The Jack Rabin Collection on Alabama Civil Rights and Southern Activists

Series II: Southern Activists

Sub-series 3: Clifford and Virginia Durr

Appendix II.3C: Transcript of Audiotape 18

Location: ?the Durrs’ home

Speaker: Clifford Durr

Interviewer: An unidentified woman.

Date: Unknown (probably late 1960s or early 1970s) / 1973

Repository: University Libraries, The Pennsylvania State University, Special

Collections Department, Historical Collections and Labor Archives

Transcriber: Barry Kernfeld

Item number: Audiotape 18

In this transcript, “[?]” indicates an inaudible word and “[ ? ? ]” indicates something more substantial—two or three words, perhaps a whole phrase, and occasionally an entire sentence—that is inaudible.

On the majority of the present recording Clifford Durr describes documents to an unidentified woman interviewer who is helping him to organize his papers in preparation for delivery to an unidentified archives. The transcript comprehends much of audiotape 18, but several passages have been skipped, because his remarks have little meaning independent of the document that Durr is showing to the interviewer.

On the latter half of side B, Durr reads one of his biblical parables. He states that he wrote this parable “26 years ago,” a few days after President Truman initiated the Loyalty Program, in March 1947. Hence this portion of the recording was probably made in 1973.

Durr: Let’s see how well the recorder will pick things up if we just let the microphone stay here between us at a distance. Maybe it will work. It’s sort of a nuisance to have to pick it up every time you want to use it. 2 – 3 – testing.

Following our telephone conversation the other day, I decided to get out the tape recorder. In view of the confusion in my files, it might help to get them all together – the files that relate to the same subject matter together when we get started organizing them. And then again, as you know, going through the chronological files, which are largely letters but sometimes other documents, we run across isolated items that don’t seem to have any relationship to anything else. So we might get on tape here just a little background of this isolated item to tie it in to some context.

Here, for example, is a letter from Lady Nancy Astor on the letterhead of the English-Speaking Union, dated March 10th, 1920, which I just ran across loose in an old file basket. I’ve asked you questions, if you recognized the characters in there, Mrs. Woodhull Martin, and you passed the test. You did know her. You’re the first – the only women’s libber I’ve found that had ever heard of her before was Susan B. – I mean, Susan Sanford, [?advertiser]. She had heard of her.

But Lady Astor – this was when I was at Oxford, and she was very active in the English-Speaking Union and devoted herself to trying to get the American students at Oxford and Cambridge into English homes for visits. So I got a letter – I may have another one somewhere in my files, but I’m not quite sure. It indicates there may have been a previous letter – saying that Mrs. Victoria Woodhull Martin would be delighted to have two young Americans spend a fortnight with her at her place in the Cotswold Hills.

A friend of mine, Bill Stubbs from Savannah, Georgia – we were planning to go to the continent, and we were going first to Norway, where we were going to visit some friends we met. They had a country home there. So this – we had about three weeks to wait. So the – I don’t know how it is now, but when you visited the British in their country places, they made no effort to entertain you. They gave you a place to stay and food, but you’re in your own. And the Cotswold Hills, that’s one of the most beautiful parts of England. We decided that we would take a chance and see what it was like.

We went on the train to a little place called Tewksbury, which is as close to her country place. It’s called Bredon’s Norton, and she has – about all there is there is her estate. we were met at the station by her secretary, a Miss Cooley, with a liveried chauffeur in a foreign car, a French car, and driven about 7 or 8 miles to Bredon’s Norton, where we were taken to a beautiful old manor house built probably in the sixteenth century, and the only other people there were two visitors, a Mrs. Larissa Miles and a Miss Barrett.

Then we were taken to a lovely little cottage which we were to have ourselves, a guest cottage, and then we would come up to the manor house for our meals. But when we went up for dinner always, although it was in the depths of the country, it was always black tie.

Mrs. Martin lived in an enormous [? pile] up on the hill above the manor house. I thought it was a very ugly thing [ ? ? ], but it was enormous, and we didn’t see her for three days. But then she came driving up, riding in the side car of a motorcycle.

Interviewer: Your hostess! She didn’t see you for three days?

Durr: My hostess. She just turned us over to her secretary and the other two ladies, who were visitors, and then, as I say, she came. She was somewhere around 83 or 85 at the time, and very lively, riding in the side car of this motorcycle with her manager, who’s taking her – making a tour of the estates. The only other time we saw her – she did invite us up to her house for tea on one occasional.

But the first night we were there, I saw some literature on a table, and among other things, there was a – one of these old – I don’t know whether you’d call it steel engravings, but the kind – drawings that they would have in the paper. And here was a woman in Victorian garb making a speech to a group of bearded gentlemen, and the caption says, “Victoria Woodhull delivering her memorial to the Senate Judiciary Committee.” So I asked her secretary. I said, “What is this all about? Who is this Victoria Woodhull?” She says, “Don’t you” – I mean, Victoria Woodhull – “Victoria Woodhull. Don’t you know?” I said, “No.” “That’s Mrs. Martin? She ran for President of the United States against Grant.” She was duly nominated at the convention of the women’s party, but they wouldn’t put her on the ballot. So she appealed to Congress, arguing that women would people within the meaning of the 14th Amendment and making all of the traditional arguments, but she got on the ballot.

I was a little baffled, but later I’ve run across Victoria Woodhull’s trails in quite a number of books. As a matter of fact, two or three years ago in a single year I read two biographies in the – I read about them in books reviews in the New York Times. I’ve never read them. And as I recall, in one of Mark Twain’s books that was published after his death – I don’t know whether it was “The Damned Human Race” or one of the other things, he mentions a very interesting incident in Mrs. – Victoria Woodhull’s career.

It seems that she and her sister, both named Claflin – their background was a little bit lurid. Their mother was a – supposed to be a rather loose lady, and they got out this newspaper called Claflin’s Weekly. It was partly devoted to the problems of women’s suffrage, but to a considerable extent, a blackmail publication, and she would – they would threaten to expose people unless they paid off. But the sister became the mistress of Commodore Vanderbilt. He would advise her on investments, and as a result, she did pretty well.

But, in any event, one of the people she tried to blackmail – and this instant is in one of Mark Twain’s books. He was living in the Connecticut area. Henry Ward Beecher had one of the biggest churches around. You know how respectable. But she threatened to expose him for having an adulterous affair with the wife of one of his elders. Apparently he wouldn’t pay off, so she published it all, and the end result was that he was actually indicted for adultery and tried, but there was a hung jury, and they never went back – the case wasn’t brought up again. It was hushed up as best they could.

She – then Commodore Vanderbilt - according to Miss Cooley, she said she found that the women’s suffrage people in the United States were a little too tame. They were not militant enough. But in any event, I think you know something of the background of the leaders of the women’s suffrage movement. So many of them came from the old abolitionists. They were rather strait-laced ladies, very committed. But they knew about Victoria Woodhull’s background and her activities, but she – apparently she was one of the most effective speakers they had, and when she spoke, why those people came by the hundreds and even thousands. So they were debating what to do about her, but they decided they needed her politically, and so she continued along that line.

But as I recall, what actually happened, instead of her going to England because of her militancy, when Commodore Vanderbilt died, he did leave this Claflin sister some money, but she thought she’d been mistreated and threatened to sue the estate, and that would have been a pretty scandalous affair. So they paid her off.

So she and Victoria Woodhull – she had married a man named Woodhull, but her name – maiden name was Claflin – went to England to join up with the women suffragettes there, but in very short order she met this man Martin, who was a very wealthy banker - Martin Banks are still all over England – and so she married him.

Now, sin doesn’t pay off, but – maybe – but it looked like they did pretty well, and so she married him, and in her middle 80s, when I saw her, she was . . .

Interviewer: Still going strong.

Durr: . . . still going strong. She was – I don’t think she was active any more in the suffrage movement after she met – after she married Martin, but I’m not quite sure about that.

Another document out of place – Ray Jenkins had borrowed this. He probably wanted to write an article about it. And here I just stuck it loosely in the front. This is my position, Clifford J. Durr, minutes of commission action on a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, December 1, 1947. You have that in your files. But here is the entire commission report. A lot of material [?] by J. Edgar Hoover and on this particular incident, where he started – he sent us the – he just wrote us a letter about this applicant for a radio station, saying that a majority of the stockholders, according to his information, are communists, actively engaged in communist activities. And you’ll notice the – I use these – this statement I just referred to of December 1, ’47, to give a little publicity to the kinds of things that go into FBI reports. Hoover was right at the top of his prestige then, and everything that was in an FBI report was almost sacrosanct. It was said to be a highly efficient organization and very careful and so on, and I wanted to show the recklessness. So I paraphrased from the – some of the information that Hoover sent us in his reports, and you’ll find longer reports in there. But this might be an interesting footnote for someone interested in that period.

[Durr refers to a confidential letter of January 14, 1948, without further explanation.]

[Durr refers to a letter from Paul Porter, a $50 check, and a memorandum regarding the Dixiecrat fight involving Truman and the Democrat electoral vote in 1948.]

