The Jack Rabin Collection on Alabama Civil Rights and Southern Activists

Series II: Southern Activists

Sub-series 3: Clifford and Virginia Durr

Appendix II.3F: Transcript of Audiotape 21

Location: ?the Durrs’ home

Speaker: Clifford Durr

Interviewer: ?Henrietta McGuire

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

Repository: University Libraries, The Pennsylvania State University, Special

Collections Department, Historical Collections and Labor Archives

Transcriber: Barry Kernfeld

Item number: Audiotape 21

Occasionally, both here and on some of the other audiotapes in the Durr sub-series of the Jack Rabin Collection, Clifford Durr indicates that these recordings are being made in preparation for writing a book. His biographer John A. Salmond discusses Durr’s unfinished autobiographical project in the final chapter of The Conscience of a Lawyer: Clifford J. Durr and American Civil Liberties, 1899-1975 (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama, 1990), 202-204. The exact relationship remains unclear between, on the one hand, these audiotapes in the Rabin Collection, and on the other, Durr’s autobiographical documents at the Alabama Department of History and Archives, detailed in Salmond’s footnotes to the pages cited immediately above.

The exact name is difficult to hear, but about 14 minutes into audiotape 21, Durr seems to say “Henrietta McGuire” in reference to the interviewer, and toward the end of the tape, Durr refers to her father-in-law, Dr. McGuire, a minister. This interviewer is almost certainly the woman referred to in Durr’s autobiographical “Henrietta transcript” at the Alabama Department of History and Archives; see the introductory notes to the transcript of audiotape 22.

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.

Durr: . . . the last one, [?] the tag end of the tape, there’s just a little bit – my voice faded out. I don’t know whether the tape went bad or whether . . . [interruption of recording]

Before we get into the chapter beginning with the Montgomery story, there is one of my loyalty cases that I overlooked, and I think we better get that down now, and then we can work it into the chapter later on.

I’m going – I’m dictating this to give a true name and occupation to the man, but it might be advisable for his protection, because these things hang over a long, long time, and – if they’re publicized – it might be necessary to change his name and change around his occupation a little bit to conceal his identity.

This was the case of Dr. Karl Heiser, a rather distinguished psychologist. He came to my office one day, and he had already been found disloyal by the Civil Service Commission Loyalty Board and wanted me to handle his appeal. The story, as he told it to me, was this:

He had formerly taught at Connecticut State College. I believe that’s Storrs, Connecticut. Then, in his work, which was psychology, he had done quite a bit of research on methods of detecting incipient battle-fatigue neuroses. He had tried, during the war, to be allowed to go the front, so he could study the behavior of men firsthand, but this was not permitted. But he did go into military government right after the war and was – found himself in charge of the relief organizations, more or less directing them around – in – mostly in Austria.

He had not sought a government job, but the government had in effect sought him out. One of the agencies of government – and I’m not sure whether it was the Veterans’ Administration or the Public Health Service – had gotten interested in his studies. They had some money for research, and so they approached him with the idea of coming to work for the government, which appealed to him, because here was an opportunity to carry on the research which he was quite interested in. At the time, though, when he came back, after the war, he had – was made executive secretary of the American Psychological Association.

He had the complete transcript of his hearings. There were three basic charges against him. And I have all this in the files, and over time I think I will refer to them and correct any inaccuracies I might make here. The three charges were generally: one, that while teaching at Connecticut College, he had been accused of [being] actively engaged in communist activities and being in close association with either communists or people engaged in communist activities. The second charge also related to Storrs. He had defended – he had been faculty adviser to a student group, and the student group had protested against compulsory ROTC and had been vigorously attacked by the football coach and the military official in charge of the ROTC on the campus. The third charge was that while in military government in Austria, he had – this was the time where we had – I forget, is it three? – a four-power government in these areas: Russia, France, Britain, and the United States, and there was a joint government there for a while, handling these matters. The charge was that, although assigned to American military government, he had supported the communists in excluding the Quaker relief organization from going into Austria.

I read the transcript, and the answers to these charges came out quite definitely. First, as to the communism at Storrs, what had happened. This was during the Depression days. There was only one grocery store in the community. The grocer was taking advantage of the situation and charging what the faculty members and their wives thought were excessive prices. So along with the head of the economics department and several other professors, they organized a cooperative buying group. People were looking for jobs then, and there was a lot of property available, so they got a hold of an abandoned garage and a former grocer, and would buy their groceries out of town wholesale, and several days a week they would set up this cooperative store where the wives of the faculty members would come and do their – buy their groceries.

Then, after it got going, fliers were distributed around in mail boxes throughout the community accusing Heiser and the economics professor and the others of being communists. They went to a lawyer, who began to check into the matter, and he made his own investigation, and it was pretty conclusively proved that these fliers had been prepared and circulated by the grocer of the community. So suit was filed against him, a libel suit, and he immediately retracted, and the matter was disposed of with a public retraction in the paper by this grocer. That disposed of charge number one.

As to the support of the opposition to ROTC, this was in the slack period between the wars, when the military was not in the ascendance here at all. It was just -- the climate was pretty much that of England when the Oxford Union debated this question. We will – and concluded we will not fight for king and country.

But he had merely defended the right of the students to take this position. And they were not taking it on a principled ground really. Their general idea – ROTC is okay for the guys that like it, that like to get up and get out there and do these things, but we think we can spend our time more profitably in the library or – with our books, than marching up and down with a gun on our shoulder. And Heiser had been backed up by the administration, and that affair had dropped.

As to the Austrian relief affair, it just happened that there were several Quakers in Washington who had been connected with the Friends relief operation in Austria, so he asked them to come up and testify. He had not bothered to hire a lawyer, because he hadn’t taken these charges seriously.

Their testimony was in effect that this was part – the – that there was a policy of the four-power governmental group that all relief would be handled through the local political entities to try to get them reestablished – these municipal organizations and the things of that sort. And they said, contrary to the charge that he had joined the communists in excluding them, as a matter of fact he had gone to bat with the communist members of the delegation and at least had gained for them the right to go in and make inspections of this relief, which was more than they’d ever been granted before.

That seemed to pretty well dispose of the charges, but nevertheless he was found disloyal. He told me, “I’m not interested in working for the government any more. When I – I didn’t have any idea this kind of thing was going on. But I do not like to have the finding of record that I am in effect disloyal to the country.” So I agreed to handle the appeal for him to the Loyalty Review Board.

The review board sat in panels of three. The chairman of the board was a man named LeRoux, who was a very successful lawyer in Washington and had just been elected top layman in the Presbyterian Church [ ? ? ] branch U.S. – U.S.A., isn’t it? So he had considerable prestige.

I went through the record in great detail, and I talked to Dr. Heiser in detail. It didn’t seem that he needed any more witnesses, but I did get affidavits from people who had known him as to his good character and his reliability and his [?-]ability, and we already had in the record the testimony of these people who had been connected with the branch of service. So when we went into the hearing, I started off by saying to the board, I don’t know exactly what is bothering you about Dr. Heiser. And maybe if I can – we can find out what the real concern is, we can save time. Is it the Storrs incident? The Storrs, Connecticut, or either of those incidents. Or is it the Austria incident?

At that point the chairman said, “We are not interested in these peripheral matters.” Now these are the very charges, but he says these are peripheral matters. Then he goes ahead and turns to my client. “Dr. Heiser, in your last hearing,” he notes from the record, “your extreme view on freedom of speech led you to say that you would even grant freedom of speech to communists. Is that correct?”

He replied, “Yes, but I would like to explain my position a little better, to make it clear.” He says, “I think you can let communists talk all they please, and as long as people are allowed to answer them, I don’t think they’re going to cause any trouble. And I am very much aware –aware, once we start silencing any group, I’m afraid of what that would lead to in the way of academic freedom and general freedom of speech.” Then he went on – I had not thought of briefing him upon this kind of thing, because it was wholly unrelated to the charges against him – but he was a very intelligent person, and he went on to say, “Now my feeling about it might be a little bit different if there was an excited crowd around and a man was making an inflammatory speech that seemed to be – there was a serious – an immediate danger that he might inflame the mob into violence.” He says, “That’s – at that point, I would stop it.” As a matter of fact, just through his own reasoning, he came out where, right where Mr. Justice Holmes came out in establishing the clear and present danger doctrine in the Schenck case.

