the people who owned the mill, who ran the mill?
Well, I don't know whether I could at this distance try to evaluate that.
I think they knew the men; they probably didn't even know the head man
in Roxford at all, because he didn't get out among them. He had one
Well, that again was accident. I was very interested in turnover (there was a great deal of labor turnover then), and trying to make the foremen conscious of how much it was—they just didn't know. I could go from some records there; they had a foremen's council that met once a month.
This was at Pomona?
No, no, this was at Spray. I made up some figures showing them how much turnover, and some of them were perfectly astonished that they'd had that much turnover. And then the superintendent got interested in it, that it was an expensive thing; he hadn't realized it. They just don't know that there's that much coming and going, you know. Of course where they had a village they may go and stay out six months and come back, and they're experienced people so it isn't so bad. But just the same it's still expensive and everything.
Who asked you to come to Spray?
Well, I was just telling you. So I was really doing a little sort of personnel research, just from the records that were already there (it really was not strictly speaking a real personnel department, it was a record-keeping) because they had fourteen mills there in three towns, and people would go from one to the other. And nothing made a foreman madder than for somebody at one of the other mills to take one of his workers, you know.
Who had set up the original record-keeping?
That was set up about a year before, and all that preliminary one from all that were then working had been taken when I got there. But anyway, from some of those records I had been making some studies of it, you see. Some of my best friends in college were two Johnson girls, the sisters of Gerald Johnson—have you ever heard of him?
Oh, certainly.
Well, anyway, he knew Dr. Odum. And I'd been with them a lot of times,
and I would tell him something I was counting up there. And he told Dr.
Odum that I was doing some industrial research there just with the back
of my hand, almost, you know. So I got an invitation from Dr. Odum to
meet him and Gerald Johnson at dinner at the O. Henry. We talked about
whatall (but I didn't know what I went for anyhow: he called me or wrote
me or something or other and said would I have dinner with him and
Gerald Johnson at the O. Henry such-and-such a night, and so I did). So
then he offered me to come; that was when the Institute was starting, in
'24. But I was in the midst of something that I really wanted to see,
sort of, the end of it, and I said, "Well, could I wait a year?" And he
said yes, so I went and waited a
Had you started collecting information about workers and about turnover when you were at Pomona as a community worker?
Yes. And then when I went to Dinwiddie, you see, that's when I started all these things I saw at Dinwiddie, from stuff that I had shown them that they were having this huge turnover.
Right. But how did you go from the work in Greensboro to the work in Spray?
Well, it wasn't hard to drop that walking around the village and visiting the sick, you know.
OK. So they just asked you to come to Spray and be the personnel director?
Yes. They had set it up. And as a matter of fact I didn't hire; I interviewed all the people but I didn't hire them. The foremen and superintendents did that. And the next step later was when they had—they really put it in when they began to have threats of unionism: that's when they put in a full personnel department. But it had just been set up for a year or two when I got there.
I see. Who in the mills at Spray was most interested in collecting this information?
Well, all of them were interested in labor turnover; they were all interested in that, and anything they thought could help to keep track of people and get them back if they could, if they were experienced, you know.
Who was your boss?
The superintendent, Mr. Clark.
I see. Had he been involved in the original establishment of the
Yes. Mr. Hodges had really started it, though—getting down to your generation now, with instant knowledge. No, he went to Dunwiddie (is it Dunwiddie or Dinwiddie? I've forgotten.)
Dunwiddie.
It was Dunwiddie, wasn't it. When I went up to register I had spent the night and had gotten a place to live, and a woman from Texas was just across a gap (a sort of a building, you see). We could see each other: "I'm going to breakfast; come on," you know. We went up to register, and there was this man from Raleigh that had told me about the Dunwiddie course and said he was going, and why didn't I go. And so I did. He was standing there with this best-looking, homeliest good-looking young man I've ever seen in my life. He had a huge funny nose and a great big mouth and thick lips and stubby, you know, and everything—did you ever see Governor Hodges?
I never did.
Haven't you ever seen him?
I never have, no.
Well, he just looked so alert, you know, and all, and he was standing
there with this man (I can't recall his name now) who had brought us
both, really. I didn't know he was going; I didn't know who he was until
he introduced him. And he was the one that. . . . Then this young man
who had gone through that horrible business of interviewing everybody
that was already working, you know (that was already set up). . . . Then
my office also took care of being sure that all the children of a
certain age that worked had certificates; the government sent a person
around to mills to be
Well, when you met Luther Hodges at Dunwiddie was he working at Spray at that time?
Yes.
I see. And then did he leave that next year when you came, or were you there together for a while?
Oh no, he didn't leave until '52; I think it was '52 that he resigned and went to Germany on some—no, it was a little earlier than that, it was after the war.
And the Marshall Plan?
Yes. And who was the man? It was somebody that was important; it was like Averill Harriman, but it wasn't Averill Harriman, that was head of all of this in Europe, when they saw right after the war that they weren't pulling out. The government sent him and this man (I know his name perfectly well, but can't think of it), and asked Luther to come over there and sort of whip some sense and method in the coal side of it. So he spent a while over there. And after that, then of course he became Secretary of Commerce, and after that world chairman of Rotary and so on.
Well, what was he doing
Handyman to the superintendent. He grew up there, and his family had
worked in the mill; I think he had worked in the mill some. Anyhow, he
went to the University of North Carolina, and worked his way through
I see.
I'm curious about this Mr. Clark at Spray. Was he in any way connected
with the Southern Textile Bulletin?
No, no, no; that's a different set of dogs.
OK, fine.
This Clark was a New Englander, and a gentleman if there ever was one. David Clark was my great enemy. When I started working on this stuff at Chapel Hill, on the book of welfare work, you know, he chose that time to begin—no, well. . . .
We have a lot of questions about David Clark for later on
Superintendent Clark at Spray: was he superintendent over all fourteen of the mills?
No, he was superintendent over, let's see, the two in Draper and the
eight (I guess it was) that were in Spray. But he wasn't of the carpet
mill and the bedspread mill that were in Leaksville. Now we kept the
records; they sent us records to keep people from going from one to the
other, you see, because they checked not to be hiring somebody from
another
Did you have any contact with Mr. Mebane?
No, he was before my day. I think he had died before I left. I knew his wife—I mean, well, I met her, but I can't say I knew her. What was the queen over that she got so friendly with, in Europe after the war?
I don't know.
Mrs. Mebane, yes. He's the one who built most of those mills.
NB and MF: Right.
But, you see, and he sold an awful lot to. . . . You knew how Marshall Field got mixed up with it, didn't you?
Yes.
I haven't.
Well, Mr. Mebane built several mills there, and there are two or three
other mills besides his that different families owned. But he was quite
a promoter, and also quite a salesman, because he sold Marshall Field
more goods than he could deliver—and then had to borrow money from them
to
Wasn't it sort of unusual for. . . . You had the title of Personnel Director; was it unusual for a woman to be in that position? Or at this time was it so unusual enough for anyone to be in the position that it was an open field?
Well, I don't know; I didn't think it was. Nobody seemed to think so. A young man who didn't have any training in any kind of personnel at all did the dirty work of interviewing that first business, you see; he was somebody that was just around. I never remember the slightest thing of feeling that a woman ought not to be on that job.
OK. What about your relationship with management and your relationship with workers, as far as being a woman was concerned? Did you have any problems?
Well, I was talking about management; I never heard anything from a worker either. They took me for granted when I came around to interview them.
What was your relationship with the workers? Were you close to them, or not as close as you'd been at Pomona, perhaps?
Oh no, not as close, because, you see, I visited them in their homes there.
Right. But did you have a lot of contact with them?
For instance, some of them I got to know, and a lot of times
So your work was very different, then, than what Mrs. Berryhill did later on. I mean, she said that when she went to Spray she was a social worker, versus what you seem to have been, more like on the management side. Is that accurate?
No, see, I didn't have anything like I did at Pomona out in the village itself. No, just a completely different job.
If you had to describe a typical worker in Spray in the twenties, what would you say? You were saying most of these people were from Virginia?
Yes, in the mountains, and some of them from the northern mountains of North Carolina.
