Harry Ashmore Interview 2

GEORGE STONEY: …when you're using tape recording for fact at standpoint, I know that this is not gonna be the kind of free-flowing thing that you get if you want filmmakers to run it over. But you understand what you're going to get is primarily performance.

HARRY ASHMORE: Yeah. Um. He's a consultant, is he?

JAMIE STONEY: When you gentlemen are ready.

GEORGE STONEY: I'll talk to you about that later. But it is fascinating what has happened to him. But he's, he's doing well.

ASHMORE: I was with Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 campaign, and John, John was with us.

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GEORGE STONEY: He, uh, that Chamber of Commerce attitude and how it changed.

ASHMORE: Right.

GEORGE STONEY: How, how the workers, the town should have been union, but –

ASHMORE: Right. The town was anti-union in the sense that, as I suggested earlier I think, the matter of respectability had a lot to do with this. Plus, the fact that the wealthiest people in town were the mill owners. And in any 00:01:00town, I think, that the power and property go together. Men of property normally wind up controlling the political process and the attitudes of people pretty much. That is not so much as an active business as just a fact of life in a sense. I say, I was on the newspapers, and the newspapers certainly went with the establishment. But I was never instructed to slant the news, and I don't think I ever did. We didn't. We were not encouraged to cover it in any real depth. We, we weren't – we weren't encouraged to cover any news in real depth. And in a sense, the lintheads, the mill people, were sort of like the Blacks. They were around, and they were out there, but you didn't have any 00:02:00real social contact with them. You had a great deal more personal contact with Blacks because you were surrounded by them, and you had servants. And that's another thing. The low wages that prevailed in the cotton mill permeated the wage structure in the city whether they were union or not. And of course, Blacks, at the very bottom of the heap, worked virtually for subsistence wages. And that meant that the middle class families in the South all had servants on a scale that a comparable family outside the South would never have. For example, we were middle income or lower middle income, I suppose. In fact, my father was finally bankrupted in the Depression, so we really hit some hard times. But before that, when times were relatively good, we had a Black cook. I had a Black nurse until I got old enough to outrun her, and we had Black people who worked on the, in the garden, and we had Black washerwomen who came and washed the 00:03:00clothes. So we were surrounded. We had servants on a scale that you would have had to have been an aristocrat in Boston or New York to maintain a household at that level. And this was common throughout, right down the class structure. It didn't exist, of course, in the, among the lintheads, who had to keep house as well as have everybody in the family work. Believe me, that was a two person, a two person working family up there. Children, too. I suppose that by that time that child labor laws had, I guess, cut down on the child – But they, I can remember when I growing up that it was very common that kids would be working in the mills as soon as they could walk practicably. I think that was probably over by the late '30s. And the wages, the hours, were being cut down. But again, as I mentioned, the mills were in such bad shape, they'd go on a short work week, and that might go on for ten – a month or two with a two-day work week. And 00:04:00that cut down the amount of money that was flowing into the community and affected the whole, uh, prosperity of the place. But there was no recognition of that simple economic fact on the part of the establishment. But that, I suppose there were people who were conscious of it and knew it, but they certainly were not willing to do anything about it. Uh, the unions that existed within the city were the railroads. We had a fairly big shop for the Southern Railroad, so there were quite a few railroad union people that lived inside the city. Then the printers and the, um, linotypers and so forth at the newspaper were union. These were craft unions, and they were certainly didn't have any, any class consciousness about them. They were quite conservative politically. And I think this was true everywhere. These were the old AFL craft unions. And actually, 00:05:00what came along beginning at that time and later really flowered was a division within the union movement of the country. And that's when John Lewis and Hillman, particularly Hillman, who was active in the textile business, came over from the garment workers and the industrial unions as opposed to the craft unions. And that was a great conflict between the old-line AFL unions and the new unions which were organizing. And the union that originally existed, I believe you said when we were talking about this earlier, was still the AFL United Textile Workers, but that later became the Textile Workers' Organizing Committee, which became the dominant union. And that was Sidney Hillman's creation within the CIO. And that came along by the time of the '30s, late '30s, I guess. And, of course, when Roosevelt ran for the third term, um, 00:06:00Hillman had by that time headed the first PAC for the CIO and had a very powerful influence within the Democratic Party. That was not effective in the South – That the South and unions never had any effective hold in politics until, well, in some spots, they would have. But state-wide, I can't remember any at the time I was practicing journalism in the South when the unions were able to be anything other than a contributing factor. They had some influence, and they had some influence in the legislatures. But they were never dominant, and they could always be dealt out if you – And all you had to do was have somebody holler "nigger" around a demagogue, and that finished the union. The unions couldn't handle it. They were trying to integrate the unions. I'm talking about a later period now. And there was tremendous resistance among the union people. That's what's so striking about the – that you had reminded 00:07:00me, and I had forgotten about – that when desegregation finally came, and it was accepted that it was gonna, and they were desegregating the schools and workplaces and downtown, the hotels, restaurants. And they desegregated the workforce in, in the cotton mill industry which was no longer cotton but had become a synthetic industry. And I would have assumed that the greatest resistance to sharing the workplace with Blacks would have been among the lintheads, and it turned out not to be the case you tell me. And I think, thinking back on it, I was no longer in the South when this really took hold. But I think --

