The Great Depression; Interview with Paul Edwards. Part 2; Interview with Robert Clifton. Part 1

INTERVIEWER:

You know, riding the rails, people called you guys hobos, right. And you would—and sometimes there was fear, you know, or they used to be, you know, the concern of whether what did it mean for these hobos coming in. What'd you think about that?

PAUL EDWARDS:

The term \"hobo\" was seldom used by the guys that were on the road. It was a, it was something put together by the press and by the public, but you never thought of yourself as a hobo. You were a worker. You were looking for a job. \"Hobo\" has an implication of he's just riding the rails and going nowhere. He isn't looking for work, he wants a handout. Well, that wasn't characteristic of the great volume of men who were on the road. They were looking for jobs, and they, they, they moved around in relationship to the, to the least glimmer of hope.

INTERVIEWER:

Can we stop for a sec? Instead of saying \"they,\" because you were part of it, right?

PAUL EDWARDS:

Right.

INTERVIEWER:

Can you say \"we\"?

PAUL EDWARDS:

Yeah, sure, fine. Right. That's good.

INTERVIEWER:

Ready?

PAUL EDWARDS:

The term \"hobo\" was something that was seldom heard by or used by people that were on the road. We, we were looking for jobs. We were looking for the places where there's work, and the least indication that if you got to Wisconsin there'd be a job, if you got to Minnesota there was work, or if you wanted to work in a harvest, get over to North Dakota. So that always there were, we really resented that term \"hobo\". And it wasn't used among the fraternity or brotherhood of free riders nor the railroad men didn't call you hobos either.

INTERVIEWER:

So what would be—were you kind of ordinary guys, just out of a job?

PAUL EDWARDS:

There was every element of society reflected in there. I remember one time going into a jungle when we got off the train, and there, oh, probably about 150 guys there, right. And there was a mutual cook-out, you see. Everybody would go out and hit the stores, get the waste vegetables, get the bad, unused cuts of meat, and then you all came together. And you had these five gallon oil cans, ten gallon oil cans, and you cooked up a Mulligan stew. And everybody shared in it. And there was no price attached to it, but you were expected to go out and do your soliciting for, you know, if you took part in it. I remember one time a man in a very handsome suit, wearing a tie and collar, looked like he didn't belong there at all. He, I got to talk to him, and he had just lost a good job. And he'd left his family, and he was heading out looking for work. That man stood out like a sore thumb, because he was still dressed in the garb of Main Street, you know? But he was with us, you know. And it was amazing, the different talents that were shown in, in that community. And then there was the low-life. I remember being in a jungle one night when a fellow came down, a pimp with two girls that were working for him, and he was selling those girls for fifty cents or a dollar a piece.

INTERVIEWER:

Let me ask you, kind of to go back on, you know, subject you talk about before. You know, a lot of times that you guys were being—what the press was saying was—

INTERVIEWER:

—the government, you were radicals.

PAUL EDWARDS:

Yeah. Right.

INTERVIEWER:

What, I mean, in response to that, again, what were you? Were you out to overthrow the government?

PAUL EDWARDS:

There was a, there was a kind of case made in the public press and certain elements of the community who tried to paint us as villains, as though we were on the border of assuming a Communistic control of the local community. And that, that picture was also so far from the truth. There just wasn't any such element. And I never heard revolution talked about, and I've been in jungles when they burned them down and burned you out, because they, they didn't want you in the community. It wasn't community acceptance. I don't mean that at all. But there was no real threat ever in all that I saw or did that where there was any kind of a threat of Communism or of revolutionaries. It just wasn't there. There was, I think I had, I remember one old Swede who was a Socialist by declaration. And there was a great number of, of people with Socialist background mixed into the working man's class. And that was because they game from Europe. And remember they had social security in Germany ever since 1880, right. And you had Sweden and Norway and Denmark and all those countries moving towards a more generous social concept of what government was for. These guys had been indoctrinated, and they were immigrants who came in the postwar period after World War I. And you ran into them, and you'd hear them if you were on a harvest crew at night, and conversation would build up while you—these guys had a clear idea that there was a better way to do things than we were doing them. And I suppose that to that degree they were inflammatory. But it was an inflammatory based on reason, and they were reasonable men.