Had most of them been either tenant farmers or mountaineers?
A great many of them had, yes. But, see, tenant farming didn't pay much;
the cotton mill didn't pay a lot, but it did pay more than that. And
like one man said to me—I would ask in this interview "Where did you
work before here? What did you do? How long did you work at that?" to
get some idea of their experience . . . . And they'd use that too, if he
had done a different kind of job he could be transferred on it if they
needed him, you see, with that skill. And one man kept telling me, "I
worked in such-and-such a mill, Washington mill up and so-and-so;" he
mentioned all the way around us, you know. And I said, "Well, you really
have worked in a lot of places." And he said, "Yes. Seeing the world."
And it was about a diameter
Oh, well, they were just so much better. This crowd at Kinston, you see, had been tenant farmers, and they were not too promising people. You could drive through the village; it just looked sort of sodden, you know. No, a lot of those were very alert. And there was one woman, one of my very best friends: she was highly intelligent and one of the best weavers in the mill, and she took a part when we had a fair or some special thing. Although she worked she could find time to help me with all that. And she couldn't read and write—a very intelligent woman.
Well, back to the question about the mountain people: could you tell if someone, maybe, had been raised in the mountains or if their family had been from the mountains?
Well, I don't know that you could just by looking at them; they were all the same kind of general blood.
Did they have any more money, perhaps? Were they more sure of themselves? Did they have closer family ties?
Well, my recollection is that they were just terribly interested in their families, and very distressed when anybody was. That's why when I was in Pomona I had to visit so much; if anybody was sick I just had to go see them.
Did a lot of the people who came to Spray and Leaksville from the mountains go back? Was that one reason for turnover?
No. Like the man that was seeing the world, they'd go somewhere
Did any of the mountain people seem less satisfied with the mill work, perhaps, than if. . .?
Well, you see, I wouldn't know about that, because in the first place I
didn't necessarily know. . . . [Interruption]
How long did most of the workers stay with the company when you were working with the eight mills in Spray and Leaksville?
Well, I didn't work with the ones in Wilson, but I did with the ones at Draper.
Draper I meant; I'm sorry.
Oh, some of them worked there thirty years. Some, oh we had lots, were like the man who was seeing the world. Sometimes the drop would come before we'd get his personnel record typed up and put in file.
Was there a mill village in Spray?
Oh yes, every mill had houses, every one of those mills.
That was a very, very old mill community. Were the houses old as well? Had they been redone?
Well, the ones in. . . .
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
. . . the types of houses, and you were saying that the village in Spray was older, I think, than the one in Draper, that the ones in Draper were newer houses. I was wondering if within the village there was an organized plan of any kind for education of the mill children? Was there at that time?
Well, nearly always, you see, there would be a school located
So most of the children in the village did go to school, at least through grade school? Was there a high school?
Yes. Well, I guess they nearly always, in the bigger ones they had a whole high school—I'm sure they did at Draper. Now in North Spray, where the mills were a little bit farther apart, they may have had to go to the town school away from the village, you know.
Do you remember anything about the impact of drifters in the town? Of people who were not employed, maybe, but were just kind of going through? Were there boarding houses where people could stay?
Well, there would be boarding houses for singles, you see, for just eating and sleeping; and sometimes they roomed at somebody else's house. But we wouldn't have had a drifter. He came and signed up and went to work even, as I say, if his leave card got to me before the hiring card did. Sometimes they didn't stay but a day or two, and decided they didn't like it.
But there wasn't talk about a problem in the town with drifters going through?
I never heard anything about that.
Did you ever hear the term "public work?"
Oh yes.
What did that mean? How did people use that?
They used it mainly if they worked on the roads or some kind of thing like that; mostly, I think, it's the roads.
Did people ever talk about mill work as public work?
No, they'd say the mill.
Right. Were there ever any efforts to organize among the workers when you were at Spray?
No, there wasn't; didn't start until well after I left up there, a pretty
good while before. They didn't get much of that flurry in the early
thirties, when we had such a bad time down here in North Carolina. And,
you know, two people were killed in connection with it: one at a mill up
farther west (I've forgotten what town that was in now), and one at. . .
. No, that one at Charlotte wasn't. . . . Well, I believe there was one
shot in some of it; they had right vigorous organizers, you know. It got
sort of a mobbish spirit and some shooting. And then I went down to the
trial: went the first day and they were getting the jury. And they had
about finished getting the jury, so I thought they'd take a little time
to get the last one. And I didn't break my neck to get over there after
breakfast, and got over there and the courthouse was perfectly deserted.
Now what in the world had happened? They said that when they got that
last one and they were all seated, the sheriff had the bright idea of
having somebody dressed up in the clothes of the man who had been
killed, and motored him down the aisle of the courthouse, as if they
were going to. . . . I don't know whose idea it was to have that kind of
an exhibit. And one of the jurymen went crazy on them right there in the
jurybox, screaming and carrying on; they had to dismiss the jury. So
there was another strike going on at the same time up Morganton way,
or
Was he reporting on the strike for the paper?
Yes. He was going to report on it for the News and
Observer, on that trial, you know.
What was his name?
Oh, what was his name? His son works at Chapel Hill. I just forget people's names.
You left Spray, then, for UNC in 1924 or '25?
'25.
'25. And you said through Gerald Johnson was the person that you met.
Yes. Well, I had known him for years, but he was the one who mentioned me to Dr. Odum. He said, "Well, Harriet Herring's carrying on some of that same kind of stuff up there on that job." So Dr. Odum or Gerald, one or the other, arranged a meeting there in Greensboro. I was working at Pomona, so they had me down to dinner. And that's when Luther Hodges began arranging for me to go up there. But I stayed another year up there before I went down. I was just as glad after I went that I wasn't there at the very first beginnings of it.
Why where you glad about that?
Well, I don't know, it was sort of settled down, and everybody knew there was an Institute and so on, you know—knew what it was.
What was the attraction of the Institute to you? Why did you feel
Well, because I could take some courses. And I took some courses in
sociology (finally!)
Did you plan to get a graduate degree when you went?
Well, I thought when I went that I probably would be getting a. . . . I had a research. . . .
Assistantship or associateship?
Not an associateship, the one below that: assistantship. And the offer was, you see, that these people would take that, and then they would take some courses and do some research and could get their doctor's degree. Well, I didn't have enough of any one thing; I had taken what I wanted, you know, and I'd had history and government and economics and everything else. Well at Harvard, you see, government and economics and history—no, government and economics and what's the other one—the three were together.
Political science?
Yes. And I had taken in that group field; but, you see, they didn't come
together in the others. He came up with a manuscript of the welfare work
and he said, "Now, are you going to get a degree? Because this is a
thesis, and if it goes to the publisher you can't use it." And I said,
"Well, do I have to?" And he said, "Well no, you don't have to."
This was Welfare Work In Mill Villages, your first
manuscript?
Yes
When you got to UNC what was it like to be a student there? Did Odum set out a series of classes for you to take, or were you pretty much on your own?
Very much on your own. I took another economics course with a very lively and very fine young professor that was there; he left not too long after that. And I took two or three courses with Dr. Odum. I took a course in the community with Dr. Steiner, who moved on then to. . . .
Tulane.
. . . Tulane. So I began to fill in some of the gaps that Radcliffe had left me, you see, when I just wandered about among assorted things—you weren't compelled to take any particular group there; the limitations were nothing like they are at most places.
When did you first start teaching?
Not until '35. I think Dr. Odum was tired of my not being on the faculty.
I was going to faculty meetings, though; I was a research associate by
that time. And incidentally, you talk about women there: after the
medical school came, well the whole university was growing, and the
faculty meetings got so big (and we had several people that had to speak
every single time the faculty met, you know). So to sort of slim it down
a little they decided to have each division select its own
representatives, you know; it boiled it down to about a fourth the size,
the number of people. It had grown to be a great big hallful. And then
that division, the Social Sciences Division and the Classics, selected
their own representatives. I've forgotten whether it was every year or
every two years that a list of all the people that were eligible came to
you. And speaking about women, I was elected (I don't know whether, I've
forgotten whether we were elected every year or every two years); I
spent twelve years on the council. When I first started there were very
few women except in Nursing—no, the Nursing School didn't come 'til the
fifties. But education had several—of course we weren't
Once you started teaching in 1935 what was your academic rank? Did you go up any?