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GEORGE STONEY: Ah, yes.

ASHMORE: So, yeah. It's probably worth looking at. There's some stuff in there that I'm –

GEORGE STONEY: Good,

ASHMORE: Not remembering now. I haven't had a chance to go back and look at it myself.

GEORGE STONEY: Good. Now we were talking about the, the, uh, the expectations of the whites, of the middle class whites about –

ASHMORE: Right.

GEORGE STONEY: About the, the cotton mill people being willing to accept Blacks –

ASHMORE: Right.

GEORGE STONEY: In the middle '60s.

ASHMORE: Right.

GEORGE STONEY: Are you ready?

ASHMORE: Okay. Ready?

JAMIE STONEY: Yeah. We're rolling; we're fine.

GEORGE STONEY: All right, Sir.

ASHMORE: I say overall when desegregation came to the public facilities in the South – of course, the schools was a different set of questions – but, when finally, as a result of Martin Luther King and the demonstrations and the Movement, and the South bowed to the inevitable and accepted the fact, then the establishment came around, and it became respectable to desegregate. That was the important gain. But they accepted the necessity, and so they desegregated the restaurants and the hotels and the theaters and, and, and the workplace. And they began hiring Blacks in jobs that had always been barred as was happening in the textile mills. But what was happening generally as I observed it. And I was, I was heartened by it, was the ease with which the transition was actually made 00:09:00once the white establishment accepted the fact that it had no choice. And it was bad publicity that had a lot to do with it. We're getting very bad television images of riots in the street. Little Rock would just put the establishment there in an absolute state of shock. And finally they came around. And all the bankers got together and the real es – the people that owned the town and sent word out to the merchants and the restaurant owners that "effective Monday morning, you are desegregated, or you don't have any mortgage anymore." And that did it. But once it was accepted – was the, was the goodwill with which, the lack of tension, once it, they decided to do it. And you would walk into a place here in Atlanta, you go into a hotel or a store, and you see people in the workplace, Black and white, mingling together without any sign of tension. It doesn't carry over into private life. That's still segregated and perhaps inevitable for awhile. But I think that then there was a reservoir of goodwill 00:10:00involving the races that I found penetrated where I was, in many cases, I didn't think it would. And that would have included with the lintheads. I would have thought there would have been more latent opposition because they had, they had suffered almost as much as the Blacks, but they had retained the identity of being white. And they could go anywhere that a white could go, at least they could walk in the door. If they had any money, they were welcome as a customer which Blacks were not. And so I would have thought that – and this was sort of a general assumption that most people held in the South that the rednecks, the country people, and the lintheads were really the people who when there was a lynching, usually the mob was drawn from their ranks. There might be a few respectable people. But most respectable people didn't approve of lynching. They might approve of the, of getting rid of the uppity Black, but they didn't want to dirty their hands with it. This was a kind of distinction. 00:11:00And I think it's striking, as you say, how, in the, what we would have assumed would be the citadel of resistance in the cotton mill villages didn't exist. And then once the Blacks came in, they've been accepted. And I gather that they're quite influential in the unions, although the unions, I suppose, are declining as they are almost everywhere else. They have been in the period of political reaction and demographic change which has made so much difference in this. They, the unspoken story about the South, including the racial aspect and the aspect we are dealing with here, has been the vast change in demography that's taken place in our lifetime is, was what is essentially an agricultural and rural region has become urban and suburban. This has happened in a single generation virtually, has changed the whole complexion, and I don't mean that 00:12:00ironically, of social relationships. The sad thing is that the Brown decision, which really made it all possible because that was, that threw out Plessey; it reversed the public policy; it committed the federal government to support desegregation wherever it was practiced, whether de facto, as it finally developed, or whether it was a matter of law. And that precipitated the Civil Rights Movement, made the Civil Rights Movement possible. King couldn't, Martin Luther King, couldn't have led his people out on the streets before that because they would have been decimated. But they now had the assurance that if the local law moved against them, the federals would come in, and they'd have enough military force on their side to protect them. Then television came along, and so the nation started seeing it firsthand the real horrors and saw a very exaggerated version of them as it turned out. But the whole movement then 00:13:00became a kind of a black and white morality play with the usual symbols reversed, so that the whites were the villains, and the Blacks were the righteous people. And this, this has brought about enormous changes in the practice of people, the way people live together in the workplace and in the public places of public accommodation. While I don't sense in the South any particular strain – I live in California now where there's far more race tension, uh, uh, far more than there is in the South. When I come back to a southern city, a Little Rock or Atlanta, I'm really always struck by the difference between that and Los Angeles where –

