The Great Depression; Interview with Oscar Fendler. Part 2

Marker. The distinction there on about the, I'm talking to you or discussing here the AAA program and what reaction we had in Mississippi County, here in Arkansas. It was, they felt like when President Roosevelt and the Congress passed it, it was wonderful, a blessing, a big opportunity because everybody's broke and this is going to bring in some money and create some jobs and create work. We have public works here with the CWA, build roads, bridges and buildings and stuff like that. So everybody's on a high spot, you see, thought it was marvelous and everything. Then after, when the money came back to the farmers, the landowners, let's say 34 or 35, most of the money stayed in the hands of the landowner. He was, gosh, he was broke in any way. He could keep as much money as he could.

He did. And so the tenants didn't get too much out of it and they weren't, of course, the tenants, a great number of them weren't too happy with it, but the situation had been improved considerably so they went along with it. With the sharecroppers, the sharecroppers didn't make much difference one way or the other because a sharecropper in the eyes of the landowner was just as a, almost you'd compare him, he was one step above the mule. Maybe the mule meant more to the plantation and the farm than the sharecropper did. Have somebody working, just a hand laborer is what he was. And when they put in that program of, which was awfully exciting, you know, going to plow up a third of the cotton. So they plowed up a third of the cotton, everybody with their tongues hanging, I said, well, what do you want to do that for? Cotton was selling for five cents a pound. Didn't even pay for growing it. So they thought by cutting down production of cotton, it'd raise the price, which it did.

Then when they started slaughtering the pigs, then that got everybody's attention, you know, and why do you want to slaughter them? Why don't you just give them to all of these starving people and plenty of starving people here in the county? Truthfully, I don't know what happened to the pigs after they got killed because I wasn't down there and it wasn't my job to check them. But my guess is that none of that food went for waste, that it all went for the people that needed it. And you know really wanted it. But that caused a lot of criticism of the program that it wasn't the right way to do it and everything. And our people in this county who had money or had a little property were conservatives. They felt what Roosevelt was doing was good for them and they wanted it and everything. But he was radical. His views were radical and that. So then they began saying, wait a minute here, what direction has President Roosevelt taken us? And so you'd start getting criticism among the folks who had a little college education or thinking of that.

That wasn't true of Mr. Crane, who was the boss of Wilson. He saw that it meant a great deal to his, Willie Wilson, and it did. For instance, he was the political boss of the county. In other words, whoever's going to be in any of our offices, who's going to be in the governor's office, who's elected over there, he was instrumental in saying that they were elected. Can you tell me about how many people were evicted because of the AAA? The eviction thing that happened there, they didn't need as many sharecroppers, workers on there. You cut out a third of their production and so it means you could do with a third less of your labor force. And they didn't, Lee Wilson never, as far as I can remember, ever bodily ever moved anybody off the farm. But they just let him know that it might be better if he looked elsewhere, you know, and they'd cancel his debt and let him go. And I'd say a great number of them, sharecroppers, were moved or voluntarily moved themselves. I can't remember in my representing them that we ever filed a suit to remove one.

I don't think we did. Others did it, but now they had provisions in that AAA thing. You couldn't move them until you showed they were a detriment to themselves or to the community or to the landowner, threatening the landowner, before you could do it. There's an anecdote on that if you'd like to hear it. Two of them. These are personal experiences of law, you know, this happened in maybe 34, 35. An old black couple came in, he must have been in his 70s and she was close. Their landlord here in Blival was not even a plantation guy. He was a tenant for somebody else. Had used them as sharecroppers and they were to get maybe the fruits of five acres after the cotton was laid by in July. This fellow picked an argument with him to get him to move off. He had to give something to justify kicking him off, getting his crop. He came to me about threatening to move him off.

I told him not to leave. So he went back and the next word I had, he was dead. His landowner had picked a fight with him, picked up a brick bat and crushed his skull. And of course, the widow comes to see me. I represent the widow and the courts and these are blacks. Well, I tried my best to get him prosecuted and sent to penitentiary for murder or manslaughter. I couldn't get the prosecutor attorney to do anything but prosecute him. Finally they prosecuted him. It only took a few minutes and of course they turned him loose. I went ahead as a young lawyer and I sued him for her part of the crop and everything. The jury stayed out not over, not over thirty minutes and came back and held for the landlord. This poor old lady wasn't entitled to any part of the crop. That's one incident. There must have been numerous similar to that. It went on and it didn't get in the courts.

The other one was: you had to have a reason before you could move somebody, a victim. So I had wanted to prosecute a case just to get trial experience. I'm just a youngster. In those days I'm twenty-five maybe, something like that. So the prosecutor attorney said, here you can prosecute this case. So I prosecuted it. The landlord talked to him and put him on as a witness about he accused this tenency of stealing corn from him, from his barn. It wasn't long before I saw he framed the tenant. He wasn't guilty of anything. He just wanted to get rid of him. I tried the case and the jury didn't stay out fifteen minutes and they acquitted the tenant. See, that's the opposite side of the coin. The jury, that tenant was white. If he had been black, I would have lost it, there isn't any doubt. Let's talk about the Southern Tenant Farmer's Union. Can you tell me how they organized?