No, I was a professor then, a full professor.
I see. And you taught. Did you teach every year from 1935 until the time you retired?
Yes. I had class in the afternoon, and that sort of weeded down people.
The people over in economics, they had personnel stuff too over there.
Well, some of the sociology people took it, but I don't think they
trusted me too much as much of a sociologist. But I got a lot of
students from the economics department that were taking personnel stuff,
you know. I always had class in the afternoon; that would discourage
some, you know, from doing it. But we'd meet for two hours two times a
week, and that sort of helped to cancel it being in the afternoon. One
time during the war. . . . A number of people were away, you see; a lot
of them went—well, some of the younger ones had to go, and some other
ones were called to Washington and all. So Dr. Odum asked me if I minded
teaching at nine o'clock in the morning. We were on a quarter system and
it was the winter quarter, and nine o'clock seemed to come before day,
you know. And I had big classes the next year or two, you know, because
at nine o'clock they'd take it, the ones that wouldn't take it
otherwise. I had several athletes at that time (I always dreaded
athletes)—well, two or three. I had one athlete that was excellent; as a
matter of fact he got some kind of an extra word on his diploma. But I
had one that . . . two of them sat together on the front row, and both
of them at first looked as though they just weren't half awake. Of
course this was
Going back to the Institute again for a little while, I'm really interested in getting your impressions of some people that were there, I imagine at the same time you were, most of them that I mentioned in the list of questions.
In that list? Well now, you've got Thomas Woofter; his name was Jack.
Well, his name was Jack, I know that. His real name was Thomas Jackson Woofter, Jr.
Thomas Jackson?
Right, but he was called Jack; everybody called him Jack Woofter.
Yes, well I thought his name was Jack or John.
No, he was Thomas Jackson.
Well, you have better information on me than I have, so I think you must
be right
But I wondered first of all, since you did work with Odum for a long
time, both first as a student and then as a colleague, what were your
impressions of Odum as a person to work with? And what were your
impressions of
Well I do, because he did so much in such short time; he could do things
so rapidly. And he kept up with all the people in his department; he
would drop in when he'd go to Miss Jocher's office (she was sort of
manager of the office, you see) to talk about different things. He'd
drop by my office, sometimes just walk in and make a remark about what
he was going to do or what he was interested in what I was doing or
something, and turn around and walk right on out. Then a lot of times
he'd sit down and talk. Sometimes he'd make an appointment to see them
in the evenings. I think he kept up with everybody, although he was
always busy writing a book or running off to teach—you know, he'd go for
a semester or two or three times a year. But he knew what was going on
when he was there when he was supposed to. I thought it was remarkable
how well he kept up with it. Well, he read so fast, for one thing: he
was the fastest reader I've ever seen. I remember taking an [rustling of papers]Atlantic Monthly that had an article in it that I thought he
would be interested in reading, and I took it down there to his office.
I had something else to say and I said that, and I said, "Oh, I thought
you might like to read this article;" and I opened it, and he took it.
And he said, "Oh yes," and he began sort of looking at it and turning
the pages. We talked on for, I reckon, three or four minutes (maybe five
minutes), and when I started to leave he handed me the magazine. I said,
"No, I brought it for you to read." "I read it," he said. I said, "You
haven't read it!" He said, "I have;" and, by George, he summarized what
was in that article. He sure did. Of course it had hinges, but it was
just about like this
What kind of a guy was he? Did you study specifically with him for graduate work?
I had two courses with him.
What was he like as a teacher, as an advisor for a student?
Well, he was superb as an advisor (when you went to discuss anything with him, you see) and as a teacher. Sometimes he sort of wandered. I often wondered what graduate students. . . . Sometimes they got sort of befuddled with him, because he would start something and he would assume they could finish it out, you see. And a lot of them needed to have it spelled out the whole thing. Once in a graduate course all of us were graduate students: Mr. Brown (you know, the one who was head of the School of Social Work) was in that class, and Katherine Jocher and several others. Have you met Miss Jocher?
I would like to. So far she hasn't responded to my notes to her, so I'm not really sure if I'm going to have a chance to see her or not. I hope so though.
Well, she was there when it started.
Right; right.
Well, of course she had to retire before I did, because she was a little
older than me, but she could probably tell you an awful lot. Well
anyway, this class, we had just gotten kind of lost; he would talk
along, and it was sort of rambling. I remember Mr. Brown and Katherine
Jocher and one of the others (I've forgotten who it was now), we just
said before class one day, "Well now, we don't understand what this is
Dr. Odum's
Two things that I've noticed that he talks about a lot are regionalism and public welfare, the two terms that he uses all the time when he writes in his letters and all.
Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela?
I'm not sure. [Interruption]
Well, I was asking about Odum using "regionalism" and "public welfare." What did he mean by those two terms? Or what did you feel he meant by that?
Well, I don't know. Regionalism, he certainly felt that the social and historical background of one region gave something to its way of thinking: that's the only thing that I can say. And the South was more identified with its own ideas because of what it had been through, you see. And as far as the other, well of course, he had been an administrator of public welfare, I don't know whether in Atlanta or not, but I think in Philadelphia.
Yes, that's right. He'd done some studies on black school children there.
The reason I ask was that he set up the whole school, the School of
Well, it was so close to the Sociology Department (see, he taught there for quite a while). I guess it finally went over to Mr. Brown and the School of Public Welfare. But I don't know whether the regionalism would have that; I'm sure he always brought that out in his lectures in his regular courses. I can see how he might be puzzling. And I heard at the time, sometimes students would say, "Well, I just don't know what Dr. Odum's saying." Well, I mean, we graduate students, we were grown people and had been grown for years; that time we got sort of puzzled and we just stacked up on him and made him come across.
Did you ever work with Jack Woofter very closely?
Yes, very. I went up to Washington to work for him. He was in charge of
something or other on—what was it?—some studies that were made of
communities: the WPA made a lot of studies. There were three of them on
part-time workers, part-time farming and part-time industry. One was in
the lumber business; I've forgotten what the three were in now. And he
came down there one time on a visit and he said. . . . It had been set
up before he went up there on that. And the group that was to do each
one of those was supposed to put it together and make it a study of
part-time farming in the Southeast, you see, and weave the whole thing
together. And each one of them had such a . . . proprietary feeling
about theirs that it couldn't be combined with the other ones: it just
couldn't be done. And Jack said he wasn't going to have any three little
old studies, you know, and so he came down there and
Olaf Laarson? I don't know.
Oh gosh; you see, I'm just getting so old I can't remember names. Maybe I'll forget my own sometime! But anyway, Jack asked me, "I think before you finish putting it together you might like to confer with him. He really laid out the study and supervised it, I think: he chose the places and everything." And he said, "Wouldn't it be a good idea to let him kind of look over it and talk with him about it?" And I said yes. He was teaching at Cornell that summer, and he said, "I can have him come down here or I can send you up there." And I said, "Well, I haven't ever been to Cornell; I'll just go up to Cornell." So I went up there and had a conference with him, and we got along fine. And I saw that he knew it had to be put together: there couldn't be leaflets on it. Well, the whole thing was about that thick when it got finished. But it was just silly to have such similar situations—of course some worked in sawmills, and some were part-time farmers and mill workers, and I've forgotten what the third was (there were three main industries)—and it would have looked just too botchy, you know, too sparse each one, too sparse or repetitious. So I worked on it all the rest of the summer, putting it together.
Was this in the late thirties or the mid thirties?
1936?
Well, it was getting toward the latter part of the thirties, I think. It was published, though.
Right. I think I've seen it referred to before. Did you know Woofter very well when he taught at UNC and when he was working, like, on the TVA studies and things like that?
I knew him both times, because, you see, I went up there and worked in his office there practically a summer on putting that. . . .
The TVA study?