[Durr refers to clippings from the Washington Times Herald of December 1847 (sic: 1947), and from Time magazine.]

Now here’s a New Republic article. I didn’t write it, and it’s not about me particularly, but it relates to the old Defense Plant battle, to get the Defense Plant Corporation going, and there is an article, “Jesse Jones’s Bottleneck,” by Michael Strait. I remember he was not entirely accurate. I believe I talked to him about trying to straighten him out. But there was a lot of pressure. Mr. Jones was trying to drag his feet. He was not too enthusiastic about the idea of putting all these money – this money into plants, because he couldn’t see the dangers. And so a lot of pressure was being put on him from the press to try to get some action out of him. Meanwhile I was sort of trying to get some things done in the morning while he’s busy being Secretary of Commerce. But the Defense Plant file is where that belongs.

And while we wee – are mentioning Defense Plant, I found on my recorder a tape which I had made with this fellow Imhoff over at [?] City College on the Defense Plant Corporation. I’ve got in there somewhere – I’ve got two tapes – two sides of two tapes on it. I think that has got a lot of rather interesting material in it, but I don’t know how you’re equipped to keep tapes there and what you could do about it. If somebody was interested in the Defense Plant story, the financing of the war program, I think they might find these tapes quite interesting and helpful, but I don’t know how to go about preserving them.

Interviewer: We have film and microfilm readers – no tapes.

Durr: So I’ll just leave it here then.

[Durr refers to a typewritten manuscript from the Senate debate on the Goodwin Watson case, as contained in the Congressional Record of May 6, 1942, and an FCC memorandum on that same case, regarding the removal of federal employees.]

[end of part 1 of side A of audiotape 18].

[part 2 of side A, track 1:]

[Durr refers to:

1. a draft of a speech he gave in New York in 1948;

2. a certificate admitting him to practice before the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, March 1, 1951, in regard to his work on behalf of the farmers’ union while in Denver, resulting in a $30,000 verdict;

3. a draft memorandum on the post-war need for an international communications policy, written circa October 1946, just before his trip to Moscow;

4. an undated draft, perhaps of a speech, on radio, with handwritten annotations by Durr and his administrative assistant, Charlie Cliff;

5. from an annual meeting, probably in New York, circa 1950, his tribute to an African-American lawyer in Washington, D.C., Charles Houston, who died while Durr was president of the Lawyers’ Guild

6. undated notes for the Yale Law Review Students’ Conference, Judicial Review of Administrative Sanctions;

7. a clipping, “Radio’s Performance,” Birmingham News, December 14, 1946, regarding a Town Hall program on which Durr appeared with Sydney Kaye, general counsel for Broadcast Music and Frederick Workman of the Hucksters.

8. his initial decision and preliminary statement on the application of the Independent Broadcasting Company of Knoxville, Tennessee, regarding a station run by the radio preacher J. Harold Smith.]

[the transcription resumes at track 2 of part 2 of side A:]

I just handed you a letter from Ed Brecher enclosing an article from The American Scholar, which is the Phi Beta Kappa magazine. Ed Brecher doesn’t figure in my files very much, but he figures very much in my activities at the Federal Communications Commission. Ed, interestingly, I think his background was in philosophy, but he had worked for the [?] Committee for a while, then he came to work for the Federal Communications Commission. He was really a researcher and a writer. He was about the best I ever saw going through masses of material and in short order putting it in some kind of meaningful form, and he was used to write hurry-up reports for Congress, things of that sort. He worked pretty closely with Frye. Then he began to work with me. You have commented – [?] such nice things about my style of writing, but I think maybe some of the things show Ed Brecher’s touch. I would always dictate the first draft of every speech or article I wrote, to get my ideas down, but somehow the paragraphs, where you just have to leap from one paragraph to paragraph, and I’d turn it over to Brecher and he had a way of adding a few words and making it flow, and whenever I could – of course he wasn’t on hand for everything I ever wrote by any means, but I used to work with him, and he was – he had – played a very active role in the preparation of the so-called Blue Book, the report on the public service responsibility of broadcast licensees.

One rather interesting addition to the history of educational broadcasting is the role that Ed Brecher played there. He’s now a freelance writer. He writes on a little bit of everything. He’s gotten on some of these sex articles of Masters – Dr. Masters and somebody else. He’s worked for them. But he grinds the stuff out at a great rate. But in any event, when I started working on this idea of getting some FM frequencies set aside for non-profit educational broadcasters, I’d meet with the educational broadcasters around the country. Their meeting places were primarily [?] at the Institute for Education by Radio and the University of Wisconsin, where they have the station, WHA.

Ed got extremely interested in this project of trying to get some frequencies set aside, but when the time came, I’d pretty well sold most of my colleagues on the idea of going along with setting aside – see FM – the new frequencies – new range of frequencies just opening up, so I insisted this wouldn’t be a question of taking frequencies away from any commercial broadcasters, but setting aside some frequencies that were brand new and saying, these are exclusively for non-profit educational broadcasting, or you can call it community broadcasting or whatever you want to. But the trouble about it was that the educational people that were interested were generally at the assistant or associate professorial level. They were the ones who were doing the job, and the presidents and the administrators of the colleges knew very little about it and were [ ? ? ] interested.

So finally the time came when the commission had to have hearings to justify setting these frequencies aside, and some educators would have to come in and make the record and show that they had a responsible – could make a responsible use of these frequencies, and they were important to them. But the only people qualified to do that or interested enough were these young fellows at the lower level who had been working on the thing. But not only did they have no prestige at all, but they hardly had radio – railroad fare to Washington, because salaries of professors were pretty low at that time. A full professor was getting around $6,000 or $6,500 in the average state university. So I was very concerned, after all this groundwork, we’d have the hearings and just by default we’d lose the frequencies. The commercial broadcasters would get them.

The morning came for the hearing, and much to my surprise and relief, a number of presidents of land-grant colleges were there to testify in support of this allocation of frequencies to educational broadcasters. You know the land-grant colleges were the ones who had the political clout in Washington generally, and they all gave very strong statements. The end result was the commission had a record made that would justify setting these frequencies aside, which we did.

I discovered just a few days later what had happened. Ed Brecher had taken – left the commission and gotten into some other office in Washington and was putting in long-distance calls to the presidents of the land-grant colleges. He just got the list of them from somewhere, and this was at his own expense or someone was working with him. I don’t know who paid the telephone bills, but it wasn’t on the commission’s [?]. Ed would start out by saying, “Now you’re about to pass up the greatest educational medium that’s ever come along since Gutenberg’s printing press.” They’d hem and haw, “What are you talking about?” Then Ed would give them a spiel about FM and what they could do with frequency modulation broadcasting in the univer – as an educational medium, not only for in-school broadcasting to the community schools around, but [ ? ? ] general broadcasting and sort of extend the walls of the campus – the boundaries of the campus out into the entire community.

The response would be, that sounds very interesting, but we had – didn’t know anything about it. Ed said, if you are interested in these frequencies, you better be in Washington at such-and-such a time for this hearing. It’s going to be at such-and-such a time and such-and-such a day. The response was, if we came, we wouldn’t know what to say. We don’t have the proper background. Ed says, “You just come to Washington. I’ll have something written for you to say.” So Ed, a member of the staff of the FCC, had been preparing the statements for these presidents of the land-grant colleges, and as a result, we got the educational frequencies set aside, and that carried on through into educational t.v. So the operations of government sometimes are rather strange. I don’t think the other members of the commission ever knew about Ed’s skullduggery until he resigned. It would have been something else, or he’d have been fired forthwith by the other members of the commission who knew about it.

[There is an interruption of the recording, which then resumes in mid-sentence:]

. . . the report centers in the Hollywood case. But here’s something from the Capitol Radio Reporter, the comments of Capehart, and I don’t remember seeing that in any of the material you had so far, but you must have it in there, and I – maybe I’ll get a little on tape here, just by way of background until my tape runs out.

Following my blast at Hoover, given this summary of the information that he had given us, showing the uselessness of it, Senator Capehart of Indiana issued a public statement demanding that I be investigated by Congress. I replied, and I – we ought to have copies of it somewhere – saying, that’s fine. Investigate me. But let’s just go ahead and get everything out in the open. Investigate me, investigate the FCC, and while you’re about it, investigate the FBI. I’ve got nothing to conceal here. Let’s get the whole story out in the open.

At just about that time – it seemed wholly unrelated – the owner of a radio station in Arizona or New Mexico came to see me. He was having some problems with his technical coverage of his radio station, and I saw right off the problem wasn’t great. I thought it was the kind of thing that the engineers could help him straighten out in no time at all. So I called up one of the engineers and asked him to see him, and apparently they did fix him up and showed him how to arrange his antenna better so he could get better coverage.