So they asked him if he would advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence. He said, “Of course not. I’d – I like this form of government.” And then another question was, “Do you believe that people should be employed by the government while they are advocating its overthrow?” He said, “I think if a person is – doesn’t like the government he’s working for, I don’t think he can be a very good government employee, and that would raise very grave doubts in my mind as to his competence.” They went on in this [?] . . .

[a faulty moment in the recording]

. . . and then toward the conclusion the chairman of the board said to him, “Now Dr. Heiser, I want to say to you that you are the frankest and most intellectually honest person that’s ever been before this board, and it’s not that we think that you are communist, or have ever been a communist, or would ever doing – do anything knowingly to promote the cause of communism, that bothers us. But what does bother us is your willingness to grant a freedom of speech to others which you say you would not exercise yourself.”

So they confirmed the order – the finding that all – on all the evidence there was reasonable grounds for believing that he was disloyal. There, there was no further appeal from the Loyalty Review Board except to take the case into court. I told him I thought this would make an ideal test case on the constitutionality of the whole loyalty program. It had not been passed on by the courts. The firm Arnold, Fortas, and Porter had the Dorothy Bailey case pending at the time, which later they lost by a divided court – a divided court at the time. But in any event I told him – I said, “You – I know it’s a question of limited funds that you have and the job you have, but I would be delighted to provide my legal services free, and I’m quite sure that I can get the ACLU or some other similar organization to put up the money for the court costs in preparing the record.” He says, “I want to go back home and think about this a while. I’ll let you know whether I’m going to go ahead with appeal.”

About a week later he came back, and he said, “I feel like a coward, but I am not willing to go ahead with the appeal.” He said, “First, the people I am working for in the Psychological Association, I’ve kept them informed of everything that’s going on. They are backing me up, but they say, if this matter gets publicity and pressure is brought to bear on them as a result, they well might have to find it advisable to let me go.” And he says, “Again, I have some children who are of the high and junior high age and [?] personal, and I’m afraid that would cause them a pretty rough time. So I just feel that I’m unwilling to expose myself to the repercussions of an appeal with the ensuing publicity that might result.”

So then – I was just about to leave for Denver at this time, and so I said, “Let’s at least bring this matter to the attention of the President. I will draft up a letter and let you go ahead and sign your own letter to the President.” And then I told him of my conversation with Truman before my dis- -- about the reappointment – my reappointment to the FCC, in which he told me at the time that he wanted to protect people, and if this didn’t protect them, he would amend the order or even repeal it if necessary.

Then later, some [?] criticism had been made of the unfairness of the program in the press, and Truman had come out with a public statement in which he had said that if any unfairness or injustice resulted from the operation of the program, he wanted it brought to his attention personally.

So I got together – before doing it, writing the President, I had written to the head of the Loyalty Review Board, Seth Richardson, pointing out that this was not – this decision was not even in accordance with the Loyalty Board standards, that this went far beyond anything that – any test that was laid down in the Loyalty Board, because there was no question of his membership or sympathetic association with any subversive organization. It was just a question of his willingness to grant freedom of speech. So I first get out this letter to Seth Richardson, and I ask for a hearing before the full Loyalty Review Board. This consisted of about 25 people, and as I said, they sat entirely free, so I tried to appeal to them.

I got a letter back from him which said, “I have taken the pains to glance at the record, and the hearing of Dr. Heiser seems to be all in accordance with the established procedure, so we are not willing to go any further.” So I get the material together, and get at this letter from Heiser, and he signs it and mails it to the President, reminding the President of his public statement that he wanted any injustice in the program to be brought to his personal attention.

The President promptly refers the matter back to Seth Richardson. Then I write again and ask for attention. Richardson refers the matter to a man named Blair, who is head of the public sector – Public Service Commission at the time. Just a run around, and all these vague letters back to the president: it’s all in accordance with the established procedure. I’m not able to get at the President at all.

Finally – I was in Denver at this time, and I knew quite well one of Truman’s administrative assistants, a man by the name of David Lloyd. As a matter of fact, he at one time had been a lawyer for the FCC, not while I was there, but he had left just before my time, and I had met him through some of the other lawyers. So I bundled all of the material up and sent it to David Lloyd. I said, “For God’s sake, isn’t there somebody that could get the top guys off the merry-go-round and give some attention to this matter?”

Lloyd writes back that he has gone through the record himself, and he thinks that there was some injustice done and that the Board seemed to be applying standards of security to what was really a loyalty hearing, but he went on to say that those of us close to the President feel that he must do – he must – should preserve his effectiveness for more important things.

Again, I wrote a letter back to Dave Lloyd, and – a copy of which I have in my files somewhere – in which I pointed out the implications of this thing and said, among other things, that the devilish thing about this whole procedure is that the standards were so vague that the judges would inevitably be held accountable for their [?] anybody, and those who appointed the judges. It would get right back to the President.

Within a couple weeks there are headlines in the paper that Joe McCarthy had made charges against David Lloyd. Then of course you remember the later incident – and this was during the ’54 campaign – maybe a little later. No. It must have been a little later than that. But Truman was out of office at the time Nixon made his attack on Truman in which he . . .

McGuire That’s right.

Durr: . . . called him a . . .

McGuire: A traitor.

Durr: . . . called him a traitor. So I wrote a letter to Truman, in which I expressed my sense of outrage at this intemperate and unwarranted attack on him. But I went on to say that, “Mr. President, there are other people who have in effect been called traitors to their country, not by Joe McCarthy, but under your own Executive Order 9835, and some real hardships have resulted. People have lost their jobs and their reputations, and many still are sweating with the problem of feed- – of raising their families – supporting their families because of this.” Now I said, “Your prestige in the Democratic Party is still very strong. For God’s sake, can’t you go before the Platform Committee at the next Democratic Convention and urge upon them a plank urging a return to these basic American principles of freedom of speech and due process of law and the abolition of all of the – this police state stuff?”

I get a letter back: “Dear Cliff, wasn’t it awful, the things that that guy McCarthy said about me? I appreciate your letter very much. Thanks again. Yours sincerely, Harry S. Truman.” Completely ignored the point that I was trying to make.

I want to say here, as I say at the beginning and don’t want to forget about that: I have pretty complete files on this Heiser case, including the correspondence, and we can get this up in draft and then go over it again with the files before us, and I think some of the letters, or at least some . . .

McGuire: Excerpts.

Durr: . . . extracts them, should be – might be copied right into the book.

Now we will go on with the Montgomery story. When I came back, as I believe I have told you on another – this is down on another tape – I was still in a cast for my back. Virginia and the children had driven the car. We’d stopped by Washington on the way. I had flown to Washington to Ann’s wedding, and then they met me at the airport, and we had the wedding there in the Unitarian Church in Washington. Then again I was put on the plane and flown back to Montgomery while Virginia and the children came on by car.

My doctor in Denver had referred me to a Dr. Con[?] in Birmingham whom he recommended very highly. So I stopped off in Birmingham, where my sister lives and checked with Dr. Con[?], who immediately ordered me to bed. He was insisting that I go to the hospital. My sister protested that if all I needed was to go to bed, this was going to be a long day, and she had plenty of room, and she could give me all the attention that I needed. He finally agreed to that. So he cut off my cast, but told me to stay in bed, and we got a [?] machine which my sister learned how to operate. But for three months I was not even allowed to get up to go to the bathroom. Then I got up and began to walk just a little bit, and more and more every day, and then came back to Montgomery, where we stayed with my mother. I continued to extend the walks under a doctor’s direction , also to go over to the YMCA every day for swimming. I began to improve, and I desperately needed some income coming in, because I was flat broke and just living off the kindness of the family – my sister and my mother. But I wasn’t yet in position to take on full-time work. The first job I did, I was employed as a consultant for several days by the Alabama Public Service Commission in the hearings that they were having on telephone rates, and having been with the FCC, I had some background in this kind of thing. Then I started doing some work for the Durr Drug Company, which was my brother’s business, and then I established – set up a law practice, renting space from Ervin James, who was from Montgomery and had been my first administrative assistant when I went on the FCC in Washington.

I was determined that I was going to stay out of controversies as far as I possibly could and would develop myself – devote myself entirely to building up a law practice. I might say that at the time, getting back to Montgomery, I was rather pleased with the changes that had taken place in many respects. Far more appearances of prosperity, without affluence of course. You no longer saw the wasted, gutted farmland that had been worn out from growing cotton, caught up in the one-crop economy. The lands had been – gone back to pasture or to pine trees, and the landscape was much more beautiful. Then the lot of the negro seemed to have improved considerably. There were not as many of the decrepit shacks that we had before, but a substantial number were living in simple but reasonably comfortable homes. And the relationship between negroes and whites was more relaxed than I had ever seen it. Again I was impressed with the schools for the negro children, who were, at least from the outside, the buildings, looked just about as good as the schools for the white children. These were encouraging signs. I think the Wages and Hours Act, the minimum wage, had a lot to do with the improvement of the conditions of the negro. He had not become wealthy, but at least he’d gotten over the dollar – away from the dollar a day jobs.