. . . part-time study together. But I had known him ever since he came to
Chapel Hill, and then his wife both; knew him socially, and we had
offices right next to each other and everything.
I never did, because he passed away in 1972.
I knew he had died, but I didn't know just when.
Right. So I never did; and I've had a hard time finding people who knew him, to find out just what he was like. For example, how did he and Odum get along? I know Odum in his papers praises Woofter for his ability. Did they get along well as co-workers at UNC?
As far as I knew. I don't know anybody in that department that didn't
admire Dr. Odum and follow his leadership, and depend on him for
guidance
No, no I haven't either. I was just wondering, because Woofter, again very few people have said much about him and I just wasn't sure.
Well, he was a very quiet sort of person, except, as I say, when he had
something on his mind he could stand and talk to you 'till your biscuits
burned!
Well, I think they did have right much the same philosophy. They were
certainly very congenial; and both of them admired the other immensely,
I'm sure of that. But I must confess I haven't read enough of. . . .
I've dipped into Rupert's work, but people were writing too many books
around there: I couldn't read all of them. I know they didn't read mine!
Henderson Brown, I think it was.
. . . and I gathered (now I don't want this quoted anywhere, but you can maybe run upon it) he was having some difficulty getting a chance to do graduate work, especially to get any kind of a teaching fellowship or anything. You saw him.
Yes, yes.
Of course it was sort of puzzling looking to think about him. And I'm
sure that they felt if he would work for a PhD what would they do
with
Well no, not really.
Well, I'd known him for several years, dropped by his office and everything, before I finally one time saw the palms of his hands. And there were enormous corns on the palm of each hand where he grasped his crutches, you know, because he had to swing his whole weight right on his hands. I'm sure he probably had corns under his arms too. But he was always so cheerful, and very witty (just as funny as he could be), and a brilliant person. He wrote well, and, not like some of the rest of us, wasn't called off to do all sorts of crazy things as often as the rest of us were.
Why do you think that was? Not just because physically he might not have been able to, but do you think maybe Odum wanted him to do more theoretical work, or what?
No, I think it just was that he couldn't have gone off and done it. Of course he had a car fixed so he could drive it with his hands and didn't have to use his feet. But it was such a struggle to get in and out of the car and everything, I don't reckon it ever occurred to him to send him off to do a field work somewhere, you know. Now, talking about women being in difficulty going around working, a person as badly crippled as he was would have had a very difficult time, don't you think?
True, true. Did you ever have any courses with Eugene Branson?
No, I didn't.
Not at all?
No. He was in his last years when I was there.
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
He was sort of important, you know. A very charming person (had lovely manners), a good old southern gentleman. But he was very southern and very rural; you see, Hunt Hobbs was his disciple and succeeded him, and taught rural sociology right on 'till he died.
Right. Did the rural sociologists and Odum get along? I mean, it seems to me that rural sociology at UNC pretty much kind of went in one direction and Odum went into another.
Well, you see, Branson went there much before Odum ever did. And they didn't have any courses in sociology as such until Odum went there. What's the man who brought him there?
Harry Chase, didn't he?
Yes. He knew him in. . . .
Clark University, I think.
Yes, I think it was at Clark. They hadn't had any sociology; when he
became president, very shortly after that he brought Dr. Odum there. And
he was so dynamic while Mr. what's-his-name was getting slowed up. And
he was a little sort of pompous too, you see. But he and Hunt Hobbs had
big classes in rural sociology. Well one thing, when I first got there
the people in his class would work up a county: he might have two or
three in his class in Lenoir County, and they'd work up a study of
Lenoir County. And most of them were published, you see. And that kind
of kept them going and alive. And of course North Carolina was more
rural fifty years ago than it is now.
Of course you were working in the industrial side. One thing that both of us are interested in is: what happened at UNC about studying the mills? I mean, Odum had Johnson and Woofter doing studies of blacks; he had Arthur Raper doing studies of farm tenancy and the like: lots of rural and racial kinds of studies. And yet when, I guess, you tried to do studies of the mills then there was lots of opposition from mill owners and all kinds of problems.
Yes. David Clark called me "several women," he encountered my trail so often.
Well, he didn't actually refuse, but he didn't think he was the one to do it, because he was labeled as a sociologist, you see. And what I did was get a man in the Economics Department who taught personnel, and we went down.
Who was that?
I can't remember his name. He left the university a few years after that.
Was it Holland Thompson?
No no, Holland Thompson never was there; he taught there in summer school once or twice, and a son of his taught there. Got his degree there, I think, his doctorate degree.
Was it Harry Cassidy?
Well anyway, he was over in Economics and he taught personnel. If Dr.
Odum said absolutely to me that he wouldn't want to be the one to ask
about it, he said it so gently that he must have said, "Get somebody in
economics that was doing personnel," because I didn't even realize I'd
been rebuffed. At that time labor turnover was really a problem in
mills: they just came and went, you know. I knew of a study, a
cooperative between a university (I've forgotten what school it was now;
some friends of mine were there) and the mills. The mills would report
to them the people employed and the people that had left and everything
(the total turnover), and then they would compare theirs with each
other, you know. So this man and I (maybe his name will come to me when
I keep saying things around him), we talked it over and decided that we
would suggest a similar thing in the Institute, if we could get a dozen
(we didn't want all the mills, but just some representative ones) mills
to cooperate on that. Of course it would be an awful nuisance to them to
report to us both of those all the time, but we could set it up so that
it would be very simple for them to. He and I went down, and I talked to
Mr. Clark at Spray, who had been my boss and seemed to like me all right
and didn't think that I had turned rabid or something or other just
because I'd gone to a university. Well Luther Hodges, you see, was a
product of the university too, and by that time he was counting on him
quite heavily as his assistant. So I talked to him about it, and
suggested that at the meeting that we were going down there and tell the
Association, the North Carolina Textile Association about it and see if
we could get some volunteers to cooperate with us on it. And he agreed
that he would. Of course this professor and I weren't allowed to go to
the meeting at all; we asked if we could. I knew the president,
Why was he so upset with Frank Graham?
Oh, he was too liberal. What's the next word after liberal?
Radical?
Radical. He was radical; yes, they applied that word to him. He did make
acknowledgement in an editorial after that meeting at Charlotte that the
university, some of the people at the university had suggested making a
study, but we think we don't want anything mixed up with anything as
radical as the university, you see. So he warned the faithful against
giving any information at all. Then when I started going around getting
information I changed subject on him, you know. I think that sort of
puzzled him; he didn't say anything for a while. But finally he had an
editorial saying that there was a woman from the university going around
getting information, and he sort
Did your friend and old boss Mr. Clark ever bring up your proposal at the meeting?
Well, I don't know who presented it.
It was presented though?
Yes, it was presented, and Mr. Clark told me that he (my Mr. Clark, not
Textile Bulletin's Mr. Clark). . . . My Mr. Clark
was a New Englander that came down here for Marshall Field. His father
was on the Supreme Court in North Carolina, and was considered one of
the most liberal judges of his time on the Supreme Court. Wasn't that
funny?
Yes. When your Mr. Clark from Spray presented the proposal, did he say anything about the way the manufacturers themselves reacted to it?
Well no, I never got any real detailed report on that. I just got a report that they thanked us for the suggestion, but thought it wasn't practical to try to do it. It was very polite and very nice, and very cool.
What did you think about David Clark? How did you react to him?
Well, I never saw him very many times. I read his magazine every week; at least I read his editorials, and that was enough for me.
People seemed to have taken him seriously.
Well, the mill men did.
Why do you think they did?
Oh, because he was a very forceful writer on things concerning the mills,
looking out for their interests: that's why. He didn't want them
pestered. No, he was all right
I know one time Paul Blanchard tried to get some kind of a study going. There was a meeting in Greensboro and other things where he invited Odum to work with him on some kind of study of the mills. This is later on, I think, in '37 or '38.
Paul Blanchard, of course, rings a bell all right, but I can't hook it up with anything connected with us. Maybe he did with Dr. Odum, but I can't remember Dr. Odum saying anything. I might have, but I've forgotten it. It didn't make enough impression to last this long.
