The Great Depression; Interview with Wendell Miller. Part 1

INTERVIEWER:

OK. Tell me about being in Harbor City in 1932, what conditions were like?

WENDELL MILLER:

I was a minister in 1932 in a little community called Harbor City, no harbor no city, but it was a convenient shoe-string strip between L.A. and the L.A. harbor, by way of Harbor City towards San Pedro. It was a little community church, and I found there the majority of my people were stevedores or working round the docks, all of which had been shut down, practically, and nearly every person in my church was out of work. And it came to the point where I was so disturbed by it that I got a group of men together and said, \"Let's make a survey, and find out what are the real conditions not only among our own church people but as a community church.\" We were responsible, I felt, for the community. And they went from house to house, and very frankly said, \"What do you have to eat?\" And we found folk without food, literally without food. One family had flour and that was all, and they were making a gravy out of flour and water and salt and they even were trying to feed it to the youngster less than a year old. We found another family that had nothing but coffee in their house. So I got a hold of my district superintendent and said, \"I know what I'm supposed to do as a minister, but we have here an emergency that simply requires that we drop some of the things that ordinarily are supposedly a part of the church program. These people are hungry.\" And we first began by going over to the YMCA in San Pedro, and I got acquainted with the chaplin of the western fleet of the Navy. It was a, they called it the naval YMCA, and I told him what the problem was. And I said, \"I want to go to the high school and get the use of their auditorium, and I want you to provide me talent and we'll put on a regular orpheum type show. And the requirement to come is to bring food of some kind or another.\" Well, this began and it was very popularly received because it was a high-class program, it was no worse, and if anything better than what you might pay for at the actual orpheum. But that was not enough. So I got the same group of men together, some in the church and some out of the church, and we sat down and I said, \"We've got to have cooperation, whether we organize or not is not important because we don't need a chairman, we don't need a secretary, and certainly we don't need a treasurer.\" So we organized it, an unemployed co-op, I think probably the first one in the Los Angeles County, and we went up to the Japanese farmers who had most of the property in Palos Verde Hills, aside from what Vanderlip had on the far side. And they were big truck farms, and we said to them, \"Look, when it comes to harvest time, let us harvest your crops. You keep the saleable stuff, give us the culls. They're a misshape in the light, but they're edible, and they're nutritious.\" And we began, in that simple fashion, and we acquired a lot of vegetables. Then we went over to the fisheries in San Pedro, and we said the same thing to them but they didn't need our help, but they were very gracious, they gave us extra fish that they had, we went to the bakeries, they gave us the day old bakeries, baked goods, that they had. And then I got ahold of the Red Cross and very graciously they stepped in and said, \"We'll make you the flour center of this area.\" And I had flour stacked up to the ceiling. And the word got out that the Harbor City Community Church has food. We never ask anybody, \"Are you religious? Do you belong to a church?\" These things weren't important, these were hungry people. And we ask how many people there were in the family? We simply accepted their word for things, we never tried to check on them at all. And this was the beginning, and for the rest of the remainder of my time there we held services on Sunday, as we were supposed to do, but the main activity of the church was trying to feed hungry people.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, great.

INTERVIEWER:

Then how it affected you.

WENDELL MILLER:

All right. In 1934, there was a Call To Action Conference in Evanston, Illinois by a group of concerned ministers. It was ecumenical, it wasn't any one particular group. But those who felt that when Jesus said, \"Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth,\" that's precisely where he meant it to be. That, religion wasn't sort of a reward after life, but it had something to do, it had everything to do with how you live now. And they sent out invitations to those who were interested and concerned equally in that sort of interpretation for this particular meaning. And we attended what was a week or more where we discussed, what is the responsibility of the church in today's world? We had come through a deep depression, the results of which were still very obvious, and we began to realize that we were not supposed to get people into heaven, but heaven into people. So that we related to each other in a responsible way, and that when Jesus said, \"You don't live by bread alone,\" he didn't say you don't live by bread, he never left that out. It's an integral part where it's a holistic religion, it meets the need of the total person. And because of the economic depression and the incompetent results, we were faced with problems that the church hadn't faced for a long time, and that is the accountable unrest that people, not knowing for sure whether they had a job, not knowing for sure whether there would be money enough to feed the family. And this was sort of a new birth as far as a great many of us were concerned. I was introduced to it to be sure in my experience with the unemployed in the Harbor City Community Church and area. But this was one where, it was lifted up and pointed to specifically. And we began to work out a basic philosophy, \"What does your religion really mean in relationship, not simply to a spiritual sort of existence, but what does it mean in community, which involves economics, and politics, and race, and all of the relations, international relations, all of the relationships that people have?\"

INTERVIEWER:

Did it, did it change your life, do you feel?