GEORGE STONEY: Now, could I ask you why there isn't a similar kind of thing about unions? Unions, uh, in terms of demonstrations, including the acceptance, including the attitudes and so forth. Could you make parallels there?

ASHMORE: Well, I think there's probably at some levels more acceptance of unions. For example, the schoolteachers now have a union, and a pretty strong one. And the public employees have a pretty strong union. And these are middle class or people who are treated with some respect. And the old blue collar workers, I'm not sure but that they're becoming an extinct species. With the better paying jobs, they've all become middle class, and they tend to be pretty reactionary and, in many cases, politically. Uh, we've seen a lot of that in the Reagan era. And the unions simply have not been able to adjust, I think, to this changing demography I'm talking about. I'm not sure that the private sector's done any better. Uh, I think the whole, all of our institutions seem to me to be sort of out of date. I think they haven't been able to keep up with the change. And political institutions or unions, I think are part of that. Uh, I don't know that there's a great deal of middle class 00:15:00hostility to unions unless there are people who are engaged in some kind of a business which has workers which normally people who are in control of a business would rather not be organized. So, there would still be that kind of opposition. There would be an economic interest or a perceived interest whether it's real or not. And there's never been, the establishment, the Chamber of Commerce type establishment, has never really been realistic about the need for higher wages and the benefits of it flow to everybody. They always hang up on the short-haul question of something is going to be. And then the South has been through this spasm of trying to attract industry. And that has a lot to do with it. Every state has a development cooperation, and they give tax benefits, exemptions and so forth, reasonably enough because they've had an enormous surplus of population because they, everybody on the land has been displaced. 00:16:00And so these people had to go somewhere. Of course, a great many of them went to New York and Chicago and Los Angeles, the Blacks, and they're the underclass. They simply would not absorb. They moved in there and went out of sight. They were segregated more strictly than they ever were in the South. That's the basis of the urban problem in this country is the failure to really absorb these people who were shifting from agriculture, who had no skills except the basic ones which there's no market for an agricultural skill anymore. First-rate automation in the country was agriculture. Once the tractor came in and then the weed-killing chemicals, the way you used to have to need several hundred people to run a plantation, you run it now with about three people and an airplane that sprays the damn crops. It's just amazing when you go into the real plantation country like eastern Arkansas and Mississippi and find the land is just depopulated. Now these people, if they are still there, they are all on relief 00:17:00because there's no work for them.

GEORGE STONEY: Could you go, just think back now to the –

ASHMORE: Hi!

GEORGE STONEY: When the uh, when this '34 strike came, it was amazing to me to see how surprised the manufacturers seemed to be that so many people came out. They didn't think they were, they thought they were going to be loyal. Could you talk about that, and then the parallel with the same kind of thing when, uh, Blacks demonstrated?