OK, fine, fine. Because there was just a mention in the correspondence at one point about this. Blanchard was from, I guess, outside of North Carolina and was going to try to do something, and Odum didn't like it very much.
Well, Dr. Odum probably realized that his name would be enough to queer a thing, you see.
Odum's name would be?
No, no, Blanchard's. Well, pretty soon Dr. Odum's would have gotten to be if he'd done that, you see.
What was Dr. Odum's relationship with Frank Graham at this time?
Oh, all right.
I mean, David Clark seemed to have been onto Frank Graham, as far
Well, he was already on him before he ever got on Dr. Odum and me—and
"several women"
I just wondered: did Dr. Odum and Frank Graham see pretty much eye to eye as far as what should be done in the textile industry, or feelings about manufacturers or how to deal with them?
Well, I don't know. I hate to say what Dr. Odum felt about it. I would
think, knowing him as well as I did, that he would say that Frank's
flat-out speeches irritated them so that it didn't do much good, you
know. One thing: there was a strike up there in the hosiery mills in
High Point, and Frank had been making speeches around that labor should
be allowed to unionize if they wanted to. Well, that was a bad sentence;
that was bad language right there, you see. Then when this strike
happened they climbed the fence (some of them climbed the fence) of the
mill (it was a hosiery mill in High Point)—gosh, when have I ever
thought of all this mess? Anyhow, they got in there and got in the mill
and began talking to the people, you see, about that they were
organizers. They hadn't been able to get too much response getting them
in their homes or in the streets or the drugstore or somewhere. And I
think that my recollection is that they had the police and got them out
and so on, and arrested the ones who climbed the fence. Frank was down
at. . . . He knew this organizer. He was a North Carolinian, he wasn't a
"foreigner"—if you could just say he was from up North or somewhere
else, you know, you would damn him right away. So Frank was down at the
beach, and all he knew about it was what he saw in the paper. He sent up
a telegram to this fellow that had been put in jail for climbing the
fence and taking two or three of them in with him, and he said, "I'm
sure you've done nothing wrong."Textile Bulletin for me. And Frank would come by every once in
a while, and I showed him
What was your own opinion of Frank Graham's outspoken nature?
Well, I just think that he honestly felt that way about it, and he was just going to. . . . One of his first speeches on the labor situation—they were just beginning to have some efforts at organization. . . . The first one was a mill up at Mocksville—not Mocksville; what's the other town up there?
Statesville.
No, along the Virginia border.
Reidsville?
Danville?
No, not that far; it's in North Carolina. Anyhow, it wasn't Oxford, but it was somewhere along that area.
Henderson, Yanceyville.
It may have been Henderson.
Henderson in 1927, I think.
Well anyway, a union tried to get formed there, and of course it was a
little early for it and it didn't get very far. And the mill just
squashed it, you know. And I went up there and talked to managers, and I
spotted one or two workers and talked to them on the street (picked them
up and talked to them a little about it). And I wrote a little article,
and it was in the Survey.
Oh yes, yes.
That helped to make them mad with me, you see; my name on it didn't help
any when David Clark saw that I was suggesting this study. (That name, I
thought when I approached it unsuspecting it was going to come out, but
I'd forgotten what it was: that professor in economics, in personnel
work, that I worked with.) I sat on my doorstep and was able to go
around to the back of the house for several days, as long as the
reporters stayed inside.
Textile Bulletin were in formulating the Institute's future as
far as research in industrial relations and working conditions and labor
problems was concerned.
Well, it didn't do any good because, you see, they really weren't organized firmly enough.
The Institute, you mean?
No, I mean the workers couldn't be organized firmly enough. Now those in this other town up there that I keep calling Morgantown, but it isn't Morgantown. . . .
Marion?
No, that's not it; it's something in that area, though. It was sort of a bad strike, and I think somebody was shot. I don't think he was killed (somebody was killed in Gastonia) but there was some shooting and hard feeling. If you want to look up the articles (if you can get the dates of them), I have millions of clippings from newspapers on file. Do you know anything about them?
Yes. A lot of people have used those.
Have they?
Right. Did you just collect those during this whole period?
For quite a long time. I had a tenured little man that had to be given
work by whatever was giving unemployed people work. He was a graduate of
the university, and wore his Phi Beta Kappa key here so nice and
He cut out all those clippings?
Well, I had begun already to do a lot of it, and then I had him. When I
got him full-time (well, the full-time that he was allowed to work each
week; he was just allowed to work a certain number of days a week)
No, they're used very frequently.
Well, I'm glad somebody's using them. A man from Louisiana came here and
used them one time. He was writing on something about the attitude
toward them. And he came over, and he was astonished that there were so
many papers that had had editorials favoring unionism and the right of
the union. He said that he hadn't found that anywhere else, that it just
sounded as though the
Was there any other effort after you tried to do mill studies for the Institute, was there any effort made to do studies like that (like in the thirties)? Did anybody else try to follow up what you were doing?
No, I don't think so. Well then, you see, in the forties I did that study on the sale of them. And then just about the time I retired two students, two graduate students, came in, and they were talking about making another study of what the state of them was now. I said, "Well, it ought to be done, to see whether they have become part of the town or not." I said, "Now, it's been plenty of time, because most of the sales started just before the war started." And then they stopped, but right after the war they were very fast. And that's when I made my study, in the middle of the last half of the forties. And I said, "It's quite time to see if they are still just a neighborhood and are not part of the town." But I never did get anybody started on it.
I was wondering if at the time you were doing your early work, you felt
that the research you really wanted to do (for instance labor
turnover
Well, of course I was disappointed at the time, but there would have been an awful lot of pure routine, you know, doing it. If you had had, say, twenty mills that sent in their turnover (all that left and all that didn't and everything, you know), over a period of years it would have been a very tiresome job. It would have been revealing, and I think would have. . . . I know right there at Spray when I began sending them around to the superintendents (I sent around a report every, I don't know, two or three months or something; of course I turned it in to Mr. Clark all the time, what the turnover in the different mills was, and even sometimes broke it down by departments), the superintendents were very interested in that. And I think maybe it might have done some good, to sort of urge them to. . . . You see, the foremen or the superintendents did the hiring, and they should have sorted them a little better. But we didn't ever get anywhere with it, and of course it would have been a big routine work. I'd have had to have somebody who did nothing but that with that many mills; every day there'd be some.
Didn't you at one time propose to do some work with J.J. Rhyne?
No. He had about finished his study.
You never thought of doing work together on the lives of mill workers or anything like that?
No, no. He was interested sort of on the side, because he grew up in a mill town. He was working on his doctor's dissertation, and had a good deal of his material when I got there.
I see. What did you think about his book when it came out?
Well, to tell you the honest truth I never read it, because I had talked
to him so much about it I felt I already knew it.
Did you feel he was doing good solid work though?
Well, I thought it was solid enough, but he was not a very brilliant . .
. didn't make his case when talking to you. I just don't remember much
about it; didn't sound like a very exciting thing to me. And
Manning Hall?
No, Manning used to be the law one. This place is west.
Murphy? That's the one that faces Saunders.
No, Saunders is the one. No, we had a big room there the first year I was there, and a lot of desks. The Johnsons were here and I was here, and Rhyne was here in the corner. And we talked about it all the time, both of us mill hands, you see. So I felt I knew enough about it.
I wondered what the response was to your own book, Welfare
Work in Mill Villages, when it came out? How did people within
the university respond to it?
Well, I don't think many people in the university bothered
I don't think he ever said anything about it; I can't remember that he did. I believe I would have remembered it if he had.
What about other manufacturers?
Well, one or two that had been particularly helpful I had them send copies, and they wrote me nice letters about it. I think Mr. Cone, Bernard Cone, didn't think much of it. I ran into him afterwards, and I didn't make the mill village good enough, you see, to suit him. That's the only one I remember that ever spoke to me about it.
What about organized labor? Did anyone in organized labor respond to it?
I can't remember that any did. And I didn't see any because, you see,
after that flurry of organization in the thirties, when the killing at
whatever this other town is that I can't remember and the man dying in
the jury box when this spectre came in, it died down for quite a while.