WENDELL MILLER:

Oh, my life was changed drastically at that point, because now I reworked my own philosophy as to why are you a minister, \"What are you supposed to be doing?\", and I began to reread our scriptures in a totally different perspective. I had had it as the transferral beyond life, and now I begin to read it from the frame of reference, \"Well, what does this say to me now, and what does it require of me now, and surely what does it require of the church now? What should the message of the church be now in relationship to people, here and now, and not in some far future that is dim and misty?\" So my life was very definitely changed at that point.

INTERVIEWER:

Or a magic kingdom.

INTERVIEWER:

So after, soon after that conference you went back to California and you heard about Upton Sinclair. Tell me about what that meant?

WENDELL MILLER:

Well, I found out for the first time that politics was really a very serious and sober part of one's religious philosophy, or ought to be, I mean, and I had never encountered it as such before. Heretofore to me it was...

INTERVIEWER:

I'm sorry. Can you start that again? Can you start again about how politics was part of religion?

WENDELL MILLER:

Oh yes. Before I had gone to the Call To Action Conference, politics was sort of a side issue. We voted and we went to elections, we felt it was necessary to do, but it didn't have the real impact on my thinking as after I had been to that conference, wherein I began to realize that politics was involved in how people live. Laws were made that restricted or gave freedom, gave privilege or took away privilege from people. And I began to realize how important that was as far as my own personal religion was concerned, and as a minister I felt, therefore, I had to share that thinking in my preaching, and I began to do that. And I began to realize that as I looked, the parties over there wasn't too much that I could wholeheartedly endorse, because

I saw class distinctions, I saw racial distinctions,

I saw the privileged people getting more privileges, the poorer getting poorer.

It was at that time,

not far from our church, there was a Hoovertown that was built out of old packing crates and the like, we knew what people were going through.

WENDELL MILLER:

And I said to myself, \"The time has come, you've got to take a stand on your political stance.\"

WENDELL MILLER:

\"Where do you stand and what do you stand for. And that's...\"

INTERVIEWER:

We're gonna go back to what you were saying about the taking a political stand.

WENDELL MILLER:

Oh, yes. My politics changed. I had not been an ardent party member of any party. But I voted because I felt that was the right thing to do as a good citizen. But I had never applied it because I had never analyzed it. And I began to realize that politics had so much to do with the duty of life. It told some people where they could work or if they could work, it told other people what categories they had to stay in, it meant jobs for some and privilege for others and unemployment for others. And it concerned me to the point because I realized that I had not incorporated that into my total philosophy, and... See, mine isn't simply a religious philosophy, it's philosophy of life and that includes everything. So I began to think in terms of, \"What political party speaks to all the problems of life that relates to the things that I say are important?\" And that's when I became first interested in what socialism was trying to say. Well, I began not labeling it as such, but I began talking and preaching about the sanctity of human life, that every person was a sacred person. And on the basis of that I began to draw new people into the church. Among them was a Walter Thomas Mills, one of the early American old-time socialists, and he was very intrigued by what I saying, because he said, \"What you're saying is what our party has been saying.\" And then another man showed up, an old-time, he was anything but a religious man, and certainly not a church man, but he heard the minister was saying things over there that he might agree with and he came over. He was another old-time socialist. And, interestingly enough, he asked me if he could join my church. So I began to surround myself with people who believed as I did, the Kingdom of Heaven was meant to be on earth, and that included the whole of life, the way he lived, the way he worked, his paycheck, what was involved in family relations and the like. And in the midst of that came the announcement that Upton Sinclair was gonna run for governor. And right off the bat I began to read his literature. Some of it was delightfully shocking. His Profits For Religion, Profits Of Religion was one because of the way he spelled it. He spelled it the biblical way, prophet, but the inference, of course, being very clear [sic - the book's title uses the word \"Profit\", not \"Prophet\". The church all too often and all too long and, sadly enough, still too many are related to the profit side, p-r-o-f-i-t side, and seemingly were more interested in that than they were in people. Well, when Sinclair came out with his EPIC program, End Poverty in California, I said, \"That sounds what I believe in.\" And we began to inquire and Walter Thomas Mills, who was a warm person...

INTERVIEWER:

WENDELL MILLER:

All right.

INTERVIEWER:

Because then it's harder for us to...

INTERVIEWER:

OK, so back to hearing about EPIC, End Poverty in California.

