"Some Kind of Socialist:" Lee Hays, the Social Gospel, and the Path to the Cultural Front

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

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Graduate Theses and Dissertations

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"Some Kind of Socialist:" Lee Hays, the Social Gospel, and the "Some Kind of Socialist:" Lee Hays, the Social Gospel, and the

Path to the Cultural Front Path to the Cultural Front

Elizabeth Withey

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

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Withey, E. (2020). "Some Kind of Socialist:" Lee Hays, the Social Gospel, and the Path to the Cultural Front.

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“Some Kind of Socialist:” Lee Hays, the Social Gospel,

and the Path to the Cultural Front

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts in History

Elizabeth Withey

Stephen F. Austin State University

Bachelor of Arts in Music and History, 1981

Stephen F. Austin State University,

Master of Arts in Music, 1983

December 2020

University of Arkansas

This thesis is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council.

——————————————————

Michael Pierce, Ph.D.

Thesis Director

—————————————————— ———————————————

Robert Cochran, Ph.D. Jeannie Whayne, Ph.D.

Committee Member Committee Member

——————————————————

Richard Sonn, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Abstract

In 1939, with sixty-five dollars and twenty pages of Commonwealth Labor songs, Lee

Hays, youngest son of a Methodist minister, hitchhiked thirteen hundred miles from Mena,

Arkansas, to New York City where he found stardom in the Folk Revival movement, first, as a

founder of the Almanac Singers then the Weavers. Hays’ biographer Doris Willens and others,

viewing Hays’ unabashed socialism, ribald humor, penchant for beer, brandy, and cigarettes as

induced by the childhood trauma of his father’s death, argue Hays rejected his father’s beliefs:

replacing religion with radical politics. This thesis, in contrast, argues Hays’ upbringing

immersed in contradictions of Progressive Era Methodism in the Jim Crow South proved a

seedbed for his work with Claude Williams, socialists, and radical social gospelers, which, in

turn, undergirded his cultural front contributions to the Almanac Singers, People’s Songs, and

the Weavers. Rather than rejecting his religious upbringing, Hays transformed it: representing

and depicting a southern religious left fighting for rights of labor, biracial coalitions of

sharecroppers, and redistribution of land against Arkansas’ planter-dominated economic system.

His life and work illumine a southern route to the cultural front that passed through the portals of

radical religion.

Yet, though Hays, by age twenty-seven, had labored in leftist film, drama, music, writing,

education, and union organizing, Michael Denning largely absents Hays from the anti-fascist,

pro-labor coalition of artists, writers, filmmakers, dramatists, and musicians — The Cultural

Front — he argues emerged between 1929 and 1959 from a “material base in the CIO” and the

collision of a non-communist-centric, American Popular Front social movement with “new

cultural apparatuses of state and industry.”

Hays’ collaborative compositional process and

resulting Billboard-chart-topping blend of traditional, altered, and freely composed “folk” music

are at odds with Denning’s arguments privileging individual cultural auteurs, left wing musical

theater productions, jazz, and “cabaret blues” as the movement’s representative musics.

Moreover, Hays’ southern religious roots defy Denning’s demographic model positing radical

moderns, anti-fascist emigres, and young plebeians from “the immigrant and black working-

class neighborhoods of the modernist metropolis” as “the heart of the cultural front.”

Instead, Hays points to a nascent southern cultural front emerging from a radical religious

pro-labor base extending through labor colleges and southern union organizing. Through his

creative output and at once reluctant and enthusiastic embrace of commercial, national, and

international acclaim, Hays merged the southern religious left’s messages of social and economic

justice with folk and newly composed music in the Cold War Era to meet a new political

moment: changing the means and content of political dissent and the trajectory of international

popular culture.

Threading through decades from 1914-1981, Hays’ life ties the Progressive Era to the era

of Reaganomics: knitting together Old Left and New. Post–World War I and Depression-era

Arkansas, labor history, socialism, mainline and radical religious belief, vernacular and

commercial music, and the artistic, political, and social milieu of Denning’s Cultural Front all

intersect in Hays. His life shines a light on the origins of twentieth-century southern radicalism

and its cultural contributors.

Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London and

Brooklyn: Verso, 1998, with updated version, 2010), xviii-xix, 4-6.

Denning, The Cultural Front, xv, xvi, 324.

Acknowledgements

When I was a child in the 1970s, each November my family traveled twisting two-lane

roads from Fayetteville to Jackson County in East Arkansas to visit relatives. Though they

owned their own farms by 1970, many had grown up tenant farming or as day laborers working

from sunup to sundown on other people’s land. The nearest sizeable town, nineteen miles east,

was Newport, one of Lee Hays’ childhood homes. Another, Forrest City, was sixty-four miles

south. Without knowing it, I spent a lot of time on Lee Hays’ terrain, and the sounds, colors, and

contours of that world shaped my understanding of Hays’ path. My relatives seldom talked about

the Depression, but it permeated every part of their lives, and their life stories inform this thesis.

For if my East Arkansas relatives seldom talked about the 1930s, my father, a tenant farmer's son

who attended college on the G.I. Bill of Rights and became a professor of physics at the

University of Arkansas, talked about them a great deal.

Those stories did not include Lee Hays, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, or the

coalition of radical religionists who figure prominently in this thesis. For introduction to these I

thank Dr. Michael Pierce, who directed this thesis, for suggesting Hays as a topic, and for his

direction, encouragement, and patience as I wound myself along Lee Hays’ path over a period of

years. I likewise thank the members of my thesis committee, Drs. Richard Sonn, Jeannie

Whayne, and Robert Cochran who helped shape this thesis not only through their valuable

critique and comments but with their written works and instruction during my coursework.

The methodology for primary source research for this thesis rests almost entirely on the

work of digital archivists. When I first began research on Hays, the Lee Hays Papers in the Ralph

Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections at the Smithsonian Institution were in the early stages

digitization. After conversations with archivists, that work was quickly completed, and I am

deeply grateful. As I am to digital archivists of the Howard Kester Papers in the Southern

Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the archivists of the

Winifred D. Polk Archives for The Arkansas Conference United Methodist Church; and the

many archivists at Highlander Research and Education Records at Wisconsin Historical Society,

University of Wisconsin-Madison; Jack Conroy Papers at The Newberry Library; Claude

Williams Papers at Wayne State University in Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban

Affairs; Archives and Special Collections of Oxford College Library in Oxford, Georgia; and

especially those in the University of Arkansas Special Collections, who, in multiple emails and

conversations, readily provided digitized documents included in this research. Without their

assistance, this thesis would not have been possible.

Finally, this paper and would not have been possible without Quin Withey. For

conversation, criticism, patience with endless discussion of minutia, innumerable collaborative

living room performances of Almanac Singers’ and Weavers’ songs, and collaboration in much

more, thank you.

Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 “The State of Arkansas” 24

Chapter 2 “Some Kind of Socialist” 46

“The Beginnings of Socialist Thought” 52

America’s Disinherited 73

Chapter 3 We Are Not Alone 87

Bibliography 111

Introduction

The camera zooms in tight on a hand strumming guitar strings then pans back to reveal

three men in matching suits and short haircuts and a woman wearing a strapless tulle-skirted

evening gown on a sound stage that seems a cross between a small Victorian living room and a

future sitcom set. “Irene Goodnight! Irene Goodnight! Goodnight Irene, Goodnight Irene, I’ll see

you in my dreams,” they boom in close harmony.

The four have arranged themselves casually, if not comfortably, on furniture scattered

about the stage. The guitarist stands with one leg propped on a chair, the woman and a banjo

player lean against a dining room table, and centerstage, perched nonchalantly on what could be

a large plant stand or short pulpit, is a very big man. He looks older than the others — in a

sitcom, he would be the father, teacher, preacher, or perhaps, the comic next door neighbor. This

blocking is a change. In the three other Weavers’ 1951 Snader telescription films, he looms

mostly in the back, deftly avoiding a banjo neck accelerating up to an eighty-degree angle when

he moves front to take a solo and again as it swings down when he steps back to resume the bass

line. Gliding forward again, he stamps and claps with the others as the four sing Tzena Tzena, “a

folksong from the new state of Israel,” in a performance the big man, spinning a school-house

globe, describes as “a musical trip around the world” where “the first foreign country we’re

going to visit is ‘The State of Arkansas.’” Arkansas is a “foreign country” this man, Lee Hays,

knows well.

“The State of Arkansas,” one of Hays’ signature songs, performed with the both

Almanac Singers and the Weavers, is a dark, comic, musical commentary on the “mis’ry” he

THE WEAVERS TELESCRIPTIONS, Snader Telescriptions, Corp., 1951, 7 April 51, MP1423; Duke Goldstone,

WEAVERS TELESCRIPTIONS, USA, 1951, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/jots.200020971/.

witnessed in his home state before moving north permanently in 1940.

Born in Little Rock, in

1914, to William Benjamin Hays, a Methodist minister, and Ellen Reinhardt Hays, one of the

first women to work as a court reporter in Arkansas, Hays had, by the time he was twenty-five,

suffered the death of his father and subsequent institutionalizations of his mother and sister, been

shuttled, homeless, between his adult siblings, lost his chance to attend Hendrix-Henderson

College to the 1929 stock market crash, and witnessed the worst of Arkansas’ racism and

oppression.

But if much of Hays’ early life was misery, there were also accomplishments.

Before his move north, he graduated from Methodist-founded Emory Junior College; studied

filmmaking with Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz of the radical Workers Film and Photo League in

New York; wrote, filmed, directed, and produced America’s Disinherited, a short film about the

desperate conditions of southern sharecroppers; enrolled in College of the Ozarks where he

planned to study for the ministry; and worked with “the red preacher,” Claude Clossey Williams,

in his ministry, union organizing, and New Era School. After Williams’ ouster from the

Presbyterian Church, Hays, with the National Committee for the Support of the Reverend Claude

C. Williams, chaired by Willard Uphaus and including among its membership Howard Kester,

prominent left-leaning Methodists James Dombrowski and Winifred Chappell, and Union

“The State of Arkansas” is a “traditional” ballad with lyrics credited to various writers. “State of Arkansas” lyrics

from Songs for Political Action, Bear Family Records BCD 15720 JL, 1996, 88. William M. Clements describes the

song as a “folk dystopia.” William M. Clements, “The State of Arkansaw,” Encyclopedia of Arkansas Music, eds.

Ali Welky and Mike Keckhaver (Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2013), 194-195.

Doris Willens, Lonesome Traveler: The Life of Lee Hays (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1988),

6, 13-17; Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Lee Hays Papers, Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and

Collections, Smithsonian Institution, (hereafter, Hays Papers); In addition to racism and violence Hays witnessed

during his work with Claude Williams and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, Hays’ correspondence and taped

memoirs record childhood memories of seeing the pooled blood of nine African American men hanging from a

viaduct in Forrest City, Arkansas, and the murder of an African American man by an unnamed member of Hays’

family he credited as impetus for his desire to work with the STFU. Memoirs Excerpts 1 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder

63; Lee Hays to Librarian, Arkansas Gazette, July 1979, series 1, box 2, folder 34, Hays Papers; Lee Hays to

Howard Kester, April 21, 1936, series 1, folder 22, Howard Kester Papers #3834, Southern Historical Collection, the

Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, (hereafter, Kester Papers).

Theological Seminary’s Reinhold Niebuhr, worked nationally to raise funds to support Williams

and his family. In 1936, with Zilphia Horton at Highlander Folk School, Hays wrote, directed

and toured Gumbo, a play about the plight of sharecroppers, and between 1937 and 1939, having

been hired as Instructor of Dramatics by Claude Williams — by then Director of Commonwealth

Labor College near Mena, Arkansas — Hays collected over one hundred songs from folk singer

Emma Dusenbury, taught labor drama, and wrote, directed, and, with Commonwealth students

toured another sharecropper play, One Bread, One Body.

With the ministry out of reach, Lee

Hays planned a life of teaching and union organizing.

Likely no one was more surprised than he

when eleven years later, he found himself a pop recording star with the folk quartet, the

Weavers. Tzena, Tzena reached Billboard’s number one slot first; Irene topped the charts for

thirteen weeks.

In the Snader telescription, three voices drop to a hum as Hays, showing the camera a

photograph of an African American man wearing a striped suit and holding a guitar, tells a story.

We learned this song from a friend of ours, his name was Huddie Ledbetter, called

himself Leadbelly, King of the twelve-string guitar. Some people thought he was the

greatest folk singer that ever lived in America. We knew him best as a rememberer of

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 13-17, 37-38, 43-48, quotation, 29; Lee Hays to Claude and Joyce Williams, n.d., box

17, folder 21, Claude Williams Papers, 1934-1954, Wayne State University, Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and

Urban Affairs, Detroit (hereafter, Williams Papers); Lee Hays to Claude Williams, October 25, 1935, box 1, folder

19, Williams Papers; Vance Randolph and Frances Emberson, “The Collection of Folk Music in the Ozarks,” The

Journal of American Folklore 60 (April-June 1947): 122; Vance Randolph, “Ballad Hunters of North America,” The

Arkansas Historical Quarterly 7 (Spring 1948): 7; Barbara Jaquish, “An Examination of the Mythic Frameworks

Used by Two Forms of Media to Present the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union” (M.A. thesis, University of

Arkansas, 2007), 25; Mary McAvoy, Rehearsing Revolutions: The Labor Drama Experiment and Radical Activism

in the Early Twentieth Century (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019), 156-159, 196; William H. Cobb,

Radical Education in the Rural South: Commonwealth College 1922-1940 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,

2000), 192; Lee Hays to Laurence Hosie and Willard Uphaus, April 2, 1937, series 4, box 5, folder 40, Hays Papers.

“The Billboard Music Popularity Charts, Part V: Juke Box Record Plays Week Ending September 29,” The

Billboard Disk Jockey Supplement, Section 2, October 7, 1950, p. 56; The Weavers Billboard hits continued. “On

Top of Old Smokey” would, in 1951, become their second most popular single, and Hays’ “Lonesome Traveler” on

the flipside of the Weavers’ recording of Guthrie’s “So Long it’s Been Good to Know You,” reached number three.

Jesse Jarnow, Wasn’t That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America (New York:

DaCapo Press, 2018), 93-94, 102-103; see also, “Goodnight Irene by Gordon Jenkins and his Orchestra and the

Weavers,” "Goodnight Irene (song by Gordon Jenkins and His Orchestra and the Weavers) ••• Music VF, US & UK

hits charts", accessed, May 12, 2019.

folk songs — and he taught us dozens of them — especially Irene. This was his theme

song and he sang it for over thirty years before he died. Well he died before Irene got to

be known by so many millions of Americans. Huddie had a hard and wonderful life. It’s

over now, but his songs are still very much alive.

Irene comes to life as the Weavers divide stanzas into solos. Hays takes the last verse,

one Huddie Ledbetter “gave” him after hearing Hays’ husky southern bass rendition.

Stop rambling, Stop your gamblin’ Stop staying out late at night. Go home to your wife

and family. Stay there by your fireside bright.

“Irene Goodnight! Irene Goodnight! Goodnight Irene, Goodnight Irene, I’ll see you in my

dreams!”

Years later, Hays said of these films, “If I'd known how foolish we looked, I swear on

Pete’s chin whiskers I’d have given this up for something socially useful, like plucking

chickens.”

Throughout his life, Hays used humor to diffuse memories of dangerous times, and

this was no exception. In 1951, under investigation by the FBI, outed in Counterattack as

performers of “Communist song favorites” for “Red Front Groups,” and denied television

performances for refusing to sign loyalty oaths, the Weavers, looking like college students off to

the prom with Hays as chaperone, embodied McCarthy era fears of Communism’s cultural

threat.

During the Weavers’ first national tour in 1951, when Snader Telecriptions showcased

the quartet’s hit single, Tzena, Tzena with Goodnight Irene on the flipside, Decca received a

telegram requesting comment on “allegations . . . they had recorded for a communist front a

party line ballad called ‘The Peekskill Story.’”

In 1952, Harvey Matasow’s testimony before

the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) claiming he had seen members of the

In his “Posthumous memoirs” Hays recalled after a performance with the Weavers at a gathering of folksingers,

Leadbelly, who was also performing, “liked the way I sang that [last] verse so much he gave it to me. After the show

was over he said, ‘that’s your verse.’” Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

Lee Hays quoted in Ronnie Gilbert: A Radical Life in Song (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 89.

Ibid., first quote, 79-80, second quote, 94.

Ibid., 97. This telegram from Tom McCarthy at WKRC Radio Station, was far from the only complaint Decca and

Gordon Jenkins, its president and Weavers supporter, received.

group at Communist Party activities completed the Weavers’ blacklisting — a period of

unemployment Hays’ called a “sabbatical that became a Mondical and a Tuesdical.”

In 1955,

when Hays and Pete Seeger were called to testify before HUAC, the committee’s questions

circled around performances of two songs co-authored by Hays: “Wasn’t that a Time,” by Hays

and Walter Lowenfels, and “If I had a Hammer” by Hays and Seeger. Counsel for the

Committee, Frank S. Taverner, questioned whether not only Hays’ songs but Hays’ talent itself

was a tool “used to advance the cause of the Communist Party” in the United States. “I don’t

know what you mean, sir, by the use of the word, ‘used,’” Hays countered that day.

Over

twenty years later, in a letter to Seeger, Hays would write, “we all had Communist friends, and I

certainly did, but I was never aware that any of them were giving me any orders. None of us

were very good order-takers to begin with. If the Communists liked what we did it was their own

good luck . . . . I suppose the most I can say is that I was a fellow traveler. It was a great trip, and

still is.”

Hays’ letter captures Michael Denning’s notions of the American Popular Front as a

non-Communist-centric movement of fellow travelers and a cultural front, Denning, echoing

Hays’ friend New Masses editor Michael Gold, argues created “a second American Renaissance”

in art and culture.

Yet Denning largely absents Hays and the Weavers from the anti-fascist, pro-labor

coalition of artists, writers, filmmakers, dramatists, and musicians — The Cultural Front — he

argues emerged between 1929 and 1959 from a “material base in the CIO” and the collision of a

Ibid., 98; Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 150.

Frank S. Taverner, counsel to HUAC, and Lee Hays. Quotes from: Lee Hays testimony before U.S. House of

Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities, 84

Congress, 1

session, Investigation of Communist

Activities in New York Area — Part VI (Entertainment), August 16, 1955 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government

Printing Office, January 1955), 2360.

Lee Hays to Pete Seeger, n.d., series 1, box 2, folder 31, Hays Papers.

Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London and

Brooklyn: Verso, 1998, with updated version, 2010), xvi, 98, 203.

non-Communist-centric, American Popular Front social movement with “new cultural

apparatuses of state and industry.”

The quartet fits neither Denning’s artistic nor demographic

parameters. The Weavers’ practice of group composition and resulting Billboard-chart-topping

blend of traditional, altered, and freely composed “folk” music is at odds with Denning’s

arguments privileging individual cultural auteurs, left-wing musical theater productions, jazz,

and “cabaret blues” as representative musics of the cultural front and opposing New Left

assessments of Popular Front culture as middle class, nostalgic, populist, “middlebrow,” and

ultimately conservative. Viewpoints best summarized, Denning argues, by historian Warren

Susman’s assessment of Earl Robinson’s Ballad for Americans as “a pseudo-folk ballad,” which

like other Popular Front works presented “an absurd vision of the American past, a peculiar

notion of American society in the present, a ludicrous attitude toward American culture in

general.”

And while Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman, and Pete Seeger approximate Denning’s

demographic model of “the heart of the cultural front” — Gilbert and Hellerman as “young

plebeians” emerging from “the second generation of the second wave of immigration,” forming

“a new generation of . . . artists and intellectuals who had grown up in the immigrant and black

working-class neighborhoods of the modernist metropolis,” and Pete Seeger, son of Charles

Seeger, as a second-generation radical modern whom Denning argues, with antifascist émigrés

such as Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht young plebeians were allied — Lee Hays jars Denning’s

Ibid., xix, 6.

The term “folk music” remains problematic as an overarching categorization of genre. Here it will be used

interchangeably with the term “vernacular music,” principally as Hays understood folk music to be “music of the

people”— a broad-based group of genres including Childs Ballads, Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag, songs and

music collected from unknown regional musicians and ordinary people, and hymnody — all of which could be

transformed through the “folk process.” Hays and his generation also included blues, spirituals, prison, work, play

songs, and other vernacular musics under the general umbrella of “folk.” Denning defines “cabaret blues” as a

melding of jazz and political cabaret emerging from an “alliance between Jazz and the Popular Front” and dates the

emergence of the genre to Billie Holiday’s performance of Strange Fruit at the New York club, Café Society in

1939. Denning, The Cultural Front, 324; Warren Susman quoted in Denning, 116-117.

model. The youngest son of a Methodist minister raised in rural Arkansas far from the

“modernist metropolis,” coming of age within a coalition of social gospel activists fighting for

economic, social, and racial justice for Arkansas miners and sharecroppers, Hays cannot be

contained within parameters arising from Denning’s acknowledged long-term focus on urban

rather than agrarian-based labor.