I thought no more of it, but the very next day a neighbor of ours called up and asked if – called several people in the neighborhood and asked if we could come out after supper for coffee, and he said that this man – he gave his name. I’ve forgotten his name now – was a great banjo player, and – the man that ran the radio station. He mentioned to me – he said nothing about him having come to the FCC. But he says that [?] had written a symphony built around his banjo playing. This neighbor said, “I play the guitar pretty well. So come on over. We’ll have some drinks and some good music.” So we went over and had a very pleasant evening. This man was great on the banjo. And then he mentioned my run-in with Hoover at the time, and he said, in effect, My God, I would hate to be in that kind of fix, to have this kind of stuff go in the FCC files about me and have no opportunity to answer it and didn’t even know what it was all about. That was about the limit of that conversation.

Two or three days later the phone rang. It was Senator Capehart. He says, “Mr. Durr, I just want to – I called to tell you how much I appreciate what you did for my friend” – whatever this man’s name was. We’ll call him Mr. – just Mr. Blank. I said, “He came in, and he had an engineering problem. It seemed pretty simple, and I sent him to the engineers, and they straightened him out. It was the kind of thing I do as a matter of routine for anybody that came in.” He says, “That’s one of the things I like about you. You treat everybody alike.” He said, “I want you to have lunch with me some day, but I’m about to leave. I’m going back to Arizona this afternoon, but I’ll give you a ring and we’ll have lunch when you come back.” I heard no more about this investigation. So I found out later that Mr. Blank, whatever his name was, had had a radio station in Indiana, and he had done quite a number of favors for Senator Capehart. So on his own accord he went to Senator Capehart, and says, “Look here, Senator. You’re barking up the wrong tree going after Commissioner Durr on this thing. He’s dead right about it.” And so that was the end of the Capehart demand for my investigation.

Here’s another loose paper that doesn’t seem to relate to anything. It’s a memor – two memoranda sent to me by Paul Duncan. He worked for Senator Lister Hill. This doesn’t relate to any of my assigned government activities, but it does show the thinking of the time. You’ve got – the first memorandum relates to the Truman policy on Greece and his own thinking. This didn’t get out publicly. And later, his memoranda n the approach to the problem of communism, the hostile military country as against the idea. He apparently wrote those about – some time before he sent them to me. He’d heard a speech I made, and then he sent me that as an indication of his thinking. But it does show the – some of the thinking at the time going on at the lower level about our foreign policy and what should – what it should be. And there was a lot of concern when Truman came on, moving into the Cold War policy, which a good many of us in the government – we were not in foreign affairs, but we were deeply concerned about the direction foreign policy was taking.

In parts of the files that you’ve already gotten in there, I find several memoranda that I wrote – one very lengthy one, as I recall, to Carroll Kilpatrick, about what I thought our post-war policy should be. It was economic as well as political. Maybe I’m particularly interested in that because I’ve just finished reading the two volumes of Kennan’s memoirs dealing with that period. Rather interestingly, why Kennan didn’t get in trouble sooner. I found out, he complained, and it seems to be a part of the way the State Department operates. He writes these agonizing memoranda, and he agonizes still more that nobody ever reads them.

So there was a lot of this kind of thing going on, that you just passed on to your friends that were concerned, and we were exchanging ideas. But it is an indication of my thinking along – at that time. But also it might be of some interest to somebody who’s just getting – wanting to get a feeling of the approach to foreign policy at the time. I was pretty conscious, without being any – claiming any expertness at all, I was – I had some ideas that had just developed from the little I’d seen, first as a – in Germany in my student days, and then what I saw in Spain in my student days. The – saw a revolution working up then, although I was politically wholly unsophisticated. And then I got quite a shock when I was in Russia in ’46, not so much from what I saw in Russia, because without being able to speak the language and being confined to a radius of 30 miles from Moscow, there’s not too much I could see and understand, but I did – it was our attitude, looking at the United States from Russia, that I found very frightening. We talk about communist lines, but we had lines just as rigidly as they did, which blocked their thinking and a careful approach to the problem.

And I got myself in trouble. I testified before the Senate foreign affairs – Foreign Relations Committee against the NATO treaty. That barred me from going on the faculty of the Yale Law School. Dean Acheson got upset, and I was told years later that that was the reason, because I was – I just couldn’t see Russia as having military ambitions at that particular time. You can’t conceive of such devastation. We did – I say, Moscow itself was – came through the – the Germans did not destroy Moscow. There were only a bomb – a few bombed out buildings and they’d been within artillery range, but they didn’t want to repeat Napoleon’s mistake, getting there and get caught and freeze. They’d have a place to hole up, so they – although they got within artillery range of Moscow, they didn’t try to destroy it. But in flying in – we flew from Berlin to Moscow, and I suppose we were probably around five or six thousand feet, and all the way you just saw nothing but devastation. It was just as if everything in the United States, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi River, had been completely wiped out. So I couldn’t conceive of Russia at that time having military ambitions or even a military potential, but nevertheless it was not the thing. You had to get on the bandwagon and talk about the threat.

Later I was a little bit confirmed. I was there in Poland in ’48, and I saw some of that. Russia had some troops in there. And then later, years later, I was at a conference in England, called Wilton Park Conference. It was a fortnight conference on international affairs, and they had people from the United States and Europe. And this was – the Labour Party was just coming into its power then, and then the NATO treaty – the question of whether that treaty would be renewed, and there was a very conservative member of the Labour Party. They have their right and left wing too, and they would talked to us, the importance of renewing the NATO and describing its coming into existence in face of the Russian armored divisions poised to sweep over Europe. There, at that conference, there were some rather high level military people, career military people from Sweden and Nor – no, [ ? ? ] Sweden – Norway, Finland, and Denmark, who were –had been with the military for years and years, been through World War I. So after the speech, I put it to each of them independently. I said, “Now what is this about this great threat then, the Russian armored divisions poised to sweep over Europe?” Every one of them independently replied, that’s a lot of bull. Even if Russia had wanted to attack Europe, she didn’t have enough oil to go 30 miles. But yet this was the line that was given us.

Interviewer: Question: they did sweep over Hungary . . .

Durr: Sure.

Interviewer: . . . and they [?] Czechoslovakia..

Durr: The satellite countries, right around them. That was their limit.

Interviewer: Had not NATO been there though, would they have stopped? I just [?] understand why [ ? ? ] . . .

Durr: You see NATO – if they had been poised to sweep over, as we were pictured – it took a long time to get NATO going, and they would come right on in long before NATO could have stopped. And I was quite interested in getting Kennan’s approach to that. See, I had him pictured as the author of the policy of containment, and consequently I saw him as one of the early Cold Warriors, but he was very embarrassed about this interpretation that had been put on this paper he wrote on containment, that he did not like Russia a bit. He saw the problems there, but he said it was inevitable that Russia was going to move into the – these satellite countries, because that had been the source of invasion throughout history, through the – Poland and the other countries, and that that was going to be the limit of her military aims. And again, he didn’t think that she was going to do much militarily there, but political infiltration, and he emphasized in the containment, he was talking about political activities rather than the military containment. He said that our efforts to contain them militarily would have been a tremendous mistake. And so many are beginning to say that now.

But it was all part of the hysteria that we – that was worked up. It was sort of like the witch hunt in Massachusetts. If you’ve ever read Marion Starkey’s Devil in Massachusetts, that’s one of the most perceptive and interesting books I ever read. I never have found out whether Marion is a man or a woman. Many of that . . .

Interviewer: i-o-n? It could be a man or a woman.

Durr: It’s spelled i-o-n, but I thought I saw a review once in the Harper’s in which they referred to her as “she.” But, in any event, this was a teacher of English at a college in Vermont. She got interested in the Salem witch hunts, and she took time off and took about a two-year course in psychology before she went into this thing and writing a very human standpoint and describing how this thing built up from just a couple of teenage girls getting into hysterics when they grot caught doing something they shouldn’t do, and then the idea – the one little biblical verse, “thou shall not permit a witch to live.” That’s what the Lord said, and how it builds up psychologically.

And you saw the same thing in trying to describe McCarthyism. You have so many of the repentant ex-communists that would come in, and oh, they’d got – they would just bare their hearts, and you’d think that during their communist days, that they’d been the most sinful people that ever was. As a matter of fact, very few of them had any opportunity to do anything very dangerous, but the pressure got on them, and they switched around, and they became the main informers, and any people that they had even known – they’d say they were nice to them or something – that becomes an association with them. It was the same thing in the Massachusetts witch hunt.

And then you have people going before the committees, ex-communists, and from their abject repentance, you thought they were the worst – most dangerous people in the world. They’re so sorry.

But how could you deny the existence of witches when the psychology got going? When the hysteria finally ran its course, a few began to take stands against it. There were 30 confessed witches in jail. It’s a psychological problem that arises at the time. I’ve seen articles and talked to some police chiefs around the country from time to time, and one of the big problems they have, when there’s a very sensational murder committed, and they have a hard time getting a clue, what throws them off is these people coming in – sometime coming in personally, sometimes writing anonymous letters, saying they did it.

Interviewer: Why? To . . .