And another thing that is hard for people to realize – the Northerner is likely to center all the racial problems on the South, or at least they did a long time, finding that was the source of the trouble, but Washington, D.C., was as tightly segregated when we left in 1950 as Montgomery, Alabama, was when we arrived about a year later, after being – we being in Denver. In Washington, there was only one place I knew of where you could have lunch with a negro friend, and that was a YWCA cafeteria. They were not allowed to go to the National Theater, and of course you had some very well educated people in Washington around Howard University and other places who would be quite interested in cultural affairs, good music and things of that sort. But one integrated movie had been established on a trial basis, and much to everybody’s surprise, it seemed to be working without any great violence.

But I was not concerned with getting into any more fights, and [?] immediately, there were none there. As a matter of fact, civil rights had never been my concern particularly. Virginia had been interested in getting rid of the poll tax and restrictions on voting, but I had been working in an entirely different line in Washington, first for the RFC and then the FCC, and I had gotten into the civil rights fight – civil liberties fight – controversy, not out of any ideology I had to start with, but just I’m seeing this FCC employee Goodwin Watson kicked around. That fits into the other story.

My law practice seemed to be moving along fairly well. It takes a little while to get going, but I was getting some of the general type of practice: wills, real estate closings, and the like. I had a small retainer from the Durr Drug Company and another small retainer from Aubrey Williams son and father, which paid office expenses. And so I had the feeling that in another year or so I would be back into practice and at least earning a moderately good living.

But then one day Aubrey Williams shows up at my office. As I recall, it was a Saturday morning. He had had a subpoena from the Internal Security Subcommittee of the United States – the Judiciary Committee of the Senate, ordering him to appear at the hearing to be held in New Orleans about a week or two later and to testify – I have the subpoena somewhere in my files, I think. I don’t remember its exact language. It was broad language – to testify what you may know about the communist infiltration or operations in the Southern Conference Educational Fund and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.

Aubrey had, as President of the Southern Conference Educational Fund – this was one of the first organizations that had been set up – integrated organizations for the negro and white to fight for some equality on the part of the negroes. It was an outgrowth of a combination of the poll tax fight plus an effort to do something about the economic situation in the South, behind which was the President’s Economic Report on the South, which came out in 1938.

Virginia had been very active in the organization in its early stages, but when I got sick – in fact before, when we left Washington, she had her hands full with looking after me and the children, so she severed her connection with about every organization she’d ever had any connection with at all.

At the time I – when Aubrey came in, I immediately got busy working with him on preparing for this hearing, calling people over the phone, trying to anticipate the type of questions that might be asked and the answers to them. And Virginia was taking dictation. She was my [?] – my legal secretary. But when we knocked off to go home late Saturday afternoon, I noticed that she seemed to be rather concerned with my representing Aubrey. I told her I just had to do it. At that particular time, I was under treatment for a heart condition. I never had thrombosis, but what the doctor referred to as a coronary insufficiency. In fact, he had even warned me about participating formally in trial work, because I get so tense [?]. I told her that I just had to represent Aubrey. There’s nobody else to do it.

Then my doctor called me up. Virginia had apparently called him to find out what he felt – how he felt about it. And he was very emphatic that I should not go to New Orleans. So I told him that I would try to be – take it easy, but I didn’t see how I could get out of that. [ ? ? ].

By Monday morning the problem was somewhat simplified. We went into the office to start the day’s work and there was a marshal waiting for Virginia with a subpoena of the same kind. So then I called the doctor and said, “Look here, doctor. You might as well be reasonable about this thing. You know it’s going to be far more of a strain to be up here in Montgomery while Virginia’s down in New Orleans going through this ordeal than it would be to be down there in New Orleans with her.” He said he understood, but he said, “I think under the circumstances you probably – it would be better for you to go, but for goodness sake, be as light as you can on yourself. And there are other people involved. See if you can’t get some other lawyer to take as much of the burden as you can off of you.”

The reason for Virginia’s subpoena was quite obvious. The Supreme Court – she, it was true, had an early connection with the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Southern Conference Educational Fund. There were several similar connections toward both organizations a long – several years before. But the Supreme Court still had under advisement the case of Brown against the Board of Education, which was the school segregation case. We were eagerly – the public was eagerly awaiting the outcome of that case. It was very much in the press and much speculation as to how it would come out. If the date’s right, this was March. And of course Virginia was the daughter-in-law of Hugo Black, so here was a nice way to make headlines – sister-in-law of Justice Black, a member of Red organizations.

The Republicans were in power at the time. Eisenhower was President. Eastland was just a member of the Internal Security Subcommittee. It was called the Jenner Subcommittee. Jenner was a Republican. Eastland was a member. I believe McClellan of Arkansas was a member, and I forget who else. That the hearing was politically inspired was pretty obvious too, because Eastland was coming up for re-election. The primary was to be in May, and he had an opponent, and he felt the opposition might be a little serious, and New Orleans was about the nearest place you could get to Mississippi for this hearing, and this would set him as the defender of the Southern way of life against the Reds and the black supporters.

We – how people behave under this kind of situation is quite interesting. The local paper, the Alabama Journal, of which the editor [?] was a [?] professional, old time Southerner [ ? ? ], and he prides himself on his [?] with the old Southern families. So he wrote this editorial on two beautiful Southern girls. The two beautiful Southern girls were Virginia and her sister Josephine, and the general impression was they come from such gracious people, and they were themselves charming Southern ladies, but the tragedy that they would get involved in this kind of thing.

McGuire: [inaudible]

Durr: Virginia wrote an answer to that, which I believe we can dig up too, and [ ? ? ] it was a beautiful letter, as gracious as the editorial.

We were working for several days on this business, getting prepared. And we knocked off one day. Of course the newspaper had the – the local paper was full of the story. And we knocked off one morning around 10 o’clock to get some coffee, began testing human behavior. On the way – and I – I had to get change [ ? ? ]. We met John Dod[?], who was regarded as one of the court’s – [?] court’s best lawyers in Montgomery. He’s now [?] appointed a federal judge [ ? ? ] circuit court of appeals, [?]th circuit.

So Virginia, just feeling a little mean, stopped John and said, “John, you’ve seen in the paper that I’ve been subpoenaed to New Orleans.” Of course I myself had not been subpoenaed, because I’d never gone to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare [ ? ? ]. She said, “John, I’ve been subpoenaed, and would you be willing to go down as my lawyer?” He began to stammer and turn white as a sheet and began to come out with all kind of reasons why he couldn’t. So Virginia [?] response [ ? ? ]. Then we went in and got our coffee, and just as we came out, we ran into John Kohn. John, as you know, is one of Montgomery’s most conservative lawyers, to say the least. He was one of George Wallace’s legal advisers and . . . .

McGuire: [inaudible]

Durr: I think probably he still [?]. But John somehow has always been extremely familiar – friendly to me, and he came up to us. He said, “Virginia, who is going to be your lawyer down in New Orleans?” Virginia said, “Cliff is going down there, and he’s been through this thing in Washington so many times that he knows how it operates, and I suppose he can give us all the advice necessary.” John’s reply to that was, a lawyer has no more business representing his wife in this kind of a situation than a surgeon would of operating on his wife when she was in a serious condition. Unless you tell me I’m intruding, I’m going to New Orleans as your lawyer, and I am going at my own expense.” And he did, and was magnificent.

McGuire: [inaudible]

Durr: And [ ? ? ] more of that story a little bit later. Here was the conservative – the reactionary versus the liberal.

Another rather interesting experience was [?] father-in-law. He was in very bad health at the time. He had high blood pressure. He was getting ready to retire. He was close to 70. I had gone to church on Sunday. [?] was not there, and some other minister was filling in, but this was close to my father’s birthday, and it was a custom for members of the church to provide the flowers for certain things, in honor of a member of the family, so the flowers had been in honor of my father.