Hays is not the only southerner marginalized by Denning’s approach. Denning’s focus on

the CIO-dominated urban North, Midwest, and West mutes southerners’ contributions to a leftist

cultural renaissance and obscures the paths they traveled to radicalization: limiting the scope of

the Popular Front cultural coalition he posits. Zilphia Johnson Horton, Erskine Caldwell, John

Handcox, and Lillian Hellman receive barely a mention; the impact of radical religion on the

South, none at all. Woody Guthrie, Denning treats not for his musical contribution to a cultural

renaissance or political movement but as part of a narrative of migration to the urban centers of

Denning’s interest. And though he correctly emphasizes contributions to the cultural front of

African Americans and Blues artists of the Piedmont, by privileging jazz, and cabaret blues over

“folk” and crediting promoters and song collectors for instigating cross-genre, biracial

performance, Denning diminishes the transformative impact of folk music on the cultural front:

suggesting false divisions among coalitions of artists and limiting artists’ agency in forming

them.

His contention, for example, that Woody Guthrie and Huddie Ledbetter performed in

“uneasy collaboration” is at odds with Hays’ recollections of Ledbetter and Guthrie as two “very

close friends” spending late nights at Leadbelly’s Harlem apartment swapping verses to blues

Denning, The Cultural Front, xv. Denning acknowledges his lifelong interest in urban rather than rural/agrarian

labor in the seminar, “The Accumulation of Labor: Rethinking Work and its Representations,” Institute for

Comparative Modernities, Cornell University, Fall 2016 Lecture Series, Thursday, November 10, 2016, accessed

May 1, 2019, https://youtu.be/Q6aFvcdvYIE.

Denning, The Cultural Front, 269-272, 359.

songs and “bang[ing] the hell” out an old piano — a gift from the Almanac Singers — until

neighbors begged them to stop. Hays recalled Leadbelly as “fatherly” toward Guthrie and

supportive of Hays himself who, “dead broke, during the war years,” remembered being fed at

Martha Ledbetter’s table and handed five dollars by Leadbelly as he walked Hays to the nearest

Harlem bus stop. In contrast to Denning’s notion of “uneasy collaboration,” Hay’s tribute to

Huddie Ledbetter in the 1951 Snader films represented years of respect, friendship, and

collaborative coalition.

Such collaborative coalition was not unusual for Lee Hays; his work within interracial

alliances of socialists and radical religionists in the 1930s was the seedbed from which a career

advocating for labor rights, social, racial, and economic justice, and the power of music to

forward these goals emerged. Paradoxically, however, Hays’ lifelong insistence on artistic

collaboration, co-authorship, broad-based coalitions, and communal living — reflecting both

religious and political praxis and practical necessity — combined with his need for personal

privacy and, an, at times, intense self-deprecation has made separating the strands of his life from

what Hays called the “warp and woof” of the Weavers, challenging — as Hays’ oft-quoted

political identification as “some kind of socialist” has blurred the lines of his political views.

Hays remains elusive, contradictory, often appearing two dimensional or caricatured.

Indeed, in performances and recordings, he frequently caricatured himself — at once concealing

and revealing his own complexity, meshing fact, fiction, and humor in a way that simultaneously

carried and obfuscated leftist messages in much the way Kenneth Burke in 1935 suggested the

Lee Hays on Woody Guthrie, series 5, box 5, folder 49, Hays Papers. For more on the relationship between

Guthrie and Ledbetter, see Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (New York: Harper

Collins, 1992), 216-218.

Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers; Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 20; Robert S.

Koppelman, Sing Out Warning! Sing Out Love: The Writings of Lee Hays (Amherst and Boston: University of

Massachusetts Press, 2003), 27, 57.

“complete propagandist” could “interweave” messages sympathetic to the oppressed in a manner

palatable to an evolving middle class.

The difficulty of capturing Hays is evident in the work of

Hays’ friend and chosen biographer, Doris Willens’ Lonesome Traveler. Published in 1988,

seven years after Hays’ death, Willens’ psychological approach reflects her relationship to Hays

in the last two decades of his life.

Willens shows Hays an irascible, “Bunyanesque,” “Mark Twain of the left” — a gifted,

kind-hearted, difficult, hard-drinking hypochondriac who, scarred by the childhood trauma of his

father’s death in a gruesome car accident, rejected “everything his father believed,” and searched

endlessly for a home, “substitute fathers,” and families.

Though she summarizes Hays’

childhood, youth, and work with the radical Presbyterian minister, Claude Williams, Hays’ work

with Williams figures principally as supporting evidence for Willens’ psychological portrait of

Hays’ familial search — a theme that recurs as she traces Hays’ life with the Weavers. In her

constant refrain, “Lee and Pete, Pete and Lee,” Willens at once unites and juxtaposes Hays and

Seeger as inseparable, fraternal “sides of a coin.” While the importance of Seeger and the

Weavers in Hays’ life is unquestioned, Willens’ approach also likely reflects the contents of a

letter received by Hays’ longtime manager and friend Harold Leventhal in 1984, three years after

Hays’ death, from publisher David R. Godine after having reviewed drafts of Willens’ work.

You don’t have to convince me Lee Hays was a wonderful and important man . . . . But

this ms. is a problem . . . . I think most people think of the Weavers as a unit — at least

the “old Weavers” of Hays, Gilbert, Seeger and Henderson [sic]. This is all tied up, in my

furry adolescent mind, with the labor movement, with benign socialism, with women’s

rights, with ecology. . . . her work tells me much more than I want to know about Hays. I

mean, who cares where he grew up or how he related to his family . . . Hays isn’t, after

Denning argues Burke’s “complete propagandist” — a cultural worker Burke contended took “an interest in as

many imaginative, aesthetic, and speculative fields” as possible, weaving through all, “sympathy for the oppressed

and antipathy for our oppressive institutions” was the “working model for the intellectual of the ‘cultural front.’”

Burke quoted in Denning, The Cultural Front, 103.

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, “Bunyanesque,” xxiii, “Mark Twain of the left,” dust jacket, “rejected everything his

father believed,” 4.

all, FDR or even Seeger. What people would care about, I think, is a history of the

Weavers (and by extension the Almanac Singers) . . . . I just don’t think Hays, as much as

I loved the man, has the weight or historical importance to sustain a full-scale

commercial biography.”

In Leventhal’s neat hand at the top of the letter is written, “Doris, let’s discuss. Harold.”

Published four years later by W.W. Norton and Company, Willens’ Lonesome Traveler

reflects, if not Godine’s brutal assessment of Hays, yet, the spirit of Godine’s letter. There is an

overarching sense of disappointment and reductionism in Willens’ work: the sense of a life of

unrealized potential. Of the book’s 281 pages, 59 recount Hays’ life before 1940, the year he co-

founded the Almanac Singers in New York. Focusing principally on Hays’ work with and

relationship to the Weavers through the lens of her own and the group’s conflicting emotions

after Hays’ double leg amputations and death due to diabetic cardiovascular disease in 1981,

Willens shows Hays’ a gifted, tragic, contrarian, flawed figure in comparison to Ronnie Gilbert’s

common sense, Fred Hellerman’s ambition, and Seeger’s incessant activity.

Though not to be

faulted for her determination to publish on Hays’ behalf, nor her extensive research in his papers,

Willens’ psychological, Weavers-dominated approach glosses the formative impact of Hays’

upbringing in Progressive Era Methodism and youth working within a national network of

radical religious activists on the development of his later political, artistic, and social beliefs. In

point of fact, Hays’ Methodist upbringing paved the way for his early work among radical social

gospelers which, in turn, undergirded his contributions to the cultural front and shaped the Cold

War-era work with the Weavers that influenced generations of musicians and changed the course

of popular culture. Far from “rejecting everything his father believed,” in his writing, lyrics,

musical composition, and “ministerial” performative persona, Hays represented and depicted a

David Godine to Harold Leventhal, January 30, 1984, series 3, box 3, folder 53, Hays Papers. Godine was

referring to Fred Hellerman.

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 255.

southern religious left fighting for rights of southern labor, biracial coalitions of sharecroppers,

and redistribution of land against the planter-dominated economic system represented in

Congress by Mississippians Theodore Bilbo and John Rankin — both targets of Hays’ scathing

musical commentary.

Rejection of his father’s beliefs remains a persistent trope in writing

about Hays, however, as Lonesome Traveler, still the most comprehensive work on his life, has

become the discursive foundation from which other work has sprung.

The study of Hays’ life during these years shows his religious and political principles, in

fact, coincided. Methodist political support of prohibition was linked to Progressive Era reform

and rooted in ideas of social service dating back to Wesley and pointing forward to the pro-labor

Methodist Federation for Social Service (MFSS) for which Hays’ friend and mentor Winifred

Chappell was secretary before becoming faculty chair at Commonwealth College a year before

Hays was hired as Instructor.

In 1914, the year Hays was born, the Methodist Episcopal

Church, South — the southern branch of Methodism in which Hays’ father served — adopted the

Federal Council of Churches’ version of the 1908 MFSS Social Creed affirming labors’ rights to

arbitration, the abolition of child labor, a six-day work week, and a living wage that was “the

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 122, 228; Koppelman, Sing Out Warning!, 52. On representation and depiction, see

Michael Denning, “The Accumulation of Labor: Rethinking Work and its Representations,” Institute for

Comparative Modernities, Cornell University, Fall 2016 Lecture Series, Thursday, November 10, 2016, accessed,

May 1, 2019, https://youtu.be/Q6aFvcdvYIE. For Hays’ songs about Senators John Rankin and Theodore Bilbo see

Lee Hays and Walter Lowenfels, “The Rankin Tree,” People’s Songs Bulletin, February 1945, pp. 4-5; Lee Hays,

“Talking Bilbo,” Songs for Political Action, Bear Family Records BCD 15720 JL, 1996.

John Lee Eighmy, “Liberalism in the South during the Progressive Era,” Church History 38 (1969): 364, 359-372.

In 1932 the MFSS declared “the present industrial order is unchristian, unethical, and anti-social.” See Jason E.

Vickers, The Cambridge Companion to American Methodism (New York: Cambridge University Press), 110, and

Russell E. Richey, Kenneth E. Rowe, and Jean Miller Schmidt, American Methodism: A Compact History

(Nashville: Abington Press, 2012), 152; David Nelson Duke, In the Trenches with Jesus and Marx: Harry F. Ward

and the Struggle for Social Justice (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 2003), 59-61;

Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll, The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal

America (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: The University of Illinois Press, 2011), 87.

highest each industry could afford.”

In 1921, socialist leader and former Presbyterian minister

Norman Thomas linked radicalism and religion, arguing the “religion of the future” would be

“built on elements already implicit in the labor movement.” By 1934, when Hays at age twenty

returned to Arkansas and began working with Claude Williams, thirty-four percent of Methodist

ministers surveyed identified as socialist, language in correspondence between social gospelers

was sometimes “salty,” and the occasional smoke, was, for some, a cherished Depression-era

indulgence.

Hays did not reject his father’s religion; he transformed it. By “zipping” union

lyrics into familiar hymn tunes and adopting a humorous, “ministerial” persona, Hays made

accessible ideas advocating the rights of labor, social and economic justice, racial equality, and

the possibility for radical personal and political transformation. For Hays, religious form became

a vehicle for transmitting radical messages.

In the most strident example of speculation on Hays’ personal life, Jeff Sharlet’s essay,

“The Embattled Lee Hays,” first published in the Oxford American (2007), posits Hays’

motivations for collaborative coalition based in closeted homosexuality.

“They were all Lefties,”

Sharlet writes of the Weavers, “but it was Lee’s longings — one part Red, one part Religion, one

The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Gross Alexander ed. (Nashville, Dallas,

and Richmond: Publishing House of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Smith and Lamar Agents, 1914), 373;

Duke, In the Trenches, 61.

Norman Thomas quoted in Dan McKanan, “The Implicit Religion of Radicalism: Socialist Party Theology, 1900-

1934,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 (September 2010): 773. Of the 20,870 respondents to a

questionnaire sent by Kirby Page in 1934 to 99,800 clergy from ten mainline denominations and 609 rabbis, fifty-

one percent favored a “drastically reformed capitalism” with twenty-eight percent favoring “socialism or something

like it.” At thirty-four percent, Methodist clergy were the largest group identifying as Socialist. Eighty-four percent

of respondents granted permission for their views to be published. Gary Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making:

Interpreting an American Tradition (Chichester, Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 121. Hays recalled, as a boy,

finding chewing tobacco, a corncob pipe and smoking tobacco in his father’s luggage after Reverend Hays returned

from one of his frequent trips as presiding elder. Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

Perhaps more importantly to Hays, Claude Williams was a smoker. After Williams release from harrowing

experiences at the Fort Smith jail in 1935, College of the Ozarks students who were among his chief followers

greeted him with home brew to hear his story. Arguably in Hays’ milieu, by the time he was in his twenties smoking

and drinking were not unusual or viewed as particularly rebellious. On Williams, see Cedric Belfrage, The Faith to

Free the People (New York: The Dryden Press, 1944), 23, 175; Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class,

156.

part angry empathy of a closeted gay man raised holy-roller in rural Arkansas — that provided

the tilt that made “Goodnight, Irene” lilt so lovely out of jukeboxes across the country.” Sharlet

overlays Willens’ work with sexual allusion. As a young man, Hays had a “movie star chin,”

Harvey Matasow’s testimony before HUAC is a “fatal kiss,” and there is this:

Hunger and loneliness aged him. Beneath the deep bass voice and behind the Hillbilly

routines, Lee was afraid, as permanent a condition as the sexual desires he referred to,

obliquely in a pseudonymous review of now-forgotten novels by gay writers he deemed

too “defensive” about their longings. “Have you ever been married?” Acquaintances who

didn’t know better (which was most of them) would ask, and Lee would crack his broad

thin lips in a grin, his little liquor-soaked teeth like a row of corn on the cob and tell about

his first time, way back when, with a “golden-haired girl,” in a Confederate cemetery: no

more questions, please.

Sharlet later issued, if not a retraction, a partial apology for the piece asserting he had

misread clues “based on various textual sources,” and revealing a “source close to Lee Hays” had

contacted him, calling the essay “a mischaracterization that would have made Lee very

unhappy.” In the paragraph above, the “acquaintances” who asked Hays why he never married

was, in fact, Angela, the twelve-year-old daughter of Walter Lowenfels who thought of Hays as

her “other father,” and the cemetery story is one of the most poignant passages in Hays’

unfinished “Posthumous Memoirs” recorded not long before his death.

Sharlet’s essay, the most

extreme case of speculation on Hays’ personal life, has spawned further blog posts positing

Sharlet’s unsourced interpretation of Hays’ sexual orientation as fact and was published in the

2008 Best Writing in Music (Da Capo Press, 2008) where it survives both digitally and in hard

Jeff Sharlet, “The People’s Singer: The Embattled Lee Hays,” The Oxford American 58 (Fall 2007)

https://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/185-the-embattled-lee-hays; Jeff Sharlet, “The People’s Singer: The

Embattled Lee Hays,” in Best Music Writing, 2008, eds. Nelson George and Daphne Carr (Philadelphia: Da Capo

Press, 2008), 169-181.

Jeff Sharlet, Mutant Journalism, Saturday, September 29, 2007, “Oxford American’s 9

Annual Music Issue

(2007),” accessed September 9, 2017, https://jeffsharlet.blogspot.com/search?q=Lee. Sharlet’s essay contains no

notes or other citations. The stories of Angela Lowenfel’s inquiry about Hays’ marriage and the cemetery reference

Sharlet combines in a fictionalized account appear in Willens as two unrelated stories. Willens, Lonesome Traveler,

17, 105. Hays’ memory of a romantic meeting in a confederate cemetery near Emory Jr. College when he was

fifteen may be found in, Memoirs, Excerpts 1 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 63, Hays Papers.

copy while Sharlet’s apology lies buried in his personal online blog.

Though Sharlet does not

omit Hays’ work with Claude Williams, he minimizes Hays’ religious and political views,

positing them as secondary to rather than motivating factors for Hays’ later musical work.

According to Sharlet, “Lee’s god wasn’t God, . . . . "it was ‘The People’ . . . . You could call

Lee’s religion communism, but he’d just as soon call it a song . . . . as far as he was concerned,

collectivism meant four-part harmony.

The desire to minimize Hays’ leftist political views is likewise evident in Robert

Koppelman’s “Sing Out, Warning! Sing Out, Love!” The Writings of Lee Hays (2003). Though

Koppelman acknowledges Hays’ life-long religious affinity, his work with Claude Williams, and

the importance of “recogniz[ing] the worldview, the whole vision, the social democratic purpose

that pervades his [Hays’] work,” he stresses Hays “never received a penny from the Soviet

government” and that — with Ledbetter, Seeger, Guthrie, and other folksingers of the day—

Hays “perceived folk music largely in nativist terms and Jeffersonian and egalitarian to the

core.” Koppelman cites Denning’s model of an American Popular Front defined by the “Age of

the CIO” rather than by Soviet or CPUSA control to support his vison of Hays’ work as a kind of

benign socialist Americana.

But stressing a benignity in Hays’ work diminishes the radical

roots from which it came. Arkansas proved fertile ground for socialism in the first two decades

of the twentieth century. In Hays’ birth year, 1914, the state was rocked by strikes in coal mining

Tom Maxwell, “A History of American Protest Music: We Have Got Tools and We are Going to Succeed: Lead

Belly, Lee Hays, and the hammer songs that powered the folk movement,” Longreads, October 2017, accessed June

30, 2019, https://longreads.com/2017/10/04/a-history-of-american-protest-music-we-have-got-tools-and-we-are-

going-to-succeed/; Eric A. Gordon, “Ronnie Gilbert’s Radical Life in Song” in People’s World: Continuing the

Daily Worker Founded 1924, September 6, 2016, accessed May 1, 2019,

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/ronnie-gilberts-radical-life-in-song/.

Sharlet, “The People’s Singer: The Embattled Lee Hays,” The Oxford American, 58 (Fall 2007),

https://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/185-the-embattled-lee-hays.

Koppelman, Sing Out Warning!, 28, 13-15, 16-19; Richard A. Reuss, with JoAnne C. Reuss, American Folk Music

and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000), 170 cited in Koppelman, 22.

regions of heavily socialist Sebastian County just twenty-five miles from Booneville where

Hays’ father died in 1927 — the year the Supreme Court decided against those same striking

miners. In Marion County, where zinc mining predominated, Eugene V. Debs retained a solid

14.03 percent in the 1920 presidential election, down just 1.62 percent from the election of

1912.

By 1913, Arkansas socialists were linked by more than eight socialist periodicals

published in locations that crisscrossed the state from Green Forest to Hot Springs and Jonesboro

to Van Buren. Debs himself published in The Appeal to Reason, printed in nearby Girard,

Kansas. When Hays returned to Arkansas in 1934 after living four years with his eldest brother

in Cleveland, Ohio, he chose mentors who combined radical politics with revolutionary religion

to fight for rights of labor and restructuring of land, wealth, and race relations in Arkansas and

the South.

Without doubt, Lee Hays eventually, and with gusto, rejected restrictions and

stringencies of prohibition. But finding an intertwined religious, social, and political milieu upon

his return to Arkansas, he had no need to substitute politics for religion. His work within a united

front of social gospel activists, socialists, educators, the bi-racial Southern Tennant Farmers’

Union, and as Director of Dramatics at Commonwealth College, concretized the political and

While most sources, including Hays himself, give Hays’ birth year as 1914, census records from 1920 list him as

age five. “United States Census, 1920,” database with images, FamilySearch

(https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MDFF-QR8 : 14 December 2015), Wm. B. Hays, Madison, St. Francis,

Arkansas, United States; citing sheet 10A, NARA microfilm publication T625 (Washington D.C.: National Archives

and Records Administration, n.d.); FHL microfilm 1,820,080; Michael Pierce “Great Women All, Serving a

Glorious Cause: Freda Hogan Ameringer’s Reminiscences of Socialism in Arkansas,” The Arkansas Historical

Quarterly 69 (Winter 2010): 295. For election results, see US Election Atlas.org, “1912 Election Results-Arkansas,”

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/state.php?year=1912&fips=5&f=0&off=0&elect=0https://uselectionatlas.org/

RESULTS/state.php?year=1912&fips=5&f=0&off=0&elect=0. On zinc mining in Arkansas, see Jane Ellen Ross,

“Zinc! By Thunder!: A History of the Rush Creek Mining District, Marion County, Arkansas, 1887-1920,” (M.A.

thesis, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2009).

G. Gregory Kiser, “The Socialist Party in Arkansas, 1900-1912,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 40 (Summer

1981): 153; Joshua Youngblood, “Realistic Religion and Radical Prophets: the STFU, the Social Gospel, and the

American Left in the 1930s” (M.A. thesis, Florida State University, 2004), 47; Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 16, 26;

Koppelman, Sing Out Warning!, xxiii.

social beliefs he brought to the cultural front, espoused in his work, and, through his lyrics,

collaborative composition, and performance, transmitted to future arenas of unity and dissent.

In contrast to Koppelman, historian Charles Joyner’s essay, “A Southern Radical and

his Songs: Lee Hays, the Almanacs and the Weavers,” argues Hays cannot be understood outside

of his political context: noting, before he came north, Hays received a “baptism-by-total-

immersion in radical politics.”

Joyner points to Hays as an example of a “distinctive Southern

wing of the Popular Front” posited by Robert R. Korstad, whose constituents, Korstad argues,

believed in redistribution of wealth and power, expanding the southern electorate to undermine

the alliances between southern and Republican congressmen responsible for inhibiting “social

welfare measures and progressive labor laws,” and who hoped, in “the political space opened up

by the CIO and the New Deal,” to construct a biracial movement to forward economic and

political democracy.”