Durr: So they want to take all the credit for it. So that’s a real problem of police work.

Interviewer: There are also confessed witches today. Of course in different [ ? ? ]

Durr: Sure. And I talked to a young fellow who got out fairly early. He was at that time teaching at the American University. I just ran into him at dinner at the house of a friend one night. And I had just been in one of these loyalty hearings all day long, and he was asking me about it., and I was telling him that this had been a particularly bad one, a [?] non-political person at the lower level, the stenographic level, and maybe years before they’d given two or three dollars to the Spanish ambulance fund, which was the thing to do in the light of the times, just like you’d give to community chest or Red Cross or something of that sort. Then the rules of the game changed on them, and I – I would – I used to – some of these hearings, I’d go home and go in the bathroom and start throwing up. And Virginia would ask me, said, “Why do you – you always have been tense in the courtroom, but I’ve never seen you this way. What is it?” And I tried to explain to her. I said, “You see the disintegration of a human personality taking place before your eyes behind the closed walls of this hearing room.” And here you have this person who wants to conform, and they have conformed all their lives. And as I say, they gave this money to the Spanish ambulance or something very innocent at the time, and then the rules of the game change on them, and all at once, they’re in effect being accused of being disloyal to their own country. So you see them going through this struggle with themselves. They want to be good Americans. But how can I behave so I’ll stay out of trouble? And as I put it, it was like a primitive tribe that’s hit by a plague. They know nothing about the theory of germs, and so they must have offended the gods, but exactly how they’ve offended the gods, they’re never sure, and they want to placate the gods, and they don’t know how to placate the gods, and it’s something of the same thing.

This man, anyway, he spoke without a trace of an accent. I assumed he was an American, but it turned out he was a German refugee. He’d been in the University of Berlin when the Hitler business first started, and of course for a while there the Nazis were not quite sure of their power. They moved a little bit gingerly, and he would describe the processes. He had been arrested and held for questioning three times. First they get you in. They’re very polite about it. They are sure you’re a good German, and so there’s some students around the university that are not good Germans like we are, and they’re a great threat to this country, and maybe you can tell us about them, give them some leads, feed them some names. You don’t give, so they take you out and lock you up overnight. The next day you’re brought back for questioning again, this time a little rougher, in a room – a different room, with some bull whips on the wall. About the third time – they lock you up again – about the third time they start using the bull whips on you. But he was – he never – they weren’t quite sure of their power, and they last time they held him for three weeks. He decided he better get out. So he did manage to get out and came to this country. But this was fairly early, before the Hitler power built up to such a tremendous – it got a sort of momentum so completely.

But he said he got interested in watching the behavior of people under questioning when pressured, and he says the people who cracked up under it were the mildly liberal, decent Germans. They had been first pretty upset about the brutality of the – Hitler and the Nazi youth, but they wanted desperately to be good Germans, and they began to wonder whether they were being good Germans when they did question the power – the activities of the regime in power. He says the – generally, on the average, the communists – and they got a few communists – and the Jews held up far better, because the communists didn’t have this loyalty to Germany anyway, and the Jews began to catch on. It was not because of their loyalty to Germany, but because they were Jews, and they held up, but it was just these mildly liberal Germans who wanted so desperately to belong and not have their patriotism questioned, that cracked up.

And it’s the same pattern in Salem. These good church people were very decent people, but they were afraid that they might be accused of being heretics, and so they would – some would have done little things that were probably very decent things, but out of the orthodox, and they began to repent of the most decent behavior, and some of them got to thinking of themselves as maybe I’m a witch, because I haven’t been behaving just like they say I should behave.

In any event, that’s – I don’t know what value it is

Interviewer: It’s background for this hysteria in the 1940 [?] 1949..

Durr: That relates generally to the general implications of the Truman doctrine, which – politically, it – they whipped up the Cold War idea of the communist menace for political purposes, and that now has been admitted by most of the historians who go into that period, that we had the revival of the old isolationist sentiment. They were afraid of that.

And the – of course on the other hand there were all the relief questions. Greece – Turkey wasn’t having any problem from revolution particularly, but it was out of money. It was a [ ? ? ]. That had been England’s sphere of influence. So you had at that time this sort of a revolution going on in Turkey, with some of the guerillas that had been fighting the Fascists, the Nazis. Some of them were communists. Some of them were not.

Interviewer: Excuse me. How did you say that again? The Truman administration whipped up this sentiment . . .

Durr: The anti-communist sentiment was whipped up to get support for foreign policy, and Greece was having a terrible time economically. They were in a bad way, and so was Turkey, but Turkey needed arms, so the idea of this Greek loan, when Churchill informed Truman that Britain couldn’t do anything any longer. The idea first of this $300,000,000, I think it was, was to protect the economy.

Interviewer: I thought it was a grand gesture.

Durr: They were worried about the – this was – the economy would collapse.

Interviewer: Is this the Marshall Plan [ ? ? ] about?

Durr: No. This preceded the Marshall Plan. This was one of the first, and they were very skeptical of their ability to get this thing through Congress, because of the isolationist sentiment. It was generally, we went in there. We helped them out. Now let’s go back to tend to our business. Sort of like World War I. Let’s get our troops out of there. Get uninvolved.

Interviewer: Which is exactly what we’re doing today.

Durr: So this idea of – talking about the – because of the fighting up in northern Greece and the – and there were communists in there, but Russia did not support them. Russia under the – under all of the agreements- Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, it was then, were our sphere of influence, and we recognized this as not our sphere of influence. And they would not – the liberals of this country got very worked up about Russia, because she wouldn’t give refuge to the Greek guerrilla fighters when they would get into trouble and they would creep into some of these satellite countries and they would be driven right back. So a lot of them were killed because Russia did not give them refuge. It’s a baffling thing.

But in any event, somebody – I don’t know who. Atcheson was in on the writing of it, it says – but they get this idea of this being communism about to take over Greece, and this communist menace, and we’ve got to stop communism, and they found that the isolationists were the most violent anti-communists. So appealing to this anti-communist sentiment among the isolationists, the Greek loan went through,. Of course this was the first – it was a unilateral action. It bypassed the U.N., and it was the - putting the U.N. out of action before it was really given a chance.

It looks like we’ve just about finished up on my government files, and also I’ve got the major part of the files on my activities since I got back to Alabama. In view of the state of confusion, I’m sure that there are some loose piece of paper hanging around somewhere and that some pieces will show up that are not just duplicates. I do know that I have some of the instruments – writings stuck away in drafts of this book I’m supposed to be writing, but I’m quite sure that most of that – most of those are duplicates. If anything else shows up, I supposed I can pass them on to the archives later.

I remember one small folder that we haven’t yet run across. I believe it is still around somewhere. This contains articles I wrote for this newspaper The Compass. Whether they called it The Star or The Compass or PM at the time, I don’t remember. But this was on the trip to Poland, and I sent them several articles. I don’t think any of them were ever published, although I thought they were quite interesting, and I don’t know whether it was just they were not regarded as newsworthy or didn’t deem it expedient at that time to publish anything that might show Poland or any of the satellite countries in any kind of a favorable light. If they do show up, I will let you know.

Now we’ll turn to the letters, and here are two folders that I ran across – in fact I spent most of yesterday reading them, because it was so interesting to me. It’s quite interesting to go back and read things that you wrote about 50 years ago. Both relate to my time at Oxford.

Here is the first folder. I don’t know who put these together, but this says that – these are early bits dealing with my trip to Oxford and the early part of my stay there. I don’t know who put them together, but they – and I can’t identify the handwriting. But here’s a more larger and thicker folder, and the handwriting on the outside is that of my mother. This is what I found particularly interesting. How it would look to somebody else, it’s hard to say.

Interestingly, these are – in both folder there seem to be nothing but my own letters, and I was receiving many letters, as my own indicated, and they would reply to other letters from my mother, father, brothers, and other members of the family. I recall that when I got back from Oxford and even after we got married, there was a – I had the bottom of a steamer trunk which we put up in the attic of Virginia’s parents’ home. Those many letters, particularly from my mother, were there, but they’ve completely disappeared. They may have been destroyed, but we may even run across some of them loose when we get into the – these other cardboard boxes. I just don’t know what is in them.

I find to my surprise that there’s a great deal of history coming through my letters from Oxford, at least briefly mentioned. For example, there’s an account of Lord Brice, former British Ambassador to this country and author of The American Commonwealth, who delivered a lecture at Oxford and later came around to the American Club, where we talked to him.

Then there was a mention of General Smuts. And it seems that I was at Oxford at the time of the general strike, and I’m expressing great concern about the shortage of coal and whether we’ll be able to keep warm. In view of the – my reputation later in life of being something of a radical, which I don’t think I was, it seems that I was quite conservative in my younger days. I am anything but sympathetic with the strikers.

And one letter is in there to my father, right after World War I. There were coal strikes in Birmingham, and he had been appointed on a commission by Governor Kilby to go into the demands of the miners. The report they came out with was generally unfavorable to the miners for the ideas of organizing a union, and I thought they were dead right. And I had pretty much the same reaction, as I said, to the general strike in England.