WENDELL MILLER:

The word had gotten out that Upton Sinclair was going to run for governor, which was a shocking thing for a lot of the electorate, and there was a total barrage to begin with against him, particularly led by the Los Angeles Times, and in order to bolster their side they began to quote from his many writings and appealing to the church people among others.

INTERVIEWER:

OK. I'm going to ask you now to start again on this. Just because, instead of using the...

WENDELL MILLER:

The what...

INTERVIEWER:

You use the word \"they\", so who is \"they\"? You're saying \"in order to bolster their cause.\"

WENDELL MILLER:

Oh, yes.

INTERVIEWER:

So can you tell me who you're referring to?

WENDELL MILLER:

Upton Sinclair announced that he was running for governor in California, which disturbed a great many of people, the privileged group, the capitalist group and such, because they believed that his particular policies would probably end their rule, and if carried out might have done it. But he came in with, what to me, was a very realistic program, which he called EPIC, End Poverty in California. It was so logical nobody should have disagreed with that particular goal, ending poverty in California, but he came out with it very specifically and began to name items which would have to occur and things which would have to be done, which was most disturbing. And among other things, in the opposition, they went back to some of his writings. And

the particular book on profits of religion was one in which they quoted out of context to be sure, saying, \"Look what he would do to religion. Look what would happen to the church\" and

such. Well, to be sure, that frightens a lot of people. There were a lot of people who were not ready for that and I was an iconoclast by that time and I realized that, \"Stand up and be counted.\"

We had a church on Florence Avenue,

which at that particular time was the busiest street in L.A. County,

and we had two

large

electric signs

enclosed on the front of the church, one where we would put the church announcements and the hours and days. The others we would put up little statements. And they had been calling, the opposition had been calling Sinclair an atheist because, having taking things out of context, they could make him say anything. And, I was fed up. I saw the placards that were going out and the like,

so I put up an electric light it during the night, it was there 24 hours a day, \"I would rather vote for an atheist who acts like a Christian than a Christian who acts like an atheist.\" Well, [laughs] we got a lot of reaction against that you can be sure,

but I've never been known to back down when I'm taking a stand which I believe to be right and I thoroughly believed, then and now, that I was right. And the fortunate part was, you see, I had been building up a group of people in the church whose philosophy was basically the same as mine, that the bread of life included the daily bread, and in their prayers when they said, \"Give us this day our daily bread,\" they meant a daily loaf of bread, whole wheat or wheat or whatever, they meant that. And so there was nothing inconsistent with the sign as far as they were concerned. And they backed me, I don't think I lost a single person out of that church because of it, but we got a lot of newspaper letters to the editor criticisms and such. But it stood, and we stood on that ground and kept it at that point. Upton Sinclair's philosophy was not only in ending poverty, but it was consistent with the other point of view which we held, and that was that conflict between nations, handled in the way that we were, was destructive to the total pattern of life, including the economy. And so we put up a sign hung across the front of the church that would be a good eight feet long and 18 inches wide, \"Truth is the first casualty of war.\" And then we constructed another bench stop, I mean a bench for the bus stop at that corner, in which we put on there, \"Billions for war, how much for peace?\" And we had a box there where we would put in literature for EPIC, and for peace, and every Sunday in the bulletin we had a peace insert, every Sunday we put that in also. All of this was a part of the total revolution of my thinking of what was included in religion. And I give not only the Call To Action Conference the credit for my stimulation, but certainly Upton Sinclair. Unfortunately I never met him. Later on I called Norman Thomas my friend, which he was, he spoke in my church and such, but

it was Upton Sinclair who gave me the real stimulus going into the direction of the political side of what the Kingdom of Heaven, earth, should be like.

INTERVIEWER:

Great. Was the church really divided on these kinds of issues? Why was the church so threatened by it?

WENDELL MILLER:

Well, when you say the church you speak of it as the whole, not my individual church.

INTERVIEWER:

No, not your...

WENDELL MILLER:

And there were a lot of other individual ministers whom I knew, unfortunately they're all gone now, I'm the only one left, but there were others who voted and took a stand, maybe not as auspiciously as I had because I was in the proper place with a good lighted sign and many other things in my favor, but there were churches, but the majority of them, no, the majority of them supported the incumbent governor. And they fell for the line that he was an atheist and his Profits of Religion struck home too close at some places. And you can rationalize anything you want to, if you want to, by the Bible, you can rationalize anything you want to. And very earnestly and sincerely...

WENDELL MILLER:

...they would rationalize and say, \"No, he's an atheist, we can't support him,\" and they didn't. And I'm sure that militated against, in the total result of the voting.