__________
“…a kind of mindlessness that was special to the period…”
David Halberstam
speaking of the anti-communist rhetoric of the era.
__________
“HARRY TRUMAN was a success in
the White House partly because he was openly, joyously and unabashedly Harry
Truman; he was what he was, he gloried in attacks on his inadequacies, they
being in general the inadequacies of most normal men, and he made his
limitations his assets…” (Halberstam,
forgot to note page)
NOTE TO TEACHERS: Most of my students had never heard of President Truman. It always worked to show them this famous picture and ask them why this photo from the 1948 presidential election was famous. (If I had a kid who seemed to know, I wouldn’t call on him or her – or now, “they” – until we had several “wrong” answers. I liked to use Truman’s story of persevering in 1948, as an example for my classes.
See descriptions of the campaign below.
I was a do-nothing dope in school, myself, and only learned the importance of perseverance later in life. For example: at Parris Island.
*
I.F. STONE paints a grim picture in his book The Truman Era. (By comparison, this blogger is a big Truman fan – but aware of the dangers of the period.)
Explaining his reasons for fighting for freedom, which he saw as under attack, he wrote, “The place to be is where the odds are against you; power breeds injustice, and to defend the underdog against the triumphant is more exhilarating than to curry favor with those on top and move safely with the mob.”
“These were the years which saw the beginnings of the Cold War and of the drive toward intellectual regimentation in America.”
Stone refers to Truman as a “mediocre president,” and paints a picture of the mediocrities who fill Congress:
The composite impression was of big-bellied
good-natured guys who knew a lot of dirty jokes, spent as little time in their
offices as possible, saw Washington as a chance to make useful “contacts,” and
were anxious to get what they could for themselves out of the experience. They
were not usually corrupt or especially wicked … The Truman era was the era of
the moocher. The place was full of Wimpys [a character in Popeye cartoons] who
could be had for a hamburger.
He also warned readers that, “Big Business planned to establish a glacial conformity, a chrome-plated American version of what George Orwell saw ahead for mankind.”
“There are moments when the traditions of liberty seem to exercise very little real hold upon the American mind,” he warned while also warning against “that often most intolerant of despotisms, the majority itself.” 114/xix-xxiv
Stone also lambasts “the backwoods bird-brains of the House Un-American Activities Committee.”
114/48
*
February: A Communist coup, as Goldman writes, “sucks Czechoslovakia under The Iron Curtain, recalling to the least-informed Americans memories of Munich, 1938.”
Russia appears ready to take control of Finland. Italian elections are coming in April and newspapers in the United States agree that the Communists have at least a 50-50 chance to win.
“Fear of what? Most people don’t know exactly.”
President
Truman appeared before his press conferences making little pretense of chipperness.
His faith in ultimate world peace, the President admitted, was being shaken.
Reports went out that Secretary of Defense James Forrestal was meeting in Key
West with heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force to iron out their roles in the
event of fighting. Two Republican members of the house, Charles Kersten of
Wisconsin and Richard Nixon of California, expressed an attitude rapidly
spreading in Congress. They presented a resolution giving “solemn warning to
the conspiracy in the Politburo that any further step of aggression, internal
or external, will be actively resisted by every means at our disposal.”
Throughout
the country war fears ran rampant. In New England, “wait until the Russians
hit” and “when we fight Stalin” were becoming clichés. In Atlanta, friends were
greeting each other with: “Well, boy, break out that old uniform.” A Seattle
newspaper summarized: “Generally, people here have come to feel that war is
definitely on the way.”
A
Chicago reporter caught the national mood in its fuller nuances. “Cold fear is
gripping people hereabouts. They don’t talk much about it. But it’s just as
real and chilling as the current 11-degree weather. Fear of what? Most people
don’t know exactly. It’s not fear of Russia alone. For most think we could rub
Joe’s nose in the dirt. It’s not fear of Communism in this country. Few think
there are enough Commies here to put it over. It’s not fear of the atom bomb.
For most think we still possess a monopoly. But it does seem to be a reluctant
conviction that these three relentless forces are prowling the earth and that
somehow they are bound to mean trouble for us. Not many months ago, these
forces were something to be thought about only in off moments—like when you
turned in some commentator by mistake….But all winter, confidence in peace has
been oozing away. With the Czech coup , it practically vanished.” (1/78-79)
*
“That was the most beautiful music I have ever heard.”