Then I find a description of the – of Hyde Park, where all the speakers gather and say what they please and are left undisturbed. I describe wandering to the – a little area that’s taken over by the Bolsheviks, as we called them in those days, and I express a little shock at the extremity of their - the ideas that they express, and say in this country – in the United States, we’d be sending them back where they came from, as if I thought that was a good idea, but I say that England’s decision has very – is a very different situation from the United States because of the extreme gap between the upper classes and the laboring people, those at the bottom of the heap.

I find another letter in there relating to the – a Russian – a Bolshevik ambassador – they called him – I belief his name was Krassen – who came to the Quaker Hall at Oxford – or Friend’s Hall. Whatever they called it, run by the Quakers – to make a talk on the famines in Russia. By the hall, I sat – they could seat probably only 250, three hundred people. There were four or five hundred milling around on the outside, and some, curious to hear what he had to say, and others doubtless with intention of – there with the desire of breaking up the meeting, and I express that some – the idea that the students would like very much to toss Mr. Krassen into the Isis River. I mention the fact that he drives up in a Rolls Royce and say – I don’t know where I got the information – it’s his own automobile, and it seems to be rather hypocritical for a Bolshevik, professing to be concerned for the ordinary people, should be driving up in a Rolls Royce automobile.

[end of side A]

[side B:]

Durr: I arrived in Oxford in January of 1920. Of course this was during the aftermath of World War I, and I have quite a number of observations about the unfriendly attitude of the British toward the United States. There was a certain stiffness. Oxford at that time was – as far as the English students were concerned – was almost entirely the upper classes, and they were not very friendly toward Americans in any event, but there was a general feeling that the United States had let them down. I even mention the unpopularity of Woodrow Wilson with the League of Nations. It was as if he had led them to the mountaintop and then deserted them when the United States didn’t go into the League of Nations. There was a terrific feeling almost of betrayal.

Then England was poor ant the time, and the United States was being very prosperous, and Uncle Sam became Uncle Shylock in some of the extreme papers, expecting the loans made during the war to be repaid and the like. Later it appears – and this must have been my correspondence about a year later – that Wilson’s popularity seems to have revived again, after the alternative was Warren Gamaliel Harding. The – I write about the election of 1921. I had – this was the first time I had reached the age to vote, but I was just as glad that I wasn’t registered and couldn’t vote, because I didn’t think there was much of a choice offered when the alternatives were Cox and Harding. And I mention an election we had at the American Club. We had our own election with speeches for the candidates. Eugene Debs, the socialist who was still serving time in the penitentiary in Atlanta, was also on the ballot as a socialist candidate. I mention the fact that the Southern boys stood firm and as a result, Cox did win at the American Club, but that 19 votes went for Eugene Debs, and I’m expressing the idea that this was not just evidence of socialistic ideas, but sort of a protest against the alternatives.

I also mention going back and reading Brice’s book, a chapter in there in which he’s explaining why very few top-flight men get elected to the Presidency, there being a few rare exceptions. And I mention some of the charges being made in the political campaign as gathered from the press. I’ve forgotten what the main charge against Cox was. Of course he was identified with Wilson and the League of Nations, and he was going to pull us right back into this – these foreign entanglements that we’d been warned against, but one of the accusations against Harding, which I mention in my letter, is that he had negro blood, so whether true or not, that apparently was being used in the 1921 campaign, and not – and sometimes rather openly.

Then I mention a speech that Harding had made in Birmingham – I assume Birmingham, Alabama, but of course I don’t remember him coming to England when I was there – and Harding at the time seemed to – gathering from my own letter – he seemed to have advocated political equality for the races. I am upset by that, which shows that I was pretty traditional in my Southern ideas at the time, and I was saying that he can’t understand that political equality moves inevitably into social equality and all the implications of that. But I do say that I think that Harding is a sincere person, but that he’s not very understanding or very bright.

Apparently there was quite a bit in the papers at that time about the Washington conference, and I mention the headlines on the subject and the amount of newspaper space being given to it, but there’s nothing in my letters from which you can understand or get an idea of my views on the issues or really what the issues are, or rather were at the time.

And I write quite a bit about the ignorance of the British, particularly the upper classes, about the United States. It’s like a Southerner talking about the Northern liberals. And they do evidence a very profound, startling ignorance of what the United States is like. I think they still – at that time were still thinking of it as a frontier – raw frontier country with little in the way of schools and universities and so on.

I mention a speech that Stephen Leacock, who was the economist from McGill University, a Canadian who had more of a reputation as a humorist, and he was really quite good, both as an economist and a humorist, but he made this speech at the Oxford Union, trying to tell the English something about the United States and Canada as well, and express their shock when he calls attention to the fact that there were many universities in the United States between Harvard and Yale, and some quite good. The British seemed to be – so many of them seemed to be surprised to know that there were universities that amounted to anything, other than Harvard and Yale. But Leacock, with his wry humor, was able to get across his ideas quite well, and I think did a very effective job.

And I mention several times being asked by some of my English friends exactly where the equator ran through the United States and – two different ones separately – if – they wanted to know if Rio de Janeiro wasn’t the capital of Florida.

But I seemed to have grown a little more tolerant of the – my fellow students – British fellow students as time went on and found myself not giving in at all on the – my feeling about the stiffness of some, but there are others that I found quite friendly, and I began to make a distinction between the boys from, say, North England and those from the rural sections of the country. Being from a rural section of the country, that gave you more of a claim to aristocracy.

And then also, quite a bit on a bicycle trip about the kindness and friendliness of a lot of the fishermen we ran into off the coast of Clovelly and the innkeepers and people of that kind.

By the time I got to Germany, which was 1921, I had the feeling that I had gone to some – matured in my thinking a little bit. I describe, as we go along, not only the sights and the cathedrals and so on, but my reaction to the people. And I’m quoting from the American press, the Times Herald, which was published in Paris, and also I got hold of a copy of the Reader’s Digest from somewhere, in which they were writing about the Germans’ hatred of the – America, and really, you’d think that the atrocities of World War I are still being carried on against American tourists. I’m writing home. I’m saying in effect that I have no way of saying that these specific instances did not happen as recounted, but the general impression seemed to be that if you ever got around the police, you’re liable to end up in jail. I pointed out – of course we did have to check – when we went into a new place, we had to report to the police station, everywhere we went. But I pointed out that this was equally true in France and theoretically true in England, although they didn’t – were not very rigid about it, and was contrasting the rudeness of the French – the police forces where we tried to – police stations where we tried to register, but when we couldn’t – our French was not too good – as against the patience and even the kindness of the Germans, who tried to help us out and understand, and maybe they’d end up by finding somebody that’s – that spoke a little English.

Then I describe my – I go into the areas of occupation. I had remembered that Americans had withdrawn at that time, but apparently they were still there around Coblenz. And I contrasted their appearance and general behavior to the – that of the French and British. The French soldiers didn’t look too impressive to me, but – and in one area using a lot of Singhalese troops and foreign troops as – black troops as – in the army of occupation, and I was saying that this was – I find this – I find myself thinking back on the Reconstruction days of the South.

But I do begin to be struck with the cult of war in Germany. Everywhere you go, you see these monuments to military men. I say, to illustrate the point, that the woman on top of the fountain in the court square in Montgomery – if this had been a German fountain, she would have had on a helmet, a shield, and been carrying a sword, that everything there glorified the military. And I did say that I saw many of the people – men, now of course in civilian clothes, who looked to me like the old Hun type, the Prussian militarist, and you could – it took no great stretch of the imagination to conceive of them as back in uniforms, giving orders which they expected to be obeyed implicitly, and the orders concerned were nothing but accomplishing their purposes of glorification or expansion of Germany, that these were – you did have this feeling about so many that you saw, but I did not think this was typical of the German people as a whole.

I describe an airplane flight which I took and I - it was a very simple – small airline that ran from Munich to Augsburg, only two passengers, and the informality of the pilot who talked at us a great length. He claimed to have shot down nine British planes or something like that during the war. He would talk about the war as if it were a football game. No sense of any horror about it at all.

So in one place I do say – the mark is declining, but there seems to be plenty in Germany. Less – far less poverty than you find in France and in England. People are very busy and well fed. I also make the observation that notwithstanding the Versailles Treaty and all the stories we read in this – carried in the press in this country about the Germans having to go back and live on nothing but potatoes and things of that sort, which I say is not true from what I saw in the restaurants. These were just middle-class people, and they were eating a lot, and they were eating quite a variety of things.

But I say that in 10 to 15 years, I saw the possibility – there’s no reason why Germany could not be a military power again and back at the whole – the same old thing she was after in World War I. So I did have the sense that Germany, although a defeated country, was basically a very militaristic country and that this militarism had been instilled by education of the people for several generations back. I think I did sense something that was going on there, even though I was a kid. Of course the 10 to 15 years was a little bit short, but I was never – I didn’t say this in my letters, but later in retrospect, when Hitler came to power and people here were saying, he’s just a tin soldier. People would never follow him. I said I was deeply disturbed, and I said this is the old Junker spirit in a less polite form, and that people are going to fall for it, and we’re facing grave dangers.

