Born Fighting (29 page)

His problems began when he stood up to a man named A. P. Mills, a local baron who owned both the bank and the general store in Kensett. A. P. had done alright during the hard times, even finding a way to send his son Wilbur to Harvard. Upon his return Wilbur became a local judge, and then a rather famous congressman, both for his expertise in tax law and for his antics with a South American stripper named Fanne Foxe. A. P. Mills was a cheerful man, a true “good old boy” who still would remember my mother by name when she returned to Kensett with her children more than a decade after she had moved away. But he was also very much a creature of his time and place, and my grandfather was not.

As my grandmother, great-aunt, and aunt all told it, my grandfather’s sin was to explain to the black folk of Kensett that they were being charged higher interest rates than whites at A. P. Mills’s store, thus keeping them in an even worse spiral of debt—and also to suggest to A. P. Mills that this was not a particularly Christian thing to do. My grandfather was pointedly warned that he was causing trouble. By all accounts, my grandfather then told A. P. Mills to go to hell. And A. P. Mills, along with some others who controlled the admittedly sparse purse strings of White County, showed my grandfather that there could be such a thing as hell on earth.

Within a few weeks my grandfather could not get a regular job in White County. He moved back up to the Carbondale coal mines for a while but my grandmother, one of twelve children, got homesick, so he brought the family back to White County. They began following the crops around the region, picking strawberries when they were in season, picking and chopping other people’s cotton, and truck farming. School for my mother and her brother and sisters became intermittent and at times impossible as they picked and chopped alongside the adults.

My grandfather, shunned by the local powers-that-were, never backed down from his beliefs. He had broken a hip badly in a farm accident, and an apparent bone infection eventually caused his skin to permanently split open in that area (I write “apparent” because no doctor treated him), bringing a steady ooze from the joint. My grandmother kept two sets of bandages for the hip, boiling one every day while he wore the other. But this did not keep B. H. from walking six miles round-trip to Searcy several days a week in order to debate others who gathered in the town square to discuss politics. He argued the rights of the black and the poor, and the unfairness of local leaders. And in these spirited debates he was usually, as a wise man once put it, in either a minority or a majority of one.

It was probably the blood infection that killed him. My mother was ten when B. H. Hodges walked inside the house and died. One of her strongest memories of that time was of my grandmother having to steal a few ears of feed corn from a nearby field, silently stripping the kernels off the ears with a knife, and then mixing them with lard in a frying pan to make a dinner. And of brushing her teeth with twigs broken off nearby trees. And of her next-youngest sister dying before her eyes of typhoid fever after the two of them had shared the same drink of stagnant water from a barrel in an old black man’s backyard. And of working all night in the woods of absentee farms with two of my great-aunts, secretly cutting and ricking wood on land that belonged to a different class of people in Memphis or maybe New York, hauling it away in a borrowed truck, and delivering it by dawn to fuel the ovens and woodstoves of homes in Searcy and Kensett.

Years of this kind of labor gave my mother arms and shoulders like a weight lifter. When she met my father in Texas at the age of seventeen, his strongest initial reaction was not of her dark-haired, violet-eyed beauty, but that her hands felt as rough as the bark off a tree. And as I myself grew into manhood and progressed through a variety of academic and professional challenges, my mother and grandmother both would seize my hands whenever I first walked into their homes, massaging the palms and feeling their thickness. Whatever else I did in life, it was important to both of them that I never lose my “workingman’s hands.”

When I became assistant secretary of defense in 1984, the deputy secretary of defense was a protégé of Caspar Weinberger’s named William Howard Taft IV. Taft, who had graduated from Yale in 1966 and Harvard Law School in 1969, is the great-grandson of former president and Supreme Court justice William Howard Taft, also of Yale, and the great-great-grandson of one of the founding members of Yale’s famous secret society, Skull and Bones. Will Taft and I may as well have grown up on different planets. He had gone to Andover, Yale, and Harvard Law, heading to Nader’s Raiders after law school. I had attended seven different public schools in four different states between the sixth and twelfth grades alone as my father moved from one military base to another, then headed off to the Marine Corps and Vietnam after the Naval Academy. But I found Taft likable and proficient despite a certain patrician aloofness. And he did not know it, but he had also inspired me.