Baseball
season: The New York Times had a good story about Maybelle Blair, who came out as a
lesbian, at age 95, in 2022.
In 1948, Blair was playing softball in Redondo Beach, California, when a scout for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League saw her play. He wanted to sign her; but her mother resisted. When she found out Maybelle would be making $55 per week she put her on the train to Chicago.
In her “early 90s,” the Times noted, Blair once visited a sporting goods store and asked to try on a pair of baseball cleats. Once the salesman realized she was serious, he brought her a pair.
“He put
them on my feet. I got up and marched around, and I heard that clicketyclack in
my head and I was never so happy,” Blair said.
After
taking the cleats for a walk in the store, Blair took them off, put them in
their box and told the salesman that she wouldn’t be taking them.
“That
was a big thrill of my life, just to put cleats on and march again,” she said.
For
Blair, the sound of cleats brought back memories of suiting up as a Peoria
Redwing and walking onto the field, her favorite baseball ritual.
“I was
so proud of myself because it dawned on me: I got to play the game I loved and
cherished,” she said. “I’d put on my spikes and march down the aisle and walk
onto the field, clicketyclack, clicketyclack. That was the most beautiful music
I have ever heard.”
Blair
was one of more than 600 women to join the baseball league, created in 1943 in
response to World War II. As young men were drafted, fears spread that the war
would be the demise of professional baseball and its ballparks. So women played
instead.
Blair
first began to become aware of her sexuality in fifth grade, and her first love
came when she was a senior in high school. “I’ll never forget her,” she said.
But she kept her relationships private and never married.
“I was
so worried about my family because in those days nobody knew anything about
people being gay or what have you. It was so nerve-racking,” she said.
She
found herself happiest on the field. Blair, who grew up in Texas and
California, said she was “born a baseball fan.”
Image
“If I
hadn’t, my father would have gotten rid of me,” she said with a laugh. “Playing
baseball was the only entertainment we had besides breaking horses.”
*
THE
ACRONYM “WASP” for white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants first appears in the New
Amsterdam News. WASPs were once rightly described as “America’s original
ruling class.”
*
“Carry as little as possible. But choose that little with care.”
April 4: Earl Shaffer, a WWII veteran, sets out to become the first person to walk the Appalachian Trail in one continuous hike. When his tent proves too cumbersome, he ditches it and sleeps in a poncho for the next 124 days. One pair of Russell Moccasin Company boots got him all the way through. He carried a little notebook to record impressions. “The fact that he was carrying those extra five or six ounces showed how important it was to him,” says Jane Rogers of the National Museum of American History.
Today about 1,000 thru-hike the trail each year; 3,000,000 walk portions. (His entire journal is online.) Having served four years in the Pacific, he said he set out to “walk the war out of my system.” He passed the battlefield at Antietam, met other veterans out hiking and talked to a farmer whose son “was psycho from [the] army.” Twice, he mentions Walter, a childhood friend, in his journal. Walter had dreamed of walking the trail with him someday, but he was killed at Iwo Jima.
Shaffer became the oldest person, at 79, to hike the entire trail in 1998.
That record was broken in 2017,
when Daniel “Greybeard” Sanders completed the thru-hike at age 82.
 |
A recent hiker on the trail. |
I had a good number of students who enjoyed reading Bill Bryson’s book, A Walk in the Woods, about his own hike.
NOTE TO TEACHERS: You
can find a copy of a
reading list of several hundred books I used in my class. I retired in
2008, but add a few books every year.
*
Summer: Lt. James W. Becton Jr., an African American officer serving in the U.S. Army reserves, listens as his base commander reads President Truman’s executive order desegregating the military.
Becton would eventually rise to the rank of lieutenant general, but explained how he felt at that time:
“‘As
long as I am the commander here, there will be no change,’” he recalled the
base commander saying. “I didn’t believe what I heard,” he added in an interview with The Washington Post in 2018. “This
was the commander in chief saying this is what it’s going to be. But here was a
commander saying nothing would change.”
*
June 24: The Berlin Air Life begins. The New York Times highlights the contributions of Lt. Gail S. Halvorsen, the original “Candy Bomber” of the operation.