These letters pretty well speak for themselves. I don’t care whether they’re put in the Durr family collection or in mine, just as long as they can be gotten at, but I would like to see these Oxford letters sort of in a place where they’re kept all together, not mixed in with the others, because I do think they make – anybody who gets interested in this thing – I’d like for my children to read some of them someday and be sure that they can be found.

Now here are some – just a hodgepodge of letters, completely loose, and they seem to range in time and varying people, and some are addressed to me and some are – most are letters that come in to me. Here for example in this envelope are some more of my Stark School report cards. Included in the bundle is a letter from Professor Stark to my father, who had apparently just sent in the money to pay for – pay my fare to Washington to the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson. Professor Stark took about 30 boys up to Washington for the inauguration, which I look back on with – that I found very exciting, seeing Woodrow Wilson, who of course was in his prime at that time, and [?] Taft, who was retiring, and seeing the sights of Washington. First time – it was the first time I’d ever been in a real big city.

Then here are two other letters addressed to my mother, and they have written on the envelopes – they seem to have been sealed up again. Maybe it was time and the dampness that sealed them up – marked Alice Venable. Mrs. Venable was – I think Milo Perkins might be interested in them. I’m sure he will know all about the Venables. But she was a typical example of the poverty-stricken widow following the Civil War, who was too pride – too full of pride to ask for charity and wanted to make it on her own. They had this place at [?Hope Hall]. Mrs. Venable used to come into Montgomery and do sewing, and I can remember the – all the ladies talking about her, how beautifully she sewed, that everything she did was a work of art. Then her daughter, Miss Annie, ran the farm. She worked in the fields, plowed, hoed, raised chickens, and would come into Montgomery maybe once a week, bringing in vegetables and chickens and whatever she had for sale.

Mrs. Venable used to invite us children to come out sometime for the weekend. She lived in this old frame house, what I thought was the largest house I had ever seen. It was four stories with a well - with the whole thing, balconies, and each – inside balconies around this floor well. But it never had been finished, and there were some rooms they lived in in one part of the house. Other rooms had corn stored in them or furniture or a harness and things of that sort.

So apparently they were some people of some consequence before the Civil War. As I say, they were building this enormous old Southern mansion which was never completed. The war came on, and here they were trying to maintain their dignity and making their own way without complaint. They were very courageous people, Miss Nannie and her – I mean Mrs. Venable and her daughter Miss Nannie. Milo, I’m sure, can – knows about them, and I think he might be interested in seeing these – I don’t know what’s in the – what’s even in the letters, but Milo might connect them up to other – to the families that are still around. I can’t remember any of Mrs. Venable’s children. Of course there’s the historian Venable. But I just remember Miss Nannie. She’s the – the daughter was the only one of the children that I was conscious of.

Now here are a couple of other letters. How they got in this bunch, I don’t know. They probably belong with the Oxford letters – French stamps on them. See if you can make out this signature here at the end. Jean somebody. I’ve forgotten their last name, but this was a very amusing story.

This letter as you notice is addressed to “Sir Clifford Durr,” care of American Express Company, and the origins of my connection with these two French girls was this: one day when I was at Oxford, I got a letter from [?DeMurray] Spotswood of Mobile. He and I had been fraternity brothers, and he said that he’d had a rather interesting experience. He had gotten a letter from a French girl saying that she and her – she was studying English, and that a lot of the girls in class, or at the suggestion of the teacher, probably, had decided they wanted to make contact with English-speaking boys and get up a correspondence with them to improve their French.

So he did not know where she got his name. Maybe out of some school annual or something of the sort, but she had written and asked that – if she could conduct this correspondence with him, to improve her English, and he said fine, so they had been corresponding for about a year, and he found her letters quite charming, and if I was going to Paris, could I look her up?, see – maybe see if I could find her and give him a report on what she was like.

So I was just about to leave for France then, going through the battlefields first and then coming down to Paris. So I dropped the young lady a note, telling her that I was a friend of DeMurray’s, and I wanted to – would like very much to meet her, and that I would be in Paris on such and such a time and that she could reach me through the American Express Company.

We took a day or two longer at the battlefields than we expected, and when we arrived in Paris, which was in the morning, we went right on over to the American Express Company to see if there was any mail, and there was this letter addressed to “Sir Clifford Durr” inviting me to lunch. It was that very day. It said that her father had some position in the government, and if I would come to his office at around noon or whatever time it was, he would escort me to their home for lunch.

So I went around, and I found the father, a little lively little Frenchman with a goatee. He didn’t speak a word of English, and my French was not the best in the world, so he pardoned himself and signed a few letters and papers, and then we walked to his apartment. It was five or six blocks away, and at a great rate, very rapid French, he was giving me a tour, an account of all the buildings and things as we went along.

Then we got to this apartment, which was very nice, but rather simple, over – downstairs, there were some shops. Upstairs was apartments. Apparently this girl – her mother was dead, and she was of high school age. She was a teenager, maybe about 17, I would say. She seemed to be in charge of things, and she had this friend with her, Yvonne [?LaMot]. Yvonne didn’t have any English-speaking boy to write to, and she wanted to know if I would be her pen pal, and I told her, fine. So we had a very pleasant lunch. It was very strenuous from my standpoint, because I found that when – although they could write a little English, when it came to talking, they were as bad in English as I was in French, but I got my dictionary out at the table, and we had a lot of fun over my accent and my misuse of words.

This went on for about two hours. They can spread out – the French can spread out a meal a long time. And then papa announced that he had to go back to work. I was very relieved, because I was tired and trying to keep up with the conversation, so I thanked them for a pleasant evening, and then this Yvonne LaMot, the friend, said, oh, you can’t go. Mama is expecting you at our home for tea. So I didn’t know how to get out of that, so I went to mama’s with her and found that she had about six or eight of her classmates there. None of them spoke any English at all, and I was the only boy in the crowd. It was a lot of fun, teasing each other. One of them played the piano quite well, and we’d – she’d play the piano, and we’d sing French songs. I found this Yvonne a very bright girl, and she spoke enough English so that with her English and my French, we could converse pretty well. So, from then on – I would get to Paris quite often on vacations, and I would generally drop by to see her. I would – summertime we might play tennis together or go to walks in the park or I might take her to the movies. This had been going on for about, and we would – had our correspondence going. She would start her letters in English and write a few paragraphs and then go on into French. I would respond, starting off in French and then ending up in English. But I was – this was after we had been knowing each other about a year, I suppose, and I was in Paris and I was – the parents invited me to come over to supper. It was a very nice supper. Every vegetable, every piece of meat is a separate course, so we eat from about 7 ’til 10, and then papa calls me to one side and gets me in another room and very seriously starts off by saying – telling me what a bright and attractive and wonderful girl his daughter is, and that he himself is a chemical engineer. I think he worked in some plant. As best as I could figure it out, they made liquid air. He didn’t speak any English, and I had to take it all in in French. He says his daughter wanted to go – was going into engineering too and would work with him, but that this was no life for a French woman. A French woman should have a husband and raise children. And there was quite a shortage of nice young men in France as a result of the war, and he had been observing me over the years – over a year, and he knew I was Protestant while they were Catholics, but he went on to explain to me that the Catholicism – the French didn’t take their Catholicism too seriously, and that while he was not a wealthy man, he could provide a fair dowry, and it got most embarrassing.

But I sort of called on my French, and it – under pressure I think it came back better than – I was speaking more fluently than I ever had. I tried to explain to him that I found his daughter very charming and very attractive, but I didn’t think she was in love with me, and this was just a friendship we had. We enjoyed each other. But in any event, when it came to marrying, that was a long way ahead of me. I was still a student, and that meant about three more years before I would even be out of law school and maybe at least five years before I would be supporting myself, much less a wife. The response to that was very quiet: I thought I would bring it up, because you seem to be a nice fellow, a nice young man, but I see the point. And so that was the end of my affair with Evonne. We never carried on any more correspondence.

Right here in the same bunch loose, there’s just this hodgepodge. I seem some letters apparently from my nephews to mother. There’s one little envelope by itself. It’s just sealed up, and it says “letter from Cliff, shortly after his marriage.” But it’s 12 o’clock now, and you have to go. We’ll take a look at those when you get back next Monday and see where they belong or if you want to put them in the archives at all, and then maybe we can get into some of these cartons here and see what else we can find. We might find some of the letters from the family to me.

I have no feeling one way or the other how you arrange these things. Of course, before my Washington days, I suppose my correspondence would properly belong in the Durr-Judkins correspondence, but as I said, I would like for this Oxford stuff to be sort of kept together and not mixed in, so if anybody wants to get that out, they can read it consecutively. There’s about a half a day’s reading just in these letters from Oxford, which, as I say, I find extremely interesting, but maybe they might not be as interesting to others as they are to me, except for little bits of the history of the time and my reactions to it, and the observations of a kid on the people and the countries of Europe that I went into.