ASHMORE: Yes, I think that there was a genuine feeling of paternalism in the old management of the cotton mills. That changed a great deal when they began to be picked up by the national companies, and the old owning families I think are practically extinct. I doubt that there are many mills left, maybe Callaway or somebody like that, where a family is still in control. Certainly, I don't think any of the old families that I knew in Greenville are still in control of 00:18:00the mills as they were then. They've all been picked up by J.P. Stevens or somebody like that, national chain. So, but there was a – and the, the paternalism was phony to a degree, but it wasn't entirely phony. And I think the management did feel some sense of noblesse oblige, if no better than that, out of some sense of responsibility for the well-being of these people. Although they didn't deliver on it, and they certainly didn't sacrifice to benefit the employees. But I think that feeling was there, and I think that accounts for the fact that they were genuinely shocked when the people decided to join a union and walk out on them. They didn't, they took this kind of personally. I mean, they felt they were being turned on by, by their wards in a sense. And I think that was a genuine feeling and accounted for a lot of it. And they just simply couldn't believe that these people could be persuaded to join a union by some people, some outsiders coming in from the North, some damn Yankees 00:19:00coming in and trying to persuade them to join something that they thought was a Bolshevik outfit, you know, this propaganda was all around. It predates Joe McCarthy. And once anybody identified himself with a union, he was immediately a Red, or he was, uh, uh, some kind of a subversive un-American. This was pervasive. I think most middle class people didn't, weren't conscious of this, that they weren't exposed to the fact that there was a union. I mean, they didn't think about it much. But where it impo--, impinged on their consciousness, I think it did. In the same sense that the Blacks – as long as the Blacks weren't uppity, you know, you felt pretty kindly. But once they got uppity, you had to do something about it.

GEORGE STONEY: Okay.

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GEORGE STONEY: The, this paternalism and the unions. Because I think that's very, you're right on the nub of it.

JAMIE STONEY: Hang on, Dad. Battery indication here.

ASHMORE: Right.

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GEORGE STONEY: Okay, Sir? I hadn't thought of –

ASHMORE: I hadn't thought of this aspect of the paternalism, but I think this may have some significance. As I mentioned, the cotton mills that surrounded Greenville are on one flank, are on the west, banded together and created a school district, a complete school district with Parker High School, which really was a first rate high school. It was run by a man named Pete Hollis, who was brought in from somewhere, and was a professional educator and apparently a pretty good one. Now, I think, and I hadn't – This is what I hadn't thought of before. I think perhaps one of the reasons for the acceptance of the union was that a generation had come up that was pretty well educated, gone through this high school, and they were, at least to some extent, freed of the, 00:21:00of the bias and prejudice of their parents who were generally illiterate. So you had a rising educational level. Now, I think the mills didn't have to put those schools in. I think there probably were places where they weren't provided schools. They just went to whatever public school was available, was close. Also, I remember in North Carolina, that Kannapolis, which the Cannon families, a sizeable city, they owned everything over there. They had a daily newspaper, which they leased out, and the man – they owned the presses, I think, so you could hardly raise your voice against the management. But they, they prided themselves on their paternalism, and I think with some justification. I think they provided a lot of amenities and that sort of thing that they didn't have to provide. But again, I suppose, a rising educational level had something to do with this. You have to realize that when these people first came off the land and the cotton mill villages, they were totally parochial. I mean, they were, they were illiterate in most cases. They didn't 00:22:00read, and they had very little contact with the larger world. Uh, they had all their built-in biases, but they were submissive, and I think, in the beginning, they were perhaps even grateful to have a job. They were in such dire straits at the beginning. So, I think that paternalism can't be dismissed as being, became a kind of convenience. As I say, the national mills began to take over and displaced the old families, I'm sure it was just a device. They probably provided some amenities and had personnel people trying to make the hands feel good. Which was one way to keep them from joining the union. But acceptance of unions – this is another aspect of it I hadn't thought about, but Franklin Roosevelt was a real folk hero of the South because he had done a lot to lift us all out of the Depression. Roosevelt, of course, brought the unions into a 00:23:00powerful position within the Democratic Party. And they had real influence during the Roosevelt years in a sense that they never had before. The CIO became dominant in the movement, and it was a creature of the Democratic Party. And, of course, the Wagner Act and partly the New Deal reforms strengthened the Labor Movement a great deal. Well, the impact on the South was that all of the southern members of Congress, Senate, and the House were Democrats because we had a one-party system. Now within the one-party system, you had conservatives and liberals. And a fair number of people during that period turned up on the liberal side that came from the South, and they tended to be pro-union. They accepted the unions, and the union had enough strength as time went on so that their votes became important and their money and their organizing ability. So 00:24:00that, when I got to Arkansas in 1947, Sid McMath had just been elected, quite a liberal, reformed governor. This was a G.I. generation. I'd just come back from the war, and he'd just come back. And so, Sid had a working relationship with the unions. The unions were not too strong, but they were, they could deliver votes. And in Little Rock, they were fairly strong because they had a great big railroad, two big railroad yards there. And they had West, uh, North Little Rock, which was across the river and separately incorporated, was pretty much a union town. They had a lot of industries over there that were organized. So, I don't know that you could say that the unions became respectable, but they became more so. And at least you could survive in politics with an identification with the unions. Um, you didn't always win, and usually – 00:25:00well then again, if a demagogue rose and hollered "nigger," that canceled all that out. And I did mention earlier the unions were having their own internal difficulties of trying to, because the union — the international and national unions ordered desegregation, and the locals frequently resisted. I recall that the then Grand Dragon of the Klan –