Lt. Gail
S. Halvorsen, an Air Force transport pilot, was on the grounds of West Berlin’s
Tempelhof airfield on a mid-July day in 1948, taking part in a historic
confrontation of the early Cold War years, when he spotted some 30 German
children in ragged clothing outside a fence.
He
reached into his back pocket, extracted a pack of Wrigley’s Doublemint and
handed out the last two sticks of gum in the pack.
“The
look in their eyes, I could see their appreciation for something so small,” he
recalled long afterward. “I wanted to do something more, so I told them to come
back later.”
Halverson promised to drop more candy the next day, when he flew in from his base near Frankfurt. The children asked how they would know which plane he was flying. “I told them I’ll wiggle the wings.”
In the
months to come, an act of kindness by this American airman — the boys and girls
of West Berlin would come to call him Uncle Wiggly Wings — grew into a storied
good-will operation within a Great Powers drama.
Lieutenant
Halvorsen and his two crewmen joined with fellow American airmen to drop a
total of 23 tons of candies, chocolate and chewing gum wrapped in tiny
parachutes from their planes while preparing to touch down at Tempelhof
airfield with vast quantities of other supplies in an effort to break a Soviet
land blockade of Berlin’s Allied-occupied western sectors.
The Times notes that the airlift represented not only “a defiance of Soviet power by the United States, Britain and France,” but “also symbolized reconciliation between the German people and the Allies in the wake of World War II.” Only three years before, Allied warplanes and left German cities in ruins.
The
airlift began after the Soviet Union cut off the Allied powers’ land access to
West Berlin, situated deep inside Soviet-controlled East Germany, in June 1948.
The people of West Berlin were faced with near starvation and an impending
winter without fuel.
The
airlift, which continued for 15 months, claimed the lives of 31 American airmen
and 39 British fliers in accidents, but it thwarted the Soviet leader Joseph
Stalin’s attempts to drive the West from the city. By the time it ended in
September 1949 (the Soviet blockade had been lifted the previous May), Allied
pilots had flown more than 277,000 missions, sometimes buzzed by Soviet
fighters, to supply the city’s western sectors with 2.3 million tons of food,
flour, coal, medicine and construction equipment.
Lieutenant
Halvorsen, a native of Utah, flew 126 Berlin airlift missions, joined by his
co-pilot, Capt. John Pickering, and his navigator, Sgt. Herschel Elkins.
In
September 1948, the Air Force sent Lieutenant Halvorsen back to the United
States to publicize his efforts, and he appeared on the CBS-TV program “We the
People.” American candy manufacturers began donating sweets, and schoolchildren
volunteered to wrap them in simulated parachutes, made from handkerchiefs and
twine, for shipment to Allied-occupied West Germany.
Lieutenant
Halvorsen received many letters from German children during the airlift.
A
9-year-old named Peter Zimmerman sent him a homemade parachute and a map
providing directions to his home for a candy drop. Lieutenant Halvorsen
searched for the house on his next flight but couldn’t find it. … Peter sent
another note reading: “No chocolate yet. … You’re a pilot. … I gave you a map.
… How did you guys win the war anyway?”
Lieutenant
Halvorsen sent Peter a chocolate bar in the mail.
“Gail
Halvorsen enchanted the children of Berlin,” recalled Ursula Yunger, who had
been one of those children and later settled in the United States. “It wasn’t
the candy,” she told The Tucson Citizen in 2004. “It was his profound gesture,
showing us that somebody cared.”
Halvorsen earned a private
pilot’s license in 1941, joined the Army Air Force after briefly attending
college, and earned his wings in 1944. He hoped to see combat, “but he was
assigned to ferry bombers and transport planes across the South Atlantic for
the European and North African campaigns.”
*
July 10: With Truman’s approval ratings tanking, some panicked Democrats consider drafting Eisenhower to run for the presidency.
He sends back this reply: “No matter under what
terms, conditions, or premises a proposal might be couched, I would refuse to
accept the nomination.”
*
July 11: A group of whites and blacks visited Druid Hill Park, in Baltimore, “to stage an inter-racial tennis combat, and were collared and jugged by the cops,” says H.L. Mencken. He later condemns the arrest, as well as the policy behind it:
A free citizen in a free state,
it seems to me, has an inalienable right to play with whomsoever he will, so
long as he does not disturb the general peace. If any other citizen, offended
by the spectacle, makes a pother, then that other citizen, and not the man exercising
his inalienable right, should be put down by the police.