[end of interview with archivist]

[biblical parable:]

Notwithstanding its billing, the story I shall have to tell was not written as a sermon, Palm Sunday or otherwise, and I do not think it would be regarded as a sermon in any church other than the Unitarian. I wrote it 26 years ago, and it was cribbed largely from a big book written considerably longer ago than that, a book which over the years has acquired quite a degree of respectability, but I am afraid one which we are more inclined to worship as a book of magic than to read as a rather remarkable compilation of human experiences and insights. I am referring to the Bible.

The inspiration was in no way holy. In fact, it was an event which I saw as anything but holy. I am referring to Executive Order 9835, issued by Harry Truman in March of 1947, setting up what has now become known as the Loyalty Program. This was during the period of McCarthyism, a national illness which began long before the Senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, was ever heard of on the national scene, and which, I am afraid, did not entirely pass away with his censure by the United States Senate or even his death.

This was a few days after Truman has issued his loyalty order. I found myself deeply disturbed. I remember sitting in the back room of my home in Virginia, thinking about it, and all at once the thought occurs to me, after all, wasn’t Jesus Christ crucified for subversive activities? So I got out the Bible and began to use it as a research document. Almost immediately I found what I was looking for: He perverteth the nation by his teachings.

So I went on reading the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Many of the stories of Jesus are repeated in each of the books. Some have different little – a slightly different version of the same events. In other cases one might have a story which is not included in the others. As I continued my research, this story began to unfold. Here is a typical civil liberties case. Here we find the techniques that are used to hush people up. They are – these methods are about as old as history. We find them in the period of the Inquisitions. We find them in the period of hysteria in England following the French Revolution, in the excitement of the Jacobins. We find them followed in the witch hunts in Salem, Massachusetts. We find them in the Alien and Sedition Laws adopted, when our country was brand new, out of the terror of the radical ideas of the Jacobins. They still go on.

In my original version of the Palm Sunday sermon, which was given in 1940 [sic: 1950] before the Unitarian Church in Denver, I devoted about half of it to the immediate background, referring to the activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Loyalty Program, and the general excitement over “communism.”

I’ll start the story with a question: Was Pontius Pilate really a very wicked man? Next to Judas Iscariot, he is perhaps regarded as the foremost villain of the New Testament, if not of the entire Bible, but is he deserving of such uncharitable condemnation?

Judas had acquired considerable prestige from his membership in the small band of apostles. His appointment as treasurer of the organization gave him added standing. For a while it looked if he were lined up with a winning cause. His leader was young and able and had a gift for gaining followers and inspiring their devotion.

Then the tide turned against Jesus, and the pressure was too much for Judas. He was ambitious, and there was neither fame nor money in a losing cause, only unpopularity and abuse, and perhaps physical danger, so he turned informer.

There being no counterparts of our present day magazines to hire him or to carry his confessions and disclosures, he took his reward directly in cash. The remaining spark of decency which caused him to throw his bribe back at the feet of his bribers and then hang himself, was not sufficient to save him from infamy.

Pilate’s sin was one of omission rather than commission, but this has not mitigated the severity of the present-day judgment of his behavior. His betrayal was not personal, but of a public trust. Jesus meant nothing to him personally, and Pilate had no concern with his ideas one way or the other. Jesus was just another defendant brought into court for trial. As a public official, Pilate was faced with a clear responsibility, and he shaked it. He permitted an injustice to be done with full awareness that there was an injustice.

In retrospect we’re inclined to judge his particular type of betrayal almost as harshly as that of Judas. Certainly the consequences were no less cruel. But if we look back at the record in the light of the present-day conditions in our country, Pilate appears in a more sympathetic light. He seems to have been of normally decent instincts for his day and time. He had at least an average sense of public responsibility, and the whole record indicates his respect for the judicial process. He was honest with himself. There was nothing of the hypocrite about him. He didn’t try to justify his actions or others’ failure to act on high moral grounds or considerations of national security. He faced frankly the fact that he was moved by no higher principles than political expediency. His last act in this episode was that of a man who wanted to do the right thing. Upon the request of the disciple Joseph of Arimathea, he readily delivered up Jesus’s body in order that it might be decently interred. He refused to be a party to besmirching the reputation after death.

Pilate was up against almost irresistible pressures. He was operating in a climate of fear and hate, for the most part deliberately created. His particular predicament forecast the difficulties and pressures now confronting our loyalty boards, congressional committees, and even the courts, who voluntarily or involuntarily are attempting to deal with the problem of disloyalty and un-American activities in this country.

The theological emphasis upon the supernatural elements of the crucifixion and resurrection have served to obscure a very significant aspect of the whole affair. Here was a typical civil liberties case over the issues of freedom of speech, opinion, worship, and due process of law directly involved. The story is one that repeats itself over and over in the struggle of men for freedom of the human mind and soul. The victim was unique – the victim only was unique. The other characters involved belong to no particular race, creed, or period of history.

Jesus was undoubtedly a troublemaker. Many of his associates were questionable characters. Certainly they were of doubtful social standing. In defiance of the prevailing prejudice of his day, he had said pointedly that on the test of behavior, a Samaritan might be just as good as a priest or Levite. He had questioned the accepted belief that wealth and virtue necessarily go hand in hand. He had been outspoken and vigorous in his attacks upon certain established business interests. He’d exposed the corruption of those in positions of power. Such language as the following was certainly regarded as intemperate by those at whom it was aimed: “Hypocrites, serpents, generation of vipers, whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones and of all uncleanness. Blind guides which strain at a gnat and swallow a camal.” Hypocrisy in high places was a constant problem. “All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe,” he said – he told his followers with reference to the scribes and Pharisees, “that observe and do.” “But,” he warned, “do not ye after their works, for they say and do not.” The words stung because they hit their mark. He stripped the cloak of respectability and righteousness from those who for pretence make [?] prior and left them exposed in their moral and spiritual nakedness.

Jesus’s appeal was to the malcontents, and he was effective in stirring them up and in gaining followers in ever-increasing numbers. He effectively challenged the status quo. in other words, he was subverting in the truest sense of the term. As a chief priest put it, he was perverting the nation by his teaching. He was a dangerous influence, and he had to be stopped.

A description of the tactics used to stop him has a familiar ring. His speeches and even private conversations were to be used against him. “Then went the Pharisees and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk.” Secret agents and confidential informants were put to work. “And they watched him and sent forth spies which would fain themselves just men, that they might take hold of his words, that so they might deliver him into the power and authority of the governor.” They questioned him on his loyalty to the government. “Tell us therefore what thinkest thou. Is it lawful to give tribute unto Ceasar or not?” They inquired into his religious beliefs, the soundness of his views on marriage and the resurrection of the dead. They set a lawyer on him in order to trap him in legal questions, for he’d not spared that profession in his exposure of hypocrisy.

But his great intelligence was too much for his questioners. He confounded them with his answers. He put the Sadducees to silence. “And not man was able to answer him a word. Neither did any man from that day forth answer him a word.”

In the area of public opinion his ideas were clearly winning the victory. Converts were running to his banner in ever-increasing numbers. The scribes and the Pharisees feared the people and hence were unwilling to trust them with ideas. Though they hated him without a cause, their hatred became an obsession. Unable to answer him, they decided to kill him. Argument having failed them, they took fear as their weapon. “If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him, and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and our nation.”

Jesus thus became a threat to national security. They now had a propaganda line with which public opinion could be effectively aroused. Courage on the battlefield is commonplace, for there men face death with approval of their fellows. But courage required to face the disapproval of society in defense of a cause is far rarer. Disloyalty, whether to place or nation, is an odious label, and none want to bear it – wear it. Those who wear it, whether justly or unjustly, are to be avoided, for the taint of guilt become attached by association. Their victim was driven underground for a while, and “Jesus walked no more openly among the Jews.” His followers were intimidated, but his ideas were not so easily destroyed. Even among the top officials of government, “many still believed on him, but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue, for they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.”

The symbols of a great religion based on justice and humanity were prostituted to fan the flames of hatred. This man was guilty of blasphemy, they said. The attack took on the zeal of a religious crusade, and the threat of physical violence was added to the social and religious pressures.

Jesus fully understood what nature of men is in this world. They were tolerant of dissent, so long as that dissent was weak and ineffective. They paid reverence to the memory of dead reformers, because those reformers were safely dead, but once their positions of power and authority were really threatened, they were ruthless. They would stop at nothing. He had the measure of their viciousness and hypocrisy, and told them so. “Ye build the tombs of the prophets and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, if we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have partaken with them in the blood of the prophets.” But he reminded them, “Ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. Behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes, and some of them ye kill and crucify, and some of them you scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city.” He frankly warned his followers of their danger. “They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.” And again, “now the brother shall betray the brother to death; and the father, the son; and children shall rise up against their parents and shall cause them to be put to death; and ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake.”