After church, my sister said, “Father was so devoted to Dr. Maguire. Let’s take some of these flowers out to him. And we – he’s in – not well at all, so we’ll just say – leave flowers there and just stay a minute and say hello.” So we went by his home. He was lying on a sofa in the living room in his bathrobe. We exchanged just a few words and got up to leave. And we’re going out the door and Mrs. Maguire said to Virginia, “Virginia, I see you’re getting your name in the paper.” With that, Dr. Maguire rose from his couch, his face flushed in a highly emotional state. He said, “You go down to New Orleans and let the people down there you’re Protestants. This is an outrage against Protestantism, Americanism,” and he was – he got so worked up, we had to leave very hurriedly. We were afraid he might have a stroke.

In any event, at the appointed time we take the train and go down to New Orleans and check into the [?] Hotel, where there were several other members of the conference who had been subpoenaed and were present: Jim Dombrowski and Myles Horton were two that I remember. Jim, I believe, was being represented the young New Orleans lawyer named Ben Smith. So we got together right off to plan strategy, and I told Ben of my heart condition and asked – I think I’d asked him to take the [ ? ? ] Dombrowski, to take a little bit of the strain off of me. So we went ahead and tried to knock out our plans.

The hearings opened the next day. There’s another little interesting bit: Virginia’s political activity. She had decided that we would be better off if this turned out a one-man committee, if it really was Jim Eastland. It was Jim Eastland’s [?], and if she could get the other – [?] pressures [?] to bear, to keep the other members of the committee from coming, it would be much easier to deal with [?] Eastland, because of his [ ? ? ], and again, we knew something about him. He couldn’t [ ? ? ] Alabama after [ ? ? ]. But we were well aware of what kind of person he was.

So before leaving Montgomery, Virginia got busy on the telephone. First she tried to get Lyndon Johnson. He was then Majority Leader of the Senate and had been an old friend of mine. We knew him quite well in Washington. She could not get through to him. Finally at night she called up and got Bird at home. And she said she wanted to speak to Virginia. Bird said – speak to Lyndon, but Lyndon had gone to bed. So then she told Bird what this was all about. She had had [ ? ? ] to New Orleans [ ? ? ]. She said, “I’m waking Lyndon up.”

So Lyndon came to the phone, and Virginia told him about the subpoena. [ ? ? ], “Honey, I didn’t know a thing in the world about that. You and Aubrey are fine people” and so on. And Virginia said, “I don’t know why you say you don’t know what was going on. You’re the Majority Speaker – Majority Leader of the Senate. I looks like to me you would know what’s going on in your own Senate.”

But in any event, then Lyndon said, “What can I do? Anything I can do for you?” Said, “Yes. You see to it that no other Democrat comes down with Jim Eastland. Keep McClellan away.” Lyndon said, “I’ll see what I can do. I didn’t know anything about this, but I’ll just see what I can do.”

Then the next day she gets thinking of what Republican contacts she has, and she thinks of George Bender of Ohio, who was just to the right of Senator Robert Taft, but George Bender had been an active supporter of the anti-poll-tax legislation, because it was good politics in his state [ ? ? ] vote and substantial political influence. This was a Sunday, and she put in a call for George Bender. He was not in Washington, and finally she located him. He was on vacation at Chagrin Falls, Ohio. So she got George on the phone, and I can hear his voice. He has a booming voice. He’s sort of a [ ? ?] type of person, everything for love type, and he was the kind that, in the Republican conventions, he’d lead the psalms. So, I could hear one side of the conversation. “Virginia, good for you – hear from you. You must really love me, calling me up long-distance after all this time to talk to me.” Virginia said, “George, I do love you as much as ever, but I didn’t call you up to tell you how much I love you. I called you up to tell you that I’m pretty indignant that I’ve been subpoenaed before this Internal Security Committee and I think it is outrageous.” He said, “Virginia, I don’t see that you’ve got anything to worry about. You just answer the questions. You’re – everybody knows you. You’re a good, fine, loyal American. You just answer the questions.” Virginia said, “George, that’s what I intended to do. But,” she said, “you never know where the questions might lead to, and you know, on this poll-tax operation, there were very many people involved that have been under attack or will be under attack as left-wing if not subversive, and as you recall, a lot of this anti-poll-tax literature, we prepared it in your office, using your videograph machine, and we sent out a lot of material over your frank. And,” she said, “if they do begin to – if you don’t know where the questions are going to lead to, and I – if I start answering all the questions, it might lead right back to you.” “Isn’t there some constitutional amendment you can invoke?” Virginia said, “There’s the Fifth Amendment, but I don’t intend to invoke that. I don’t have anything to conceal as far as I’m concerned, but I don’t want, if I have to, to be getting any other people in trouble.” “Is there anything I can do.” She said, “Yes, George. There’s one thing you might do. You have some influence there in the Senate. If you will just see to it that no Republican member of the Internal Security Committee comes to New Orleans with Jim Eastland, maybe I can be a little more guarded in what I have to say in answer to the questions.” “I’ll see what I can do.”

So when we arrive in New Orleans, the papers announce that Jenner, Eastland, and McClellan will arrive in the afternoon. Then the afternoon paper announces that Senator Eastland will arrive, but that Senator Jenner and Senator McClellan had been unavoidably detained and may arrive later.

Any event, the next day after our arrival we go in to the first day’s hearings. There are two [?] people had been subpoenaed. One was a lawyer by the name of Leo Sheiner, who was born in New York, Jewish, and was practicing law in Miami. The other was a man whose name doesn’t come to mind right off, but a Polish fellow. He had been born in Poland, but his parents had come to this country when he was still a small child, and he was in the contracting business in Miami and had been quite successful.

None of our group was aware of the connection they had with the Southern Conference, but then Jim Dombrowski did remember that on one occasion a Jewish synagogue had been bombed in Miami and that he had gone down to see what could be done towards setting up a local committee to protest this kind of thing and bring a little pressure on the police. And I don’t think he remembered that these two people, but that they had probably joined this local committee [ ? ? ] being Jewish.

Whether they were or had ever been communists, I haven’t the slightest idea, but their treatment by the – Eastland was [ ? ? ] another rather interesting bit. The lawyers aren’t the only ones that had never been through this thing before: John Kohn, representing Virginia, and Ben Smith, and Sheiner and the other fellow, the Polish man, were representing themselves. But Kohn, I think it was, asked the question, “Mr. Chairman, we’ve tried to find out what the rules of procedure are in hearings of this kind. We know how to behave in the courtroom, and we need a note to Washington to see what the – to find out what the rules so we can know how to conduct ourselves.” The response to that is, “I will tell you what the rules are as we go along.”

Then John Kohn or Ben Smith – I forget which – asked, “Suppose a witness testifies against our client. Will we permitted – be permitted to cross-examine?” They pound the gavel – Eastland pounds the gavel and says, “Now, you are lawyers. You should know that never in the history of a congressional investigation has the cross-examination of witnesses been permitted, except by members of the committee themselves. You are engaging in dilatory tactics. Sit down. I don’t want to hear no more from you.” That was our introduction.

Then they start – Eastland and his counsel [ ? ? ] start to work on these two people. The abuse they took, and the insulting manner in which they were handled was outrageous. They were finally just driven into rages and just exploded, and Eastland ordered the marshals to take them forcibly out of the courtroom.

We were quite worried about how the press would handle [ ? ? ] but the Montgomery Advertiser had been a very conservative paper, and they sent down a reporter by the name of Fred Anderson, whom I did not know and Virginia didn’t know, but we’d seen – occasionally had seen a news article under his byline. Naturally we’re expecting the worst from this coverage and were used to the sensational write-ups coming in from Washington. But the – after dinner, the day of the first hearing with these two men I’ve mentioned on the stand, there was a knock on our hotel-room door. I opened the door and it was Fred Anderson. He said, “I thought you might be interested in seeing the story I’ve written of today – about today’s hearings before I put it on the wire.” He started off his story by saying, “From where I sit at the press table I can look out of the window and see the United States flag flying from the corner of the Federal Building. I have to look up quite often to assure myself I am still in the United States of America.” Then he went ahead and wrote out of his outrage and indignation the most magnificent, hard-hitting account. It was simply a factual account of [ ? ? ], but it was unbelievably good newspaper.

McGuire: You don’t happen to have that?

Durr: I think we have it on file.

[end of side A of the audiotape]

[side B begins:]

Durr: Testing 1 – 2 – 3 – 4. Come shut the door. Is lunch ready?

This is a continuation of the story of the New Orleans hearing. I might go back briefly to a little of the background. The main witness of Senator Eastland, which he introduced at the very beginning, was a man by the name of Paul Crouch. Mr. Eastland – Senator Eastland stated for the record that Paul Crouch was a man in whom the FBI had the greatest confidence and that he was fully vouched for by the Department of Justice. He was then employed in the Immigration Service, which is a branch of the Department of Justice.