My personal experience with them, of course, was limited. But my observations of it was pretty broad. The reason that they did organize was that so many landlords, and I'm not catching a reflection up on the Wilson County because I don't think it applied to them at all, but so many in this county and the neighboring counties of Criden and points out here in Arkansas, were taking terribly advantage of the tenants as well as the sharecroppers. They just treated them like dirt, you know. These people were hungry. They were starving. The children didn't have clothes. They were in awful condition. And they'd try to get the attention of the landlords, they'd just ignore them, push them aside. "If you don't want to work, we'll get somebody else who will work." Your job will be filled up pretty fast.

They started organizing groups then, particularly not as much in Mississippi County as they in the next to us county. And very quickly, a fellow named Mitchell was in here with them, and he encouraged them, and he organized pretty well. He finally made contact with, he and several others, with Norman Thomas. Norman Thomas was a candidate for president in the 1932 election, for Socialist Party in 1936 election, and then three more elections after Norman Thomas there. Well, Norman Thomas came down here at their request to help them, and if I can permit a digression, I'll tell you, I was personally acquainted with Norman Thomas. I'd met him when I was in school at Cambridge, Massachusetts and had sat around at the houses down there on Sundays, and he would talk to about fifty, sixty of us students, and you

know, trying to inculcate us with a socialist philosophy. And then I'd heard him at Ford Hall, and he was just an outstanding man, brilliant, good-looking, attractive guy, tall. And so at the invitation of these people, they invited him to come to Mississippi County to talk to the workers, tenants and stuff. Our sheriff at that time was Big Boy Wilson, and he had a deputy named Hale Jackson, and they met him at the county line that divides Criden County from us, also near Poinsett county line. They told him they would not guarantee him safe passage. That was in early 1934, and so he turned around. He went back up north, and maybe four or five miles, and then crossed over to the next county. Thomas really was sold on the plight of the tenants in this area, as well as the sharecroppers. He came back to, made speeches in Memphis, he came back to Poinsett County, and then

34 and then 35. In 35, he finally got into Mississippi County, and they had a, he had a meeting down in a little community called Birdsong, in the very south end of the county, and he was up there talking to them, you know, to the— Okay, that's the end of the camera roll. We're gonna start back. Take three. Take four. Take four, Marker. Norman Thomas finally came to Mississippi County, finally visited this county in 1935, and he went to a little community called Birdsong, mostly black inhabitants down there, in the

south end of the county. He was talking on the front of the church, they set him up, too big a crowd, maybe several hundred, couldn't all get in that little church or building they had there, and so he was addressing them and telling them about how they're being mistreated, how they could, you know, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union could be of help to them, and all of that. Well, surrounding him on the side, the ground on the outskirts were representatives of landowners, ones that were the farm bosses and stuff. They created an incident, and they just walked up there and they removed him and somebody else was with him bodily from the stand and told him to get the heck out. They didn't use profanity, they didn't need a blankety blank, you know, Yankee to come down there and tell them how to farm and how to handle their labor and all of that. And they bodily just, with their friends, Mr. Mitchell and others that were his friends there, had to spirit him out, get him out of there and get him back to the bridge across

Mississippi River into Memphis to save him from bodily harm. Whether he ever came back to Mississippi County after that, Mr. Thomas, I don't know. He had made earlier visits to Poinsett County with incidents, and one of the first incidents that I can recall that I learned about was when he spoke to a group of pretty well-established businessmen and farmers there at Mark Tree, which is a town right across there from Mississippi County, maybe 40, 50 miles from here. And he told them in no uncertain terms how they were mistreating these tenants and the sharecroppers and that they were violating all sorts of laws and a bunch of stuff. And that didn't sit kindly with his audience, and they sort of told him he was not welcome there in Mark Tree and they wished he'd stay away from Mark Tree in the future.

And they complained about it to the commercial appeal, that's the Memphis commercial appeal, ran big stories on it, big incidents. He was, Mr. Thomas was, I mean, individually one of the finest men I've ever known, high ideals. He just happened to differ with me and with a lot of us in our views on economics. And the most pleasant visits I ever had with anyone was with him. It was through him that I met another big socialist named Harold Lasky from London, an outstanding man, I met him in Cambridge and in Boston. They did not have much reason for being in Mississippi County or Poinsett County as to accomplish much. I've read their reports , Thomas and others, about what they accomplished. They didn't accomplish a great deal in the long run.