Then when it came back it was on a little more solid ground. As far as
that's concerned, Marshall Field mills (they still belonged to Marshall
Field then), they opposed the union as hard as they could. As a matter
of fact they had some sort of a hearing up there. I like a nut was
always going wherever anything was happening about the mills, you know,
and I pulled up there as hard as I could. I can't remember his name, one
of the main people from the Labor Department was there and was going to
testify. And they put him on the stand,
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
. . . '29, did you anticipate any reaction like that from the workers, from your work?
No, I was surprised, I really was. Well, you see, the first one was that
one in that town up there. Maybe it was Henderson; I believe it was
Henderson, that one that I wrote up in Survey. And
that was isolated for a long time. And then they began down around
Gastonia and up at this town west of Gastonia.
Why did you go to Gastonia? What were you looking for? Were you just interested in observing, or were you really hoping that the workers would be able to form permanent unions?
Well, I was hoping if they knew enough about it and were going to make a try that they knew what they were doing, because they were going to have a hard time. And they'd have to stand up and be counted.
Did you think they did know what they were doing at the time?
Well, I think they realized that they needed some help on their side, because their wages weren't. . . . Of course it was during the Depression; I guess wages had gone down. See, I wasn't in the mills then, and I didn't know what had happened exactly to wages. But I'm sure they must have gone down in the early thirties, and they hadn't been any too high to begin with, you see.
What were you hoping would be the outcome of the strike?
Well, I just hoped nobody'd get killed: that was the main thing.
Well yes, I think some of them did. When you come right down to it, I think the Marshall Field ones did. To get to the place that they had to have a hearing shows that they were doing everything they could to it. Once they gave over to it. . . . I went up there a year or two after; everything was peaceful and they said they were glad they had it.
Had the union?
Yes. Said they didn't have to discipline them anymore: if people were
absent too much they'd just tell the union they had to get their folks
in
I know that in a lot of your writings you spoke of, for instance, the positive side of workers owning their own houses. Did you sort of view unionization in the same sort of way, sort of the positive side of self-government?
Well, I felt that they were so helpless in a not-too-skilled industry and
naturally not a high wage industry that they had to have some protection
besides just good will, because every mill management didn't have good
will, you see. I had one young man that made me so mad I didn't know
And I said, "Besides, I've done so much of this I could sit down, I could go out there and sit in my car and write down everything we said." Well, he looked a little abashed, but he took the papers.
Did you have any relationship with people who were involved in
No, I never did know any that . . . well, I knew some that were sort of professional organizers, but more the people—what were the people that had some meetings up in the mountains on trying to educate the workers to it? Can't think of those people's names.
The Southern Summer School for Women Workers?
Yes. They were trying to; I mean, that was a missionary work with them, you see. And I knew them very well. Some of them came by to see me right often, and I kept in touch with them. Went to one of their meetings; took Luther Hodges to one of them, as a matter of fact.
Well, don't put this in it
No, he and I had gone up there. The textile industry always had a summer meeting up there at Blue Ridge.
The textile industry?
Yes. A lot of people would come and speak, and it was a general revival kind of a thing, you know. At the same time—what was that woman's name? She was a good friend of mine.
Who was with the Southern Summer School?
Yes.
Louise McLaren? Was that the one?
Yes. Do you remember another name?
Louise Leonard McLaren?
I remember one was named Louise; her first name was Louise.
Lois MacDonald?
Lois MacDonald; she came by Chapel Hill to see me very often, and I went
up there. Now that's the one I took Luther to. They were having a spree
of meetings at the same time this was down at Blue Ridge. So we went up
there. He said, "We'll have to go in your car." He had gone up and taken
several foremen or managers or something in the big company car this
long, you know. I said, "All right, we'll go in my Ford." We went up
there, and I introduced him—just introduced him by his name; I didn't
say where he was from. I said that I was over at the meeting at Blue
Ridge, and she knew about that, so she probably assumed that it was
somebody in the mill. And we listened to the speeches and talked to her,
and talked to two or three of the people. And then we came home; and the
only time I ever hollered in a car in my life was coming back. They
closed the gates there at 9:30 or 10:30 or something or other at Blue
Ridge (you know, that thing that all sorts of organizations go to). And
we knew we had to get back (we hadn't warned them that we weren't
coming), so he was making time. And the curve didn't ever stop, you
know; it just kept right on being curved. The only time I ever hollered
in a car I said, "Luther!" And just then a road appeared right there off
from this circle, and he rode down the road.
What did he think about going to the. . . ?
Well, he didn't want to be identified. I introduced him and told her who he was. I introduced him by his name, but I didn't say he's with Marshall Field mills.
What did he think about what they were doing, though?
Well, I think he thought they were probably getting up false hopes. I
don't know, I shouldn't say what he thought. I know he wasn't too
What basically were they trying to do?
Well, organization, and organization meant strength, you see. That's all I know.
But, I mean, were they working closely with the unions?
Well, they had the backing of the unions. They usually had some union organizers that went along behind them or ahead of them or something. I know they had organizers, because they were prepared to organize any group that wanted to try it, you know.
Their title was "for Women Workers." Were they working primarily with girls at textile mills?
Well, wasn't it under the YWCA somewhat?
I think most of the instructors. . . .
I think it was. I think that's the reason it was women, it specified women.
What did you think about both of those women: Louise McLaren and Lois MacDonald?
Well I liked Lois very well; I saw a good deal of her. The other one, I just knew her but I didn't know her as well. I thought she just had missionary spirit, you know.
Lois did, Lois MacDonald?
Yes. Did you ever know her?
Yes, I met her one time.
She's like me; she's getting kind of old too, isn't she?
Yes. Southern Mill Hills? It came out the same year as
yours, I believe.
I read it. But, I mean, there were so many things (articles and things) coming out then, including mine, I couldn't keep up; I can't keep them differentiated.
Did you think of her as an academic colleague, that she was in basically the same kind of study that you were, doing the same kind of academic work?
No, I thought she was doing missionary work; her whole spirit was missionary. I wasn't missionary-ing!
Not from outsiders coming in to try to do it on almost a semireligious thing, you see, because the owners just had the upper hand so completely without having to express it. He had the job; and if you'd get a bad name as agitator you couldn't get a job somewhere else. So I thought that they probably got people in unhappy situations unnecessarily.
Did you ever talk to Lois MacDonald about her work? Did she ever ask you anything?
Well, we never went into it in great detail, because we just would refer to it. She'd tell me where she'd been and where she'd been having meetings. No, I can't remember. I know she had right much missionary spirit about it. But I wasn't missionary-ing, and so I was just getting information from her to try to see what the situation was.
Were you ever tempted to do that kind of work yourself?
No, I never have been a missionary.
Well, there's always been some people in North Carolina that criticize the university, just like there are more that think it's holy land, you know.
Which side do you think most people in the state were on? I mean, ministers attacked Odum at one time about the evolution issue, and Clark attacked Odum. Did North Carolina not like the university in the twenties, and did they like it better later on? Or was it always kind of a negative. . .?
Well, I think it's always been under criticism, all its whole time. Before the Civil War it was criticized. And I think it's perfectly natural for it to be; I think it's unnatural for it to be just so praised all the time and no criticism.
Did that bother Odum?
No.
It didn't bother him?
I don't know that it did. I guess he just took it as part of the day's work. They never did get on him nearly as hard as they did Frank Graham anyhow. Have you seen any indication that it was comparable?
No, except for the fact that in Odum's letters oftentimes he refers to it
in some degree of frustration, because I think he wanted UNC to be
much
Oh, some of these times when my door would be open he'd come in; he'd say "Clark's on me again" and go out, you know. That would be about the end of it. I don't think it really worried him; it may have. He looked tough, but he was a very sensitive person.
I had another question too, I guess going on later into the thirties and even the forties. And that is: Odum's whole desire to plan things (in other words you had the North Carolina Planning Board, you had his efforts to start the Southern Regional Council and things like this), how closely were you in touch with his efforts to do that?
Well, only just little snatches, you see. I wouldn't know the whole program particularly, unless it was something like an organization that did develop and so on. I might know something about that as it began operating. He didn't discuss them in great detail with us.