Crouch himself, by way of qualifications, took the stand and testified to his own communist background. This begins with a court martial when he was a private in the army in the – about the middle of the ’20s. He was court-martialed for – I believe – he gives a section of the law, but it was subversion in the ranks, was his charge, and he was sentenced to 30 years at Alcatraz disciplinary barracks, but after 3 years his sentence was commuted and he was turned loose. Then Mr. Crouch becomes very active in the communist party.

He testified against the two witnesses who were on the stand the first day. His knowledge – sometimes he claimed first-hand knowledge, but sometimes admitting that he didn’t have first-hand knowledge, but because he was so active in the communist party and such an important figure in the communist party, why he knew everything that was going on. One of these characters, according to his testimony, I believe had been designated to greet the comrades from Moscow when this country was overthrown and occupied, a very fantastic story.

Having seen him and heard his name, my memory began to flash back to an earlier period, 1950, right after Joe McCarthy made his famous Wheeling, West Virginia, speech, in which he said there were 205 card-carrying communists in the State Department. This disturbed me, because it was getting so much attention, but what disturbed me even more was the reaction of the government, particularly the State Department. Dean Atchison was then Secretary of State, and instead of standing up and slugging with McCarthy and demanding that he prove his charges, he gets busy getting statements for – from Jimmy Burns, former Secretary of State, and General Marshall, a former Secretary of State, and the three of them join in saying to the press that Owen Latimer, who was one that McCarthy had sideswiped, had never been on the payroll of the State Department. Owen Latimer, at that time and for many years before that, had been a professor at Johns Hopkins University and had acquired quite a reputation as an expert on China and Manchuria and that area. He had written extensively. Whether Owen Latimer was red, green, pink, or blue, if the State Department had not been picking his brains to find out what he knew about the situation in China, they were not very well – much on the job. As a matter of fact, Owen Latimer at one time, at the request of President Roosevelt, had served as an adviser to Chiang Kai-shek.

McGuire: [inaudible]

Durr: He spent a great deal of time there. I don’t know – don’t recall now whether his parents were missionaries or on business there or not. He had spent a great deal of time there and knew all the characters and spoke the language perfectly and many of the dialects.

This seemed to me in no way to meet this charge of McCarthy, just meeting it by retreat. Instead of trying to meet the enemy with your horns down, you try to fight him with your rump. Inevitably your rump’s going to get torn off. So I wrote a letter to the Washington Post, saying that this charge of McCarthy’s was creating a great deal of hysteria and unless answered, it was going to cause a great deal of harm to the country, and then I referred to Achison’s position and said, this is no way to meet this kind of thing. And also I took that occasion to say that if this country really believed in the things that it professes – professed and really was concerned with getting rid of the hysteria by showing the country that the government was not infested with dangerous subversives, the most effective thing that could be done was for Truman to repeal his loyalty oath.

The very next day, after this letter was published, a Congressman Wardell of California was all ready, as soon as Congress opened, with a dossier on me and the Washington Post. I’ve forgotten the charges against the Post. I think I’ve got that around somewhere. But he said, in effect, as to me, that according to the sworn testimony of a former communist by the name of Paul Crouch, this fellow Durr had been seen in frequent attendance at top meetings – at meetings of the top communist echelon in New York City. I issued an answer to that in the press, but the – all attention was focused on McCarthy. The Washington Post did carry a brief story of my answer to it. And then at the same time I wrote Chairman Woods, who was then secretary – I mean the Chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, asking if there was any such testimony in the files about me, and if so, I would – wanted to – an opportunity to see it and to answer. I was never able to obtain even an answer from Woods.

So here was this Paul Crouch that shows up four years later in New Orleans. My curiosity was aroused, of course, about this connection. I had seen him once, on one occasion. This was I think when I was representing Frank Oppenheimer. I had been in the office – waiting around the office of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and I saw a middle-aged couple hanging around, looking like lost souls, and I asked one of the secretaries there, who they were, and she told me that it was Paul Crouch and his wife, who were former communists. That’s the only occasion in which I had ever seen him.

So having that in mind, at the first recess on the first day of the hearing, I motioned for some of the newspaper men to follow me, and I went up to Crouch and referred to this Wardell statement, and I said, “Now man to man, I want to know, is that Congressman Wardell’s lie, or is it yours?” Before he could answer, he was surrounded by the staff of the Internal Security Committee. Arens, the counsel, whispered something in his ear, and he said, “When I have something to say, I will say it under oath,” which of course meant subject to the congressional immunity that goes along with testifying in a Senate committee hearing.

McGuire: [inaudible]

Durr: Before we went to New Orleans, of course we had spent quite a lot of time discussing the hearing and the position that the different parties would take. The three that I was representing were Jim Dombrowski, who at the time was president – he was executive secretary of the Southern Conference Educational Fund; a man named Myles Horton, who ran the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee; and Virginia. And they all said that they were not going to feed the committee names of other people and get them in trouble. As a matter of fact, when the Southern Conference started, there were some very respectable characters in it, including such people as Mr. [?Co--- ] of the [?Co--- ] Mills. As I recall, he presided at the opening of the meetings, and there were other people of his caliber connected with it. Because the approach to start with was to put the Southern problem very broadly, this went into – it was considering some of the problems raised in the economic report on the South, so we had the background, the lack of credit, the high interest rates, the disadvantages that the South was under from a business standpoint because of the freight-weight differentials and the basing point system of pricing [ ? ? ]. So when it did become – it really became concerned primarily with race as a result of the first meeting, because of the good many negroes there, and Bull Connor, who was then police commissioner, moved in and demanded that the meeting be segregated, and of course it was not effective after the segregation took place, because when they were all together, they were discussing their problems, and here they were shouting at each other from a distance. That is – I don’t want to go into that in great detail here, but in any event that got in the press. Mrs. Roosevelt moved her chair out right into the middle aisle between the negroes and whites as a form of protest, but some of the more conservative whites just pulled out of the meeting quietly at that time.

So none of them wanted to cause embarrassment to anybody else. So they all said, we have no secrets as far as we are personally concerned, and we will give them any information – answer any questions they want to ask about us, but we’re just not going to feed them names. I pointed out to them that the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, the guarantee against – the protection of the individual against self-incrimination was for the benefit of the person involved, and you couldn’t invoke it to protect other people. So if they started asking – answering questions about themselves, they would be unable to invoke it in questions about others.

McGuire: It’s a blanket thing. You mean to say . . .

Durr: The – that is for the protection of the individual. Now I couldn’t get on the stand – I could say, “I will not testify, because it might incriminate me,” but I can’t say, “I will not testify, because it might get Henrietta McGuire in trouble.” That’s – I’m the only one that protected by it.

But they all said too that they were not going to invoke the Fifth Amendment under any circumstances, because although it was a very respectable provision of the Constitution with a very [?] background going back to old John Lilburne and his fight with the Star Chamber in Britain, it had – an atmosphere had been created in which, in the public mind, if you invoked the Fifth Amendment, that meant that you had something to hide. So I pointed out to them, from a legal standpoint, if they didn’t invoke it and didn’t answer questions about other people, they were clearly in contempt. All said, we’ll just have to take our chances, and if means going to jail, we’ll go to jail, but we’re not going to get other people in trouble.

That is digressing, but we get back to the first day’s hearing, and I believe I left off before with the newspaper man coming to the door of the hotel after supper. But in the middle of the night I was wakened by the clatter of the typewriter. Virginia had rented a typewriter and had it in her room, and she was going away at a timely rate, very vigorously. So I asked Virginia what she was doing. She says, “I’m preparing a statement that I’m going to give tomorrow morning when they put me on the stand.” I said, “It’s all agreed as to what kind of position you should take. You’re not going to invoke the Fifth Amendment and you’re not going to feed them names of other people, but you’ll testify – answer any questions about yourself.” Virginia said, “From what I’ve seen today” – she was shocked and horrified at the treatment of these two men the day before – “I’ll have nothing to do with this committee.”

Her statement started off by saying that she had the highest respect for the investigatory power of Congress, but from what she had seen, she was convinced that this hearing was not a legitimate exercise of the investigative power of Congress, and it was nothing but a kangaroo court, and that she would not participate in it in any way and would have no part of it. She went on further in the conclusion – I have that statement around – conclusion, after describing the antics of the committee, she said, “I stand in utter and complete contempt of this committee.”