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JAMIE STONEY: Do these young men know about this?

GEORGE STONEY: They're learning.

JAMIE STONEY: Come on, Dad.

ASHMORE: Well, I think we are fairly well into old fart-hood.

JAMIE STONEY: Okay, we're rolling.

GEORGE STONEY: Okay. Yes.

ASHMORE: Um, we're talking about the influence of unions and politics, and that did become quite effective. As I said, you could survive in politics and be pro-union in most states until some demagogue arose and hollered "nigger," and that all just went out the window. And the unions were having their internal 00:26:00troubles. They were ordered by their international that took the position of desegregation, particularly after the Brown decision. But many of the locals resisted, and I recall one great figure from that time who would turn up on television wearing his pointed dunce hat. This character who was then the Grand Kleagle of the Grand Dragon of whatever it was of the Ku Klux Klan, and to the great embarrassment of Walter Reuther, he was a member of the local UAW, uh, here. So this really was a, this kind of thing was happening all across the South. Now this would create a great deal of ripples and ripple effect, but I think, again, after the desegregation began, they found that the unions accepted it. And I guess now there isn't really a segregated union left anywhere in the South.

GEORGE STONEY: Uh-hum.

ASHMORE: Totally. There may be a few. Gold craft unions, possibly.

GEORGE STONEY: You mentioned in Epitaph for Dixie that when you were looking for 00:27:00a base for your operations, you mentioned that you were having trouble getting such a base. And you'd mentioned it, I think, to a relative, and he said, "Well, you're like the guy, whose in the position of the guy, who's running for Son-of-a-Bitch without"

ASHMORE: Opposition.

GEORGE STONEY: Opposition.

ASHMORE: Yeah. That was when I was in Arkansas then, and the Supreme Court decision was pending, and they knew it was coming down, and the fund for the Advancement of Education, which was the educational branch of then independent of the Ford Foundation had all this money. And, um, they had launched a national experiment in teacher training. And they had, they got Arkansas, all the teacher training institutions in Arkansas agreed to put this in on a state-wide basis. And it was old Bob Hutchins-type reform. And which, what they wanted to do was see that every person before they got licensed as a teacher had four years of 00:28:00liberal arts, and then the fifth year (which was what the Ford Foundation would fund) would be devoted pretty much to on-the-job technical training, actual teaching, before they were, they were actually licensed to teach. So Arkansas was selected as the guinea pig state, I suppose, on the theory that if it worked in Arkansas, it could work anywhere. And Harvard had a parallel experiment, and there were a couple of other's going on. Well, at that time, Sid McMath had pointed me to the Board of Trustees of the State Teachers' College. So, I got to know these people from the Fund for the Advancement of Education, uh, and they were coming through – Well, then they set out to try to find some university in the South that would undertake a study of the segregated school system, recognizing that the Supreme Court was gonna rule either that they had to be equal, made equal, which they were far from being, or they were going to be integrated. And either way, it was going to cause an enormous strain on the 00:29:00public education system. Well, no university was willing to touch this, either public or private. They couldn't find any university to take it on. They had a lot of individual people who wanted to work on it, scholars, to go in and just find out factually what was the actual discrepancy and what would it take to put the systems together or to make them equal. They couldn't find anybody to run it, and I, and so finally they asked me if I would head the study. And I did. I couldn't leave the Gazette. I had to do it part-time. We set up a control group here in Atlanta. We had about 30 scholars from various institutions around South, sociolo –