During my initial “courtesy call” in Will Taft’s office, I noticed that he kept a huge painting of President Taft just behind his desk. And so when I returned to my own office, I called my aunt in Arkansas and asked her to send me the old snapshot of B. H. Hodges standing in his boots and overalls, staring hard back at the world that had tried to stomp him. I had the small photo enlarged as far as technology would allow, which resulted in a four-by-seven-inch black-and-white copy. Then I framed the picture with barn wood. And from that time forward, old B. H. has looked down on whatever desk I happen to be occupying, urging me on but also standing watch over my humility.

Some people have their Skull and Bones. And some people keep their pride, then die of untreated broken bones.

After B. H. Hodges died, my mother’s family scattered to the winds, most pouring out of Arkansas into Michigan, Kentucky, Texas, and California, and a few places in between. But it was not simply her father’s death that drove them. It was also a war, the innovative policies of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the inevitable further migration of a people who were finally deciding to join the exodus into mainstream America. In addition to the 3 million people born in the South who were living in other areas of the country in 1920, another 1.7 million from the states “south of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers and east of the Mississippi” had migrated out of the region during the 1920s, about half of whom were between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five.
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The 1930s and particularly the 1940s and 1950s would see an even greater escalation of this pace, and also for the first time would see a substantial in-migration initiated primarily by the large number of federal programs and military bases that were either opened up or expanded in the region during the nation’s mobilization for World War II.

After World War II the South would begin to resurrect and reshape itself. And those who had left the South and the other areas of the Scots-Irish heartland were also helping to reshape America—not surprisingly, from the bottom up.

4

Hillbilly Highways
                              

THERE ARE A
lot of people who do not remember the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a great deal of fondness. Strong evidence supports the traditional conservative viewpoint that his domestic policies were focused too heavily on centralizing the power of the federal government and creating a quasi-socialist state. It is also undeniable that in foreign affairs Roosevelt persistently maneuvered the nation into World War II, and then threw a monkey wrench into the hard-earned peace by conceding Eastern Europe to Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference just before the war ended. Further, this longest-serving president was overtly and unapologetically aristocratic, his attitude toward the poor more the result of a patrician paternalism than an empathetic populism. Roosevelt hardly wanted to eliminate the elites from the American political formula; to the contrary, he was a product of the superwealthy upper class and thrived on their system of transparent privilege. As one small example, it would boggle the minds of today’s media if a mere assistant secretary of the navy, not to mention a president, decided to have a battleship carry him from Washington to his summer vacation home in the very north of Maine, as Roosevelt rather nonchalantly did while holding that lower office.
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And others argue with some merit that it was mobilization for the war rather than Roosevelt’s policies that finally brought the nation out of the grave economic crisis of the 1930s.

But for those Southerners whose families had been trapped inside the generations of unending poverty that long preceded the Great Depression, Roosevelt was a godsend. At last they had found a president who, when it came to their dilemma, was not afraid to lead and who was willing to address key issues rather than simply paper them over with rhetoric. What mattered paternalism when the modern-day descendants of the old Great Captains had remained so powerless against outside economic forces, and yet also continued to completely dominate opportunities within the region? The South had been an economic basket case for generations. The entire nation was now in crisis. And Roosevelt had tossed aside the too-familiar pattern of proposing vague economic policies that would immediately benefit the wealthy and might—perhaps later, if things went right—“trickle down” to those in need or “float everybody’s boat” with the rising tide of prosperity. Nor had he decided simply to throw welfare money at those who would not or could not work. Instead, he chose to institute concrete, government-funded programs that actually put people to work.

Many of Roosevelt’s vaunted New Deal programs had a profound impact in the South. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was especially busy in the region, even though its activities spanned forty-seven states. Eventually its ranks swelled to 275,000 young men who were paid the princely sum of thirty dollars a month (as much as some sharecroppers made in a year) to work in American forests and to landscape a growing federal highway system.
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And the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), created in 1933 to manage the Tennessee River, grew over time into perhaps the most important and successful federal project in history. For the people of the Appalachian Mountain region, the TVA meant more than jobs; it brought electricity, and thus the first stages of modernity into the rugged hollows and backcountry. Even today the TVA is America’s biggest public power company, bringing in $6.8 billion a year and supplying electricity to more than 8 million people in a seven-state region that comprises much of the principal area of Scots-Irish settlement and influence.
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And whether or not the mobilization of the nation’s industries and military that began after September 1939 was the true catalyst for turning around a moribund economy, it did bring jobs to the people of the backlands, the kind of cash-paying employment that previously had not been available to those who wanted desperately to work. Further, most Southerners knew that these were the kinds of jobs that easily could have gone elsewhere. They were not wrong to credit Roosevelt’s personal sensitivities, as well as the power in the Congress of the Solid South’s vaunted seniority in key leadership positions, for this resurgence.