Of course I couldn’t dissuade her from changing her mind, and the next morning, at breakfast, John Kohn joined us, and of course he pointed out that this was clearly contempt and she would be on the way to jail if she used this approach, but she said that was – that’s it. She’s [?]. But we did finally persuade her to say in the statement and to answer the question, if they asked her if she was a communist, that she could say – would say that she was not and had never been a communist. She didn’t want to do that, because that was crawling, in a way, but she was thinking in terms of Justice Black and others and embarrassment that might be caused, so she did put that statement in.

The next day, Paul Crouch’s introduction to her taking the stand, proceeded to testify that – I believe he said that he had not met Virginia, or at least had not known her, but that he was so closely connected with the Communist Party that he knew everything which was going on. Then he even claimed that he was – the first meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare was really his idea. Virginia had never seen him before, to our recollection. And it got to be a rather fantastic, absurd testimony.

There was another rather interesting bit. Arens, the counsel, moves down from the bench and takes the witness stand and proceeds to read at great length from a book called The Hidden Way. What it was about, I don’t know, but the general idea was that the communists found the most effective allies they had were not Communist Party members, but liberals who would go along with much of their ideas, and that was by way of background. Of course it was supposed to be a place for taking testimony. I think he was even put under oath before he started reading from the book.

Then Virginia was ordered to the stand, and she answered the question about – admitted that she was married to me, and in answer to the question whether she was a communist, she said she was not and never had been. Then they went on with other questions, and she says, “I’m – from here on I’m standing mute. I’m not going to answer any questions of any kind from this committee.” And they tried to bait her: “Are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” She says, “No, I’m not taking the Fifth Amendment specifically, but I’m invoking every provision of the Constitution designed to protect American citizens from outrages such as this.”

You can imagine the frustration. This goes on for about a half hour with the television cameras grinding away and Virginia standing mute. They begin to ask her about people and organizations that she’d never heard of, but she just remained silent. Every now and then she’d take out her compact and powder her nose, which exasperated them still more. And finally, after about a half an hour of that, in complete frustration, they asked her to leave the stand. Or they asked her – no. Then they called Paul Crouch back, and then as either Eastland or Arens asked the question whether – “Do you want to step down?” She said, “No, “I’m perfectly content to sit right here,” so here – so Paul Crouch had to get another chair while she remained in the witness chair. And Crouch began to develop still further the idea – he got a little vague about her, but that – see Virginia was very active in trying to get rid of the poll tax and was the – carried the ball on the congressional legislation to abolish the poll tax as a prerequisite for voting in federal elections, and Mrs. Roosevelt had been quite interested in it. So Crouch was testifying about Virginia’s visits to the White House with Mrs. Roosevelt with some insinuations that this was a part of a deep dyed conspiracy.

But they got nowhere with it, and so finally they let her leave the stand. Then . . .

McGuire: What about the statement?

Durr: She asked that the statement be put in the record. Eastland would not allow her to put the statement in the record, because she refused to testify, so instead she just handed it to the press. There were about anywhere from a dozen to 15 reporters present throughout the hearing.

Myles Horton I believe was the next. I looked forward to his testimony. Then they put Aubrey Williams on the stand, and I am representing Aubrey Williams. Aubrey, just like the rest of them, he answers only questions about himself, but won’t give them names or talk about other people. Paul Crouch, by way of introduction, says that he had met Mr. Williams, after one of his speeches, when he was head of the N.Y.A. or the W.P.A., and was introduced to him as Comrade Williams. This was about the only occasion when he had ever seen him. And that’s about all the testimony he has about Aubrey, that he goes up after a speech and is introduced to him as Comrade Williams.

So Aubrey, as I said, answered the questions about himself, but refused to give the names of others. Now Crouch – I mean Eastland, as I had said in the earlier tape, said at the beginning of the hearings that the right of cross-exam – to cross-examine the witnesses had never been permitted and would not be permitted in these hearings. But after Williams stepped down from the stand, Eastland smiled and said, “Mr. Williams, you have been such a cooperative witness, I will waive the rules and let your counsel cross-examine Mr. Crouch,” which was a strange kind of proceeding and I’m quite sure was related to my confrontation of Crouch the day before.

So I know nothing about Crouch, except what he’s testified to about himself. Crouch rather interestingly, in his testimony about others – he said in his introductory statement that he had spent more than 5,000 hours with the FBI telling them about what he knew of the communist activities, and he wasn’t through yet. If you take 5,000 hours, and you put it 8 hours a day, and you – 5 days a week, you can see that he’s employed quite a bit of the time, and he was paid a retainer of $25 a day and expenses, and so was on the payroll quite a bit.

Having – knowing nothing about him except the – Crouch, again, when he was asked questions, it was almost like putting a coin in a jukebox. A record would play, and he couldn’t be stopped until he had finished his little speech. And rather interestingly, he had prepared himself, and he would give time and dates – even time of the day when he had seen people, going back 10, 12 years ago. In other words, he had met Mr. Williams on a Wednesday, the 2nd of May, 1943, or whatever it was, and . . .

McGuire: At 3:30 in the afternoon.

Durr: At 3:30 in the afternoon. Very specific. Here I’m given the right to cross-examine. You see, I was not subpoenaed, because I had never been a member of the Southern Conference. So it was pretty obvious that Crouch was a psychopath. I think the press saw that, and I’d seen one of his taped broadcasts of the hearings that they put on at night, and it came through very clearly that here was a very – a deranged man, but Eastland all the time insisting that he was vouched for by the Department of Justice and the FBI thought very highly of him. I thought the – my only approach was to just let Crouch do more bragging to expose still more of the psychopathic side of his nature. So I started out questioning him about his experiences in Alcatraz and asked why he had been – his sentence had been commuted? I suspected that possibly that was some arrangement with the FBI and that possibly he had been an FBI informer all the way down the line.

Every question I ask, I get an answer that is not responsive, but something in the way of a speech. I tried to hold him down to answers and Senator Eastland always stops me. All the other witnesses he had held down to yes and no on occasion, but with Crouch, he says, you asked him the question and he’s – you’ve got to let him answer, so he’d go ahead with his speech.

So I think I’d given – he testifies that after leaving Alcatraz, he’d become very active in the Communist Party, and then he goes to Russia. where – here was a man who’d been a private in the army for about 18 months – where he lectures at the Russian Military Academy, and not only that. He is – the Russian General Staff takes him in on the war plans that they have against the United States, including particularly their plans directed toward taking the Panama Canal. Here was a man. He never had – he’s a private – experiences, was lending the enemy counsel. And he goes into detail about the type of training he gets over there: how to blow up trains and blow up airplanes. I asked him, among other things, if they taught him how to lie. “Oh,” he says, “yes. That was an important part of it.” And I sort of wanted to know if he’d ever forgotten that training and he again – I got an evasive answer.

But Crouch starts doing just what I wanted him to do, which was bragging about himself and all of the nefarious activities during the time of his communist activity. You would have thought that he was a greater menace in this country than the Russians and the H-bomb. And he enjoys –he’s enjoying himself very thoroughly all the way through. So finally I asked him when he left the Communist Party. He said, “1941.” I said, “Why did you leave the Communist Party.” He said, “I was out on the West Coast, and I saw atomic secrets being handed out by some of our scientists to some members of the top communist spy ring, and all at once I saw this thing in all of its horror, and I got out to save the lives of my children, Mr. Durr, and of yours, if you have any, having seen the horror of this thing that I had been connected with, when these leaks – atomic secrets were being leaked out to the spy ring.” I said, “Now, when – you said this was 1941?” “Yes.” “When did you first report what you’d seen to the FBI or any agency of government?” “1948.” I said, “You mean to say you got out of the Party to save the lives of your children and mine, but yet you’ve waited seven years before you reported it.” Of course again I get speeches.

So finally I want to bring out the absurdity of this business of communist charges. How do you prove you’re not a communist? And I suspected that possibly he might have maintained a connection with the Party as an FBI informer. So I finally – in conclusion, I asked him – I said, “Now Mr. Crouch, are you still a member of the Communist Party?” I got another speech in return for that. I said, “Now, can you prove that you’re not a member of the Communist Party?” Another speech came out again, and at that point, Arens, the counsel, leaned over and said, “Mr. Crouch, is Mr. Durr a communist?” Crouch’s response: “I don’t know if he still is, but I saw him back between 1939” – 1937 or 1939 – “and 1941 in meetings with the top communist functionaries in New York City.”