INTERVIEWER:

And, and who were most—and you were—you said there were also a lot of guys like yourself out of high school who may have been, there were no jobs in their own community.

PAUL EDWARDS:

Right. I came out of high school in 1930, and was blindsided by the recession, but didn't, the Depression, and we didn't even know what it was, didn't know what the term was. We were just, it was in the natural course of events that we were on hard times. And we had to hustle for jobs. And we did all the lowly things that are done now by immigrant labor here and around this part of the country. We picked apples. We thinned apples in the spring. There was a sequence. You got, you thinned apples, which is to say, in the apple growing country, you knocked every other apple off the tree.

INTERVIEWER:

Were you ever scared during this time that you'd never make it, that times were going to get so bad?

PAUL EDWARDS:

I never remember any sense of fear of the tomorrow, or of the drift of things. We were swimming in a tough stream, but it was, it was the natural order of things. Once more, to say, we thought it was the logical way that history ran, that you had—my brother Andrew used to make me, he was my oldest brother, and he'd make me work hard, because you hired out for tough. You knew it was tough, and you hired out to handle these big bundles and pitch bundles or pitch hay or whatever. He always felt it was your obligation as a working man to, to give the man his money's worth. That's not revolutionary, that's, that's pretty conservative, that's a point of view that I don't, I have a hard time linking the word revolution with the Depression. There was a not a sense of revolt. There were individual flair-ups under great provocation, but there was no mass move towards the resolution of our problems by revolution. It just did not exist. I saw strikes and I saw riots and I saw police attack a gathering of discontented labor men in San Francisco on horseback. I wasn't there for the shooting. I left before the end. But we used to—there would be maybe 3,000 men.

INTERVIEWER:

I'm actually, I need to ask you to stop. Can we stop for a second?

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Let's get settled here. Hold on just one second. Alrighty.

PAUL EDWARDS:

The California migration reached out to people in many directions. It just wasn't up in our part of the country. If you look at the Dust Bowl, in the intervening land, people by the hundreds of thousands drove out of there in old rickety wagons with stuff piled up on top them, and you know, \"California or Bust.\" This was, this was the promised land. And, and they came short of money. My God, you can't imagine how short of money people had to go on. And they traded off jobs, they did little jobs, they did anything they could for a few gallons of gasoline to keep going west. And they bedded down in the damned circumstances, wherever there was a public park. My specialty was band stands. If you could find a band stand in a park, you could always crawl into that and be sheltered for the night. And it was a, it was a time of—there was a dynamic to it. It was, it was underway. It was massive in its import, and it's affected California ever since.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, that's—OK. Great. The next question I want to ask you again was about Upton Sinclair. You used the term that Sinclair was a \"minor league miracle.\" [laughs] I liked that term.

PAUL EDWARDS:

Oh, you liked that? [laughs]

INTERVIEWER:

So if you could tell me again that that's what you felt. That, you know, guys like you that— Oh, we need the slate?

PAUL EDWARDS:

There was a fascination that followed from my exposure to Upton Sinclair that stayed with me all my life. He was, he wasn't big, he wasn't vociferous, he wasn't violent in his language, but he was a kind of a minor league miracle. He, he took you with him. And he took you into the thinking process. He was a thinking man's radical, you know. He wasn't just an ordinary skimmer, he, he really had a profound philosophy. And if you ever bought into it as I did, it became more or less the ruling motif of your life.

INTERVIEWER:

Explain to me once more about \"Production for use,\" as if I know nothing about it.

PAUL EDWARDS:

Right. At the heart of the End Poverty in California program was really a very simple phrase, and that was \"Production for use.\" That was a new term. We know about production for sale, for trade, and we, we had all sorts of commerce in which production was the—I remember Wendell Willkie used to say, \"Per-duce. American must per-duce.\" And again we've got the same chant going by the little fellow down in Texas. \"We gotta per-duce.\" And, but nobody ever put the ending on that phrase. Produce for what? Produce for use. That was what made sense to me, and it still does in this day and time. There is, there is such a capacity for production in America that shuts down when the profits aren't long enough. That seems to me that there ought to be some sort of a balance in there, that at that stage of the game you could produce it for use, and find a—I suppose, in a sense, the reasons the economists criticize it, they say that's resorting to a barter system. Well, I don't know that I condemn the barter system in its entirety.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Let me get set up here. Just give me two seconds. OK. Any time now.