Once mobilization began, factories and military bases sprang up all over the South as well as in states such as Michigan, Illinois, and California, where many Southerners had recently migrated. Importantly, the military bases inside the South brought with them a large influx of people from other regions, for the first time in several generations exposing the curious folkways that had evolved after Civil War Reconstruction to close scrutiny from outsiders. Although some Southern military bases had been used during the 1917 buildup to World War I combat, that mobilization had been brief—a matter of months—and most of the military bases had either been deactivated or reduced to cantonment size after 1918. By contrast, the World War II buildup began in the spring of 1940, when the army’s War Plans Division initiated a training program designed to immediately raise an army of 4 million men and that involved a steady influx of soldiers from across the country for the next five years. Actually, construction at some bases, such as Fort Benning, Georgia, had begun as early as 1935, using public works funding from New Deal programs.

Rather than 4 million men, some 16 million Americans would eventually serve during World War II. Along with California, the South held the highest density of these soldiers, a strong percentage of them either coming from the South or spending part of their military years training there. Large-scale training bases became a staple in the recovering economies of virtually every Southern state. Fort Benning, on the Alabama–Georgia border, was home to 100,000 soldiers at any given time. Fort Bragg, North Carolina, had a wartime population of 159,000 soldiers. Fort Polk, Louisiana, was activated as a large training base in 1941. Fort Stewart, Georgia’s 280,000 acres were activated in 1940 in an area that had been completely devastated in the final days of the Civil War by the infamous Union general William Tecumseh Sherman and had yet to recover. More than 500,000 soldiers were trained during the war at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, a post named for Andrew Jackson that had been reactivated in 1939 as an infantry training center. Fort Campbell, Kentucky, built in 1942, became home to three armored divisions and an infantry division. Fort A. P. Hill, Virginia, activated in 1940, became a maneuver area for the II Army Corps and three National Guard divisions, and in 1942 was headquarters for the task force that Gen. George S. Patton was preparing to lead into the North Africa campaign. Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, was activated as a large training base in 1940. Forts Hood and Bliss were activated for similar purposes in Texas, as was Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, all in either 1940 or 1941.
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And that was just the army. The Marine Corps opened up its huge base at Camp Lejeune in 1941 originally as the training ground for the 1st Marine Division, which soon thereafter deployed to Guadalcanal. It also vastly expanded its recruit training facilities in Parris Island, South Carolina, where more than 200,000 recruits were trained during World War II. Naval bases dotted the Southern coastline from Norfolk, Virginia, to New Orleans, with Charleston, South Carolina, one of its main hubs. Naval aviation expanded from a small school at Pensacola, Florida, to additional training facilities in the vicinity of Jacksonville, Florida, and Corpus Christi, Texas. Army Air Corps bases—the precursors to today’s air force bases—seemed ubiquitous, as pilot training tried to catch up with wartime needs as well as an industrial production rate that eventually reached 8,000 to 10,000 planes a month.

The impact of this phenomenon was cultural as well as economic and had extensive long-term implications. During World War II, millions of non-Southerners of all ethnic backgrounds, most of them citizen-soldiers who had been conscripted (two-thirds of those who served in that war were drafted), were personally exposed to the twin realities of the South. On the one hand, they were often confronted by an honor-bound but frequently backward white culture that was willing to defend its way of life against all outsiders. On the other, the glaring racial humiliations of segregation were visible for all to see. In many eyes, white poverty was attributed to cultural inferiority rather than the generations of Yankee colonialism that had produced it, while the racial inequities they observed would leave a lasting impression, fueling nationwide support for the desegregation and civil rights efforts that began shortly after the end of World War II. And although President Harry Truman may not have had such karma in mind when he announced the policy in 1948, it is interesting to note that the military was the first institution in the country to formally renounce all policies of segregation.

But that would come later.