For instance, back there in those days, they encouraged strikes. And of course, to mention strike, a union to a southern landowner, which is like, I don't know, if you should mention, I suppose, a Jew to Hitler, you know, you get about the same reaction. And they encouraged strikes for the cotton. They had a cotton picking strike where they didn't go out to work. He was able to raise the price of picking cotton from 50 cents a hundred to 75 cents. He got that accomplished for him. That was some good. And when he got to cotton picking, I mean chopping, not sure that anyone listening to what I'm saying, knows anything about the cotton growing. But in order to grow cotton, you plant it and then you have to go in there. After it comes up, they have hoes, the people had to do it by hand labor, and they'd have to chop it in spaces so the cotton would grow and the weeds wouldn't stifle it out. And so they had a strike on the cotton.

That was about 1935, I remember. And they created some problems for the landowners when they did it, and they got some benefits for them, for the benefit of those tenants and sharecroppers. They did do that. The landowners didn't like it, of course. - How did they try to stop them? What did they do? Oh, Well, they tried to stop them by threats and have these redneck people that were there, you know, worked for them, the bustle boys being around and threatened if they didn't scatter out and get away from there, they're going to beat the devil out of them and whatever came in handy. And if it was necessary to be thrown in jail, create a disturbance, they'd throw some of them in jail. And then the ironic part about it was when they'd throw them in the jail and to get out, maybe some landowner would go in there and buy what they owed the county for the fine of that, and they'd have to work forcibly, so to speak, for that same landowner.

That wasn't pleasant at all for them. - Now, what did you think of the STFU? - Do what? - What did you think of the Union personally? Oh. Well, personally, I thought it was just a grandiose scheme that had no practical basis at all. There was no way in the world they could ever organize a union. I was opposed to it because my views were colored by the people I'm representing. I'm representing Lee Wilson. I'm representing other big planets. So I wasn't objective about it. But as objective as I could be, I would say that was maybe a resort that they had to use to get attention. It's the old story about, they always talk about mules and how he's lazy and indifferent. A mule was, you know, you're trying to ply him and everything. He'd just stop. And the only way you could get his attention is to pick up a large club, a two by four, and hit him over the head.

Once you got his attention, then the mule would start moving. And that was the same theory, I think, of Norman Thomas and Mitchell. Maybe if you hit him in the head, the landowners, you'd get their attention. You know, last time you told me that it was nearly impossible for sharecroppers to get out of debt. How so? Well, when you talk about the debt of people working on any of the plantations, you're faced with the fact that I have discussed, that of using not currency, not money, not legal tender, but using those doodly books or the brosines or whatever it's called. But even more so than that, everything that he obtained, the tenant or the sharecropper, everything, was on the books.

It was charged to him. And that's his doctor I told you about and everything else. So at the end of the year comes after the crops were in, and maybe November, December, something like that, and he'd come in there. They'd call him in there for settlement. And invariably when he settled, he didn't have any money left over. He was always owing the landlord $100, $200, $300. And so he started off the next year in debt. And so the law was he couldn't leave if he was in debt. So it's sort of like a type of indentured servant is what these people were. Even the tenants in a sense were. They didn't have freedom of motion, of action and stuff. And it's the same old thing, the old saying around here is that don't pour out the water. until you know you've got some fresh water.

You better keep the water you've washed in and keep that same water. That was the old saying, you better keep it. And be careful if you did throw it out, you didn't throw out the baby with the tub. Be careful of what you did. So they had to be real attentive in looking after their own interests. The one that had nobody look after his interests was the sharecropper. He didn't have anybody. He sort of, I've always tried to think- where did the sharecropper come from? Where did he ever come from? And so he had to have migrated to Arkansas from North Carolina, Georgia, where they were raising cotton and then the boll weevil run them out of there. So they moved over to Alabama and maybe Tennessee, down to Mississippi. The boll weevil run them out of there. And so they came up north where there weren't many boll weevils, in Arkansas. And a lot of them came in here because you had scouting troops that'd go down there, people, go down there and pick up ten families, blacks or whites and bring them up here.

And they get paid for it. And that's the way they came in here. Some of them just came in here as drifters. Tell me what kind of people sharecroppers were: black and white. When you say, when I think about, try to analyze what kind of people they were or are, I have to go back and think about the poor whites in England back in the days when Charles Dickens wrote his books about them, some of the other English writers. Probably the ones you know that in England they'd put them in jail if they couldn't pay their debts. There was no problem at all. They just took them to jail. I don't know what they did in jail, just sat there. And so a great number of them came over to this country in the 1700s, to Georgia, the debtors prison. Can you keep me in the 1930s in Arkansas? So these people were drifting to Arkansas and they didn't have anything and nobody cared about them.

So they'd get a job with Lee Wilson or any other plantation, these folks would, and they'd just hang on and stay until maybe they got tired and they'd move on to other places. A lot of landlords would intentionally like I've told the story about moving them off