INTERVIEWER:

OK.

PAUL EDWARDS:

Production for use was more than a slogan. Every place I've ever been in the field of international aid—

INTERVIEWER:

I want you to stay with the, the past. Stay in '33, '34.

PAUL EDWARDS:

Right, right. All right. Production for use as a slogan, or as absolutely the substance of End Poverty in California, reached out to every farmer, every fruit grower, every, everybody that was in the business of producing, particularly in the area of foodstuffs and that sort of thing. Because every wheat bin the Northwest was overflowing with wheat. And it was selling for as low as 27 cents a bushel. And that was not production cost by far. And farmers, out of sheer habit, kept growing the damn stuff, because farmers grow the wheat. And yet every corn bin, corn was—I remember hauling corn into this elevator in the Depression, working on a farm in Indiana, when it was three cents a bushel the day we went to the elevator. And the day we got there, it was dropped to two cents a bushel. Now you, you know this is not production for profit, so it was production for loss. So it was production for use was much more, much more sensible than the other proposal.

INTERVIEWER:

OK. You said you went to, you said you followed Sinclair around, like from meeting to meeting . Can you—

PAUL EDWARDS:

That's right. I suppose I went to only four or five different locations. I wasn't a, I was not a member of the troop. I wouldn't represent myself. I was just a, a convert or an addict. A new, a new formula. I went up into Ventura County. And we went out east of here to Imperial Valley, and that's where trouble came on, because that's where the police and the American Legion with the baseball bats broke up the meeting. The meeting was never held.

INTERVIEWER:

OK. That's one other, one other question. I want you again to describe to me what you describe very beautifully but I want to get one more time. Give me the visual image of, of knowing, of these oranges being, the gasoline poured on, and how that, how mad that made you when you knew that there were people who were hungry.

PAUL EDWARDS:

Right. Going back to the, to the \"Production for use.\" I suppose the most inflammatory thing that I was witnessed, or was imparted information and saw the pictures, were great rows of oranges, piled as high as your head, and they threw buckets of gasoline up over them, and then they touched a match to them. Oranges are not the best thing to burn. But there they were. They cooked and popped and blistered, and you threw away a quarter-mile-long rack of oranges. I remember one, one other fruit that was brought into play in the Depression, and that was when it hit San Francisco for the first time. And they were selling apples on the street. And here would be men, dressed in the kind of clothing that you'd go to work in an office.

INTERVIEWER:

I just want to get back to the oranges just for a moment. And the oranges, seeing those made you understand \"Production for use\"?

PAUL EDWARDS:

Yes, yes. It, it—the sight of, the sight of the destruction of that amount of foodstuffs—and oranges were one of the early recognized virtuous fruits with lots of, of health-giving characteristics. And the idea of burning and wasting that volume of particularly useful foodstuffs outraged me, and it filled me with anger. And it became almost symbolic of why I was easy to persuade that this little man with the silver hair was preaching a gospel of salvation, that he was speaking to a very real situation.

We were hungry,

and here was food just being destroyed. They didn't even have a marketing program for it like they had later in the New Deal, where they took those same oranges and gave them to people. That became part of the Surplus Food Program, if you remember, as they did with beef in South Dakota, and they did with—up where I lived in those days, in South Dakota, that's when we learned to eat grapefruit. All those Texas Democrats had got the grapefruit that was grown in Texas into the market, and they were giving it away to the people in North, South Dakota who'd sometimes waste it and feed it to the hogs.

INTERVIEWER:

So in California things were just rotting while people were hungry.

PAUL EDWARDS:

Right.

INTERVIEWER:

OK.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Great. Good.

INTERVIEWER:

Thank you. Great.

PAUL EDWARDS:

Good. I hope it shapes up for you.

INTERVIEWER:

Oh, wonderful.

PAUL EDWARDS:

Good editing will help you.

[End of Edwards interview; beginning of Clifton interview]

INTERVIEWER:

OK. Let's start by having you tell me how you first got involved with Sinclair. What attracted you to him?