Though Korstad’s “southern wing” describes well the radical southern

milieu from which Hays emerged, in his book about the mid-century North Carolina tobacco

workers’ struggle, Hays does not appear — though John Handcox, Claude Williams, Zilphia

Johnson Horton, Pete Seeger — “a radical folklorist who helped spark the left-wing folk revival”

— Woodie Guthrie, and Paul Robeson, all of whom visited or, in the case of Claude Williams,

indirectly influenced the strikers, do.

Hays appears, obliquely perhaps, in Korstad’s mention of

the Almanac Singers whom he credits with helping spread protest music throughout the South.

But like Joyner’s essay about Hays and his friends, Korstad’s Almanac reference points again to

Charles Joyner, “A Southern Radical and his Songs: Lee Hays, the Almanacs, and the Weavers,” in Dixie Redux:

Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney, eds. Raymond Arsenault and Orville Vernon Burton (Montgomery, AL:

NewSouth Books, 2013), Google edition, 234-235, 231-232.

Korstad quoted in Joyner, “A Southern Radical and His Songs,” 244-245, 245-246; Robert R. Korstad, Civil

Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South (Chapel

Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 147-148.

Korstad, Tobacco Workers,” 147, 151-153 237-239, “a radical folklorist,” 237-238.

historians’ difficulty dealing with Hays on his own terms. As does Joyner, who even as he

argues, against Denning, that the folk music of “Lee and his friends . . . . more perhaps than any

other artistic effort, carried forward the spirit of the cultural front,” reveals the challenge Hays’

insistence on collaborative authorship presents those untangling Hays’ life and work from the

“warp and woof” of others.

Why is Hays, who was during his lifetime one of the most internationally recognizable

representatives of Korstad’s Southern Front, so neglected in Popular and Cultural Front

histories? Like his relationships with friends and coworkers, Lee Hays’ story is neither easy nor

comfortable — not the heroic tale of which a “commercial biography” David Godine referenced

in his letter to Harold Leventhal was made. At once difficult, opinionated, dogmatic, and

recalcitrant, Hays was likewise a kind and supportive mentor, creative, brilliant, and beloved.

Among his colleagues and peers in folk music, ideas about “the Question” — whether folk music

and musicians should be commercial — and Hays came to believe that they should, to help “beat

the blacklist;” forward the cause of folk music; and to survive financially — were the source of

verbal and print battles. Hays’ ideas contrasted him with Seeger, who, though he had supported

commercial endeavors for the Weavers and became the most financially successful of the four,

left the group in 1957 when the other three members voted to record a cigarette commercial.

the topic of Seeger’s growing aversion to commercialism, Hays recalled Seeger’s wife Toshi

Seeger telling him, “Pete doesn’t want to lose his following.” “God help me if I ever wanted a

Joyner in Dixie Redux, 245-246; Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

Mikkiko TACHI, “Commercialism, Counterculture, and the Folk Music Revival: A Study of Sing Out! Magazine,

1950-1967,” The Japanese Journal of American Studies No. 15 (2004): 193-197; Matthew R. Hengeveld, “Who are

these folks and their music?: A History of Sing Out! Magazine” Pennsylvania Center for the Book, accessed July 4,

2019, https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/feature-articles/who-are-these-folks-and-

their-music-history-sing. When told by Decca Record producers the Weavers had to choose between being good or

commercial, Hays replied that they could be both. Gilbert, A Radical Life, 73. On Seeger leaving the Weavers

because of the cigarette commercial, see Gilbert, A Radical Life, 107, Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 180-181, and

Memoirs, Excerpts, 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

following or needed one or had one,” Hays commented in the last reel of his taped memoirs to

Doris Willens in 1977. “The idea of wanting a following is so alien to my way of thinking. But it

seems to be natural to people like Pete and Woody, who also prided himself on his following . . .

. I just want to trundle my little pushcart of strawberries up and down, whispering, ‘Strawberries

for sale. Strawberries for sale,’ and hope that nobody hears. . . . anathema comes with the

thought of memoirs.” Anathema because Hays could not bear to reveal things about others,

especially about the “strange and powerful influence of Pete and Toshi,” that might be

interpreted as derogatory; because, “it’s possible my role in history is to be a footnote;” and

because, “I’ve not accomplished a great deal worth talking about, I have failed in almost

everything I have tried, and . . . I’ve survived not so much by my own efforts as by the

generosity and kindness of associates who have included me in, and made it possible for me to

share in the good things that I’ve had.” With more humor, recording in his last home, a small

house in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, his friends helped pay to insulate, he commented, “My

joke to friends has been, when they ask what I’m doing, I say I’m sitting here trying to maintain

a dignified silence.”

His friend and manager, Harold Leventhal, wanted to keep Hays occupied,

and to some extent, succeeded. Hays kept up a vigorous correspondence, remained an

unrepentant socialist, gave interviews to young scholars about the early days and the folk revival,

visited with family and friends who traveled to see him, kept the coterie of teenagers who

idolized him in Croton entertained, plugged away dutifully at his “Posthumous memoirs,” and

gardened — poring over seed catalogs became one of his greatest pleasures.

But the

Memoirs, Except 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 6, Hays Papers.

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 204-205, 224-225; Lee Hays to Reuben Hays, January, 1975, series 1, box 2, folder

44, Hays Papers; Richard Reuss to Lee Hays, October 28, 1965, series 1, box 1, folder 75, Hays Papers; David

Dunaway to Lee Hays, March 28, 1976, series 1, box 2, folder 34, Hays Papers; David King Dunaway and Molly

Beer, An Oral History of America’s Folk Music Revivals (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010),

201.

undiagnosed tuberculosis and diabetes responsible for his colleagues’ assumptions of Hays’

laziness and hypochondria had robbed him of his health. By 1977, Lee Hays was an invalid and

knew it. In 1972, the year Pete Seeger visited North Vietnam, Hays lost a toe to diabetic

gangrene. In 1975 and 1976, surgeons amputated his left leg and implanted a pacemaker. By

1978, both legs were gone. In 2009 when Pete Seeger sang Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land”

at Barack Obama’s inauguration, Hays had been dead twenty-eight years.

Dying in 1981, just

eight months after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, Hays did not have the long life, good

health, or inclination to fashion his own legacy.

Not everyone agreed with Hays’ assessment of his contributions. “I would like you to

know, lest there’s any doubt,” wrote Ronnie Gilbert after the Weavers’ final concert at Carnegie

Hall, “that for me, your presence on that stage was the point of this concert, its true significance.

You are a fucking hero, you old fart — and you’d better get used to it.”

Harold Leventhal

countered that Hays’ self-denigration ignored “the whole sense of a human being, his

personality, that made others want to include him.”

The desire to include Hays did not arise

from his complex personality alone. In 1978, academy-award-winning lyricist Sammy Cahn

wrote Hays hoping to include him in a publication featuring “all the great lyrists” including

Oscar Hammerstein and Ira Gershwin to benefit the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Declining, Hays

replied, “To learn after all these years that I am not only a LYRIST but a GIANT and GREAT

LYRIST is almost more than a humble songwriter can stand. To tell you the truth I didn’t even

know what a lyrist is until I looked it up and found that it means lyricist. You could have fooled

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 76, 230-234; Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, DVD, directed by Jim Brown,

(Genius Products, LLC, 2007).

Ronnie Gilbert to Lee Hays, March 21, 1981, series 1, box 1, folder 23, Hays Papers; Gilbert was speaking of the

Weavers’ final Carnegie Hall performance on November 28, 1980, documented in The Weavers: Wasn’t That A

Time! directed by Jim Brown, screenplay by Lee Hays, New York, 1982.

Leventhal quoted in Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 157.

me. . . . all in all, I don’t qualify for a position among the august company you are assembling.

But I thank you and the computer for thinking of me.”

Hays had not lost his sense of humor or

his reticence.

Though compelling, the historical significance of Lee Hays’ life is not bounded by his

well-documented, path-breaking work with the Weavers. Threading through decades from 1914-

1981, Hays’ life ties the Progressive Era to the era of Reaganomics: knitting together Old Left

and New. Post–World War I and Depression-era Arkansas, labor history, socialism, mainline and

radical religious belief, vernacular and commercial music, and the artistic, political, and social

milieu of Denning’s Cultural Front all intersect in Hays — both in his lived experience and in

his intellectual, artistic, and performative output. His life shines a light on the origins of

twentieth-century southern radicalism and its cultural contributors. Indeed, the early formative

years of his life, those least addressed, reveal not only the formulation of talents and tenets Hays

brought to the cultural front but much about radical activity in Arkansas and the South. In rural

Depression-era Arkansas and the South, where the CIO struggled for power and federal monies

for cultural projects had little reach, Hays and other left-leaning artists, musicians, writers, and

educators emerged from a power base of church, religious, and service organizations led by a

generation of social gospel activists working in coalition with unions and socialists at both local

and national levels.

Hays represents a third generation of religious activism emanating from

Sammy Cahn to Lee Hays, February 21, 1978, and Lee Hays to Sammy Cahn, n.d., stamped received March 1,

1978, series 1, box 1, folder 64, Hays Papers.

Peter Gough, Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield:

University of Illinois Press, 2015) shows the limited reach of federal monies for cultural projects in the South and

provides analysis of the Federal Music Project, later the WPA Music Program, terminated in 1939, for which

Charles Seeger worked from 1938 to 1939. Examples of organizations in and with which social gospel leaders were

regionally and nationally allied include the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen; the American Civil Liberties Union,

chaired by Harry Ward; the League for Industrial Democracy; Federal Council of Churches; National Religion and

Labor Foundation; The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom; The Committee on Economic and

Racial Justice, chaired by Reinhold Niebuhr; The Committee for the Support of Claude Williams; Commonwealth

College and Highlander Folk School; the Socialist Party; the YMCA and YWCA to name only a few.

three influential professors: Harry Ward and Reinhold Niebuhr of Union Theological Seminary

in New York and Alva Taylor at Vanderbilt University. Though their views on how to achieve

social justice in the South differed, each communicated powerful ideas his students — Claude

Williams, Howard Kester, Myles Horton, and with them Lee Hays — strove to implement.

Family tragedy, alienation and abandonment, violence, parental death, and mental illness

were likewise frequent components of radicalization. Hays is a pointed but far from singular

example. Of the southerners receiving focus or mention in Denning’s Cultural Front, many have

backgrounds not dissimilar to Hays. Blues singer Josh White’s father, a Methodist minister in

South Carolina, was institutionalized for mental illness after a near-deadly beating at the hands

of whites. Woody Guthrie and his brother raised themselves when their mother, suffering from

undiagnosed Huntington’s disease, was institutionalized after it was rumored she set Guthrie’s

father on fire. As a child, the novelist Erskine Caldwell, son of a Reformed Presbyterian

minister, was beaten unconscious by those opposed to his father’s social gospel beliefs and

practices among sharecroppers and African Americans. Zilphia Johnson Horton worked with

Claude Williams until 1935, when, estranged from her father for her pro-union stance, Williams

and other social gospel leaders encouraged her work at Highlander Folk School, where she soon

married Highlander founder and former student of Reinhold Niebuhr, Myles Horton.

Hays, many southern cultural workers moved north to escape the South’s violence and bring

their work to a wider audience but none emerged from Denning’s “ethnic working classes of the

Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1939 (University of Virginia

Press, 1981), 29-30, 39-41; John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights

Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 77-78.

Elijah Wald, Josh White: Society Blues (New York: Routledge, 2013), 2; Ed Cray, Ramblin’ Man: The Life and

Times of Woody Guthrie (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2004), 30-31; Wayne Mixon, The People’s Writer:

Erskine Caldwell and the South, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 11-12; Chelsea Hodge, “‘A

Song Workers Everywhere Sing:’ Zilphia Horton and the Creation of Labor’s Musical Canon,” (M.A. thesis,

University of Arkansas, 2014), 14-17; Dunbar, Against the Grain, 41.

metropolis.”

Their stories point to the existence of a southern cultural front yet unexplored by

scholars. Hays’ life is a window on their stories: revealing radicalizing influences on southerners

of his generation, the pathways many traveled to become part of a “second American

Renaissance,” and how their work affected political, social, and artistic change.

In the organizations he co-founded — the Almanac Singers, People’s Songs, and the

Weavers — Hays was the chief representative of this influential but little-known constituency.

The Arkansas folksongs and hymns zipped with pro-labor lyrics Hays carried north united

socialism, labor, radical religion, and the push for southern social and economic change in a

powerful, transmissive cultural medium. “Zipper songs” were living, evolving creations made as

people, singing together in union meetings and labor schools, in the call and response of southern

spirituals, shouted out new words of union: giving new power and meaning to well-known,

beloved melodies.

In Hays’ hands, and through the collaborative “folk process” he espoused,

such songs became ever-evolving communicative tools for what Kenneth Burke termed

“symbolic enrollment” and “revolutionary symbolism” as ordinary people became involved in

the creative process of political enlistment. In urban, northern regions of the cultural front —

through his creative output and his both reluctant and enthusiastic embrace of commercial,

national, and international acclaim —messages of social and economic justice from the southern

religious left merged with newly composed music in the Cold War Era to meet the needs of a

new political moment: forever changing the means and content of political dissent and the

trajectory international popular culture. “The future is really disclosed,” Kenneth Burke told the

Denning, The Cultural Front, xix, 6.

Hodge, “’A Song Workers Everywhere Sing,’” 30-33.

1935 Writers Conference, “by finding out what people can sing about.”

Today, in what is now

Burke’s — and Hays’ — future, when protesters sing in unity and dissent, they still turn to the to

the songs of Hays and his era — Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” the anthem of the

Freedom Struggle, “We Shall Overcome,” and “If I Had a Hammer” by Hays and Seeger.

For

Lee Hays, singing and writing songs for “the people” to sing was a political act aimed at

determining the future. That people continue singing his songs to protest injustice today shows

that his work may point to a better future, still.

Kenneth Burke quoted in Denning, The Cultural Front, 56. Zipper songs are those, to quote Hays, “so constructed

that you have to zip in only a word or two to make an entirely new verse.” Thus, the meaning and function of songs

could be changed, by creating verses with new words, from resignation to empowerment or from church invitational

to call to join the union. The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union most often used familiar hymns Hays described as

“rhythmic and full of bounce . . . derive[d] from the invitational hymns of the old camp meetings.” Many, such as

“Roll the Union On” were written at New Era School with Claude Williams and John Handcox. For Hays’

quotations, see Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 56-57. On zipper songs, see also Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the

Working Class, 75-76.

Ibid., 75-76. Claude Williams to Lee Hays, n.d., series 1, box 2, folder 20, Hays Papers. Based on the

aforementioned letter, Gellman and Roll show Williams and Hays adapting the hymn, “I Will Overcome” for union

organizing at the New Era School as early as 1936. Per Hodge and Korstad, “We Will Overcome” was taught to

Zilphia Horton at Highlander Folk School in 1946 by workers who had struck against the American Tobacco

Company at Charleston, S.C. Korstad names Anna Lee Bonneau and Evelyn Risher as those who taught Horton the

hymn. Chelsea Hodge, “The Coal Operators Daughter: Zilphia Horton, Folk Music, and Labor Activism,” Arkansas

Historical Quarterly 76 (Winter 2017): 305; Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism, 239. “This Land is Your Land” was

sung at the Women’s March on Washington, in 2017, “We Shall Overcome” and “The Hammer Song,” perhaps

most famously at the March on Washington in 1963, and “We Shall Overcome” most recently at protests and vigils

surrounding the murder of George Floyd, Jr. See Eric R. Danton, “Folkways Celebrates the Social Power of Music,”

March 4, 2019, PasteMagazine.com, accessed April 1, 2019, https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2019/03/the-

social-power-of-music.html; Kevin Duggan, “George Floyd protesters gather for fifth day of marching in

Brooklyn,” amNewYork, June 3, 2020, https://www.amny.com/brooklyn/george-floyd-protesters-gather-for-fifth-

day-of-marching-in-brooklyn/; Jon Harris, “Somber Bethlehem vigil, energetic Allentown youth march, calls for

change following killing of George Floyd,” The Morning Call, June 6, 2020, https://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-

nws-naacp-george-floyd-vigil-lehigh-valley-protest-20200606-rkz5f5xfufehpjcahls22qbjx4-story.html; Joe Heim,

Hannah Natanson, and Susan Svriuga, “A Somber Feel at D. C. Protest on Day of George Floyd’s Funeral,” The

Washington Post, June 9, 2020, accessed, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-somber-feel-at-dc-protest-on-

day-of-george-floyds-funeral/2020/06/09/67656478-aa56-11ea-9063-e69bd6520940_story.html.

Chapter 1

“The State of Arkansas”

“Woody, Cisco, and the Almanacs . . .” wrote Millard Lampell to Hays in 1980, “it all

seems another world. And yet, flashes of it are startlingly vivid. More alive than things that

happened 8, 10 years ago.”

“The State of Arkansas” was one of Hays’ signature songs during

the Almanac years, but the song’s comic, “dystopic vision” also suggests the influence of the

contradictory messages of Hays’ Arkansas childhood on his path to the cultural front where, after

meeting Millard Lampell, he co-founded the Almanac Singers. Hays and Lampell knew each

other before they ever met in person. Both young writers — in the spring of 1940, Hays was

twenty-seven and Lampell, twenty-one — had published in the New Republic and corresponded

about their work. When they met in New York City the summer of 1940, they “hit it off” and

decided to become roommates. Within weeks they met Pete Hawes, who brought around a friend

from Harvard, another twenty-one-year-old performing as Peter Bowers, a name he used to

protect his father who was working for the government as Deputy Director of the Federal Music

Project — Charles Seeger. As the four began to sing together, Hays recalled, “some of the first

Almanac songs were made up during that first week.” Within a few weeks more, “Woody

Guthrie “pulled in from the West Coast with his whole family.”

Millard Lampell to Lee Hays, n.d., series 1, box 1, folder 60, Hays Papers. Though Lampell’s letter to Hays is

undated, the letter references filming “The Wall,” a television series filmed in Sosnowiec, Poland in 1980. See

Arthur Unger, ‘“The Wall’ finally comes to TV,” The Christian Science Monitor, February 12, 1982, accessed July

21, 2019, https://www.csmonitor.com/1982/0212/021201.html.

Almanac Singers, “State of Arkansas,” recorded July 7, 1941, track # 5 on Sod Buster Ballads: Folk Songs of

America, Sung by the Almanac Singers (General Album-G21) featured Lee Hays, Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell, and

Woody Guthrie. William M. Clements, “’The State of Arkansaw:’ A Folk Dystopia,” Southern Folklore 46 (1989):

3-14; Jim Capaldi, “Wasn’t That a Time!: A Conversation With Lee Hays,” Sing Out: The Folk Song Magazine,

September/October, 1980, p. 4. Hays’ interview suggests he was with Walter Lowenfels at the League of American

Writers Conference in New York City where he may have seen Aunt Molly Jackson and Sarah Ogden. Richard

Reuss with Joanne C. Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 1927-1957, (Lanham MD and London:

Scarecrow Press, 2000), 149; Peter Gough, Sounds of the New Deal, 21, 32, 127, 163, 170; Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of

2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

Hays and Guthrie had met once before “at a big party, a fundraiser for Spain or

something” in Philadelphia’s wealthy Main Line district. Lee had paused for the winter in early

1940 at the Philadelphia home of poet Walter Lowenfels and his wife, writer and translator

Lillian Lowenfels: the last of the “friendly houses” along his hitchhiking route from

Commonwealth College to New York City. As Commonwealth College collapsed around them

the previous summer, the only way the Commoners could see to get their collection of labor

songs to the workers was to send Hays north where he could “form a group and sing,” so they

chipped in what they could and raised sixty-five dollars to fund a journey that covered over

thirteen hundred miles. That night at the posh Philadelphia fundraiser, where Woody Guthrie and

Will Geer performed together as they had in California migrant workers’ camps, Hays and

Guthrie had little time to get acquainted; as Hays recalled, “All of a sudden Woody disappeared

into the bushes with the most beautiful girl in sight, as he usually managed to do. So I didn’t get

much chance to talk to him at that time.”

Three years later, however, they had plenty of time to

talk. Guthrie’s letter to his second wife Marjorie, following “a free supper which I got after

buying some brandy. (The brandy cost me twice as much as a super would have.),” shows Hays

putting his “ministerial” counseling skills to use. Describing a post-prandial conversation and the

advice Hays gave about problems arising from the couple’s long-distance relationship, Guthrie

wrote, “Naturally the discussion quickly took the shape of our personal problems, and Lee gave

me a very good talk. Lee says that if we let any kinds of doubts or suspicions eat their way into

the foundation under us and let our love affair fall down, we are very foolish . . . . It’s a pretty

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 59, 62-63; all quotations, Capaldi, “Wasn’t That A Time!,” p. 4.

good thing to be able to talk your troubles to a friend you know has come through a lot more than

you have.”

Hays said there were as many versions of the Almanacs’ founding as there were

Almanacs — which could mean upwards of fifteen — but the core story, like the core group,

remains constant: Hays and Lampell, Hawes and Seeger, and Guthrie.

