| NDN | Photo Gallery | Documents | Classroom | Search |
Student Activism in the 1930s
Berea College, Kentucky I am of the fourth generation of descendants of pioneers who migrated from Virginia to Kentucky when Kentucky was still very much of a frontier state. Not very long ago, as my father can point out from his own early experience (he is only fifty-five) people, of my locality were almost completely independent of the outside world. The complexities of a spreading industrialism had not affected them, and, as all the old-timers maintain, they were obviously much better off. Quite naturally we have not been a family of industrial workers, at least not predominantly so. However, with the advent of industrial exploitation of our coal and timber resources some thirty or thirty-five years ago my father began depending in part on industrial labor as a means of subsistence. As a consequence, we have known from bitter and cruel experience just what poverty is. Many times we have been without any food in the house, without money or a job; I myself have gone barefoot until Christmas, and some of my eight brothers, as well as many other children of the community, have identical experiences every year. Twentieth-century industrialism has come into the hills, but it has not brought in its wake prosperity and plenty; it has brought misery and despair. It has taken away the independent spirit of stalwart pioneers and made them dependent upon a decadent economic system, a system rotten to the core. When I was of grammar-school age my father usually managed to have some sort of job, earning enough to clothe and feed his gang of seedy boys as well as the other kids of the neighborhood were clothed and fed. Then, I attended the little one-room school regularly every day, seven months each year. I was fairly competent and managed to get my grammar-school diploma at the age of thirteen or fourteen. But I wasn't destined to go on with my schoolwork without considerable friction. A series of set-backs put the family in a most insecure position; my grandfather, who lived with us, became ill and lingered between life and death many months before death finally relieved him of his suffering; my mother wasn't strong enough to do her household work; and we lost the cow upon which we depended for fully half our food. Despite these reverses, my father managed to hold on to part-tine jobs and to make ends meet; it all seems like a miracle now, and I wonder how we managed to keep afloat. When I was about fourteen, my father's partner on a timber-cutting contract job walked out on him, leaving him no one to carry on his ill-paid job. Since I had quite early learned how to swing an axe and pull a crosscut saw, my father took me into the timber woods to help him carry on. We finished the job and continued to take others like it, the brother next to me soon joining us on our pitiful little jobs. The three of us got less than ten dollars per week, most frequently getting about six or seven dollars. This we had to take in merchandise from a store which sold frequently at rates fully 25% higher than cash stores charged. Naturally, the family dependent upon us didn't live very luxuriously, nor did we three in our little batch-shanties out in the middle of the pine woods. After three years of this timber cutting, at which the three of us probably cut more than a million feet of logs, I hoboed a freight train to a railroad grading camp about one-hundred and twenty-five miles from home. Despite the fact that I was only seventeen, I landed a job on the grade, at the extravagant wage of thirty cents an hour. This was a lot of money for me, and I decided right away that I would save it and go back to school. I worked about two and one-half months and sent in my application for admittance to Berea Foundation-Junior High School, of which I had known for a long time. To my great joy, I was accepted. With my few clothes packed in a cardboard box which I carried with me, and with all my own money, plus the collective savings of the rest of the family, about eighteen dollars in all, in my pockets I boarded the bus for Berea. After a rather wearisome nights' journey of about one hundred and fifty miles, I landed in Berea September 12, 1929- and stuck almost like a leech until I started to New York a few weeks ago. Of course I left for short vacations and hoboed and hitch-hiked many places, but it was always with the feeling that I was a Berea student, with a Berea tradition to live up to. I always expected to return to Berea within a few weeks, either for classes or for labor. Berea was my home, the first real home I had ever known. Though the sledding was often very hard, I enjoyed my first economic security at Berea. Except for a stormy debating career on the question of unemployment insurance, which ended in a row with the debating coach and my leaving the team with an avowal that I would never debate again, my high school career was rather uneventful. I studied a little, worked rather hard to pay my expenses. and, incidentally, loafed a lot. It was hard to study with such delightful opportunities for 'bull sessions.' But, I somehow managed to make fairly decent grades. However, when I was graduated from Berea Academy in 1933, there was a great deal of doubt as to whether my standing was high enough for me to go to college at Berea. The college is so exclusive that only the valedictorians from ordinary mountain high schools are admitted. I left Berea in June 1933, with a heavy heart. Many of my classmates and pals were accepted for college, and I was merely on the waiting list, a polite device for telling students that they will probably have to go to college somewhere else or go back to the farm. A large number always have to take the latter course, as I should have had to do. About the middle of the summer, I got the supreme thrill of my life; after a lot of arguing and discussing, the entrance committee had decided to admit me to college. I knew that a few influential friends had made my good fortune possible. It is hard now to appreciate how thankful I was to these friends. The first year at college was as uneventful as the four years of high school, but not so the second year. A group of us with real or pretended social and class consciousnesses got together and decided to form a 'radical club.' We were unattached for quite a while, but finally we decided to ally ourselves with the Student L.I.D. as 'The Vanguards.' Though there are, no doubt, some hypocrites in our ranks, most of us are 'Vanguards' in a literal sense of the world. Despite the fact that there is a widespread feeling of discontent and restlessness in the mountains, a feeling almost amounting to despair, there is no organized radical movement, either among the adults or the youth; most of them don't know the difference between radicals and conservatives. They vote the Republican ticket out of a tradition of many years standing. The Vanguards aren't committed to the philosophy or ideology of any political party; we are determined to learn as much as we can about the existent parties in the radical movement and, when we begin voting, to join and support the one which has a program which our mountain people will support. To do otherwise is without a single rudiment of good sense; silly prejudices won't break down the capitalist system in Kentucky any more than they will in New York City. Already, there have arisen certain issues vital to our infant L.I.D. and to us as potential party members. If it is in order to say so at this time, I want to say that I fully intend to utilize all the influence I command to make the outcome of these controversial issues favorable to the growth of a political party with enough power to liberate the victims of an economic chaos. Though I am a member of the Student L.I.D. chapter, I am not a whit interested in the autonomy of the Student L.I.D. or any other youth organization. I am interested in a mass movement of young people who are open-minded enough to compromise their petty differences in philosophy and get together for a grim fight to overthrow capitalism. I might add that it isn't the philosophy of any mountain man or woman that I have met to use the NEW TESTAMENT or Sunday-school tactics in fighting an enemy, though they do indulge in rather pious religious ceremonies two or three times each month. I, being an exception to a lot of generalities, rule out the bi- or tri-monthly indulgence. Home | Historical Essay | Documents | Credits |
| NDN | Photo Gallery | Documents | Classroom | Search |