Were you involved, for example, with the North Carolina Planning Board?
No.
Not at all?
Well, now I worked for a while for—what was that man's name that was the ambassador to Columbia in South America? That might have been planning. That's the one that I did that study of industries in.
I don't know the man's name, but in 1944 you did a pamphlet for them that had a lot of pictures.
Percentages of things, and there was black and red and so on.
Right. But there was also a pamphlet with photographs talking
For manufacturers, yes.
For manufacturers.
Well that's the one. I really can't even recall the name of the man; I
know he was ambassador to Columbia. He was the editor of a paper in High
Point for years, and I'd known him for years. His organization was very
eager to get new industries started. He got me all steamed up about it,
and I did that little do-dad on what we had raw materials for, you see.
We had a very good man who would make those charts, you know (circled
percentages and so on). When he was making them he didn't have any black
stuff, and so he had red and he put red there, because he knew that it
would photograph black. He brought it in to me and he said that these
circles that he was doing percentages on, the Institute didn't happen to
have any and that would hold him up, and he'd just use red and it would
photograph black. I told (the name nearly came then, and I can't say it)
when I took it over to him to be printed. I told him that; I said, "Now
this red will turn black; that's the most intense, that's the highest
percentage." The figure was there beside it to say 57 percent, and 32
down here would be gray and so on, you know. I thought he understood
that. And I went over to see the proof of it, and by george, they'd done
it in color. The silliest thing that ever was in the world, all those
little red. . . . Of course it was always the top one, but it looked
sort of silly to have them. . . . They should have been red, solid red,
and diced-up red and striped red and pale red, you see
What about things like: did you ever try to join or get interested in the
Southern Conference for Human Welfare or Southern Regional Council at
No, I'm not much of a joiner. I had some relations. . . . I've kind of forgotten all about that now; I don't know when I've ever thought of that organization. Tell me a little more about it to remind me.
The Southern Conference?
Yes.
Well, the Southern Conference started in 1938 under Frank Graham and Virginia Durr of Alabama and a number of people. It did not include Odum. Odum did not get involved; Will Alexander did not get involved. And I'm not really sure why. I don't know whether you remember anything about Odum talking about the organization, or anybody else at UNC. They met at Birmingham in 1938, I believe—wasn't that right?
What were they trying to do?
Well, it was basically an interracial organization trying to carry on the Commission on Interracial Cooperation much further in terms of obtaining integration.
Well, if it was interracial I wouldn't have bothered with that anyhow. He
wouldn't have told me about that particularly, because I didn't work in
that field at all. All I knew was just that I grew up with blacks and
all sorts of
Why do you think you never got interested in interracial work or interracial studies?
Well because I got interested in industry, and that was interesting
That's the only time. . . . No, that wasn't just after the war. You see,
the big mass of the selling came after the war, and so by the early
fifties I reckon nine-tenths of the plants had sold their houses. You
could hardly find one that they were still around. Calloways still ran
theirs for quite a while before they sold them, but they finally sold
them. They had a whole bunch of mills down toward Columbus, Georgia, you
know. But the game was over then. And the trouble was that so many of
them were enough isolated that they weren't big enough for a town for
themselves; and they weren't quite close enough for the town to grab out
and get them, because the mill would try to keep itself (the mill
itself) from being included, you know, to avoid town taxes. I was afraid
at the time. . . . That's when those two boys (I can't remember who they
were now), I know two of them came in and talked to me about it. It was
in the early sixties, because it was not long before I retired. And I
said, "I wish you would do it, because it's time now to see if. . . ."
Because that was one thing that I asked, tried to find out in every
place when I went in the forties (late forties) after so many sales:
"Now what's going to happen to you? Are you just going to be a little
blob of people sitting out there in the country on the edge of town, or
is it going to be. . . ?" A good many of them had been taken into town.
Some had been taken in before, indidentally,
There was another woman at UNC at the Institute for a while, Margery Potland.
No, she never was in the Institute.
Did you know anything about her work? Was she connected with the university?
No, I don't think she was ever connected with the university. Wasn't she associated with Lois MacDonald and those?
No. I thought she had been at. . . .
What's the name of some of her studies?
People of the Piedmont was a book that she did.
That sort of vaguely rings a bell, but I don't know much about it.
I thought she had been at the Institute for a while.
No, she never was with the university.
Did you ever have much connection with Margaret Hagood?
Oh yes, she was in the Institute with me, but we didn't work in the same
field. She was a statistics specialist and went to Washington and
Because she wrote a book called Mothers of the South;
it seems to me that didn't she have at least some mill people in
that?
They were tenant farmers' wives.
Were they tenant farmers?
I don't even remember it.
OK. She's another person that has been a little bit hard to locate information about. I don't know: is she still living, or not?
No, she died. Her daughter married and went to Israel; married a Jewish person and went to Israel as a young woman. Her mother went over to see her after she was in Israel; but I've lost track of her entirely now. She died not too awfully long after that daughter married and settled in Israel. I saw her once in Washington when I was up there. She was working (I've forgotten what department).
She was working for, I believe, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. Arthur Raper worked with her for a while on some studies.
Well I lost track of what Arthur Raper was doing.
Did you know him very much in the Institute?
Well, I only knew him as one of the graduate students that was getting his PhD degree. And I was a little surprised at your having his name in the letter and then in that list and all. What's he been doing all this time that I didn't know anything about all these things?
Well, of course he worked for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta for a long time.
Oh, that's right, he was interracial.
And then eventually he went to work on the Carnegie study, the
Now that you mention that agricultural redevelopment, I have a vague recollection of hearing something about that. But I knew him as just one more of the graduate students that were around; you know, there were always a crop of them. And I knew him pretty well, but I didn't know what he had turned into doing.
One other person that I think both of us are interested in is especially Guion Johnson. She, of course, was married to Guy Johnson. They were both fellows at the Institute. And then in the nineteen thirties I guess she was, during the Depression, was she fired? I'm not really sure exactly the situation with her, whether she was fired or whether she quit from the university.
I think she quit. She had a couple of children close along there. Then she got interested in various women's organizations and activities and didn't do research anymore.
How well did you know her during your time at Chapel Hill?
Oh very well indeed. They had the office together. Well, I told you, you
know, back over there the first year I was there here was Rhyne and here
was me, and here was Guy and here was Guion across the back end of that
room we were in. Then when we went to the university we were in
adjoining rooms; they were together in one and I was in the next one.
And I was dropping in or they were dropping in. Guy and I had more
common interests and saw each other more often in the office at least,
because we had things
She left sociology and went to the history department, didn't she?
Well, she taught in the university during the war. They got so short, you see, that even though she was the wife of a professor in sociology (which was not looked upon very well, you see: they don't employ a wife and husband at the University of North Carolina very much). . . .
I was wondering about that. Did you have any feeling that married women were treated differently from single women?
Well wives certainly were. Now, for instance, in the English department a friend of mine who was the most brilliant of her generation in her final examination and her work and all, she got a PhD in English and couldn't get a job at the university because her husband worked in the French department and was a full professor in the French department. And she didn't get a whack at the game until the shortage during the war. And then they brought her in and she taught for a while. Then she taught some over at the Negro college, in what is now University of North Carolina-D (Durham).
What did you think about that policy? Did you think it was fair?
Now they apparently abandoned it in the Nursing School, the School of Public Health and. . . . But there were three over there in the health stuff that had them. But it was very unusual for a husband and wife both to be teaching in the university, yes.
Did you ever get the impression that it was hard on your friend in the English department, or hard on Guion Johnson to have that rule operating on them?
Well, I suppose it was. But they knew it when they took their degrees and planned to stay there, that it had been a long-established policy. So they knew what they were getting into. And I don't know that they do go by that as much now as they did, because enough breaking over over in the whole health thing, you see, would bring it around some; I'm sure it does.
I wanted to ask you about one other group that I think you were involved with, the North Carolina Conference for Social Work.
Social Service.
Social Service, sorry.
Well I was secretary of it for two or three years. [Interruption]
Who was president of it?