Around these formed a

continually evolving, collaborative, compositional, performative milieu which included at

various times, Josh White, Bess Lomax Hawes, Burl Ives, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry,

Agnes “Sis” Cunningham, and Gordon Friesen. Hays believed “no creating group” — not the

early Composers Collective, New Theater League, the Commonwealth Players, Red Dust

Players, nor People’s Songs — so matched its production to “its theory of production . . . . The

Almanacs had a way of doing their work first, then if anyone wanted to construct a theory about

it he was welcome to do so.”

Almanac methodology was also based on necessity. As “Almanac

House” moved from the first apartment Hays and Lampell shared with Seeger, to a loft on Fourth

Avenue and Twelfth Street, and finally, to a house on West Tenth Street, “free suppers” became

the norm. Money was scarce, and hunger, real. Seeger took Hays to “saloons” and taught him

how to shake pepper sauce into beer to keep hunger at bay. Fortunately for the Almanacs, in

Woody Guthrie to Marjorie Guthrie, 1943, series 1, box 1, folder 27, Hays Papers. Both the Federal Council of

Churches with which Claude Williams, Howard Kester, Winifred Chappell, Myles Horton, and others of Hays’

radical religious coalition were associated and the Methodist Church (the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and

North reunited in 1939) published new practices with regard to companionate marriage, sex, and birth control: the

FCC in 1927, and the Methodists by 1940. See Ashley Boggan, “A God-Sent Movement: Methodism,

Contraception, and the Protection of the Methodist Family, 1870-1968,” Methodist History 53 (January 2015): 74-

84.

Lee Hays, “Concludes Almanac History,” People’s Songs Bulletin, December 1948, p. 9; Capaldi, “Wasn’t That

A Time!,” p. 4; Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 149. There are at least two naming stories for

the Almanac Singers. Pete Seeger credits Hays, quoting Hays as saying, “Hold on. Back where I come from, a

family had two books. The Bible, to help ‘em to the next world. The Almanac, to help ‘em through the present

world. We’ve got an Almanac. Of course, most Congressmen can’t read it.” Pete Seeger, Where Have All the

Flowers Gone: A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies (Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out, Publications, 1993), 19.

Hays credits a letter from Woody Guthrie as inspiration. Lee Hays, “Almanacs Part Two,” People’s Songs Special

Edition, Songs for Wallace, 2

Edition, August 1948, p. 9.

Lee Hays, “Almanacs Part Two,” 9; Dunaway and Beer, “An Oral History, 49-56.

addition to the Commonwealth Labor Songs, zipped hymns of the Southern Tenant Farmers’

Union — “so constructed,” Hays wrote, “that you have to zip in only a word or two to make an

entirely new verse” — folk songs of Emma Dusenbury, and his own “ministerial presence,”

Hays brought an essential skill for communal living — cooking. “We got scraps of things;”

Millard Lampell remembered in 1979, “Mother Bloor or someone like that would come over and

bring us a basket of carrots or apples from her farm. Lee would cook big loaves of bread — you

know, he’d been used to cooking for seventy or eighty at Commonwealth — anyhow, we’d have

a pot of stew going. It’s amazing how little you could live on.” It didn’t take long for the

Almanac stew pot to become famous. “In this first apartment with Lampell,” Hays remembered

in 1977, “this little place, that is where we met Cisco [Houston] and Josh [White] and Burl [Ives]

and that is where we had the famous soup pot going all the time, where everybody brought in a

potato or a piece of meat. I don’t know how I was living in those days, but anyway, we had a

famous stewpot, that a lot of people ate out of, perpetually cooking on the back of the stove.”

Members dropped in and out, contributing what they could, both in tangibles and

creativity. Song creation was not so different from stew creation, and both epitomized the “folk

process:” a term codified by Charles Seeger, with roots in ideas of English folklorist Cecil Sharp,

reflecting both continuity with the past and variation by individuals or groups. Like the stew pot

on the back of the stove, which continually simmered and changed depending on who threw in

which potato or carrot, Almanacs “threw in” verses, words, melodies, and chords; songs were

written and rewritten in the living room, at rent parties, union halls, and hootenannies. On

Sundays, when the Almanacs held open house, Leadbelly often sang Goodnight Irene, creating

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 71, quotation, 56-57; Capaldi, “Wasn’t That A Time!,” p. 4; Millard Lampell and

Lee Hays quoted in Dunaway and Beer, An Oral History, 51-52.

new verses based on the names of those present. “In folk music,” Hays once wrote upon hearing

a young singer claim an Almanac song as his own, “this is not known as thievery, but is called,

instead, the folk process.”

Though the Almanacs dominated his early New York years, Hays had, for years, been

part of a united front extending from the South through the Midwest, the Piedmont, and the

Northeast of people working in religion, education, dramatics, music, and writing to forward the

rights of labor against unbridled capitalism and “beat back what they saw as an alarming growth

of fascism, both at home and abroad.”

When the Almanacs performed, in June of 1941, at the

final League of American Writers Congress, Hays had been known to some of its membership

for years.

In 1938, the editorial staff of New Masses, which included League members

Theodore Draper, Granville Hicks, and Michael Gold, published in the “Readers Forum” Hays’

critique of leftist poets, “Wants Communist Poetry.”

Eleven days later, a January 22 flyer,

Dunaway and Beer, An Oral History, 13-14, 57; Cecil J. Sharp, English Folksong, Some Conclusions (London:

Simkin and Co. Ltd., Novello and Co., Ltd., 1907), 16-31, Internet Archive,

https://archive.org/details/englishfolksongs00shar/page/16/mode/2up. For a summary of Sharp’s principles of

continuity, variation, and selection influential to Charles Seeger’s ideas of an evolutionary “folk process,” see

Bertrand H. Bronson, “Cecil Sharp and Folksong: A Review Article,” Western Folklore 27 (July 1968): 204-205.

Bronson provides in depth analysis in, Bertrand H. Bronson, “The Morphology of the Ballad-Tunes (Variation,

Selection, and Continuity),” Journal of American Folklore 67 (January-March 1954): 1-13. On the controversy

surrounding Sharp’s work see C. J. Bearman, “Cecil Sharp in Somerset: Some Reflections on the Work of David

Harker,” Folklore 113 (April 2002): 11-34, and Dave Harker, “Dr. Bearman’s Meticulous Scholarship,” Folk Music

Journal 11 (2017): 49-53; Gary Graff, “6 Questions with Pete Seeger,” Billboard March 1, 2008, p. 31. For a

thorough discussion of Charles Seeger’s work in theory and collection of folk music, see Ann M. Pescatello,

Charles Seeger, A Life in American Music (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992); Hays quoted in

Koppelman, 83.

Erik S. Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights

(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 2.

Reuss, American Folk Music and Left-Wing Politics, 134. Reuss describes the 1941 Writers Conference as a “folk

song revival atmosphere — a hootenanny actually.” Performers in a session on music, poetry, and folk singing

included the Almanacs, Josh White, Leadbelly, and Earl Robinson. FBI Files compiled on Hays indicate that he was

present at the Writers Congress, citing a March 24, 1941, article in the Daily Worker, “America is in their Songs,”

by Peter Bowers [Seeger] as evidence. United States Government Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York

Division, Consolidation Memo, on Lee Hays, reference no. 100-86568-29, February 17, 1953, 9-10, FBI Records —

100-NY-86568.

Lee Hays, “Wants Communist Poetry,” New Masses, January 11, 1938, p. 21. Jack Conroy, editor of the Anvil,

renamed in 1938, The New Anvil, also appeared in the January 11, 1939 issue of New Masses.

headed “Commonwealth Comes to Chicago,” announced “Big Lee Hays pulled into town” to

present a program of “Ballads that the farmers sing, and some sharecropper blues” . . . . with

music by Waldemar Hille, introduced by Jack Conroy, editor, New Anvil . . . Admission 35¢.”

Hays had met Conroy that same year after hitchhiking from Commonwealth in Mena, Arkansas,

to Chicago to see a New Theater League production of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle will Rock.

Two months later, in March 1939, Conroy published Hays’ “first short story,” and in May,

Michael Gold of New Masses followed suit: publishing Hays’ column, “‘Let the Will . . . .” about

the process of creating from hymns “good union songs.”

With hardly a break to make a

thirteen-hundred-mile journey east on foot, May and August of 1940 saw the New Republic

publish two of Hays’ short stories, “My Father with the Purple Hair” and “The 49

Chicken,”

about the foibles of southern religion, featuring his father as comic protagonist. And in

November 1940, Poetry Magazine, under the editorship of Writer’s League member George

Dillon, published Hays’ poem, Deadbuggy: seeming with its first line, “Death is a rubbertired

fact,” a meditation on Hays’ father’s death. With his written and intellectual work, performance,

associations — and with his feet — Hays connected Popular and Cultural Fronts across state,

region, country, race, religion, and genre. Making life better for ordinary people, Hays believed,

required work on multiple fronts — a complete praxis he summed up in an interview during the

Almanac’s cross-country tour in 1941. “Good Singing won’t do: good praying won’t do, good

Flyer for Commonwealth Comes to Chicago, January 22, [1939] and Draft copy of script, We Shall All Be Free by

Lee Hays and Waldemar Hill, box 13, folder 664, Jack Conroy Papers, the Newberry Library, Chicago (hereafter,

Jack Conroy Papers).

Capaldi, “Wasn’t That A Time!,” p. 3; Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers; Lee

Hays, ‘“Let the Will . . . :’ The Deep South is using its old hymns to aid farm-worker unionization. Here are a few

examples.,” New Masses, August 1939, p. 15.

preaching won’t do, but if you get all of them together, with a little organizing behind it you get

a way of life and a way to do it.”

For Hays, good organizing came later, but singing and preaching in his father’s

Methodist churches began early. Indeed, without Methodist support in the form of a substantial

donation to his sixty-five-dollar travel fund from Commonwealth’s faculty chair, Winifred

Chappell, Hays might never have made his way to New York, Almanac House, and the cultural

front. At the time Chappell made her donation in 1939, she had been a leader in leftist

Methodism for over twenty years. Working with Harry Ward as secretary of the Methodist

Federation for Social Service and co-editor of its publication, Social Questions Bulletin, from

1922 to 1947, Chappell was one of the drivers of the radicalized social gospel movement

formative to Hays’ later work.

As they worked together for and in support of Claude Williams

in the 1930s, Chappell became a friend and mentor whose life provided a window on the

development of the radical social gospel to which Hays and Williams were drawn.

Like Hays, Chappell was the child of a Methodist minister. Her father’s enrollment, in

1895, in Garrett Seminary near Chicago brought the sixteen-year-old Chappell to Chicago’s

crucible of social and religious change where both the city and its churches reeled from the

effects of the 1894 Pullman strike. Mainline Protestant denominations, which, had in large part,

supported capital over labor, faced an exodus of working people they struggled to reclaim;

Chicago’s working men and women shifted the message of Protestantism leftward, forcing

Lee Hays, “My Father with the Purple Hair,” The New Republic, May 27, 1940, p. 726; Lee Hays, “The 49

Chicken,” The New Republic, August 26, 1940, p. 274; Lee Hays, “Deadbuggy,” POETRY: A Magazine of Verse,

November 1940, p. 134; Lee Hays quoted in an interview by Lillian Lowenfels, “One Million Americans Have

Heard ‘Almanacs,’” Daily Worker, September 2, 1941, p. 7, series 3, box 3, folder 52, Hays Papers.

Winifred Chappell to Lee Hays, November 8, 1950, series 1, box 1, folder 15, Hays Papers; Memoirs, Excerpts 2

of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers; Capaldi, “Wasn’t That A Time!,” p. 4; Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the

Working Class, 87; Russell E. Richey, Kenneth E. Rowe, and Jean Miller Schmidt, American Methodism: a

Compact History, 150-151; Duke, In the Trenches, 119.

churches toward greater social leveling, egalitarianism, and democracy. When upon his release

from jail in 1895, Eugene Debs cried, “Where does the church stand with reference to labor?” a

crowd ten-thousand-strong replied, “Against it! Against it!”

Chicago churches’ stance was not

quite so monolithic as the crowd at Debs’ speech proclaimed it, however, and the “largest crop of

rabble rousers” supporting labor in Chicago were Methodist.

By 1901, Harry Ward, pastor of

Street Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago’s Packingtown, was joining his congregants

in the packinghouse workers’ union. Six years later, Ward co-founded the pro-labor Methodist

Federation for Social Service (MFSS), which, in 1907, produced the pro-labor “Social Creed”

adopted by the Federal Council of Churches in 1908 and by the Methodist Episcopal Church,

South in 1914. The year Winifred Chappell, having graduated from Northwestern University,

become a deaconess, and served as Assistant Principal for the progressive Chicago Training

School for Deaconesses, was elected to the Executive Board of the MFSS — and Lee Hays was

born in Little Rock, Arkansas.

When she became faculty chair at Commonwealth College in

Miriam Crist, “Winifred Chappell: Everybody on the Left Knew Her,” Radical Religion 5 (1980): 22; Heath

Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford and New York: Oxford

University Press), 96-128; Debs quoted in Carter, 129.

Carter, Union Made, 120-123, quotation, 162.

The MFSS “Social Creed of the Churches” (1907) states the Methodist Church stands for, “equal rights and

complete justice for all men in all stations of life,” “conciliation and arbitration in industrial dissensions,”

“protection of workers from dangerous machinery,” “abolition of child labor,” “regulation of labor conditions for

women,” “suppression of the ‘sweating system’,” “gradual reduction of hours of labor to the lowest practical point

with work for all,” a six day work week, “a living wage in every industry,” “the highest possible wage each industry

can afford and the most equitable division of products of industry that can be devised,” and “recognition of the

Golden Rule, and the mind of Christ as the supreme law of society and the sure remedy for all social life.” Duke, In

the Trenches, 60-61. The 1932 Federal Council of Churches version included support of “Social planning and

control of credit and monetary systems and economic processes for the common good,” “a wider and fairer

distribution of wealth,” social insurance, “justice, opportunity and equal rights for all; mutual good will and

cooperation among racial economic and religious groups,” “repudiation of war,” and “the building of a cooperative

world order.” Gary Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (Malden, MA and

Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, 2011), 121; E. R. Hendrix wrote the mission of the FCC was “to manifest the

essential oneness of the Christian Churches of America . . . and to promote the spirit of fellowship, service, and

cooperation among them.” Of his election as first President of the FCC, E. R. Hendrix, quoting the moderator of the

session, wrote that the “lines between North and South were wiped out in the election . . . [of] a bishop of the

Methodist Episcopal Church, South, a Southerner to the manor born.” E. R. Hendrix, “The Federal Council of

Churches and its Mission,” Christian Advocate 70 (January 22, 1909): 6; Carter, Union Made, 163; Crist, “Winifred

Chappell: Everybody on the Left Knew Her,” 22-23.

1937, Chappell, embodying Methodism’s most radical elements, represented northern religious

radicalism in the South as Hays would soon represent and depict southern religious radicalism in

the cultural front.

Though far from being the bastion of left-leaning religious ideology that was the

Methodist Federation for Social Service, Progressive era reformist thinking was in evidence in

the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in which Hays was raised and his father served; most

visibly in the activities of women in “Home Missions” work. Indeed, Will Alexander, founder of

the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), in 1921, pronounced “the Woman’s

Missionary Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, the most progressive and

constructive religious group in the South.”

If southern Methodist women lacked Winifred

Chappell’s radicalism — their stance, like that of the CIC “did not take issue with systemic

economic injustice or legally imposed racial segregation” — like their northern counterparts,

they conducted reformist work they believed helped poor women and children: supporting

temperance and equal pay for working women, opposing divorce and child labor, working

consistently and diligently for peace prior to America’s entry in both World Wars, and

supporting the League of Nations following World War I.

Women of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South also conducted, what was for the time,

pioneering racial work. As early as 1913, the Woman’s Missionary Council openly condemned

lynching, and in 1920, concerned by the explosion of racial tensions following World War I, the

Council established a Commission on Race Relations “to study the whole question of race

Will W. Alexander quoted in John Patrick McDowell, The Social Gospel in the South: The Woman’s Home

Mission Movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church South, 1886-1939 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State

University Press), 144; Alexander was, himself, a Methodist minister.

Dunbar, Against the Grain, vii-viii; McDowell, Social Gospel in the South, 72-83.

relations” and “the needs of negro women and children.”

By the end of 1922, one hundred local

auxiliaries of the Council on Race Relations were active; by 1923, the number had increased to

four hundred. The early 1920s likewise saw southern Methodist women condemning the Ku

Klux Klan as they voiced strong opposition to lynching. In chilling terms, the 1923-1924

Fourteenth Annual Report of the Woman’s Missionary Council recorded Methodist women

“recogniz[ed] with gratitude that the number of lynchings were less by half last year than the

preceding year . . . . we record again,” the report continued, “our sense of shame that this

barbarity has continued . . . and urge Christian women to continue to work and pray that the

Southland and the nation may be entirely free of the crime of mob murder.”

Their phrase, “mob

murder,” well describes the horrific racial violence of 1919 Arkansas reflected in contrasting

approaches of two regional Arkansas Methodist Conferences, the newspaper of the

denomination, and childhood memories that continued to haunt Lee Hays sixty years later.

Indeed, Hays’ five-year-old memories of racial violence and suspicions of involvement by both

his church and family are the earliest evidence of his awareness of contradictions and inequities

that later drove him to fight for racial justice.

Transcripts of Hays’ tape-recorded memoirs recount a searing image.

And the story about the nine negroes hanging from the viaduct, I don’t remember how I

know that there were nine because I don’t see how I would have had time to count them.

Maybe somebody later said there were nine bodies hanging. There was time, however, to

see the blood on the gravel. The railroad ties were filled in with gravel which we used to

call white chat, and from these bodies which evidently had been shot more than once, the

blood was dripping down, and blood stains on the white gravel along the railraod [sic]

tracks underneath the bodies.

McDowell, Social Gospel in the South, 87-88, 94-95.

McDowell, Social Gospel in the South, 87-93; Fourteenth Annual report of the Women’s Missionary Council of

The Methodist Episcopal Church, South 1923-1924 (Nashville, Dallas, Richmond, and San Francisco: Publishing

House of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, 1924), 181-182, Internet Archive,

https://archive.org/details/fourteenthannual1924meth/page/182/mode/2up.

Memoirs, Excerpts 1 of 2, series 3, box 3 folder 63, Hays Papers.

In 1979, from his home at 4 Memory Lane in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, Hays

composed a letter addressed to “Librarian” Arkansas Gazette. “I am seeking information about a

mass lynching which occurred in Forrest City, Arkansas, sometime around the year 1919.” Hays’

father was a minister in Forrest City in that year. “This was in connection with a ‘race riot’

beginning in Phillips County, Arkansas . . . . The lynching at Forrest City may have involved as

many as 9 black men, and occurred on a railroad viaduct . . . . Is there any record of how many

blacks may have died in East Arkansas during that entire incident?”

Although there is no record

of a response to Hays’ inquiry in his archives, Hays’ thought may have been that violence

followed the train lines. Forrest City was a major stop on the Missouri-Pacific Iron Mountain

Line, consolidated into the Rock Island Line in 1919 when railroads were nationalized as part of

the war effort — and the Iron Mountain line ran to Elaine.

Other childhood memories troubled him. In the same month, he wrote to the editor of the

Arkansas Methodist in Little Rock “to ask your help in verifying or disproving certain memories

of mine concerning the relationship between the Methodist Church and the Ku Klux Klan in the

middle-1920s.” Hays vividly recalled, at about age eight, traveling to Little Rock with his mother

and father — then a presiding Methodist elder and former editor of the paper — and being taken

downstairs through a tunnel to the basement where the paper was printed. “They swore me to

secrecy,” he wrote, before recounting having seen “new pine shelves containing piles of KKK

Lee Hays to Librarian, Arkansas Gazette, July 1979, series 1, box 2, folder 34, Hays Papers.

If violence followed the train line, Elaine, thirty miles south of Helena was linked to Helena by the Iron Mountain

railway which linked to Mopac at Helena and thence, a straight shot to Forrest City. Library of Congress, Rand

McNally and Company. “The Rand McNally Indexed County and Township Pocket Map and Shippers Guide of

Arkansas Showing All Railroad, Cities, Towns, Villages, Post Offices, Lakes, Rivers, etc. Chicago, 1898. Map.

https://www.loc.gov/item98688447/; See also, Bill Pollard, “Forrest City Union Station,” Arkansas Railroad

History, 2013-2014, http://www.arkansasrailroadhistory.com/Forrest-City/Forrest-City.html; Railroad connections

between Helena and Elaine are documented in “Gerard B. Lambert Co. v. St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern

Railway Company et. al., Report of the Commission,” United States Government Interstate Commerce Reports,

Volume 49, February 1918-May 1918, (Washington, D. C.: Washington Government Printing Office, 1919), 158.

uniforms, and in the room were two or more black women making the uniforms on sewing

machines. — I was shown uniforms decorated with differing colors of bias tape, blue, red, and so

on, indicating rank. Whether at that time or another, I met the editor, A. C. Millar, upstairs. He

was a kindly old gentleman with whiskers.” The respondent referred him to Dr. Walter Vernon

who had recently completed a history of Arkansas Methodism. Responding promptly, Dr.