ROBERT CLIFTON:

Well, at that time, of course, that was I believe '34. I was probably about thirty-one, a young lawyer practicing law in a small law office in Hollywood. We were on Hollywood Boulevard. It was an elderly attorney and myself and another lawyer there, but anyhow it was in Hollywood. Roosevelt had been elected president, but I hadn't been in politics, didn't know too much about it although I voted for Roosevelt. But then Sinclair came along and I read about him and there was a meeting of the Hollywood Bar Association in Hollywood and Sinclair came and spoke to us. I was impressed by what he had to say about his EPIC plan. Also, he told a very interesting joke about the Supreme Court, which I didn't agree with, but anyhow was attracted. So I decided to get in the campaign, get active, and so I looked up the headquarters and walked into headquarters and said, \"I want to work in the campaign.\" So they said, \"Where do you live?\" Well, I said, \"In Hollywood.\" They looked up and they said, \"Oh, that's the 59th Assembly District.\" And I said, \"Well, all right.\" I found out that the 59th Assembly District was from Vine Street in Rossmoor, to and including all of Beverly Hills, and it ran from Pico to and including Mulholland Drive. The whole of Hollywood, you know. So they said, \"You're the Executive Secretary of the 59th Assembly District. You'll run the campaign there.\" And they gave three cards with names of people who were supposed to live in the district who were interested in it. Well I got in touch with them; they had no interest. But they said, \"Go out and organize EPIC Clubs.\" End Poverty in California, so they called it EPIC Clubs. And they said, \"You can use the school houses. Get a permit to use the school house and form an EPIC club. So I went down to the Board of Education and I applied for a permit to use the school, and then I published, oh, maybe 300, 400 handbills: \"Learn about Upton Sinclair and his Plan for California.\" I think I adopted the headline on this thing \"Little Man, What Now?\" because there was a very popular book at that, and so forth. So I took these handbills and put them all over the neighborhood, door to door.

INTERVIEWER:

Did it start—let's just start again about the handbills. Tell me about, how did you make up the handbills?

ROBERT CLIFTON:

I just wrote them up myself...well, on these handbills, I just wrote them myself. As I remember, the catchy word one was, \"Little Man, What Now?\" \"Attend a meeting and find out about the EPIC movement in California and Upton Sinclair, candidate for so forth, at the Laurel Day Avenue School at certain time in room so-and-so.\" And so I took these handbills and put them out around the neighborhood, tacked them on the telephone poles. I got in touch with a few local newspapers and told them about it. My father-in-law and I, he was unemployed at the time, we put them out from door to door. My wife and so forth. And low and behold two weeks later we had a meeting and probably fifty people showed up at the meeting in the school house. And so I explained what little I knew about the plan, but I had his book I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty in California and I explained about it and lambasted the LA Times, which was at that time very, very reactionary, and suggested that we should organize an EPIC Club in that neighborhood to carry on the campaign. And so I asked for volunteers: someone to be president and finance chairman and secretary, and we got volunteers and then we scheduled a meeting there, and I turned it over to them.

INTERVIEWER:

Why did people get so interested? Why were you so interested, and what were people so interested in about Upton Sinclair's plan?

ROBERT CLIFTON:

Well, of course, it was front page news, of course. He was a candidate for governor, and his plan, of course, was to forge jobs, to put people at work doing various things to earn a living and so forth, and the big problem was unemployment. Now that was before Roosevelt had gotten started on a lot of his big programs, you know, the Wagner Act and the Rural Electrification Act and the CWA and programs like that. So this was at the very beginning of the Roosevelt term and our big problem, or one of the big problems, was unemployment, and that's what Sinclair was aiming at: putting unemployed to work. Well, that's why we were interested and everybody else was. Not that we were all out of work, not at all. Most of these people attending were not out of work, but they knew it as a problem, as we know now, that one of the big problems is unemployment. So they were intelligent people. Not all unemployed, they weren't looking for jobs. Some of them may have been, and so forth, but anyhow that's the people that attended.

INTERVIEWER:

Were they young people? Were they old people?

ROBERT CLIFTON:

All sorts, all ages, but by and large I would say twenty-five, thirty and so forth. What now might be termed the \"Yuppie\" type, but then there was a lot of older ones, you know, a cross section...by the time of the election, of course, we were very anxious to get people to the polls, ringing doorbells and calling them and stuff like that, yes. But as far as registration, no.