Certainly
it is astounding to find so much of the spirit of the Georgia Cracker surviving
in the Maryland Free State, and under official auspices. The public parks are
supported by the taxpayer, including the colored taxpayer, for the health and
pleasure of the whole people. Why should cops be sent into them to separate
those people against their will into separate herds? Why should the law set up
distinctions and discriminations which the persons directly affected themselves
reject? If the park tennis courts were free to all comers no white person would
be compelled to take on a colored opponent if he did not care to… No one could
be invaded in his privacy. Any white player could say yes or no to a colored
challenger, and any colored player could say yes or no to a white. But when
both say yes, why on earth should anyone else object?
It is
high time that all such relics of Ku Kluxry be wiped out in Maryland. The
position of the colored people since the political revolution of 1895, has been
gradually improving in the State, and it has already reached a point surpassed
by few other states. But there is still plenty of room for further advance…The Park
Board rule is irrational and nefarious. It should be got rid of forthwith.
Of equal, and maybe even worse, irrationality is the rule regarding golf-playing on the public links, whereby colored players can play on certain links only on certain days, and white players only on certain other days. (49/227-230)
*
“The status of a mongrel, inferior race.”
July 17: At a convention of “states’ rights” Democrats, former Alabama Gov. Frank M. Dixon blasts President Truman. Speaking for the white folk of the South, Dixon warns that Truman’s effort to advance civil rights for black people will “reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race.”
Attendees then nominate South
Carolina’s Gov. Strom Thurmond to run under a Dixiecrat Party label in the race
to become the next President of the United States. The party platform pledges
to protect “the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each
race.”
*
July
26: Mencken also has an opinion regarding Henry Wallace,
the former vice president: “Soak a radio clown for ten days and ten nights in
the rectified juices of all the cow-state Messiahs ever heard of and you have
him to the life.”
Same day: President Truman announces in an Executive Order that it shall be “the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.”
Sen. Thurmond explodes. “There’s not enough troops in the Army,” he warns, “to break down segregation and admit the Negro into our homes, our eating places, our swimming pools and our theaters.” In fact, interracial marriage would be banned in several states for another nineteen years.
Racial purity was said to be at stake.
Ironically, it turned out decades later that segregation and racial purity had already ended in Strom Thurmond’s pants. When he was 23, in 1925, he fathered a child by Carrie Butler, his family’s black maid.
Butler was 15 at the time.
*
August 23: In a speech to Europeans, John Foster Dulles suggests that the threat of communism must be met, insisting, “at times, war may have to be risked as the lesser of two evils.”
I.F. Stone responds: “I do not want to hear Dulles say at Amsterdam that man is created in the image of God. I want to hear him say it in Atlanta, Georgia, when one of those images, done in charcoal, has been strung up to a tree.” 114/125
On August 23, Stone notes that “the Southern Negro exists in a twilight between slavery and freedom.” 114/130
“If the Negro continues to get off the sidewalk,” Stone adds, “he can never expect to stand upon it as an equal. The Negro himself will determine just how long he is going to go on being treated as a ‘nigger.’” 114/132
*
September: Martha Mason, age 11, goes to bed one night, feeling achy. As The New York Times later explained, “She did not tell her parents because she did not want to compound their sorrow: that day, they had buried her 13-year-old brother, Gaston, who had died of polio a few days before.”
Whatever strain had killed Gaston, it was probably the same that paralyzed Martha from the neck down. “Martha spent the next year in hospitals before being sent home in an iron lung. Doctors told her parents she would live another year at most.”
They were wrong, however, for she would live another sixty years, her “home” a “7-foot-long, 800-pound iron cylinder that encased all but her head.” Despite the limits imposed on her, she would later describe her life as fine and full,
She survived, she later said,
because she was endlessly curious and there was so much to learn.
With daily visits from her
teachers, Martha resumed her studies, graduating first in her high school
class. She entered Gardner-Webb College
in Boiling Springs, N.C., receiving an associate’s degree in 1958.
Afterward, Ms. Mason and her
iron lung were transported by bakery truck to Winston-Salem, where she enrolled
in Wake Forest College.
There, she joined a student group seeking to integrate the campus. She earned a
bachelor’s degree in English from Wake Forest in 1960.