Vernon remembered A. C. Millar as a strong opponent of the Klan but confirmed, “You are right

that some Methodists went along with the Klan and others opposed it.” Astonished at Vernon’s

prompt response, Hays composed a more cheerful reply. “Now about Dr. Millar. It seems to me

that if he was that outspoken against the Klan, my memory of a Klan-making factory in the

Arkansas Methodist building must be false. Yet I do have the memory, and it is possible that I

was taken to such a place on the same day we visited Dr. Millar . . . . The memory of going

through a secret tunnel into a basement is so vivid that it must have some basis in fact, beyond

my active boy’s imagination.”

In attempting to solve these mysteries, Hays was well aware that memory can deceive.

Yet, his memories, coinciding with the establishment of Klan no. 1 in Little Rock, reveal his

early perception of endemic racial violence in post–World War I Arkansas. Though the lynching

of nine men at a railroad viaduct in Forrest City seems to have gone unreported, in 1919, a mob

of twenty-five to thirty people in Forrest City, where Hays’ father then served as presiding elder,

hung Sam MacIntire to death beside the railroad for the crime of “being able to implicate others

in a murder.”

Hays’ childhood awareness of contradictions within Arkansas Methodism about

Lee Hays to Walter Vernon, n.d., series 1, box 2, folder 34, Hays Papers. Hays’ reference to himself as a “double

amputee” dates the letter after 1978.

Todd E. Lewis, “Mob Justice in the ‘American Congo:’ ‘Judge Lynch’ in Arkansas During the Decade after World

War I,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 52 (Summer 1993): 164; Charles C. Alexander, “White Robed

Reformers: The Ku Klux Klan Comes to Arkansas, 1921-1922,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 22 (Spring

1963): 7-9; Brooks R. Blevins, “The Strike and the Still: Anti-Radical Violence and the Ku Klux Klan in the

Ozarks,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 52 (Winter 1993): 407-408.

race is borne out by contrasting responses of the Arkansas Methodist newspaper and Arkansas

Methodist Conference Journals following the horrific violence in Phillips County in 1919.

Held in December 1919 in Hot Springs, two months after mass killings of African

Americans in Phillips County, the proceedings of the forty-second annual session of the Little

Rock Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church — a conference established for African

American Methodists in 1878 — seemed to begin as usual.

That the conference’s white

presiding Bishop, William A. Quayle, closed the morning session of the first day by requesting

“the conference stand and sing the African American spiritual “You’ve Got Shoes, I’ve Got

Shoes” gave little indication of the drama that would ensue the following day when Bishop

Quayle directed the Conference Secretary to read aloud the following “Memorial from the Board

of Managers of the Freeman’s [sic] Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church to the

Congress of the United States.”

TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES—

A MEMORIAL

The board of Managers of the Freedman’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal

Church hereby earnestly memorializes the Senate and House of Representatives of the

United States to pass a federal law for the suppression of lynching, we being thoroughly

convinced that this brutality cannot be hindered by state legislation and as thoroughly

convinced that it can be stopped by federal legislation and the holding of each locality

As separate entities within Arkansas Methodism, the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) and the Methodist

Episcopal Church, South (MECS) followed different strategies with regard to African American Methodists

following the Civil War. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South established African American churches and

conferences, and in 1867-1870, white and African American church leaders created a new and separate

denomination — then called the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (C.M.E. now, Christian Methodist Episcopal

Church). White and African American conferences remained in contact and MECS leadership, including Moses U.

Payne, founder of Paine College, made significant financial contributions toward educational initiatives. The MEC

similarly set African American Methodists apart in separate churches and districts, but these remained under the

jurisdiction of white MEC church hierarchy. Additionally, the MEC was linked to the Methodist Freedmen’s Aid

Society organized in 1866 and responsible for founding Philander Smith College in Little Rock. When established in

1879, the Little Rock Conference of the MEC was racially mixed and remained so until 1900, when boundaries set

by the MEC General Conference moved the “work of white people” out of the Little Rock Conference. Woodie

Daniel (W. D.) Lester, The History of the Negro and Methodism in Arkansas and Oklahoma: The Little Rock —

Southwest Conference, 1838-1972 (Little Rock, AR: University Press, 1979), 44-72; Walter Vernon, Methodism in

Arkansas, 1816-1976 (Nashville: The Joint Committee for the History of Arkansas Methodism, 1976), 102-117

Winifred D. Polk Archives for The Arkansas Conference United Methodist Church,

https://www.arkansasumcarchives.com/home.html (hereafter, Polk Archives).

in which lynching occurs to a community responsibility for the doings of its anonymous

citizens. We further believe that today is the day of days for such legislation, inasmuch

as the Negro has made a record for bravery and efficiency and patriotism on the

battlefield and at home, so as to make their conduct a righteous demand that the rights

belonging to an American citizen shall be accorded them in full measure. This memorial

was unanimously adopted by the Board of Managers of the Freedman’s Aid Society at

its Annual Meeting, January 14, 1919.

Following the reading the secretary recorded, “Bishop Quayle spoke concerning the same

in a forceful manner.” When the vote was called, “the whole house stood up and it was

unanimously carried.”

The story was different at the North Arkansas Conference of the Methodist Episcopal

Church, South, home to both Forrest City and Elaine. Held in Jonesboro, November 19-23, 1919,

the Journal of the North Arkansas Conference contains no mention either of lynching or the

events in Phillips county. Perhaps because A. C. Millar — former president of Hendrix College

and owner and editor of the denominational newspaper — had, in the October 9, November 6,

and November 13 editions, reported on Elaine in extensive detail. As Walter Vernon told Hays in

1979, A. C. Millar was indeed opposed to the Klan and to lynching. His editorials and reports on

the Elaine Massacre, however, reveal contradictions within southern Methodism: showing white

Arkansas Methodists’ view of themselves as positive forces in southern race relations coexisted

Official Journal of the Forty-second Annual Session of the Little Rock Conference of the Methodist Episcopal

Church, December 17-21, 1919, pp. 15-16, 24-25, Polk Archives. Following the Memorial to Congress, was printed

an explanation of the work of the Freedmen’s Aid Society stating, organized in 1866, “Its purpose is the Christian

education of the Negro. It has a theological seminary at Atlanta, Georgia, for the training of colored ministers; a

medical college at Nashville, Tennessee where 500 young men and a few women are being trained as physicians,

pharmacists, dentists, and nurses; and in addition, it has eighteen other institutions for the training of teachers,

industrial and other Christian leaders for service among the Negro people.” The Journal numbered physicians,

teachers, ministers, and industrial leaders emerging from these institutions at over 200,000 at a cost of “tens of

millions of dollars” and gave current statistics as “twenty schools, 334 teachers, and 5,702 students” with an annual

budget of “half a million dollars.” Members of the Freedmen’s Aid Society Board of Managers in 1919 included

bishops William A. Quayle who presided over the 1919 Little Rock Conference and Francis J. McConnell, who,

with Harry Ward and Winifred Chappell, led the MFSS for over thirty years and in 1936 served as an Honorary

President of the National Religion and Labor Foundation during the period of Hays’ work with the organization. See

Lee Hays to Howard Kester, February 1, 1936, series 1, folder 20, Kester Papers; “Our History,” MFSA, accessed

March 15, 2020, https://www.mfsaweb.org/ourhistory.

with a world view rooted in the Jim Crow South and what Charles King has called a “global

consensus . . . about the natural hierarchy of the world and the importance of racial purity” based

in a belief in the innate superiority of those of Northern European descent.

“We would remind

our Negro friends,” Millar wrote one week after the events in Elaine, “that . . . . We as

Methodists want them to have education . . . protection of life and property. We believe that they

are entitled to kind and fair treatment in every relation in life. We are helping to build their

churches and schools, and are anxious to do vastly more.” And yet, Millar continued, “There is

no more patent fact in human nature than the differences of races, and these differences are not

merely superficial.”

Millar’s November 13, 1919, edition is more revealing, still. “DISGRACEFUL!

HORRIBLE!” Millar’s first headline read. “Our State has been disgraced and humiliated by the

burning in the public square at Magnolia of a negro who had murdered the sheriff and had been

captured. There is absolutely no excuse for this as by regular action of the court justice could

have been speedily and surely secured.”

Millar did not continue coverage of the lynching,

however, but in the editorials that followed, turned again to Elaine. He rejoiced that “no

members of the Colored Methodist or Methodist Episcopal Churches” were among those

convicted in Phillips County and advised “the principle of ‘noblesse oblige” should “constrain us

to be patient with this child race as we are with individual children.” Arguing the violence of

Elaine was “NOT RIOTING, BUT INSURRECTION,” he blamed Robert L. Hill, organizer of

Journal of the North Arkansas Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Sixth Session, November

19-23, 1919, Polk Archives; Charles King, “How a Few ‘Renegade’ Thinkers Helped Usher in a New Era of

Anthropology,” interview with Dave Davies, Fresh Air, on KUAF Radio, August 20, 2019; Charles King, Gods of

the Upper Air (New York: Doubleday, 2019), 4-10.

A. C. Millar, “Race Relations,” Arkansas Methodist, October 9, 1919, pp. 1, 3, Polk Archives.

Though not by name, Millar was referring to the lynching of Jordan Jameson on November 11, 1919. See Guy

Lancaster, “Jordan Jameson (Lynching of), Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Central Arkansas Library System, last

updated February 19, 2020, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/jordan-jameson-13490/.

the Progressive Farmers’ and Household Union of America, for organizing an “insurrection”

Millar believed was aimed at taking possession of white-owned property that could have resulted

in the mass slaughter of white citizenry. Though acknowledging that white men of Phillips

County were not blameless and “might be justly criticized,” Millar opined, “they are entitled to

great credit for handling a very ugly situation in an admirable manner . . . . those who were

believed to be innocent were fully protected even when hundreds saw red and believed their lives

and their families and property were in imminent danger of destruction.”

That Millar’s editorial

was reprinted near-verbatim in the Arkansas Gazette the following day shows he not only

accepted the “official version” but participated in codifying it.

Though Hays could not escape the knowledge of brutal racial violence endemic to his

Arkansas childhood, as the youngest son of a white presiding elder of the Methodist Episcopal

Church, South, until his father’s death in 1927, he led a comparatively sheltered life. In

Methodist parsonages, surrounded by books in his father’s library, his mother, one of the first

women court reporters in Arkansas, taught him to type before he could write his name. By the

time he was eight years old, Lee Hays was driving the family’s Model T Ford, enjoying ten-cent

serials at the movies, and the frequent indignities of visiting dignitaries. “To hear good singing,”

he wrote later, sometimes required “running away from home” to the houses of African

American children — “pals of mine” — where his parents would find him singing Baptist hymns

A. C. Millar, “DISGRACEFUL! HORRIBLE,” and “Our Brother in Black,” Arkansas Methodist, November 13,

1919, 1-3, Polk Archives.

“Minister Discusses Elaine Uprising: The Rev. A. C. Millar Tells Facts as He Found Them in Phillips County,”

Arkansas Gazette, November 14, 1919, p. 6; Jeannie M. Whayne, “Low Villains and Wickedness in High Places:

Race and Class in the Elaine Race Riots,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 58 (Autumn 1999): 287-288; Grif

Stockley, Blood in their Eyes, the Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press,

2001), 182-184.

— “good thumping songs you can get your teeth into” and “mournful songs too . . . stamping and

clapping as loud as anybody.”

In the Hays home, both bishops and prostitutes sat at table, though probably not together,

and Hays’ childhood memories of homelife are spiked with the family trait — an “amused way

of looking at things.”

Indeed it appears Lee Hays, who became known for dry, comedic

“talking routines” with the Weavers, may have been the dour one of the family. Before he

became a presiding elder — and a preacher who could “have them laughing one minute and

shedding tears the next” — Reverend Hays was a college student who put a cow up the Hendrix

College Belfry. Lee’s brothers Reuben and Bill, who played practical jokes on their father at the

risk of whippings, replaced their father’s white handkerchief with a red sock to surprise the

congregation when the minister mopped his brow and wired up the family toilet to an old Ford

battery to give Reverend Hays a jolt in his more personal moments.

As Lee Hays would in performance, Reverend Hays clothed ideas in humor. Minnie

Frank, Hays’ older sister, by nine years, remembered their father “would discuss Malthus,

Mendel, and Kant with the more eminent of our Methodist Bishops and then say, ‘Excuse me, I

have to go milk the cow.’”

Lee Hays had his own memories of the family trait. Visiting bishops

and other dignitaries were frequent sources of hilarity. Perhaps revealing the mixed messages of

southern Methodism, Hays recalled, “One Bishop came to visit and we had an old crank Victrola

. . . I think when I was eight or nine I put on . . . what must have been called a race record in

those days. And one of the verses were [sic] It takes a long tall brown skinned girl to make a

Lee Hays, “Christmas 1947 — Some Random Thoughts,” People’s Songs Bulletin, December 1947, p. 11.

Reuben Hays quoted in Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 7; William Hays to Harold Leventhal, December 31, 1964,

series 1, box 1, folder 35, Hays Papers.

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 5, 8-9; quotation, Reuben Hays to Lee Hays, February 25, 1968, series 1, box 1,

folder 35, Hays Papers.

Minnie Frank Hays Moseley quoted in Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 7.

preacher lay his Bible down . . . . I seem to remember my father charging out and changing the

record to . . . the Hungarian Rhapsody.” Driving his father with a visiting bishop to the train

station in the “T-model,” Hays remembered charging “down the little, narrow main street,

through wagons and cars and mules and people with only minutes to spare, and I think we

missed the train, whereupon the Bishop said, ‘That’s alright, I have to go back and change my

underwear anyway.’” “The T-Model,” Hays recalled, “was so much a part of culture and life.

One of the eternal verities for reliability and durability, it was right up there with the Father, Son,

and Holy Ghost.”

Malthus, Mendel, and Kant were not the only philosophers William B. Hays quoted.

Arkansas Methodism, during the era of “muscular Christianity,” embraced the outdoors and “the

pioneer spirit” — with church camps on Petit Jean Mountain and Mount Sequoya. Hays

remembered hiking the hills with his father who, after quoting William James on the subject of

the second wind, left his son sitting on a boulder to find his and hiked on up the mountain.

From his father, Hays acquired his size and ministerial presence, a love of books, food, rural life,

his storytelling abilities, an “amused way of looking at things”— and his ill health. For while

Reverend Hays was by all accounts very vigorous as a younger man, in his mid-fifties, he would

have died of diabetes, had not injectable insulin become available in 1922, eight years after his

youngest son’s birth.

The year 1914 brought change to the Hays family, southern Methodism, Arkansas, and

the world that laid the groundwork for the social-religious outlook necessary for Lee Hays’ later

work. As Europe went to war, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South adopted the Federal

All quotations, Memoirs, Excerpts 1 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 63, Hays Papers.

Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 4, 14.

Council of Churches’ pro-labor Social Creed based on that of the left-leaning Methodist

Federation for Social Service, and William Benjamin Hays, with his wife and three older

children — Lee was born in March— moved from the Saint Louis Methodist Conference to

Little Rock, where Reverend Hays assumed editorship of the “Official Organ of the Five

Conferences of Arkansas and Oklahoma” — then called the Western Methodist.

Though owned

by A. C. Millar, the paper under W. B. Hays’ editorship, five years before Elaine, was different

in topics and tone from later years: reflecting social gospel and reformist impulses, the hardship

wrought by the war years, and, at times, “an amused way of looking at things.” Articles on

prohibition and temperance appeared weekly with frequent reports from the anti-saloon league.

“Rum is on the run,” announced the Methodist in an article on the banning of alcohol in the

European military, and the paper rejoiced in the October 8, 1914, issue that “ninety-five percent

of Arkansas is now legally dry.” The controversial work of women in home missions’ social

work was highlighted; the paper reported not only the appointment of deaconesses but endorsed

laity rights for women, which increased women’s power within the denomination.

When the

Tennessee Supreme Court removed Vanderbilt University from Methodist oversight (W. B. Hays

was a graduate of both Hendrix College and Vanderbilt University), the Western Methodist

reinforced southern Methodists’ commitment to higher education: reprinting, from the eleventh

convention of the Religious Education Association, a new Methodist paradigm focused on social

gospel issues stating that “Without any abandonment of the educational ideals of our fathers, we

must now exalt the newer ideals of social justice, social service, and social responsibility . . . . all

Gross Alexander, ed., The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1914 (Nashville,

Dallas, and Richmond: Publishing House of the M.E. Church South, Smith & Lamar Agents, 1914), 373-374.

George Thornburgh, “Report of the Little Rock Committee on Temperance,” Western Methodist, December 3,

1914, pp. 2-3; “Church Deaconesses,” Western Methodist, March 5, 1914, p. 11; Endorsement of women’s laity

rights is found in an editorial response to a letter from Mrs. E. J. Edwards. Western Methodist, February 19, 1914, p.

8, Polk Archives.

students should regard education not as a title to exemption or privilege but as an obligation to

service.”

With the coming of war in Europe, the Methodist took a darker turn, reflecting the dire

effects of European war on Arkansas. From Marked Tree Reverend Hays reported: “the financial

situation has caused many of the mills and factories in eastern Arkansas to be shut down.”

Unable to sell cotton in Europe, Arkansas cotton prices plummeted. Within three months, from

August to November, prices dropped from 10.6 to 6.6 cents per pound. The cumulative drop

from 1913 to 1914 was even steeper; the average price for cotton in Arkansas fell from 12.08

cents to 7.03 cents that year.

100

Faced with economic hardship, the southern rural church, like its

counterpart in the industrialized north, lost members. Rural churches, however, were losing not

only members but the pastors they could not afford to pay. The situation was so dire one writer

suggested the denomination purchase farms for its rural ministers, as pastors and even college

tuition were paid through “buy a bale” programs.

101

Southern Methodism in 1914 was not

without contradictions. In October, a plea from J. D. Hammond, President of Paine College — a

Methodist-founded college for African Americans tasked with training teachers and preachers to

“Bring the two races together into better Christian relations and thus fit them for co-operation in

working out a common destiny” — encouraged readers to “Buy a Bale and Help Paine College”

“Religious Education and Social Progress,” Western Methodist, September 10, 1914, p. 1; “The Church has Lost

Vanderbilt University,” Western Methodist, April 2, 1914, p. 1, Polk Archives; Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 5.

William B. Hays, “In the Field,” Western Methodist, October 15, 1914, pp. 2-3, Polk Archives.

100

“Retrenchment is in Order,” Western Methodist, October 22, 1914, p. 1, Polk Archives; Federal Reserve Bank of

Richmond, “Cotton Prices in the World Wars,” Economic Quarterly (March 1944): 2, accessed September 15, 2019,

https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/960/item/37944/toc/396851?start_page=2;

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Bulletin 131, Cotton Production and Distribution: Season of

1914 -1915, (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1915): 19, accessed September 15, 2019,

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1910/bulletins/agriculture/131-cotton-production-and-

distribution-season-of-1914-15.pdf.

101

John Womack, “A Suggestion,” Western Methodist, October 8, 1914, p. 4; Alva E. Goode, “Our rural problem,”

Western Methodist, August 20, 1914, pp. 5-6; J. P. Womack, “The Rural Church Problem — A Suggestion,”

Western Methodist, September 10, 1914, pp. 4-5; W.P. Whaley, “An Appeal,” Western Methodist, October 8, 1914,

p. 9, Polk Archives.

alongside an announcement of the Arkansas State Convention of the United Confederate

Veterans in Little Rock.

102

On the question of the European conflict, editorials show an almost

visceral opposition to war. Denouncing “The Disgrace of War” the paper warned, “Let come

what will we can never escape the fact that the national honor is maintained at the cost of

disgrace.” It was a position that linked southern and northern Methodists at war’s outset, and one

reflected in Hays’ early work with the Almanac Singers twenty-seven years later.

103

Not surprisingly, the Western Methodist itself suffered the effects of war. With paper

shortages and increased difficulty collecting subscriptions, issues became smaller, positions were

cut, owner A. C. Millar took over sole editorship, and W. B. Hays, now fully transferred from the

Saint Louis to the Arkansas Methodist Conference, moved his family to Newport to resume the

much-needed work he loved among people of rural churches.

104

Between 1915 and 1927, the

Hays family lived in Newport, Forrest City, Paragould, Conway — where Lee’s older brothers

Reuben and Bill and sister Minnie Frank graduated from Hendrix College — and Booneville.

105

The older Hays children were Arkansas Methodist success stories, and Reverend Hays rose to

some prominence in Arkansas Methodism, especially with regard to needs of rural churches,

about which he presented a “radio chautauqua” — “From Soil to Soul”— on station KTHS in

102

J. D. Hammond, “Buy a Bale and Help Paine College,” Western Methodist, October 14, 1914, p. 11; J. Kellogg,

Adjutant General, “Confederate Veterans Meet,” Western Methodist, October 14, 1914, p. 11, Polk Archives.

103

Pacifism reflected perhaps most notably in Songs for John Doe, The Almanac Singers, Almanac Records,

producer Erin Barnay, 1941. Though Hays took only one writing credit with Pete Seeger for “Washington

Breakdown,” he sang on four of the six songs; “Ballad of October 16,” “Billy Boy,” “Liza Jane,” and “Plow

Under.;” “The Disgrace of War,” Western Methodist, September 8, 1914, p. 1, Polk Archives; Duke, In the

Trenches, 90-95.