It was under these circumstances that Jesus made his decision to face trial. He would offer himself as a victim to the mob lest this mounting thirst for blood demand many victims. He still had followers who were devoted and unafraid, so the arrests of the servants of Annas were made at night. The kiss of Judas was to [?] papers. Jesus readily admitted his identity and chided the multitude who came to arrest him for their mob-given courage. “Ye came out as a thief with sword and staves for to take me. I sat daily with you, teaching in the temple, and ye laid no hold on me.”

The next day he was carried for trial before Caiaphas, the high priest who also quite conveniently happened to be Annas’s brother – son-in-law. The first question concerned his belief and his associations. The high priest then asked Jesus of his disciples and his doctrines. Jesus was not one to betray his friends. He [?] refused to express – expose his associates and immediately forced the trial into the issue of freedom of speech. “I spake openly to the world. I ever taught in the synagogues, and in the temples, whither the Jews always resort, and in secret have I said nothing. Why asketh thou me? Ask them that were with me, what I have said unto them. Behold, they know what I have said.”

He knew the law and [?] on his rights not to incriminate himself, but this was not what the court wanted. The response to his statement was a blow from an officer who stood by, and an implied threat of an additional charge of contempt of court. “Answereth thou the high priest so?” Jesus’s reply was a demand for the evidence against him. “If I have spoke evil, bear witness to that evil, but if well, why smitest thou me?”

But the evidence was not forthcoming. If he were in fact guilty of a crime, then Judas was his accomplice, and the testimony of an accomplice was not legally admissible in the Sanhedrin court. So “the chief priests, and elders, and all the council sought false witness against Jesus, to put him to death; yet found they none.” Finally two false witnesses were found who attempted to testify about a remark of Jesus, that he could destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days. But even the testimony of these witnesses was in conflict. Moreover it was irrelevant to any criminal charge that could be properly framed.

The chief priests were on the spot. Here was a dangerous man, and he had to be gotten rid of, but they had no evidence on which to convict him. Moreover, they had to think of the dignity of their court. The judicial forms at least had to be observed. The whole business began to look messy, and it would be better if someone else took over the dirty job.

So they took Jesus over to the hall of judgment, where Pilate presided. But “they themselves went not into the judgment hall, lest they should be defiled.” Pilate instead came out to them and trained judge that he was, demanded to be informed of the charges against the man he was to try. “What accusations bring you against this man?” But here also, the charges, like the evidence, were lacking. Let the accused prove his innocence, they said in effect. By virtue of the arrest, the burden of proof was reversed and thereby became the task of the defendant, to prove his innocence beyond all reasonable doubt. At least, that was their theory. “If he were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered him unto thee.”

But Pilate the judge refused to accept any such theory, because it involves the most basic legal concept. He could not put a man on trial who was not even charged that he had violated the law. He declined jurisdiction and threw the case back into the laps of the high priests. This man hadn’t violated any Roman law. “And he said, take ye him, and judge him according to your law.”

Here was complete frustration. The Jewish law was not equal to the occasion, either, even if testimony sufficient to convict him could be manufactured. They reminded Pilate that it is not lawful for us to put any man to death. The situation at this point was getting quite embarrassing for Pilate as well as the chief priests. Public opinion had been whipped up to a high pitch, and Pilate after all was a politician.

At this point, fortune played into his hands. Jesus was a Galilean, and as it happened, Herod, the governor of Galilee, was in Jerusalem at the particular time. Here was a chance to please Herod by a nice gesture of deferring to his jurisdiction and at the same time get rid of a case that was loaded with political dynamite. So Pilate waived jurisdiction and sent Jesus to Herod for trial.

Herod’s face was pleased. He liked the token of Pilate’s recognition. Moreover, he had heard quite a bit about the man Jesus and was curious to see what he was like. He hoped Jesus might even perform such a miracle in his presence. But after fruitless questioning to the accompaniment of vehement accusations from the chief priests and scribes, Herod realized how Pilate was using him. So back the defendant went to Pilate’s court.

Again Pilate demanded to know the charge. This time a chief priest whispered in his ear, and he asked, “Art thou king of the Jews?” Here was a definite charge of subversion, if not of treason, for Tiberius Caesar was in power, and anyone acting as a king in his realm was challenging the sovereignty of Caesar. Jesus immediately understood the origins of the question. The charges clearly did not originate with the civil magistrate. Jesus answered him: “Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me?” Pilate admitted that he had been prompted. “Am I a Jew? Thine own nation, and the chief priests, have delivered thee to me: what hast thou done?” Then Jesus readily gave the answer, that his interest was in spiritual and not temporal power: “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.” The answer made sense to Pilate, and he asked one further question to make the record entirely clear. “Art thou a king then?” To this Jesus answered that his only function and purpose was to bear witness to truth.

From this point on Pilate sought to turn his cross-examination into a philosophical discussion of the interesting question of what is truth. He was satisfied that there was no case and announced his verdict. “I find in him no fault at all.” Pilate suggests that as it was the custom to release one prisoner at the Passover, that he release the defendant, but the priest and his followers were adamant. Jesus had ideas, and he was articulate about them. He was therefore dangerous. So they demanded the release of Barabbas instead. Now as it happened, Barabbas was no mere dabbler in ideas. He was a man of action. He had been arrested for attempting to overthrow the government by force and violence. He had made insurrection and had committed murder in the insurrection.

By this time public feeling had been worked up to an explosive pitch. There was no evidence on which Jesus could be convicted, but there was definite political dangers in releasing him. So Pilate followed the only course left open. He resorted to the third degree. The defendant was scourged, and the soldiers smote him with their hands, but even this treatment brought forth nothing in the way of evidence. Again Pilate reported to the high priests: “Behold I bring him forth to you, that ye may know I find no fault in him.”

The priests high [sic] were after blood, and the chant “crucify him, crucify him” was steadily mounting in intensity, but Pilate persisted in his finding of not guilty. At this point the chief priests again changed their tactics. As messy as the job was, it was better for them to take over the trial, than to have Jesus go scot free. They now thought of a charge under which they could assume jurisdiction. They announced to Pilate: “We have a law, and by our law, he ought to die, because he made himself the son of God.”

With this new development, Pilate’s position became even more difficult. He was the more afraid. Again he went into the judgment hall and questioned Jesus, warning him: “I have the power to crucify thee, and I have the power to release thee.” But still Jesus remained steadfast in his refusal to confess his guilt to any crime. “And from thenceforth Pilate sought to release him.”

Now the quarry was about to escape, so the chief priests played their last card. In order to set aside Pilate’s judgment of acquittal, they proposed to try the judge himself. Pilate himself was threatened with a charge of disloyalty. Chief priests thus applied the last ounce of political pressure. Jesus, it is true, had explained that his interests lay in spiritual and not temporal affairs, but after all, he had said that he was a king, and for him to proclaim his kingship in Caesar’s realm was, according to their theory, treason to Caesar. Maybe Caesar would not be quite as [?] his politics at Jesus’s explanation. So the chief priests became the most vociferous exponents of patriotism and champions of Caesar. They proclaimed themselves more loyal to Caesar than Pilate, the Roman and Caesar’s own appointee. “We have not king but Caesar” became their cry. Pilate inferred by releasing Jesus, it demonstrated his disloyalty. They threatened to go to Caesar with the story. “If thou let this man go,” they said, “thou art not Caesar’s friend: whoever maketh himself a king, speak against Caesar.”

This last bit of pressure was too much. Pilate’s job was at stake, and was a good job. It carried with it power, prestige, and wealth. He might even find himself in the position of a defendant in a loyalty case. “So when Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, ‘I am innocent of the blood of this just person. See ye to it’.” And he delivered Jesus up to be crucified.

Pilate however made one last obeisance to the integrity of the judicial process. He wrote a title, and put it on the cross, and the writing was, “Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews.” But the chief priests were still not satisfied with the judgment of the court. Again they shifted their ground. This man Jesus was not really a king. He had just said he was. And so they demanded of Pilate: “Write not the king of the Jews, but he said, I am the king of the Jews.”

But Pilate had gone his limit. There was one line from which he would not retreat. He was a judge and respected the law. There was no provision of law under which a man could be crucified merely for what he had said. If he had to send a man to his death, the order of judgment at least would be clear, that it was for his illegal deeds and not mere words. So Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have written.” A legal principle at least was saved from [?]. Perhaps Pilate’s judicial conscience was satisfied. Certainly the scribes and Pharisees were satisfied, for Jesus was dead, and a great voice of protest was silenced, or so they thought.

But what did the suppression gain the suppressors? Perhaps the profits from their many-changing operations from the sale of sacrificial animals continued a few years longer. Perhaps they succeeded in continuing for a while their political control over the people who they so greatly feared. But the ideas they sought to destroy still lived, and they have continued to live, and to spread, because men have found them good. Now 2,000 years later we can see that the folly of the scribes and Pharisees was even greater than their wickedness.