Student Activism in the 1930s
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ASU Autobiographies

American Student Union Summer Training Institute Autobiographies
Kay Martineau
1. Most of my has been spent in small New Hampshire town, stooped in what is called "Yankee tradition", which in reality is a clinging to all that is old and reactionary and loving it because one's ancestors did it. And its primary characteristic is being what the people in those parts call individually independent. That is, each for his own business, his own farm, his own family; and each helps the poor children by a basket at Christmas, and the extra corn in August. The only deviation from the pattern of individuality is the agreement to vote for the Republican ticket.

2. The town is a mixture of woolen mills and rural outlying districts. The high school is like any other high school in New Hampshire—the children of the small retail store owners mix in studies with the Children of the Polish, Russian, French and Finnish sons of the mill workers. But when the school hours were over, the former would think of the latter, "You have to rush home and get supper and clean house for your parents, so you have no time for friends," and the latter would unconsciously classify the others as rich folk's kids. And so it went. We grow up in a high school where it was the policy to get by with as little work as possible. We never questioned anything but agreed with the teacher on everything. When he told us that we were studying from a capitalist textbook that was alright too, because wasn't everything capitalism? Debating clubs were started and dropped, we gave memorized current events and breathed with relief when we had finished them.

3. My father ran the town newspaper and we were all democrats. Their parents had before them. We prided ourselves upon our opposition and I guess we were satisfied that we were in a way pioneers. There were no questions, no arguments. One might be a good person all right and a good neighbor who tended his lawn and minded his own business, but he was a Republican, and therefore a dame fool or a mossback. Nor did we over ask why. He just was. You were expected to know why. Luckily, we weren't often asked.

4. My life differed slightly from the pattern while I was in high school as far as material things went. We believed the same things, and were all as indifferent to the world outside the county. But I had as friends some Polish and Russian girls. One's father was a butcher and he was slowly getting less and less business. One day the girl came to school and told me her father had tried to commit suicide the night before. I thought it was too bad and worried about it. I wished they weren't so poor and I disliked the comfortable and the selectmen. But I didn't know just why. When I was a sophomore I met a other girl who lived in one of the rural districts. I went to her home with her. Before we got there she told me not to be surprised at what I saw. They lived in a three roomed house with kerosene lamps and a water pump. They ate meals of boiled potatoes from tin plates. They slept in meal bags. The father came home tired from twelve hours at carpenter work. He had once trained at the Newton Theological Seminary but now he was tired and poor and old. And the family accepted it, saying, well we have to. That made me wonder. Especially when my mother assumed charity and gave them old clothes at the expense of a peculiar look of appreciation and sadness which came upon their faces. They had two adopted children. I remember asking my own family why they didn't help in that way. And they answered, "We are too poor."

5. I was sent to college with the idea that to be a success there a girl had to join a sorority and go out with a lot of boys to a lot of dances. And just because I was told, I was beginning to resent the ever-accepted, and thus began to question.

6. For my roommate I had a Lithuanian girl who was working her way through. She stayed in and I went out, she had no clothes, I had a lot, she got long letters from her family, telling her that her brother had no work and that her mother was thinking of illegally selling beer to make enough to eat. I joined a sorority. She didn't and I found her crying one night because she was called a "drip". Then with this in mind I went to the sorority rush meetings and heard them disregard the same girls I had heard anxious in the smoker, hoping they would be formally accepted by the social life of the University; feeling that if they weren't they were left out of all that was good and fine. And these girls were left out because they did not dress well, because they had no money, because no one knew their folks. And it was as true as that. Nevertheless I was a pledge, and I joined, hoping membership would prove more fruitful. Then I learned that the fact that my Jewish girl friends could not be accepted was something of significance. It was what Hitler did. And they carried it through as if it were nothing unusual. Then I realized the blindness of such A rule and of honor girls who allowed it. I left the sorority and was considered a kind of social outcast.

7. My roommate's money gave out and she left. For a long time I wandered around hoping that I would find some people, some club on the Campus which would answer my needs. Someone had once told me that there were plenty of people who felt the same way as I but they simply could not get together. I looked for boys who would talk, for girls who would talk, and not think of dances, and of their good times only. I was not then looking for an A.S.U., or even for discussions about democracy, for democracy I then interpreted in terms of equality for Jewish girls, recognition of intelligence and judgments not based on the color of a silk as or a permanent wave.

8. I joined a writing club. It was supposed to be the most wide awake club on campus. But the "bigshots" didn't go. Just the "neurotics" I was told. Those who couldn't get adjusted. And right they couldn't get adjusted. They read Steinbeck and Browder and the New Republic and told me there was a Liberal Club on campus which was sponsoring a Spanish picture the next week. Then I heard about the Spanish war. People were still fighting for the right to live, in as civilized a country as ours. I went. And the next year I kept going. The students there were what I had been looking for. Only on a much more advanced scale than I had aver dreamed of. They knew what democracy was. The whens and hows. They taught me in long discussions. And when I became puzzled they put me to work. They told me that after awhile the fight for democracy would get me. It did. It is more than simply feeling the sadness of the poverty-stricken. It involves a vast amount of education. Once since I said to one of them, "I can't escape it". And you can't. And being in a reactionary New England state where farm men growl about Roosevelt and in dire need cry about getting the dame red out of the Whitehouse, and while thousands of youth are not getting what they need in order to live and to marry, and are instead sitting in their own kitchens—frustrated, outgrown, unhappy, unemployed, is not as bad as it was once thought to be. It is being able to every day see that for which you are working. The near and specific workings of what we call democracy. It is again being a pioneer of the twentieth century.

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