At this point Senator Eastland begins to get a little uneasy, and he breaks in and says, “After all, Mr. Durr is not a witness,” but I said, “Senator, here this testimony has been given against me under oath, and I want to leave it in the record and go ahead and develop it.” So I went on further, and I asked him to pin down the date of some meetings. All I could get – he’d been very specific, even the day of the month and the hour of the day in testimony about others, but all he could – as specific as he could be was “between 1939 and 1941.” I asked him where the meeting took place. They took place in many different meeting places, because they didn’t want their location known. “Tell me one.” He couldn’t tell me one place. So finally I tried to pin him down. “Will you – could you at least say you saw me there during 1939?” No. Just between ’39 and ’41. And I even went on and tried to get whether it was summer or winter and even the time of the year, and he couldn’t remember, having been so specific about the other things. “Who was present at the meetings?” He named Foster and the well-known top members of the Communist Party [ ? ? ] there. “What went on at these meetings?” “There were discussions and speeches.” “What did I do?” “You just sat there.” “Did I ever make a speech and join in the discussions?” “No, you just sat there.” “Did anybody ever introduce you to me and tell you what my name was?” “No, but you’re one of those distinctive looking people like Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, and once you see their faces, you never forget them.”

So then I asked to be put under oath, which I was. I took the stand, and I said, “Senator, every word that this Crouch has said about me is an absolute and complete lie. I have never been to any meetings of the top Communist echelon in New York or anywhere else at the time stated or any other time. I am not and have never been a member of the Communist Party and have never even considered being a member of the Communist Party.” And I said, “Senator, both of us are under oath. I think it’s your responsibility to see to it that one or the other of us is indicted and prosecuted for perjury.”

That brought that episode pretty well to an end. He goes on again calling – the next morning – no. He calls Myles Horton back to the stand, and finally Myles was so infuriated that he has to be – he loses his temper and the marshals take him out and [ ? ? ].

The next day is a Saturday, and he is summing up. He has on the witness stand – oh, by the way. Let me interrupt. There was one other witness, a strange, miserable-looking character by the name of Paul Butler, who testified against Virginia. He said that he had seen her at a meeting of the Red council in Birmingham in the early ’40s. On further questioning, it developed that this was a meeting of the Red Ore council, and – the miners had their own union that worked in red ore. They mined – instead of coal, they’re mining iron ore – and that she had addressed this meeting on the [?] of getting rid of the poll tax as a prerequisite for voting. Later I checked on this fellow Butler, and he has a police record as long as your arm, all petty: gambling, drunkenness, fighting, and minor skullduggery.

The last day they bring two young men who are with some business organization, and they begin to testify to their vague findings – their general findings about their study of communism. They don’t know about us particularly, except what they read.

Then Eastland is put back on the stand to sum up – I mean, Crouch is put back on the stand to sum up. At this point Virginia is out of the courtroom. Myles was in a very angry mood, and she was – he’s a very high-tempered Tennessee mountaineer, and she was afraid that Myles might get in some trouble. He could lose his temper, and she was out trying to quiet him down. But Crouch takes the stand again, and he begins to sum up about Virginia. These meetings she had had with Mrs. Roosevelt at the White House take on an increasingly sinister [?], that Mrs. Roosevelt is passing on secret information to Virginia, who is passing it on to a communist spy ring.

At that point I am sitting in the jury box. This is in the courtroom, and he is on the witness stand. And I’m not – I don’t have a quick temper. I’ve only lost it two times in my life, but when I do, I just go berserk. But I must have looked pretty tense, because a man named Jennings Perry, an old friend of mine. He used to be editor of the Nashville, Tennessee, [?]. He was freelancing, and he’d come down to come to the hearing. And while Crouch was testifying, he put his hand on my shoulder and sort of patted me, as if to say, “Quiet down. This is absurd. There’s nothing to get excited about.” So I did quiet down.

But then he goes on with his testimony, and again I’m drawn into it too. Justice Black had – at the time of his activity, he had published a communist party – paper in the South, which Justice Black was extremely interested in, but Justice Black didn’t want to subscribe in his own name, and he got instructions – he never met Justice Black, but he got instructions that the subscription would be sent to me, to my office in the RFC, and I’d pass it on to Justice Black. But then he goes back again to this absurd business of Virginia getting these secrets from Mrs. Roosevelt and passing them on to the spy ring, but, he says, “Mrs. Roosevelt – I want to say neither Mrs. Roosevelt nor Justice Black knew how Mrs. Durr was using them.” They were innocents. They were being used by this sinister character.

I thought I was completely under control, but apparently I wasn’t, and all I know about what happened after that is what I read in the paper. When he left the witness stand, something in me broke loose and made it like a bass going after a moving bait. I waited until he finished his testimony and got up from the witness stand. And the newspaper account says, while Crouch was testifying, I was gripping the rails of the jury box, and my hands were white, and then as he finished his testimony I had vaulted over the jury rail and started toward him and said, “You God damn son of a bitch, lying about my wife that way. I’m going to kill you.”

That is all rather vague in my mind, but I do remember two marshals grabbing me before I got – I wasn’t closer than 10 feet from him, and they were holding me firmly, but rather gently. I can still remember the feel of their hands, as if “we don’t blame you, but we’ve got to take you out.” So I was taken out of the room, and Virginia was – is outside already, and she’s very excited. Jennings Perry forces me to lie down on a bench for a while there, over my protest, because I was feeling all right. Then I said, “Let’s cool off. Let’s go down to the little park around the Federal Building in New Orleans. Let’s walk around while I cool off.”

Which I did, and finding myself getting under control. I think Virginia was with me, Myles Horton, Aubrey Williams. And then we went into a little restaurant for a cup of coffee, and after having coffee, I said, “Let’s go back and see what’s going on at the hearing.” The hearing room was on the third floor of the Federal Building. As we started toward the Federal Building, I noticed an ambulance parked outside. I looked around and saw no signs of an accident, and I was wondering what it was there for. Then the elevator bank was in the far – in the corridors, so we just walked up three flights of steps, and started down the hallway toward the hearing room again, when here running toward me is a young doctor with a stethoscope on his – already in his ears, and the – what do you call the place you put onto the thing you put on . . .

McGuire: Microphone.

Durr: . . . the microphone pointed toward me like a gun. I’m completely baffled. He says, “Be still,” and he begins to put this microphone all over me. “Be still. Be still.” I can’t figure out what’s going on, and finally he says, “I think you’re going to be all right. I’ll write you out a prescription for a sedative,” which he proceeds to do. About the time he gets this prescription written, here coming down the hallway at almost a trot is another doctor, an older man. The younger one turns to him and he says, “Doctor, I think he’s going to be all right, and I’ve prescribed a sedative for him,” and the older man says, “Weren’t you in my class in heart at the Tulane Medical School?” “Yes sir.” “Didn’t I teach you a damn thing? Here’s a man with a history of a heart condition. He goes through this experience, and you’re dismissing him with a sedative? Didn’t I teach you a damn thing?” Then he turns to me, and he says, “You’re going to the hospital right now. I have an ambulance waiting for you downstairs.” I’m completely baffled, and then things began to fit together. This young lawyer Ben Smith that represented some of the clients – as I said in the other record, I told Ben that I was under treatment for this heart condition, and I asked him if he would take over some of the load, and Ben had apparently remembered that, and he had gotten very much disturbed when I blew my top. And it happened that this top heart man was a good personal friend of his, so he calls him on the phone immediately. So he said he’ll come as fast as he can, but meanwhile he sends this younger doctor who is free, and that’s the way it came about. But the doctor says, “Now come on and get in the ambulance, and we’re going over to Touro Hospital.” I said, “Look here, doctor. I’ll go to the hospital with you, if you will let me go back into this hearing room just for about three minutes.” I said, “I’m not going to do a thing. All I want is just to walk in and sit down. I’ll sit down quietly. I want to see them – want them to see me coming on my own two feet and see that I’m not running away from them and they haven’t gotten my goat.” He says, “Does that mean a lot to you?” I said, “Yes it does.” He hesitated a moment. He said, “No, I’m not going to take a chance. If you go in there, in that room again, you blow your top again, and we’ll be hauling you off in a hearse instead of an ambulance.” So finally we start negotiating, and I said, “Doctor, if you send that ambulance on, I’ll get in a taxi and go to the hospital with you,” which I did.