I can't remember his name. I didn't like him nohow; you just couldn't get anything out of him. And I knew that they were thinking I was terrible, you know.
Was this in the nineteen twenties or the nineteen thirties?
Yes, it must have been in the late twenties. So finally, though, he buckled up and called. . . .
[END OF TAPE 4, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 4, SIDE B]
. . . could stay on during Frank Graham's. . . . Frank Graham was president two years, and I stayed on with him. And lord, he had meetings all over. He set up committees and had meetings to do this and that and all. Was going to solve all the social problems of the state, you know. We went to meetings all from Charlotte to Oxford. I don't think we did any better than they did under that other man whose name I can't remember at the minute.
What was the overall purpose of the organization? How did it get started?
I don't know. It was quite old; it had been going on for quite a long time. Have you read anything about it?
Just a little bit.
Just a little.
It was quite active. It seems to have disappeared. Then Miss Gertrude Weaver succeeded me as secretary, and she was secretary for two or three years. And it stayed on alive for a good little while after that. But it was just general social problems and things that North Carolina was weak in, and things that needed to be done and so on.
You said the directors were called. Who were these directors who came? You said the directors came in for a meeting; who were the directors?
Well, they were prominent people all over the state.
Was it still going at the time of the New Deal?
Yes, I'm sure it was going in the thirties, because Miss Weaver was secretary during the thirties. It was just a sort of a rallying the problems of North Carolina, and what ought to be done about them.
But it didn't have any particular goal?
Well, it had no program of action particularly, but it usually attracted
a right good crowd and fairly prominent people (people social minded and
interested). I don't know that it ever stirred up the dust a great
deal,
I had a question when you mentioned the New Deal, and that was: I know Rupert Vance and some other people were very, very enthusiastic about Roosevelt and the New Deal. What was your opinion of the New Deal and its approach to the South, southern industry and other southern problems? What did you think about FDR's approach? What was your reaction to it?
Well, I don't know what you mean by his approach.
Well, his idea of setting up all these national organizations, the National Recovery Administration, Agricultural Adjustment Administration, to deal with problems on a national scale.
Well, I suppose they did awaken some people, and maybe it's better than having somebody that doesn't do much of anything (like Mr. Ford). I guess it stirred up the people a little.
But do you remember, for example, when Roosevelt was elected in 1933, do you remember what your own feelings were about him being president? I mean, did you have any feelings one way or another about the kinds of things that he was doing?
Well, I was enthusiastic about him, enough to feel that he would get things done; and I think he did. Well, you see, I worked on two or three things there that were part of it: that business of setting up committees to hire people for these jobs. Mr. Ford is just getting around to getting some of them; Roosevelt started them right at once.
You worked for the U.S. Employment Service in Raleigh (that was a part of that) one summer in 1933, I think, which was right after Roosevelt came in.
Yes, it must have been that year.
You apparently worked as a field worker in county offices. Do you remember much about that summer, what kind of work you did?
Well what I did, you see: they were going to set up work to put people to
work (I mean roads or ditches or clearing roadsides that were too tight
and so on). And they had to have some sort of hiring, because there were
no employment offices, you see. (I thought that man's name that I did
the pamphlet for was going to come then, but it didn't.) Anyhow, he was
in charge of that, and he got me to do the field work for the middle
section of North Carolina. And somebody who lived in High Point (he used
to be the editor of a newspaper in High Point) he thought would be good
for the western part, and he got somebody for the eastern part. Although
it was a Democratic president's initiative, still I was abjured to get a
Republican or two on the committees, you know. Well, I just never had
messed with politics except to go to caucus meetings, and was county
vice-chairman for years and years and went to the Democratic convention
one time (over a nice, fat fellow who wanted very much to go, but I beat
him out to go to it). So anyway, my political activity was just sort of
a side issue of fun, you know, and interested in going to that. And when
they told me about that I said, "Well, I just don't believe I'll know a
Republican when I see him. How am I going to find proper Republicans in
these counties?" You've got to set up a committee of four or five
people, and they've got to be scattered in the county. And that's when I
began to smoke cigarettes so often, I was so unhappy. When I would leave
one place and had gotten a Republican, now was that Republican going to.
. . ? I went to the courthouse first and talked to two or three people
there; and I assumed that the courthouse had some democrats in it. I'd
ask them to tell me a Republican or two that would be suitable or would
be acceptable, be some
Did they set those up? Did you ever do that?
Yes, they finally did. No, not in every county, I'm sure, but they did, because he had a lot of work going on on roads and bridges and all that sort of thing.
You never did any of the actual hiring?
No, no, I was setting up through this middle section of the state: from the Virginia line to the South Carolina line, a band like that. I'd leave one and then have to go see another one. And I'd wonder if he was the right one, and I'd smoke another cigarette, you know. I was just as fidgety about it as I could be. And I finally got them; and all of us together, the three of us, I reckon, set up committees all over. I never did hear how effective they were; I think that probably in some counties they really didn't have projects big enough to take care of them. But that would be inevitable anyhow, because it was just like it is now: there were so many unemployed that you just couldn't have provided enough, you know, in a short time to put everybody to work.
Were these committee members to receive any kind of pay for their work? It was voluntary?
Oh no, that was because they were prominent citizens, their duty.
Other than starting you to smoke
Oh no, it wasn't going to employ anybody in industry, except if a man couldn't get a job in industry and he was unemployed, he'd get a job chopping things away from the edge of the road, you know. I mean, it was down to that, because unemployment was a lot worse than it is now, you see.
What about the NIRA, the National Industrial Recovery Act? Did you feel that that would answer some of the problems in industry, and would
Well, that was pretty complicated. I went to Washington and sat around for two or three days and watched them talking about that. And it never did seem to me that it had, and it never did have, a great many useful results, as far as I could make out. But I know they took up the textile industry first; and so I just sat there for about a week and listened to them yammer about it. I guess it did some good; I don't know. I reckon motion helped some; made them feel better.
I was just going to ask about the New Deal, if you were ever offered a permanent job. Did you ever have a chance to work in Washington permanently? Did they ever offer you a job in any way?
No. The only Washington work I ever did was when Jack Woofter wanted me to consolidate those three studies into one. I went up and stayed a week, and talked to the people that had worked on it, and then came back to Chapel Hill and wrote it. I took it up to him, and then went to see this professor. I just spent the summer on it.
But you never had the desire to leave UNC permanently for a job?
I had no desire to go to Washington
Right.
I wondered about the years you lived in Chapel Hill (you said you weren't a joiner) but if you were aware of or observed certain community groups that were active. Did you ever work with the Chapel Hill Community Club?
No I didn't. I knew a lot of people who were quite active in it. But goodness, I had a job to do; most of them were housewives who had some spare time.
Who were some of the women who were most involved in that?
Oh, I don't know; I couldn't list them for you now.
What about the League of Women Voters in Chapel Hill? Were you ever active in that, or was that an important group?
I never was active in it. I'd been a voter ever since I was allowed to. Well I didn't vote the very first time, I think; I think I didn't get registered in time to vote. When would that be, '24?
1920?
I don't think so; I think it was '24.
'24 when you would be old enough.
Oh mercy, I'd been old enough. I was old enough.
I think 1920.
Oh, when women could vote, 1920 was
Was it really?
Yes, 1920 was. I'm sorry, I was thinking about your age.
I didn't vote the first time (I hadn't qualified), but I did afterwards, and went to caucus meetings and everything: county meetings and congressional district meetings and the state. . . .
Conventions?
Conventions, yes. My cane over there I got at a. . . . That's not a sartorial cane, as you can see, and it's not a medical cane; it's a political cane. You know, they give out pins or something or other to people, the candidates do, to the convention visitors. And the man who was senator from this state and died, from that little town up there near Greensboro, he was giving out these canes. And I grabbed one of them; so I have a political cane that I've been using ever since. I get more crippled all the time, and nobody's given me a cane yet but Mr.—I can't say it, but I know who he was. He was a former senator of this state for years.
What about the YWCA and the Industrial Department on campus? Did you ever work with them?
Didn't even know anything about it; don't remember a thing about that.
I think we're done.
END OF INTERVIEW