104

“Notes and Personals” Western Methodist, October 1, 1914, p. 2; “Appointments,” Western Methodist,

November 26, 1914, p. 3; “Dr. A. C. Millar returns,” Western Methodist, December 3, 1914, p. 1, Polk Archives;

Reverend Hays’ obituary in the Arkansas Methodist stated that he “gave unusual attention to the problems of the

rural church.” “Rev. W. B. Hays,” Arkansas Methodist, May 26, 1927, p. 3, Polk Archives. Multiple obituaries of

W. B. Hays are located in series 1, box 1 folder 35, Hays Papers.

105

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 9; Journal of the North Arkansas Conference Methodist Episcopal Church, South,

Sixth Session, November 19-23, 1919, pp. 4, 29, Polk Archives.

1926.

106

With the exception of Newport, Reverend Hays served during this time as presiding

elder: traveling for two weeks at a stretch to supervise between twenty and forty pastors. Never a

good driver — Lee remembered holding the door open ready to jump for his life, riding with his

father on mountainous roads — Reverend Hays and the Model T, that “eternal verity for

reliability and dependability,” in May 1927 skidded on a gravel road and flipped over. The

obituary in the Arkansas Methodist reported Reverend Hays was killed instantly.

107

“More on that

damned car,” Hays recorded into the reel to reel a lifetime later, describing in extensive detail,

not the accident, but his relationship to the machine that killed his father.

108

106

“Reverend Hays in Radio Speech,” archival clipping, series 1, box 1, folder 37, Hays Papers.

107

“Rev. W. B. Hays,” Arkansas Methodist, May 26, 1927, p. 3, Polk Archives and series 1, box 1, folder 35, Hays

Papers.

108

Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

Chapter 2

“Some Kind of Socialist”

With his father’s death began a period of movement and intermittent homelessness that

would mark Lee Hays’ life and work. Lee, his mother, and sister had limited means of support.

Ellen Reinhardt Hays suffered a complete mental breakdown from which she never fully

recovered; Minnie Frank, suffering from both mental and physical issues, also collapsed. Lee’s

older brothers Reuben and Bill, having both graduated from both Hendrix College and Columbia

University, managed the chaos from Boston and New York where Reuben was rising in banking

and Bill, with the management of B.F. Goodrich. Lee and his mother moved first to lodgings, but

as her illness grew worse, Reuben placed her in institutional care in Little Rock and moved

Minnie Frank to New York.

109

In June, less than a month after his father’s death, Lee was sent to

Camp Markham in Fayetteville. Writing to Reuben, he complained bitterly of loneliness, and

with thirteen-year-old piety, of Dr. Pratt, who “believes in evolution just as Darwin did. If

Darwin said anything of cours [sic] it was so (According to this old fop.) When I told him

everything he said disputed the Bible, to get around it he told me the Bible had gone through so

many editions and had been translated so many times it was not true. He said there is no God. He

109

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 14-16, 23; The 1928 Journal of the North Arkansas Conference shows the widow of

W. B. Hays received $146 from the conference Boards. An accidental death insurance policy through The Arkansas

Methodist paid a solid one-time payment of $1,250 to Charles I. Evans, who had charge of Ellen Reinhardt Hays’

affairs, and for a time, the older brothers received a $300 annual payment from the Inter-Southern Life Insurance

Company. With the onset of the Depression, however, the Inter-Southern was placed in receivership. Letters

between Reuben and William Hays in 1927 suggest finances were strained. Journal of the North Arkansas

Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Fourteenth Session, November 21-25, 1928, p. 55, Polk

Archives; “The Value of Our Insurance Plan,” The Arkansas Methodist, August 11, 1927, p. 3, Polk Archives;

Reuben Hays to William Hays, July 19, 1927 and William Hays to Reuben Hays, October, 25, 1927, series 1, box 1,

folder 35, Hays Papers; “Historical Sketch,” Inter-Southern Insurance Life Insurance Company Ledger, 1931-1932,

p. 3, Collection SC0109, Archives and Manuscripts Collections, Thomas Balch Library, Leesburg VA,

http://www.leesburgva.gov/Home/ShowDocument?id=14535.

made me so mad I had all I could do to keep from knocking him off his chair . . . . Keep writing

to me, I tell you it gets lonesome up here without any mail.”

110

To add to the confusion in Booneville, a new pastor and his family moved into the

parsonage before the Hays’ belongings were moved out. Reuben arrived to a chaos of confusion

about what belonged to the Hays family, what to the church, what to the new minister’s family,

and what bills needed paying. “To my utter disgust,” Reuben wrote Bill, “the new crowd had

moved in bag and baggage. Bed-clothing, piano, and everything else were being used and it was

almost impossible to distinguish which was our personal property and which belonged to father’s

successor. . . . it took three days to get everything packed up, during which time I was annoyed

by everything from squalling babies and inquisitive boys to an old hound dog that they had

imported.” The Hays family owned property in St. Francis County and had part ownership of

land near Paragould, but the latter was enmeshed in legal and financial entanglements and with

seeming relief, the brothers dispensed of it.

111

In July of 1927, Reuben reported to Bill that Lee was, “except for a broken arm” about

the same, and the brothers began planning their younger brother’s future. Lee, their mother, and,

temporarily, Minnie Frank would live with Bill, now with B. F. Goodrich in Atlanta, where, after

finishing the year at Bass High School, Lee would attend “a good boy’s school” — the

Methodist-affiliated Emory Junior College in nearby Oxford. “I realize that so far as Lee is

concerned this is more expense than we can justifiably carry;” Reuben wrote Bill, “yet it may be

for the best.”

112

If Reuben displayed less of the “family trait,” Bill made up for the lack. By

110

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 16; Lee Hays to Reuben Hays, n.d., series 1, box 1, folder 35, Hays Papers. At the

bottom of Hays’ letter to his brother Reuben, in Hays’ hand is written (probably to Doris Willens) “Smite the

Infidels! At thirteen wouldn’t you know it? I am in the oxygen chamber —my foot is — 4 hours a day . . . Hope to

see a miracle soon! Love Lee.”

111

Reuben Hays to Bill Hays, October 7, 1927, series 1, box 1, folder 35, Hays Papers; correspondence and

documents pertaining to the land in Saint Francis County and Paragould, series 1, box 1, folder 35, Hays Papers.

112

Reuben Hays to William Hays, July 19, 1927, series 1, box 1, folder 35, Hays Papers.

October, he reported that their mother seemed better, Lee was “about to bankrupt me from a food

angle,” but that “[we] manage to get along without an armistice. He has been getting along fine

in school and as there is nothing to do here but read, I find time to help him with his studies. It

would never have done to have separated him from Mother this year as the events of the summer

have dazed him considerably. He is playing tennis now and seems to be getting back more of his

old pep and meanness. Hoping you are the same.”

113

The return of “pep and meanness” seems

confirmed by Hays’ 1928 memory of paying a local barnstormer to ride in his bi-plane and fly

over Bill’s Atlanta House. The plane flew so low his mother and sister in the front yard could see

Lee waving from the front seat without goggles or a helmet. “It took only half a block to turn the

airplane around and come back around about six times,” Hays remembered, “and I’m waving

down the street and my mother’s hopping up and down . . . . my sister told me later that she was

yelling, you come down from here this instant.’ But I didn’t.”

114

In the fall of 1928, Lee Hays

began his schooling at Emory.

In his “posthumous memoirs,” Hays told Myles Horton, in the early 1980s, he was

“reaching back” to “golden places” in his life.

115

Emory was the first. For Hays, the Emory years

were a coming of age period with shimmering memories of an old Confederate cemetery where

Sherman’s hairpins — railroad ties heated red hot by Union soldiers and wrapped around the

113

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 16; William Hays to Reuben Hays, October 25, 1927, series 1, box 1, folder 35,

Hays Papers; Ellen Reinhardt Hays was in and out of institutions for the remainder of her life. Hays last remembered

seeing her “behind bars,” in a hospital that was “like bedlam” in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of

2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

114

Memoirs, Excerpts 1 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 63, Hays Papers.

115

Lee Hays to Myles Horton, n.d., series 4, box 5, folder 40, Hays Papers. Hays’ reference to the Weavers’

November 28, 1980, reunion concert and documentary “Wasn’t that a Time,” dates the letter between November

1980, and Hays’ death on August 26, 1981. Emory catalogs show Lee Hays entered Emory in 1928 and graduated in

1930. At Emory, where literary societies were important to both academic and social life, in 1930, Hays served as

secretary/treasurer for one of the oldest and most prestigious — the Few Literary Society founded in 1839. The Dial,

1930 (Oxford, GA: Published by the Students of Emory Junior College, 1930), 51; Kerry Bowden, Archives and

Special Collections, Oxford College Library, Oxford, Georgia, correspondence with the author, October 9, 2019;

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 17; archival clipping, series 1, box 1 folder 37, Hays Papers.

bases of trees — hung suspended fourteen feet above ground, and where, on a fallen Confederate

tombstone surrounded by tall, dried, and golden grasses, he “lost his cherry” to a blonde-haired

local girl who later threw him out of bed in her father’s house for reading Walt Whitman’s “I

Dream the Body Electric,” which, despite the circumstances, she despised as “nasty.” Hays

quoted Whitman for the rest of his life, believing creativity came from “loafing and inviting the

soul.”

116

“Inviting the soul” at an Emory revival meeting was more problematic, however, and

Hays’ years at Emory show he was developing a sense of the dramatic, as well as other

sensibilities. Sitting in the back row at an Emory revival, unable to feel the spirit like others who

were weeping and praying — feeling left out and “maybe to test them out” — Lee began to

“hoot and holler:” knocking over rows of seats, and, finally, heaving the marble top off a pulpit

which fell to the floor and broke. “Whereupon,” he recalled, “one of the teachers came up to me

and said, Lee behave yourself, in a normal tone of voice, which somehow convinced me that the

fervor wasn’t all that real.” What might seem like youthful misbehavior can also be read as

Hays’ depiction, albeit mischievously, of high drama employed by revivalists of the period.

117

the late 1920s when he attended Emory, Billy Sunday’s crowd-pleasing evangelistic

showmanship and athleticism had been covered in major newspapers for over twenty years.

118

116

Memoirs, Excerpts 1 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 63, Hays Papers; “I loafe and invite the soul” is a phrase from

Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Much has been made by writers of Hays’ use of this phrase as a sign of laziness; none

have made the connection to his reading of Whitman. See “Song of Myself,” 1892 version, Poetry Foundation,

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version.

117

Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

118

“Noted Ex-Baseball Player A Famous Evangelist,” The Washington Times (Washington, D. C.), July 6, 1902, p.

6, Topics Chronicling America-Billy Sunday: Athlete and Evangelist, Library of Congress Newspaper and Current

Periodical Reading Room, Serial and Government Publications Division, accessed, October 1, 2019,

https://www.loc.gov/rr/news/topics/sunday.html. Sunday was far from the only dramatic revivalist. Burke

Culpepper, a highly respected evangelist of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, who in 1916 while preaching a

revival in Helena, Arkansas criticized “the unfair treatment of labor, especially colored farm labor,” was described

as the “Billy Sunday of the South,” and had in his repertoire of sermons one during which, donning a surgeon’s

Revivalists’ soul-saving measures frequently provided a church-approved source of

entertainment Hays, as a Methodist minister’s son, knew well. Within four years after leaving

Emory, he would become the “chief helper” and staunch supporter of another dramatic preacher,

Claude Williams, who cited Billy Sunday as one of his chief influences.

119

Hays’ childhood and

youth were filled with a rich variety of pastoral personas, including dignified bishops and his

father’s “amused way of looking at things,” dramatic evangelists who kept thousands spellbound

at tent meetings through hot summer nights, and the impassioned proponents of radical religion

with whom he worked in his twenties.

120

Reinterpreting and blending them in his intellectual and

creative output, Hays constructed, in himself, a powerful tool for communicating ideas of unity,

social justice, and radical equality that proved effective from the 1940’s past the era of

McCarthyism.

Not all Hays’ memories of Emory were “golden.” He believed he was thrown out for

“stealing something he didn’t steal” — a bottle of mosquito lotion he was tricked into taking

from one of the school’s top athletes and refilling with water. Not knowing exactly what had

happened or why he was called to the headmaster’s office and asked to leave, he packed his “big

old cardboard suitcase” and — more puzzled than hurt — walked into Oxford to take the bus to

gown, mask, and rubber gloves, with medical equipment borrowed from local hospitals, including “real ether,” he

pantomimed a surgical operation to examine the contents of a patient’s heart: removing items such as whisky, dice,

and a pistol. James Culpepper, Burke Culpepper, Prince of Evangelists, (Louisville, KY: The Herald Press, 1952),

26. The appellation, “the Billy Sunday of the South” appears in The Daily Press of Paragould quoted in James

Culpepper, Prince of Evangelists, 47, 53-55. Culpepper’s comments on the unfair treatment of labor appeared in the

Helena World, July 21, 1916, cited in Susan E. C. Huntsman, “Race Relations in Phillips County, 1895-1920,”

(Unpublished honor’s thesis University of Arkansas Fayetteville, 1996), 16, cited in Jeannie M. Whayne, “Low

Villains and Wickedness in High Places: Race and Class in the Elaine Riots,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 58

Autumn 1999): 308.

119

Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 27.

120

In August of 1923, Burke Culpepper reportedly preached to between two and three thousand people each night

and from six hundred to one thousand during the day after stores closed at 9 a. m. during a three-week-long revival

— a “county-wide campaign” — held in Hugo, Oklahoma. W. U. Witt, “Revival at Hugo Oklahoma,” The Christian

Advocate 84 (November 14, 1923): (19) 1171.

Atlanta. After that, Hays said simply, “I was a hobo on the road for some time.”

121

Whatever the

confusion, Emory’s records show Lee Hays graduated in June 1930, and a Conway newspaper

records he was in town planning to attend Hendrix-Henderson College in the fall, as had his

older siblings.

122

Hays never attended. After the stock market crash of 1929, the college, and

indeed, the university system of the Arkansas Methodist Episcopal Church, South was in

financial crisis. Amid much controversy, Hendrix in Conway and Henderson-Brown in

Arkadelphia had merged the previous year, causing A. C. Millar to protest the towns had been

“set at one another’s throats in a death grapple.” By 1932, Hendrix was over $26,000 in the

red.

123

“There’s a line in my father’s obit,” Hays recorded in his taped memoirs more than forty

years later, “‘Devoted to his family, he had given his three older children the best educational

advantages and they are all making places for themselves in the world.’ I was the young one, 13

when my father died, and while the others were making places for themselves in the world, I was

scrounging around looking for a bite to eat.”

124

From Cleveland, Hays’ brother Reuben, thirty-

one, married, and an analyst for the Cleveland-based investment fund, Continental Shares, sent

letters to Lee general delivery along his “expected route” about a job at the Cleveland Public

Library; with no home or family left in Arkansas, at sixteen, Lee Hays shifted his hitchhiking

route toward Ohio. By September, he was living on the third floor of his brother’s home,

working in the Cleveland Public Library, and learning how to become “some kind of socialist.”

125

121

Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

122

Kerry Bowden, Archives and Special Collections, correspondence with the author, October 9, 2019; Willens,

Lonesome Traveler, 17; archival clipping, series 1, box 1, folder 37, Hays Papers.

123

James E. Lester, Jr., Hendrix College: A Centennial History (Conway, AR: Hendrix College Centennial

Committee, Hendrix College, 1984), 117-128; A. C. Millar quoted in Lester, 119.

124

Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

125

Hays quoted in Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 18-19; Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays

Papers.

“The Beginning of Socialist Thought”

The four years in Cleveland marked a period of political awakening in Hays’ life. In

Cleveland’s urban industrial setting, mind-opening books in the Cleveland Public Library, “little

mags,” socialism that was accessible and prevalent, and a firsthand view of mass suffering

inflicted by the Great Depression created a new awareness of the possibility of dissent as a

means for change. Working as a page in the vast spaces of Cleveland’s new five-story library,

Hays quickly discovered books marked with a black stamp as “unfit for children” were the most

interesting.

126

Among these, books by Upton Sinclair, were “like doors opening.” After the

“fixed society” of the South, Sinclair’s books taught the sixteen-year-old pastor’s son that

irreverence was not only possible but could be an instrument of change. “Just the idea that you

COULD be irreverent about these people and institutions, education, banks, etc.,” Hays said of

Sinclair’s works, “and he raised hell with Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, Big Oil People . . .

[that] was the beginning of socialist thought.”

127

Seeing lines at soup kitchens, runs on banks, and

encroaching tent cities, Hays came to believe, with many Americans, that the country was on the

verge of a fascist revolution.

128

As he passed socialists speaking on city street corners and

attended socialist meetings, “something sank in,” Hays recalled in 1976, “— and I’ve more or

less considered myself a socialist ever since.”

129

He could hardly have escaped the social and economic turmoil in the streets of Cleveland

between 1930 and 1934. Four months after his arrival, a special federal census reported, of the

126

The main building of the Cleveland Public Library where Hays worked as a page from 1930-1934 was a five-

million-dollar plant completed in 1925. Michael Ruffing, “Cleveland Public Library,” Encyclopedia of Cleveland

History, Case Western University, accessed January 5, 2020, https://case.edu/ech/articles/c/cleveland-public-library;

Richard Raponi, “Cleveland Public Library,” Cleveland Historical, accessed January 8, 2020,

https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/788.

127

Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box, 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

128

Capaldi, “Wasn’t That A Time!,” p. 3.

129

Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

city’s 900,049 residents, nearly 100,000 were out of work while another 25,000 had been laid off

or were working only part-time — and the numbers kept rising. By 1933, 219,000 workers in

Cuyahoga County were unemployed.

130

On May Day of that year, led by the Communist-founded

Unemployment Council Committee, thousands of Cleveland’s unemployed marched on City

Hall less than a mile from the Public Library where Hays, poring over Upton Sinclair, worked as

a page for fifteen to twenty-five cents an hour. He had moved out of his brother Reuben’s house

to the Cleveland YMCA by the time Cleveland’s Plain Dealer reported in 1933 and 1934 that

3,300 garment workers struck; in the spring of 1934, workers struck at over fifteen different

entities. Housing evictions sparked violence between police and protesting crowds. In a July

1933 confrontation with six-thousand protesters, police deployed teargas, clubs, and firehoses;

fourteen people were hurt and seven arrested. In a different way, the Depression penetrated the

library itself. There, artists funded by the New Deal Public Works of Art Project and Civil Works

Administration — headed, in the Midwest Region by Cleveland Museum of Art Director,

William M. Milliken in consultation with Linda Eastman — painted enormous murals in the

library’s vast new spaces.

131

“I think it was what I saw of inequality during the depression that

began to bear down on my conscience and my consciousness,” Hays reflected in his taped

memoirs. “The whole country in the grip of a terrible sickness . . . . somewhere there was an

awful lot of money, and the people who had it didn’t have it because they’d worked for it, and

everywhere there were a lot of people who needed money who didn’t have it who were willing to

130

Marian Morton, “It Was the Worst of Times, It was the Worst of Times: Cleveland and the Great Depression,”

Teaching Cleveland Digital, teachingcleveland.org, August 5, 2016,

http://teachingcleveland.org/category/1930s/the-depression-in-cleveland/.

131

Morton, “It Was the Worst of Times;” “Cleveland Main Library: Coltman Mural — Cleveland Ohio,” The Living

New Deal, accessed August 20, 2020, https://livingnewdeal.org/projects/cleveland-main-library-coltman-mural-

cleveland-oh/.

work for it and had no chance to. Somewhere along in there I became some kind of socialist. Just

what kind of socialist I’ve never to this day figured out.”

132

By the time Hays left Ohio in 1934, he had firsthand experience of Cleveland residents’

tenuous existence. In 1932, after organizing the Cleveland Loan agency for the Hoover

Administration’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Reuben Hays, having been appointed

Assistant Director for the RFC itself, left Cleveland for Washington D. C. Lee, meanwhile,

moved into the Cleveland YMCA where he and a roommate, Joe Sedlak, struggled to pay rent

with library salaries of twenty-five cents an hour. With only the change in their pockets when

Franklin Roosevelt declared a bank holiday in 1933, Hays and Sedlak did not eat for two days.

When Reuben returned to Cleveland in 1934 as an officer of the Federal Reserve Bank, Lee

stayed at the Y. Not an illogical move for a young man with burgeoning leftist sensibilities

whose brother had just become an officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland — and it

was not his first stay at a YMCA. At eleven years old, his father sent him alone by train from

Arkansas to New York, where his brother Bill was working at the YMCA in New York City.

133

However, Hays’ and Sedlak’s recollections of the period and a letter Reuben Hays wrote

to Lee on Christmas Eve 1964 suggest the brothers were engaged in a generational clash for

control that was both personal and political. Sedlak recalled Lee’s acerbic, thundering attacks on

politicians and a government that could allow “decent men to survive only by selling apples on

the streets.”

134

Hays’ memoirs from the late 1970s record in typical, dry fashion, “For some

reason I already didn’t have much sense of race prejudice in those days . . . I had a girlfriend in

Cleveland who was black. . . . That wasn’t usual in those days even in Cleveland. Today it would

132

Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

133

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 21-24; Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers. Willens

describes a trip when Hays was nine years old; Hays’ memoirs indicate he was eleven.

134

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 22.

be required.”

135

Reuben Hays’ Christmas Eve letter, written thirteen years after Lee reconnected

with his family in 1951, reveals both the tensions of the Cleveland years and the humor of

brothers reconciled. “Dear Lee,” he wrote from Cincinnati, “It has been over 30 years since I

believed I knew what was best for the world and you. You, having an equal amount of

stubbornness and independence (some things seem to run in the Hays family) said “To Hell with

him! I’ll live my life as I damn well please —” And you have.”