So they set me up with a corner room at Touro Hospital and began to give me electro-cardiograms and all kinds of tests. I pick up the afternoon paper. While I’m lying up in the hospital, Paul Crouch has demanded a police escort to protect himself from me, and while they are protecting Paul Crouch from me, while I’m lying up in the hospital, one of the policeman is taken with a heart attack and drops dead.

Eastland had announced at the beginning of the hearing that on completion in New Orleans, he was going to resume the hearings in Birmingham. John Sparkman was up for re-election for the Senate, and he would be running in the primaries in May, and we had the uneasy feeling that the Birmingham hearings would be used – or might well be used to [?] Sparkman, because he not only knew all of us, but he knew a lot of people that we knew, him from the New Deal days where there was more liberalism than there was later.

But in any event, here’s what happened at the hearings? I mentioned a Montgomery reporter wrote this beautiful story the first night. He continued to send in stories along the same lines, and the press generally wrote it up extremely well. These were mostly Southern reporters. They had not been hardened to what was going on in Washington. It was the first time they had ever seen one of these senatorial hearings going on, and with Eastland presiding, it was worse than most, and we had the feeling that they were very much on our side, before it was over. And I think too, sitting there with Crouch for several days, they began to see what kind of character he was and how he was being used.

But in any event, when the hearings concluded, Eastland called the press in and almost pleading with them, said, “Boys, how do you think we did?” Several of them spoke up, and he says, “We think it was outrageous,” which rather disappointed him. Then this same reporter Fred Anderson took a poll of the reporters that had been at the press table throughout three – the entire proceeding. I think there was about a dozen. The question he put to them: from what you’ve seen of these proceedings here in New Orleans, which of the principals involved do you regard as the greatest menace to the American form of government and way of life? Jim Eastland won hands down. Arens – Paul Crouch, the witness, was runner up. Arens was number – third, and I think of the group we were representing, only Dombrowski got honorable mention. One vote there for Jim. I think the – some reporter couldn’t get away from the Polish names, although Dombrowski is like Kosiesko or – it’s one of the old American names of families living here since Revolutionary days.

After the – I was kept in the hospital for about a week, and then I was – the doctor wouldn’t let me go back home. He made me – let me stay in a motel along the Gulf Coast or somewhere [ ? ? ] found a motel [ ? ? ] place near Gulfport for two weeks longer.

While I was still in New Orleans I got a letter from my sister, saying that she’d been to church, and your father-in-law, Dr. McGuire had then gone back to the pulpit. And he had devoted an entire sermon to us and the New Orleans affair. He was generally a very restrained man, and she said that he had gotten so worked up about it that he was pounding the pulpit – entirely out of character, and knowing of his high blood pressure, she said that she was very much afraid that he would have a stroke, but he seemed to have come through all right.

So after the doctor finally let me come back home, he told me I would have to spend most of the time – I could move around a little bit, but he wants me to lie down most of the day. Again this is a question of reactions. I called Hugh. I told him what I’d heard about Dr. McGuire’s sermon, how much I appreciated it, but I hoped very much it hadn’t injured his health in any way. Hugh’s response was, “That’s a strange thing.” He said, “His blood pressure’s gone down, and it’s been down for the last three years.”

So then I called Fred Anderson. I was very much concerned about him. [ ? ? ] such a hard-hitting article, whether he’d endangered his job. So I called up and asked if he could have coffee with me after he put the paper to bed in the – this was the late afternoon. So we got together, and I told him again – told him how much I appreciated his story. I said, “Fred, now I hope very much this hadn’t endangered your position with the paper.” He said, “Endangered it?” He said, “The paper has been getting so many letters and so much commendation from other newspapers for the coverage of the New Orleans affair, that they’re even decided that they’re going to put – enter my stories for a Pulitzer Prize.” He didn’t get it, but in any event, that came out all right.

And again Eastland decided that he wouldn’t resume the Birmingham hearing. And none of us – all of us were clearly in contempt. There wasn’t any doubt about that, and here was Virginia in her statement saying I stand in utter and complete contempt of this committee, but nonetheless, the Senate did not vote contempt, and no citations were ever brought. I think they had decided it was just a hot potato. I think the press boys were the ones that really saved us. Virginia thinks it was the quiet pressure brought to bear in Washington.

In any event, Virginia’s very devoted to Jimmy. He’s quite conservative, but been wonderful to us.

McGuire: Jimmy who?

Durr: My brother Jimmy, and a very wonderful big brother. He couldn’t quite understand the New Deal, but I was his brother and that was all right. We – when we’re together, we will discuss children and fishing and football and the like and stay off of all controversial subjects. He was out of town when Virginia received the subpoena. He was away on business. I had gotten one short note from him while I in the hospital, in which he simply said, “I want to pay for [?] you’re in the hospital. I don’t know what your financial – the state of your bank account is, but you maybe should – you need some money, and I’ve deposited so much to your account, with no mention of the affair.” Jimmy drops in after work to make his first call. I am lying in bed. He comes back to the bedroom. Virginia is terrified that this might result in some break in the family, so she goes in the bathroom and cracks the door. So Jimmy starts off by saying, “Cliff, you certainly acted like a damn fool down there in New Orleans.” Virginia, hearing that, almost fainted. He said, “Yes, don’t you have any sense at all? Here, calling this fellow Crouch a son of a bitch and threatening to kill him right in the courtroom with the marshals all around, the press all around. Don’t you have any sense at all?” He says, “Why didn’t you wait until the hearings were over and then get him in a side alley and kill the son of a bitch?” So Virginia rushed there and embraced him. That was all that needed to be said, and we have never discussed the New Orleans before or since.

Again, the question of the reaction – the press was good. The people of Montgomery knew us well enough to know that we were not dangerous characters. I don’t think they took us that seriously, but nevertheless there is this uneasy feeling once you begin to – you go through this ordeal and you get smeared, there’s always a little feeling that some of it might rub off – rub off on them. So I found that – and Virginia and I both – that people began to sort of – if you past them on the street, they would speak to us, but staying away from us. Then again, I found my law practice beginning to decline rather seriously instead of gaining as I hoped it would.

But Eastland for an entire year did not publish the report of the hearings, but then the American Legion started quite a clamor, demanding its publication, and so the report, with all the testimony, was issued as an official document by the Internal Security Committee. At that point the American Legion started a vigorous attack on Aubrey Williams’s paper, the Southern Farmer. Pressure was put on the advertisers. The advertising began to decline to such an extent that although he had a large circulation, he had to start cutting down the circulation, because the more papers – the larger the circulation, the more it cost him, and finally he had to close down entirely the publication and limit himself to using his presses for a job as a printer, which it had almost put him out of business entirely.

It was shortly after the New Orleans affair when the Senate held its hearings on Joe McCarthy, which ended by putting him pretty much in eclipse. It exposed his activities – the nature of his activities pretty thoroughly and completely.

Then another interesting bit was the fate of Paul Crouch. He had been testifying for the government for a good many years in loyalty hearings and in court proceedings, and nobody’s telling us how many people have lost their jobs – some were sent to jail – on Paul Crouch’s testimony. He was one of the government witnesses in the Philadelphia communist trials, the Steve Nelson case. The communists could get no lawyer, so they went to the bar association in Philadelphia and said, “Look here, you profess to believe in the right of counsel. How about it? Do you or don’t you?” The Philadelphia bar said, “We do,” and so they called for volunteers, and some very top-flight lawyers agreed to defend the communists as – without fee – as a matter just of the right of counsel. Paul Crouch was one of the witnesses in these cases.

McGuire: [ ? ? ] what happened is the Constitution [ ? ? ].

Durr: These lawyers in Philadelphia made – did a thorough research job. They got the transcript of testimony in every case that Crouch had testified in, and showed that lie after lie had been told, putting his testimony in one case against – and comparing it with testimony in another case, and this got out in the press. And so there was a good deal of furor raised about the government using this kind of witness. Interestingly, Joe Alsop kept the campaign going. He was outraged by it, and he made this fight. Brownell was then the Attorney General. And finally the pressure got so great that Brownell decided he’d have to dismiss Crouch, which he did. Crouch immediately demanded that the Senate Internal Security Committee investigate Brownell, that he was quite sure that Brownell had some communist affiliations or associations. But the poor man went back to [?], where he was living. Aubrey Williams about six months after our episode – it may have been longer than that – in New Orleans, got a letter from Mrs. Crouch saying that Crouch was – had – was penniless. He had a terrible case of case. They didn’t have enough to eat, and wouldn’t Aubrey please send them some money. Aubrey never told me, but knowing Aubrey as I . . .

[The recording ends abruptly as the tape runs out.]