For those inside the region, mobilization for World War II meant, first and foremost, real cash-paying jobs. My grandmother thought God himself was shining down on her when she found work in an ammunition factory in North Little Rock, making artillery rounds. She and the other backcountry laborers would board a bus at two-thirty in the morning so they could travel the forty miles along narrow roads to the factory in time to begin work, and then the bus would drop them off back in Kensett after dark. My Aunt Ima Jean’s husband, Paul, had once left a small family farm to make cars in Detroit, but he got homesick and returned. Then he found work in a sawmill where the principal contracts for decades to come went to making such military items as army cots. In the 1950s, Uncle Paul would lose half of one hand in a sawmill accident, causing him to remain at home for nearly a year as he regrew the muscles of what remained so that he could again report for work at the mill. My Aunt Zara left the cotton fields, and Arkansas, with a boyfriend who had found work as a fireman in Monahans, Texas, just outside the newly opened Pyote Air Base, where Army Air Corps bomber pilots—including, eventually, my father—were being trained. And my Uncle Ercil left a hog farm in Kentucky to enter the wartime army.

But my grandmother, like so many others, had heard that there was better work in California. Finally she saved enough money for two one-way bus tickets to Los Angeles, taking her youngest daughter, then nine, while sending my mother, then sixteen, to Texas to live with my aunt. One can only imagine the determination that propelled this nearly two-thousand-mile journey with a small child across Crkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,Ÿand finally CaliÊornia, to a place where she knew no one and where there wereIonly rumors about q job. She was a five-foou tall, Popeye-muscled, forty-nine-year-old widow with literally no money who had come to Arkansas from Tenúessee as a small child and had ne~er left, other than for a brief sti~t near the coal mines of southern Illinois. In her later years she would still recall vividly her arrival at the Los Angeles bus station in the middle of the night, and the kind man who noted her awestricken confusion and helped her and her daughter find a place to sleep.

With her physical strength and her size—or more properly, her lack of it—Frankie Doyle Hodges soon found her way to the Douglas Aircraft Company, where they hired her to work as a riveter along the tight crawlspaces inside the noses of bomber aircraft. And so within a few weeks of taking a one-way bus out of Arkansas, Granny Hodges was living in Santa Monica and working as Rosie the Riveter. And I doubt there were very many other women on the assembly line who could match the tiny woman’s cotton-chopping biceps, which were still nearly as large as my own when she was seventy-one and I was a nineteen-year-old athlete who had been fighting “under the lights” as a boxer for five years.

But as she had in Illinois, Granny got homesick for her extended family in Arkansas. Back in Texas, my Aunt Zara received a letter saying that Granny was again saving her money, this time to go home. Zara, also known as Dot, was the most fiercely ambitious of my mother’s siblings. She had been doing her own California dreaming, and as a woman in her early twenties with two children who was getting ready to strike out on her own, that meant keeping Granny in Santa Monica. Dot was also worried because my mother, who was not yet eighteen, had begun dating my father, a twenty-five-year-old pilot with questionable motivations who like all flyboys would soon depart Pyote Airfield for destinations unknown. So she decided to solve two problems at once. She bought my mother a one-way bus ticket to California, reasoning that my mother would reduce Granny’s homesickness (and increase the collective price of those one-way bus tickets back to Arkansas) while my father would soon be reassigned from Texas and thus be out of my mother’s life.

Aunt Dot was partially successful. Once my mother arrived in California, Granny calmed down. But after my mother left Texas, my father had heated up. Within a few months Dot had made it to California, although my father had by then sent my mother enough money to return to Texas and marry him. And she did, two months after turning eighteen.

My father’s family reflected the same fascination with making the jump to the California dreamland, although their starting point was Missouri rather than Arkansas. His two older brothers, Tommy and Charlie, had left school after the eighth grade and were determined that my father and his younger brother, Art, would be the first in the family to finish high school. For the rest of his life he felt an indebtedness to his older brothers that impelled his desire to succeed, remembering their financial help and moral suasion that had kept him in high school. Nor did he stop there. It was one of my life’s greatest inspirations to watch my father as he struggled through twenty-six years of night school, all the while carrying a military career filled with overseas deployments and taking care of a family that included four children, until he received a college degree from the University of Omaha during my own senior year of high school.

When the war began, my father was working as an electrician in St. Joseph, Missouri’s largest department store, alongside my Uncle Tommy. But the war scattered all of them quickly. My father enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked and went into the army air corps. His younger brother, Art, went into the army, which after examining his test scores sent him immediately for further schooling, where he became what was then called a “junior engineer.” Tommy and Charlie headed for California, followed soon by my grandmother, with Tommy spending the war at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. And by the end of the war, all of them were living permanently in California except for my father, who returned briefly to Missouri, then re-upped in the air force and spent the next twenty-three years on the road.