Full Text of the Excerpt

In 1930, I graduated from high school and I went to work at the Champion Paper and Fiber Company. I went to work for eighteen cents a hour and very soon, the wages were cut to sixteen cents. When the New Deal came into being after Roosevelt was elected, I was making fourteen cents an hour, working nine hours a day. Joe Glazer has this wonderful labor song on a recording of labor songs, which he calls "From Can't See to Can't See", and I very much identify with that, because during the middle of the Depression, I worked from "Can't See to Can't See," in the winter. I went to work before daylight and came home after dark, nine hours a day for fourteen cents an hour. I can remember as well as if it were yesterday, the day that the National Recovery Act became law. Someone came to the cutter, I was working on a paper cutter, and told me that the National Recovery Act had just been passed and that we would now make a minimum wage of forty cents an hour and that we would work a minimum of forty hours a week. So, this is why I am a New Deal Democrat and it is why I admired the Roosevelts so well. I don't make any claims to be a student of the Roosevelt era, but I was a recepient of the social change which Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt brought into being. I worked in the paper mill until 1940.

JOSEPH HERZENBERG:

Did you do the same job all those years?

ANNE QUEEN:

No, I started out as a paper sorter and then I worked at the paper cutter and then the last and I guess the best job I had was as a paper inspector. I learned a lot during those …actually it was ten and a half years that I worked. I came to understand some of the forces in our society which I felt needed to be changed and I had come to the point, or pretty nearly come to the point, before I left Champion that the church had no interest or concern about working people. I was very active in the church during my formative years. I was a member of the Spring Hill Baptist Church and I was baptized in a pond, a creek. I was very much a fundamentalist at that time and my religion, now as I reflect back on it, had much too much emotional aspects to it. I did understand something of the necessity for a social implication of the faith and by the time I went to Berea, I was moving close to the point where I felt the church had no social message.