136

Though they corresponded

regularly from 1951 until Lee’s death thirty years later, Lee and Reuben Hays never saw each

other again after the day Lee, with no word of explanation, left Cleveland and hitchhiked back to

Arkansas that spring of 1934.

137

Hays did not say why he went back to Arkansas, but based on the mentors he chose once

there, it seems likely he decided that at age twenty, it was time to stand with those working to

improve conditions for the poor, disenfranchised, and exploited in his home state. Desperate

conditions in Arkansas and elsewhere in the South were in the news nationally and within Hays’

newly acquired socialist circles. Norman Thomas, alerted to the dire situation of Arkansas

sharecroppers by socialist organizer Martha Johnson in 1933, traveled to Arkansas to see for

himself, wrote letters to Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, and, in 1934, published The

Plight of the Sharecroppers through the League for International Democracy.

138

Southern racial

injustice was front page news Hays would have had readily available in the Cleveland Public

Library, and radical religionists were on the front lines of the fight. As The New York Times

carried near-daily reports on the Scottsboro Case, Winifred Chappell representing the Methodist

135

Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

136

Reuben Hays to Lee Hays, December 24, 1951, series 1, box 1, folder 35, Hays Papers.

137

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 24, 26.

138

M.S. Venkataramani, “Norman Thomas, Arkansas Sharecroppers, and the Roosevelt Agricultural Policies, 1933-

1937,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (September 1960): 229-232; Norman Thomas, The Plight of the

Sharecropper, second edition, (League for Industrial Democracy, 1934), Internet Archive, accessed January 1, 2020,

https://archive.org/details/ThePlightOfTheShare-cropper/page/n1.

Federation for Social Service, traveled with the Scottsboro-Herndon Delegation to investigate

conditions of the Scottsboro defendants in Alabama and Angelo Herndon in Georgia.

139

Just a

few months earlier, William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago Tribune attacked Chappell, Harry

Ward, and the MFSS as examples of the “Pacifism, radicalism, and communism . . . spreading

“like a disease” in America’s schools, colleges, churches, and social organizations.”

140

Chappell

and other radical religionists Hays would soon come to know were on the leading edge of a

changing social gospel movement radicalized by the Depression and global fascist threat. When

he returned to Arkansas in 1934 and began working with Claude Williams, Lee Hays became a

younger member of a far-flung network of radical religionists extending from New York to

Tennessee and Arkansas. Those who would be most influential in his life were students or

associates of three professors of social ethics: Harry Ward and Reinhold Niebuhr at Union

Theological Seminary and Alva Taylor at Vanderbilt University, instructor and mentor to Claude

Williams.

141

139

The Scottsboro-Herndon delegation was sponsored by the National Committee for the Defense of Political

Prisoners, the American Civil Liberties Union (of which Harry Ward was National Chairperson), the International

Labor Defense, and the Herndon Defense Committee. See A Southern Welcome: A Report by John Howard Lawson,

Report of Scottsboro-Herndon Delegation (New York: The National Committee for the Defense of Political

Prisoners, November 1934) in Michigan State University, Special Collections, The American Radicalism Collection,

Gerald M. Kline Digital and Multimedia Center, https://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/southernwelcome.pdf.

Examples of Scottsboro coverage include, “Scottsboro Trials Delayed by Motion: Defense Asks Quashing on

Ground No Negroes Were on the Jury Finding Indictments,” The New York Times, March 7, 1933, p. 11; F.

Raymond Daniell, Special to The New York Times, “Negroes Transfer Waits in Alabama: Eight Remain in Kilby

Prison Death Cells Pending Decision to Move to Birmingham. BOTH SIDES MARKING TIME Defense Lawyers

Want to Consult Clients in Privacy Prior to Trial Next Week,” The New York Times, March 18, 1933, p. 17; “Jury

Out Overnight With Scottsboro Case; Judge Warns of Bigotry and Racial Issue,” The New York Times, Sunday,

April 9, 1933, p. 1; “Mass Meeting Urges Trial Delay,” The New York Times, April 17, 1933, p. 4; Hamilton Basso,

“Five Days in Decatur,” The New Republic, December 20, 1933, p. 161-164.

140

“Legion’s Chief Assails Church ‘Pacifism’ Drive: Reds Invade Colleges Says Hayes Here,” Chicago Sunday

Tribune, July 1, 1934, p. 12. Attacks on Chappell, Harry Ward, and the MFSS continued in the Chicago Tribune.

See Rembert Gilman Smith D. D., “Driving Churches on the Rocks,” Chicago Sunday Tribune, October 20, 1935,

16.

141

Belfrage, Faith to Free the People, 43-45; Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 28-30; Dunbar,

Against the Grain, 29-30, 39-41; Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making, 1-5, 126. Winifred Chappell, who became

Hays’ friend and mentor, as Secretary of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, was not a student, but a close

associate of Harry Ward’s. Myles Horton and James Dombrowski, both of whom Hays would come to know at

When Hays walked into the library of the Presbyterian manse in Paris, Arkansas in July

of 1934, Williams was in the midst of pitched battle for his pastorate. The library where Hays

would enjoy spending time over the coming weeks revealed much about why he found Claude

and Joyce Williams compelling, and why many of their congregants were abandoning them.

Around the room, the Williamses created a makeshift mural of magazine cutouts depicting the

“progress of man” from empty-handedness to industrial slave; portraits of Lenin and Eugene

Debs hung alongside the image of Jesus on the wall, and Williams’ Bible, often resting on the

arm of his chair, was just steps away from shelves displaying works of Marx, Thorstein Veblen,

Norman Thomas, Edward Carpenter, H. G. Wells, and Upton Sinclair.

142

In this parsonage

library among symbols of his new-found socialism, it is no wonder Lee Hays felt at home.

Hays found more than symbols in the library. Filled with activity, people, and

controversy, the manse was a gathering place for the town’s young people and students from the

Presbyterian College of the Ozarks twenty-five miles away in Clarkesville where Hays, in

August, enrolled to study for the ministry. Among the young people Hays met was Zilphia

Johnson — a brilliant musician four years his senior disowned by her father for her radicalism —

who became Hays’ friend, mentor, and artistic collaborator.

143

Ward Rodgers, a young Methodist

preacher and socialist from Oklahoma and Texas Williams met, with Howard Kester, in classes

with Alva Taylor at Vanderbilt, had quit his Arkansas pastorate, moved into the manse and was

Highlander Folk School were students of both Harry Ward and Reinhold Niebuhr. Gary Dorrien posits Horton more

sympathetic to Niebuhr, and Dombrowski more attuned to Ward. Williams claimed Harry Ward, who believed “the

Religion of Christ and the Philosophy of Marx Not Antagonistic,” as influential. Ward quotation from Doug

Rossinow, “The Radicalization of the Social Gospel: Harry F. Ward and the Search for a New Social Order, 1888-

1936,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 15 (Winter 2005): 68. Ward Rodgers and Don

West likewise met Williams in Alva Taylor’s classes at Vanderbilt; Williams attended classes and seminars, but did

not receive a degree from the institution. See also Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day, 78.

142

Belfrage, A Faith to Free the People, 70, 145.

143

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 26, 27-29; Hodge, “The Coal Operator’s Daughter,” 295; Capaldi, “Wasn’t That A

Time!,” p. 3.

helping Williams plan a “Religion and Revolution” conference. A month later, the conference

was attended by students from Commonwealth Labor College, local labor leaders, Myles Horton

from Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, and Willard Uphaus of the Connecticut-based

National Religion and Labor Foundation (NRLF).

144

Miners who had joined the Presbyterian

church after Williams’ membership drive among them, stopped by to talk with the “Preacher,”

and African American sharecroppers sat down to dinner at the family table. Gathered in the

manse library with Joyce and Claude Williams, Hays, Johnson, and the other young people

discussed everything from the Bible to philosophy and labor organizing, racism, and sexual

equality late into the night. It was, perhaps, not surprising that Hays’ grades at College of the

Ozarks that fall semester were less than stellar; he devoured books at the manse and was

enthralled by what he saw Williams trying to accomplish. “What Claude has tried to do,” he later

wrote, “is to take the Bible seriously. . . . Claude has said, ‘Look here, do you really believe the

Bible? Then for Heaven’s sake let’s do what the Bible tells us to do.’ For of course, we’d have

no Jim Crow, no hate; we’d have democracy in our plantations and factories and homes and

schools and churches; we’d have as Claude says, the Kingdom of God on earth. Who wouldn’t

want that?”

145

The work in Paris was fast drawing to a close when Lee Hays entered Claude Williams’

world of charisma and chaos the summer of 1934. Two months before Hays arrived, 14 of the

112 tithing members of Williams’ Paris congregation signed a petition charging Williams with

dereliction of duties, communism, heresy, and requesting the Fort Smith presbytery revoke his

144

Dunbar, Against the Grain, 70; Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 52-56; See also, Nan Woodruff,

American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta, (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard

University Press, 2003), 161.

145

Belfrage, Faith to Free the People, 68; Hays quoted in Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 26; Lee Hays, “The Singing

Preacher,” Peoples Songs Bulletin 3, Second Anniversary Edition, February/March 1948, pp. 11, 13.

pastorate. Williams’ dynamic brand of Billy-Sunday-inspired preaching, captivating to

congregants in 1930, no longer made up for the continual flouting of social norms Hays and the

young people found so appealing. Miners stopped in to shoot pool in the games room Williams

installed in the church’s abandoned wing, where, in addition to games, a nudist magazine was

found.

146

He not only dined with African American sharecroppers, but was known to swear,

smoke, and have a beer or two with the local miners, and, by liquidating his life insurance policy,

had poured the foundation on a “Proletarian Labor Temple” designed to combine church and

labor school. Further construction he planned to fund by assessing check off dues from the local

United Mine Workers was thwarted by UMW district leader, David Fowler. In spring of 1933,

half Williams’ paycheck — that paid by the elders of his own congregation — vanished. The

remainder, paid by the Arkansas Presbyterian Board of Missions, remained for the moment.

147

Williams’ membership drive among local miners, which swung the balance of church power

away from the original members, was the last straw. Though he, Joyce, and their three daughters

stayed in Paris until the end of January, the presbytery revoked the pastorate in June, and notice

was served for eviction of the Williams family from the manse.

148

Williams was not without allies in the fight, and among these, Hays found friends and

mentors on whose work he hoped to model his own. From Nashville and Mount Eagle, fellow

Presbyterians Howard Kester, Williams’ longtime friend from Alva Taylor’s classes at

Vanderbilt, and Myles Horton of Highlander Folk School wrote on Williams’ behalf, as did

Willard Uphaus, who soon arrived to investigate for the National Religion and Labor

146

Belfrage, Faith to Free the People, 35-37, 67-68, 110-112. Per Belfrage, Williams saw nudism as a “sincere

revolt against the hypocrisy found in most churches” and remarked that nobody protested the “enforced nudism” of

thousands of poor children. See Faith to Free the People, 111-112.

147

Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 41-4. Half of Williams’ $1,800 salary in Paris was paid by his

congregation and half by the Arkansas Board of Missions, headed by M. L. Gillespie. Belfrage, Faith to Free the

People, 63, 123; Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 31.

148

Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 52-54, 59; Belfrage, Faith to Free the People, 123-125, 133.

Foundation. The International Labor Defense Fund (ILD) likewise pledged support.

149

From

Union Theological Seminary in New York, Reinhold Niebuhr published an article supporting

Williams in the Christian Century. Winifred Chappell, who had visited Paris on behalf of the

MFSS, remained a staunch supporter, and Williams had support from the Presbyterian Church

(USA) which, in 1932, had approved at its General Assembly in Denver sixteen ideals and

objectives — including the rights of labor to collective bargaining, “erection of a cooperative

world order,” and “mutual goodwill and racial, economic, and religious cooperation.”

150

This

new Presbyterian dictum Williams believed would sustain him was part of a more radical social

gospel movement among mainline churches trying to reach a desperate and drifting membership.

Though the MFSS, led by Harry Ward and Winifred Chappell was at the forefront of the

movement, other mainline denominations saw the need for social service organizations.

Presbyterians founded a Fellowship for Social Action, Congregationalists, a Council for Social

Action, and Episcopalians, a Church League for Industrial Democracy. Williams and his allies

were thus part the expanding network of radical religionists in alliance with socialists and

communists extending from New York to Nashville and the South.

151

It was a network Hays

entered, embraced, and in which he planned to make his future. It was not, however, a network

that could save Williams’ pastorate in Paris from the judgement rendered by the district

presbytery in Fort Smith.

Hays was still enrolled at College of the Ozarks during the ensuing months of Williams’

“manic desperation.” Having now lost all church income, Williams became increasingly focused

on the need for “revolutionary action.”

152

During a frenetic six-month period of near-constant

149

Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 54-55.

150

Belfrage, A Faith to Free the People, 107-108.

151

Ibid., 122, 107-108.

152

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 36; Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 58, 57.

travel to enlist support of friends and allies, Williams cemented alliances that would soon impact

Hays’ life. He became more deeply involved with Arkansas socialists and the Southern Tenant

Farmers Union; friends from Commonwealth College found Williams positions as president of

the American Federation of Teachers local and as organizer for the new Workingman’s Union of

the World for relief workers and the unemployed. In November, Williams organized a bi-racial

conference in Paris to “face together the problem of creating a just society.” The three hundred

people in attendance heard addresses by Sherwood Gates and Willard Uphaus of the NRLF and

Brooks Hays, the New Deal Administration’s recently appointed labor compliance officer for

Arkansas for the National Recovery Administration.

153

Less than a month later, Williams was in

Chattanooga for a December 4 Conference of Younger Churchmen, organized by Howard

Kester, with Myles Horton and James Dombrowski of Highlander Folk School. Meeting both

Williams’ personal needs and new focus on revolution, the conference crafted a Statement of

Principles calling for “a genuinely co-operative social economy democratically planned . . .

eliminat[ing] private ownership of the means of production and distribution wherever such

ownership interferes with social good,” sent a letter to the Presbyterian church of Paris

requesting Williams’ reinstatement, and elected him to its executive committee. Three days

before Christmas, having sold his car, Williams hitchhiked to a labor conference in Fort Smith

where he wrote “revolutionary” resolutions demanding the Federal Government take over relief

allocations in Arkansas or face protests by the Workingman’s Union over poor wages and

conditions.

154

These resolutions would soon spur conditions in Fort Smith that would lead to

Williams’ arrest.

153

Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 57; “Politics and Principles: Documenting the Care of

Congressman Brooks Hays,” University Libraries Digital Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries,

Fayetteville, https://digitalcollections.uark.edu/digital/collection/BrooksHays.

154

Dunbar, Against the Grain, 74; Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 58.

As his family spent a cold Christmas Eve supported by donations from those who had

little themselves, Williams wrote an upbeat letter to Kester about the Fort Smith meeting. The

letter’s principal focus, however, was the future of Zilphia Johnson. Correspondence between

Williams and Kester regarding her shows an interest in assisting the next generation of radical

workers and promoting “art as a weapon,” three years before Hays, as Instructor of Dramatics at

Commonwealth College, announced creating “drama as a weapon for union organization” as a

mission of the college’s dramatics program.

155

“You recall Zilphia Mae Johnson,” Williams

wrote, “the young college graduate of my Young People’s Group? . . . . I tell you Buck, we must

find a place to use her in the movement -especially, since she is a Southerner, in the interracial

phase. And too, could she be of service on the tour Streater [sic] You and myself are planning -

music, dramatics, reading?”

156

Williams’ and Kester’s letters about and to Johnson over the

course of the next month contributed to her move to Highlander Folk School, and thus, to the

enrollment of Lee Hays — another “Southerner in the interracial phase” — at Highlander in the

Spring of 1935.

Despite his upbeat tone, Williams’ Christmas Eve letter to Kester shows that conjoined

with his new revolutionary focus was a penchant to dismiss even his staunchest allies he felt

were not in strict agreement with him or failed to support him in the way he desired. After the

November 9 Paris conference, Williams confided to Kester that he planned to disassociate

himself from the Religion and Labor Foundation — judging Willard Uphaus’ views to be

155

Belfrage, Faith to Free the People, 143; Lee Hays, “Workers Dramatics,” Commonwealth College Fortnightly,

September 1, 1937, p. 2.

156

Claude Williams to Howard Kester, December 24, 1934, series 1, folder 13, Kester Papers. Williams is probably

referring to African American Socialist George Streator who had attended and spoken at the Chattanooga

Conference of Younger Churchmen, on December 4, 1934. See Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 58;

Dunbar, Against the Grain, 74; Hays, “Workers Dramatics,” p. 2.

“compromising,” representing a “liberal, go slow” approach. To Kester on November 16, he

commented:

I feel that he [Uphaus] betrayed the conference, my efforts, and everyone who co-

operated with us in his speech Monday. Moreover he wants a $4,000 NRA official, a

bourgeois lawyer, a twice-defeated candidate for governor on the Democratic ticket to be

secretary in the Southwest -never do for me to serve in that capacity: I’m too direct: I

might offend the elete [sic.].

157

Williams continued receiving personal donations from Uphaus, however, and by

Christmas Eve, his opinion of Uphaus was shifting.

158

Kester, who had supported Williams’

original decision — signing himself, “your buddy in all things”— likewise supported him in this.

Replying on January 3, 1935, Kester wrote, “He [Uphaus] does have the greatest admiration for

you. . . . it would be a good thing for you to pull along with them now. Willard means well.”

159

Willard Uphaus did more than mean well. On January 30 he wrote to Harry Hopkins asserting

Williams had received discriminatory treatment when denied federal funding to teach workers

education in Paris. By February, he had begun forming the National Committee for the Support

of Claude Williams, which included among its members Kester, Winifred Chappell, and

Reinhold Niebuhr. Within a few months, Lee Hays and Willard Uphaus were working together

on the Committee to ensure the survival of Williams, his family, and his work.

160

Hays’ work on Williams’ behalf at times makes him seem a father figure to his frenetic

mentor rather than the reverse. After another semester at College of the Ozarks, during which

time his grades improved, Hays dropped out to help Williams more fully in his work. His

157

Claude Williams to Howard Kester, November 16, 1934, series 1, folder 12, Kester Papers.

158

Williams to Kester, November 16, 1934; Belfrage, Faith to Free the People, 140-143.

159

Howard Kester to Claude Williams, November 18, 1934, series 1, folder 12, Kester Papers; Howard Kester to

Claude Williams, January 3, 1935, series 1 folder 14, Kester Papers.

160

Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 58; Willard Uphaus to Harry L. Hopkins, January 20, 1935,

series 1, folder 14, Kester Papers. Committee members also included Cameron P. Hall, Harold E. Fey, George

Edwards, and Walter Warner. Willard Uphaus fundraising letter, May 7, 1935, series 1, folder 16, Kester Papers.

decision may have been impacted by the crisis of Williams’ arrest in Fort Smith less than a

month after the family’s eviction from the Paris manse at the end of January 1935.

The Williamses and Hays decided the building in Fort Smith, rented with thirty dollars advanced

from Willard Uphaus, would house the New Era School of Prophetic Religion—offering “classes

in trade union history, organization and tactics, in the Christianity of Christ, and in political and

economic subjects.” Though still reeling from the events in Paris, they were hopeful. Zilphia

Johnson visited on her way to Highlander Folk School, and Hays, with students from College of

the Ozarks, worked to get the project off the ground: soliciting support from, among others, both

Earl Browder and Norman Thomas. Despite their efforts, the Fort Smith project was over before

it began.

161

Braced to new militancy by the Fort Smith Workingmen’s Union of the World

conference in December where Williams had authored “revolutionary” resolutions, Fort Smith

WPA workers, joined by four thousand people from surrounding Sebastian County — numbers

greater than ten percent of Fort Smith’s population — were striking over a pending decrease in

wages when the Williamses arrived. After strike leaders Horace Bryan and Lucien Koch were

arrested, Williams assumed leadership.

162

Singing hymns and waving banners, the delegation from College of the Ozarks with

Commonwealth College joined in multi-racial “hunger marches” through the streets of Fort

Smith. During a prayer meeting on the morning of February 18 before a march was to take place,

161

Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 61-62; quotation, 61; Belfrage, Faith to Free the People, 153-

154; School transcripts, series 2, box 2, folder 61, Hays Papers; Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 26.

162

Williams quoted in Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 58. Per the 1930 census, the population of

Fort Smith was 31,429, Benjamin Boulden, “Fort Smith (Sebastian County),” The Encyclopedia of Arkansas,

Central Arkansas Library System, last updated May 13, 2020, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/fort-smith-

988/; Dunbar, Against the Grain, 70-72; Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 62-63. Gellman and Roll

argue the proposed wage decrease due to state FERA administrator’s contention southern workers did not require as

much as northern workers, and that too much charity would make them lazy. Dunbar contends the pay decrease was

to keep relief workers’ pay in line with that of local miners. The reduction was to be from thirty to twenty cents per

hour.

police arrested Williams, telling him, as he remembered in his memoir of the event, “The

respectable citizens of Fort Smith are going to mob you, and by God they ought to!”

163

Searching

for a telephone among the town’s citizenry to call for help that night, Hays was told, “No friend

of that damn communist can use my phone.” With other students, he stood guard over Joyce and

the three children all night amid rumors that seven hundred vigilantes had gathered in the

streets.