At both colleges (they are now
universities) Ms. Mason lived with her parents in a campus apartment and
attended lectures by intercom. At both colleges, she graduated first in her
class.
Returning to Lattimore, Ms.
Mason began writing for the local newspaper, dictating her articles to her
mother, Euphra. Not long afterward, Ms. Mason’s father, Willard, suffered a
major heart attack and became an invalid, requiring Euphra to care for him,
too. There was no more time for taking dictation. For decades afterward, Ms.
Mason wrote only in her head, publishing nothing. Her father died in 1977.
Perhaps only in a place like
Lattimore, whose current population is not much more than 400, could Ms. Mason
have thrived as well as she did. For if Ms. Mason could not go to the town,
then the town was quite prepared to come to her. The doctor visited regularly,
of course, but so did all the neighbors and the neighbors’ neighbors. So did
members of the local fire department, who came by during power failures to make
sure her backup generator was working.
Ms. Mason often gave dinner
parties (she ate lying down, with her guests around the table and the iron lung
pushed up beside it) and savored lively conversation, good gossip and the
occasional bawdy story. Amid the rhythmic whoosh
... whoosh of the iron lung, the local book club met in her home.
High school graduates stopped by so she could admire them in their caps and
gowns, as did just-married couples in their wedding finery. Souvenir magnets
from faraway places, gifts from traveling friends, adorned the yellow exterior
of Ms. Mason’s iron lung like labels on a steamer trunk.
But small-town life could have
its drawbacks. “She’s an intellectual, yet the local video store was not going
to have ‘Wild
Strawberries’ for her to rent,” Ms. Dalton, an associate professor of
communication at Wake Forest, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “She
could talk to anybody, but she needed that kind of intellectual stimulation,
too. And there were years when I imagine that was a little hard to come by.”
That changed in the mid-1990s,
when Ms. Mason acquired a voice-activated computer with e-mail capability and
Internet access. The computer brought her the world. It also let her
contemplate writing her memoir, which is subtitled “Life in the Rhythm of an
Iron Lung.”
She began the book in tribute to
her mother. In the late 1980s, after a series of strokes, Euphra Mason
descended into dementia and abusiveness, occasionally slapping and cursing her
daughter. Ms. Mason insisted that her mother remain at home. From her iron
lung, she took over the running of the household, planning meals, paying bills
and arranging for her mother’s care.
After her mother’s death in 1998, Ms. Mason began work on her book in earnest. There, in her childhood home, with a microphone at her mouth and the music of the iron lung for company, she wrote her life story sentence by sentence in her soft Southern voice, with her own breath.
*
September: The campaign for president is in its final stages. Goldman explains:
[Thomas]
Dewey campaigned six weeks; Truman, eight. Dewey covered 16,000 miles; Truman,
22,000. Dewey made 170 speeches; Truman, 271. Up and down the country the
President went, clambering out of the confusion of his campaign train to talk
to any crowd that gathered at 7 a.m. or 11 p.m. “Give ‘em Hell, Harry,”
somebody would yell and Harry Truman, the Missouri twang shrill, both hands
pumping up and down, would pour it on in the roughest English spoken by a
presidential campaigner since frontier days. So Dewey was proud of the
Republican Party? Those fellows are just a bunch of old mossbacks …gluttons of
privilege…all set to do a hatchet job on the New Deal.” So Dewey was above
mentioning Truman’s name? “That’s all a lot of hooey. And if that rhymes with anything,
is not my fault.” So the real issue in the campaign was unity? Dewey “is
talking mealy-mouthed political speeches.…I warn you...if you let the
Republicans get control of the government, you will be making America an
economic colony of Wall Street.” (1/84-85)
People talked about Truman, fighting it out. “Mighty game little scrapper,” they said. But it was expected he’d lose.
Elmo Roper had long since
stopped taking public-opinion polls; two months before election day science
declared the election over. Leading Democratic politicians, students of another
science, were publicly offering their Washington homes for sale. Bookies quoted
odds they would have refused on Joe Louis at his prime – fifteen-, twenty-,
even thirty-to-one. (1/86)
*
November 2-3: Goldman has a great description of that election night:
Until 9:00 or so Truman was leading in the popular and in the
electoral votes. This was as expected, the radio commentators explained; wait
until the rural returns came in. By ten o’clock a good many of the farm areas
were reporting. The figures were not particularly Republican, while Truman went
on rolling up majorities in the cities. The voices of the commentators were as
authoritative as ever; wait until there were enough rural returns to show the
inevitable pattern. The Chicago Tribune, no journal for
shilly-shallying, was out on the streets with its extra:
DEWEY
DEFEATS TRUMAN
Some people stayed up. Ten-thirty, eleven, eleven-thirty –
chairs hunched closer to the radio, conversation was shushed, somebody would
dart off to telephone and wake up a friend. The Dixiecrats were carrying only
three or four states in the South and Henry Wallace was showing no real
strength except in California and New York. The Truman majorities in the cities
remained substantial and the farm areas were reporting slim Dewey victories or
Democratic sweeps. H.V. Kaltenborn of NBC, the voice that had reported Munich,
1938 to America, the voice that had been news incarnate to a large part of a
generation, kept saying, crackling and definitive, wait until the full rural returns
come in. But the litany was breaking. On the ABC network George Gallup was a
shattered man. He could only sigh and tell his audience: “I just don’t know
what happened.”
Later and later the lights burned in living rooms. It was clear
that Truman was holding most of the South and a sizable bloc of Midwestern and
Western states. … By dawn the issue was California, New York, or Ohio; the
electoral votes of any one of these states would push the Democrat over. New
York, with Wallace taking a half million votes from Truman, went Republican.
California and Ohio swung crazily back and forth, with majorities of fifteen
hundred this way, twenty-five hundred the other, in states that had well over
two million voters apiece.
At breakfast time the Ohio results became definite. After a long
twenty minutes, Harry Truman came out of his Kansas City hotel suite. The strut
of the bantam cock was gone; the eyes were misty. The President and President-elect
of the United States walked slowly into the lobby, arm in arm with his brother
Vivian, and reporters overheard him whisper tremulously: “I just hope – I hope
so much I am worthy of the honor.”
Experts were stunned (one is reminded of the feeling we had in 2016). Voter turnout had been heavy. The country had been ready to remove Truman. “But then a vast swing had set in – a swing which came so late thousands said they had walked into the polling places intending to vote Republican and had ended up casting a Democratic ballot.” (1/88)
“I kept reading about that Dewey fellow,” said Charles Crenshaw of New Lebanon, Ohio, “and the more I read the more he reminded me of one of those slick ads trying to get money out of my pocket. Now Harry Truman, running around and yipping and falling all over his feet – I had the feeling he could understand the kind of fixes I get into.” (1/89)
*
JAMES EARL JONES, 17, a high school student in Michigan, of mixed African American and Irish ancestry, is slowly discovering his voice. In his early youth, he had developed a severe stutter and had remained mute.
When Jones was in high school, a poet and former college professor named Donald Crouch persuaded him to break his silence. After the teacher introduced him to the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Jones wrote an ode to grapefruit patterned after Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha.” In what might have been a bid to make the boy speak, Crouch said the poem was so good that it must have been plagiarized — a notion Jones could only dispel by reading it aloud. It turns out that poetry, like song, can help stutterers overcome disfluency, and in performance Jones found himself able to speak. Jones went on to participate in school competitions and recitals, sometimes reading lines of Edgar Allan Poe’s verse. As he discovered his voice, he gravitated toward anything that required him to use it: public speaking, debate, oratory contests.
As for that voice, Jones would go on to great success in plays and on film, including playing the voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars films.
*
December 20: In an essay titled “Mein Kampf with the (Lily-White) National Press Club, the journalist I.F. Stone describes his attempt to bring a Negro to lunch at the club:
My companion had just resigned as civilian aide to the Secretary of War. He was then dean of the Howard University law school and had been the first Negro to sit (though in the distant Virgin Islands) as a judge of the United States federal bench. My companion, William H. Hastie, has since been appointed governor of the Virgin Islands by President Truman.
We managed to get as far as a table by the window when a waiter came over and told me I was wanted on the phone. The manager was waiting for me outside the door. “Is that a colored man with you?” he asked. When I confessed it was, he told me that he would not be served. I replied that as a member I insisted on service for my guest and returned to the table. The insistence didn’t do much good. We sat for an hour talking, but not a glass of water was served us.
I tried to make a formal protest but could not get the twenty-five
signatures required to call a special meeting. Only ten of my fellow
newspapermen were willing to sign. I resigned from the club. 114/132-133