164

After eighteen days imprisonment, during which Williams feared for his life and the

lives of his family, Hays and around thirty students met him with “home brew” at the rooms of a

College of the Ozarks professor, sixty miles from Fort Smith. There, Williams recounted the

horrors of the Fort Smith jail. “You ought not to fool with a man like that,” a local minister

responded when Hays confided in him about Williams’ experiences. “He’s a hypocrite. He

preaches birth control and he’s got eight children and five of them have n****r blood.”

165

Less

than a year after his return to Arkansas, Hays experienced the danger faced by southern radicals

trying to effect change. It would not be the last time.

Hays’ biographer Doris Willens contends that after the trauma of Fort Smith, Hays,

“being neither foolish nor especially brave,” reconsidered the life of a radical southern preacher,

“dropped out of college and . . . hit the road.” While Hays did leave College of the Ozarks at the

end of the spring term in May and appears to have traveled to Highlander to study in the labor

dramatics program — supervised by Elizabeth (Zilla) Hawes and Rupert Hampton and attended

by his friend Zilphia Johnson Horton who had married Myles Horton in March — he did not

163

Gelman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 63; Claude Williams, “Prison Memoir,” Fellowship 2 (January

1936): 3-4, quotation, 3.

164

Belfrage, Faith to Free the People, 161-163.

165

Williams, “Prison Memoir,” 3. To Howard Kester from jail Williams wrote, “If I should ‘go’ and it is likely I

know — Sentiments are high — I ask , since I have given all for humanity, that the church, the liberals, the workers

and those of even a more radical hue care for my “little girlies” (God how I love them) and not let them suffer . . . . I

am writing this to you and through you to the World! I hope I succeed in getting it out We need outside help

desperately! The situation is extremely serious.” Claude Williams to Howard Kester, February 25, 1935, series 1,

folder 14, Kester Papers; Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 33; Belfrage, Faith to Free the People, 176.

leave Williams or the radical religious coalition. That he was soon back in Little Rock working

with Claude and Joyce Williams lecturing on “workers dramatics and creative writing” at the

New Era School for Prophetic Religion shows that if Hays reconsidered the ministry, he

remained determined to make a radical contribution.

166

“Of course I came up in the days of art as

a weapon . . . . it was the doctrine that dominated most of the thinking in the 30s — federal

theater, painting, all of the arts,” he would later recall. Just two years after Fort Smith, Hays

announced “drama as a weapon for union organization” to be the mission of the Commonwealth

College Labor Dramatics program.

167

When he traveled back to Little Rock from Highlander, Hays, at twenty-one, became —

by his own description — Williams’ “chief helper for quite a while.” At New Era School, with

Williams and New Era students he zipped familiar hymns with new lyrics to create “good union

songs.” One of these, “I Will Overcome” became, in Hays’ and Williams’ hands, a song about

workers’ empowerment through unions. Twenty-five years later, “We Shall Overcome” was the

transcendent anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. As he traveled with Williams on STFU

organizing trips among sharecroppers in a union with “very strong religious overtones,” Hays

often led singing or might briefly take the pulpit.

168

He also handled Williams’ correspondence,

166

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 33; Mary McAvoy, Rehearsing Revolutions: The Labor Drama Experiment and

Radical Activism in the Early Twentieth Century (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019), 147, 151; Gellman

and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 65. Elizabeth (Zilla) Hawes is not to be confused with Elizabeth Hawes

whom Michael Denning treats at length in The Cultural Front. For a brief biography of Elizabeth (Zilla) Hawes see,

Jake Altman, Socialism before Sanders: The 1930s Movement from Romance to Revisionism (Cham, Switzerland:

Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 152-155.

167

Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers; Lee Hays quoted in Willens, Lonesome

Traveler, 52; Hays, “Workers Dramatics,” p. 2.

168

Capaldi, “Wasn’t That a Time!,” p. 3; Lee Hays, “Let the Will . . . :,” p. 15; Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the

Working Class, 75-76; Claude Williams to Lee Hays, n.d., series 1, box 2, folder 20, Hays Papers; Memoirs,

Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers; Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 40.

traveled East with him, and, staying behind, worked with Willard Uphaus to find ways Williams

and his family could survive.

169

As “chief helper,” Hays’ possessed physical characteristics and skills that were valuable

to Williams. Though he had no desire for physical conflict, his substantial size and youth created

an imposing presence; his garrulous sense of humor — at once dry and bombastic — was already

in play; he wrote quickly and well and could wrangle a manual typewriter with few errors; had a

stentorian speaking and singing voice and thorough knowledge of southern hymnody; had been

driving since he was eight years old, and had — unlike Williams, Kester, H. L. Mitchell, Ward

Rodgers, and many others of the southern radical coalition — an Arkansas pedigree. Considering

Williams’ volatility and Hays’ youth, there were bound to be gaffs. One in particular shows the

responsibility Williams assigned Hays for maintaining his personal and professional

relationships, and how, in the face of Williams’ increasing need for publicly expressed loyalty

after Fort Smith, even his closest relationships showed signs of strain.

In August 1935, from Little Rock at Williams’ direction, Hays wrote Howard Kester a

brief, formal letter confirming permission to use Kester’s name on New Era and Williams

Support Committee materials. “He understands, however,” Hays wrote of Williams, “that you

have recently become highly critical of his positions and attitudes. If this attitude extends to the

point of wanting your name removed from subsequent bulletins, Claude will be glad to comply

with a request to that effect. If your attitude is still one of co-operation, Claude hopes that you

will find it convenient to visit him here soon and discuss his plans with him.”

170

Kester was taken

169

H. L. Mitchell, informing Howard Kester Williams proposed moving the offices of the STFU to Little Rock

wrote, “Claud [sic] had the brilliant idea of renting a big house and all of us moving in together . . . an idea I

promptly vetoed . . . and added that he get a place for his school and office and rent the smallest house he could find

and take Mrs. Williams and the children out of the revolutionary atmosphere.” H. L. Mitchell to Howard Kester,

July 10, 1935, series 1, folder 17, Kester Papers. Mitchell later informed Kester Williams had rented a twenty-room

house for fifty dollars a month. Mitchell to Kester, July 15, 1935, series 1, folder 17, Kester Papers.

170

Lee Hays to Howard Kester, August 7, 1935, series 1, folder 17, Kester Papers.

aback. During the summer, Uphaus’ newly formed National Committee for the Support of

Claude Williams, whose membership included Kester, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Winifred

Chappell, had raised $160.00 — by some estimates, the equivalent of over $3,000 dollars today

— to supplement the fifty-dollar disability pension paid him by the Presbyterian Church each

month.

171

Two days later Kester replied not to Hays, but to Williams. His response reveals early

fissures in his relationship with Williams and questions of transparency and political ideology

over which the fissures would widen.

I have been intending to write to you for weeks, particularly since receiving the

announcement about the establishment of your school in Little Rock. The summer has

been an unusually heavy one, and I have neglected to write my trusted friends. This

morning, however, I received a letter from Lee Hays which has goaded me into action.

Mr. Hays suggests that I have “recently become highly critical” of your positions and

attitudes. I have not the faintest notion why you have any grounds to believe such rot as

that. . . . if I have said or written or done anything that has caused you to hold this opinion

of me I want you to write me.

This letter . . . has caused me more real pain than any letter I have received in a long time

. . . . I thought my friendship for you was unquestioned. I had thought friends could be

critical of one another and still be friends. I had also thought that criticism was a part of a

healthy revolutionary movement and that healthy revolutionaries welcomed honest

criticism.

I haven’t served your committee as I have wanted to as I recently wrote Uphaus . . . . I

don’t want any thanks for what I do for you for whatever you say about me I will always

admire and love you.

172

Williams did not respond; again, it was Hays who wrote. Apologizing and attempting a

lighter tone, he explained he was responsible for Williams’ correspondence. “He does not dictate

the letters to me, but gives me the addresses and the messages he wants sent to them.” Try as

Hays might for a more jovial tone, Williams’ accusation remained:

He had understood that you were highly critical — that should be in quotes — and asked

171

Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 65; Monetary equivalency calculated from 1935 to 2020 on

Calculator.net, https://www.calculator.net/inflation-

calculator.html?cstartingamount1=160.00&cinyear1=1935&coutyear1=2020&calctype=1&x=57&y=14.

172

Howard Kester to Claude Williams, August 9, 1935, series 1, folder 17, Kester Papers.

me to write you about it, as he wanted to be sure before he enlisted further co-operation

from you. I remarked at the time of writing that it was a difficult letter for me to write and

I made several starts before I gave it up with the rather curt note I finally did send . . . . I

am sure that my letter was unworthy, and that Claude should have written it himself.

However, I have been close to his work and he has relied upon my writing letters for him

— you probably know of his complexes on the subject of letter writing. It has been hard

to do but I have tried to make a good job of it.

173

There is no record in Kester’s extensive archives of a response to Hays’ apology — either

to Williams or Hays himself — though Kester’s name continued to appear on Williams’ support

committee letterhead, and subsequent letters indicate a renewal of cordiality. This initial fraying

continued to trouble Hays as he strove to make plans for a life within the radical southern

coalition.

By October, Hays was in the East with Willard Uphaus, deeply involved in fundraising

and organizational efforts to ensure Williams’ survival. The situation was desperate not only for

Williams. From New Haven on letterhead of the National Committee for the Support of the

Reverend Claude C. Williams, Hays wrote of an enclosed check, “You will note that it is dated

November 1. There is not a penny up here except a few dollars of Willard’s which he is saving

for food . . . . Willard asks that you not take a chance on cashing the check before the first in the

hope that there will be funds here to cover it by the first, for there probably won’t be. I hope this

will straighten things out for you. At any rate, it is the best that can be done.”

The letter shows Hays working to stabilize not only Williams’ finances but the most

minute details of his travel and family life. Williams’ impetuous planning for a fundraising trip

raised concerns about funding, scheduling speaking engagements, whether Williams had his

“clergy book” so that he could travel more cheaply by train, the Williams family, who was to

shoulder the increasing work of the committee — even Williams’ whereabouts. “We realized

173

Lee Hays to Howard Kester, August 12, 1935, series 1, folder 17, Kester Papers.

with a shock today that you were thinking of your trip for this month instead of next,” Hays

wrote:

Can you leave the family in Tennessee or are the kids in school? The whole hitch is that

I’m trying to get enough regular contributions to carry you and I don’t see how you can

come until we get something of the sort . . . I myself am in debt — but that’s not

worrying me as much as getting your salary fixed up . . . . Of course I understand your

feeling about my taking over the work of the committee, I haven’t done so hot, have I?

But it’s a case of necessity. Willard can’t do it, I can’t do it, you can’t do it, who’s to do

it? Well, Willard and I have so far split the labor . . . . but as my last letter pointed out, he

just can’t pledge more than the $25. Of course it will soon have to be turned over to you

to be done from Arkansas . . . . Is there any possibility that you can finally support

yourself there without national appeal? I suppose not, unless you build up a pretty good

church.

In a letter that contained two typos, Hays concluded, “Please excuse my many errors. I

am suffering from eyestrain and headache tonight — too much worry, I guess.” And more

jovially, “How about giving us your address? Your letters are so cryptic that we aren’t sure half

the time where you are.

174

Hays knew where Williams was in February of 1936. He had just seen him in New York

when he wrote to Howard Kester on NRLF letterhead where Claude Williams’ name — now

listed as Regional Secretary for Arkansas alongside Kester for Tennessee — figured among such

powers of the religious and secular left as Methodist Bishop Francis J. McConnell, Sidney

Hillman, Sherwood Eddy, A. J. Muste, Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles C. Webber, Stephen S. Wise,

and A. Philip Randolph. It is clear that Hays, who was involved in publishing the bulletin of the

of the NRLF, Economic Justice, felt a part of the organization, and that as such, his confidence

had received a significant boost. “We are all quite angry about your recent troubles, and

especially because we are so helpless,” he wrote referring to Kester’s near-lynching following

evictions from the Dibble Plantation near Earle, Arkansas in January of 1936. “Several of us in

174

Lee Hays to Claude Williams, October 25, 1935, box 1, folder 19, Williams Papers.

protesting to Henry Wallace have received evasive answers . . . . we have called his bluff as well

as we could so far removed from the scene of battle, recommending, chiefly, the publication of

the Mary Connor Myers report.” He condemned and parodied Henry Wallace’s article in the

Christian Century, writing, “Note particularly, that ministers should not take action in social

crises, but should go around bathing the laity in their pure idealism;” he informed Kester, whom

he had yet to meet, “I have read your pamphlet [Revolt of the Sharecroppers] and consider it well

done, although a little heavy on the case-study side;” before concluding in language reminiscent

of his ministry studies, “Claude is having a wonderful trip. He is growing in stature as a public

speaker and everyone is showing him great sympathy . . . . He is giving a good word for the

STFU, and I understand is asked many times for information about it. In my own speaking, I find

a fairly good level of information about the Union — all I have to do is to supply the class

struggle bases.” In Hays’ style, he concluded, “Forgive this terrible letter.” Uncharacteristically,

Hays also betrayed concern to Kester about the future of Williams’ work. “I do feel rather futile

about the whole struggle,” he confessed, “especially in Claude’s work, which is foredoomed to

failure, but I try to help as I can.”

175

Though never disloyal to Williams, Hays’ letters from 1936-1937, particularly to Kester

to whom he confided, “I have been waiting for a long time to meet you — since I bungled one of

Claude’s messages to you, in fact,” show his desire to make both his own way and his own

contribution to the conjoined work of religion and labor. Living in the East afforded

opportunities to pursue studies and connections toward that end. In New York, Hays studied

methodologies for creating art as a weapon with radical documentarians Paul Strand and Leo

175

Lee Hays to Howard Kester, February 1, 1936, series 1, folder 20, Kester Papers; Lee Hays to Howard Kester,

February 4, 1936, series 1, folder 20, Kester Papers; Dunbar, Against the Grain, 112-115; Donald H. Grubbs, Cry

from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the New Deal (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas

Press, 2000), 88-92.

Hurwitz of the New Theater League. For the rest of his life, he incorporated the “spinal” theory

in writing plays, songs, and short stories.

176

Living at the Neighborhood House — student

housing affiliated with Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in Greenwich Village —

he met Pastor Laurence Hosie who served with Willard Uphaus on the Executive Committee of

the NRLF and another group of young people who wanted to “put religion into practice” to

change the world — the Social Action Fellowship. At his first meeting in the choir room above

the Judson Street Church Sanctuary, Hays taught the young people about the struggles of

southern sharecroppers and the song:

Weary, weary are we

Just as weary as weary can be

We don’t get nothing for our labor

So weary, weary are we.

177

176

Lee Hays to Howard Kester, February 4, 1936; Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 43.

177

Ibid., 40-44; “Weary, weary are we . . .” Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 41.

America’s Disinherited

From his work with Strand and Hurwitz and encouragement from Judson Street

Fellowship and the NRLF came inspiration for America’s Disinherited — a 16 mm documentary

film about the plight of southern sharecroppers Hays hoped would reach into the hearts and

pockets of northern donors for the STFU.

178

After discussions with Uphaus, Hosie, and “others in religion-labor work,” Hays wrote

Kester in April of 1936 of plans to create a commercially viable “social document” to bring

much needed funds to the union. His plans were ambitious: a full-length, stand-alone sound

picture with music and narration. Putting his fundraising skills work, Hays had already received

a pledge from Jerome Davis of the NRLF for $250.00 of a projected $1000.00 budget “and

possibly more if we raise the rest through other groups.” With Alan Hacker, a young film-maker

he met through Judson House, Hays planned to come south to film in Arkansas where he thought

it possible he might still have connections among “respectable people there who have not heard

of my departure from conservatism.” Hacker would contribute equipment, experience, some

funding, and enthusiasm. As for his own motivation, Hays, who told Kester his letter to him was

178

America’s Disinherited was not the first film about sharecroppers; producing a film of the sharecroppers’ struggle

had been on the minds of the radical religious coalition for at least two years. In March 1934, Eugene W.

Sutherland, a Unitarian minister from Kentucky, wrote Kester he and H. Lee Jones, a fellow Unitarian minister from

Dayton, Ohio (who had taught psychology at Commonwealth) proposed to “make an excursion into Arkansas,

Mississippi, and Alabama” with a movie camera and typewriter to film sharecropper conditions. In July of 1935,

they filmed assisted by STFU membership. By July 22, J. R. Butler told Howard Kester Sutherland had “obtained a

wealth of pictures while on the work here with Jones . . . Jones left here this morning for Dayton to begin the editing

of his “Epic of Starvation.” The film had some initial success. When Claude Williams tried in December of 1935 to

obtain one of the two copies for use at New Era School, Sutherland responded that Jones had over fifty advance

bookings and a copy could not be spared. The film’s trajectory did not so continue. With apologies, Sutherland

reported to Kester in August 1936 after traveling 8,000 miles touring the film, the fifteen dollars raised he had hoped

to send to the STFU had been spent on car repairs resulting from the trip. First quote, Eugene Sutherland to Howard

Kester, March 26, 1934, series 1 folder 16, Kester papers; second quote, J. R. Butler to Howard Kester July, 22,

1935, series 1, folder 17, Kester Papers; third quote, H. L. Mitchell to Howard Kester, July 10, 1935, series 1, folder

17, Kester Papers; Eugene Sutherland to Claude Williams, December 28, 1935, box 1, folder 21, Williams Papers;

Lee Jones to Gene Sutherland, n.d., included with letter from Sutherland to Williams, box 1, folder 21, Williams

Papers; Eugene Sutherland to Howard Kester, August 18, 1936, series 1, folder 24, Kester Papers; Sutherland was

also largely responsible for drafting the Statement of Principles at the Conference of Younger Churchmen in

Chattanooga held December 4, 1934. See Dunbar, Against the Grain, 74.

the first mention of the film to the union itself, wrote, “I have tried to help the Union in various

ways . . . . But I have not been able to do all that I should do to pay the debts which long

generations of slave owners and exploiters in my family have incurred. This has been a very real

problem to me since the day when I saw a close relative murder a Negro for a trivial reason.” By

combining newly acquired methodologies in drama and “religion-labor work,” Hays hoped to

create a tool for union education, recruitment, and funding that could effect change in his home

state. While in New York, Hays also acquired new mentors and supporters. Informing Kester he

hoped for both his and the union’s stamp of approval, he provided as reference, not Williams, but

Laurence Hosie and Willard Uphaus.

179

Williams’ name did appear, however, along with Uphaus, Hosie, Hays, Hacker, the

NRLF, Social Action Fellowship, and — representing the STFU and Hays’ success in religion-

labor coalition building — Kester, E. B. McKinney, H. L. Mitchell, and Walter Moskop, on the

letterhead of the Sharecropper Film Committee organized for fundraising and oversight of the

project. The fundraising letter Hays wrote for the committee spoke not only to the hardship but

to the agency of southern sharecroppers. “These poverty stricken agricultural workers,” he wrote,

“are attempting to change the conditions which have oppressed their class for generations. They

are the ‘basic human element in the production of cotton’ and they are thus effecting change in

the whole system of cotton production. If they succeed, all people will profit. They require our

help.”

180

In a car loaded with tent, typewriter, and film equipment, Hays and Hacker set out in the

summer of 1936, stopping along the way with Hays’ sister Minnie Frank where Hacker “took

179

Lee Hays to Howard Kester, April 21, 1936, series 1, folder 22, Kester Papers.

180

To All Friends of the Sharecroppers of the South from The Sharecropper Film Committee, 1936, series 3, box 3,

folder 69, Hays Papers.

wonderful pictures of the brand new baby,” and the two young men turned the house upside

down experimenting with lighting and camera angles.

181

Much of their filming took place not in

Arkansas, as Hays had expected, but at Delta Cooperative Farm near Hillhouse, Mississippi —

the brainchild of Sherwood Eddy and Reinhold Niebuhr established under the auspices of the

STFU and Socialist Party of America for the recently evicted sharecroppers of the Arkansas

Delta.

182

Hays wrote the shooting script, and later the synopsis of the movie, which traces the

sharecropping system from slavery in 1858 to a triumphant STFU strike after the murder of “two

union men. But they have figured without the solidarity of these workers, who meet to denounce

the murders,” the synopsis reads:

They would murder us to force us to work for a miserable 35 cents a hundred pounds!’

35 cents a hundred pounds? Then strike! Strike!

The call goes out. Soon the fields are empty. . .

Now the planters evict union members. But the union holds firm.

Planters rage against this affront. They bribe and denounce and try to lure pickers back to

work by offering slight increases. But the wealth rots on the stalk.

Now the planters loose their terror. Guns blaze and houses burn. Men disappear. A

planter boasts, ‘I’ll build a bridge across the St. Francis River with the bodies of Union

men!’

And so the Union marches. Planters may gnash their teeth and chew their fingernails off

to the elbows, but nothing they can devise will stop the strike. They must yield. Okay, $1

a hundred.

Exultantly, rejoicing as a strong runner, the Union sings its great message: Just like a tree

standing by the waters, we shall not be moved!

183

Perhaps no other piece of his early writing so succinctly demonstrates Hays’ intersection

of southern religious radicalism with the emerging cultural front than this passage. Reflecting his

Arkansas Methodist childhood, near-religious fervor for the STFU, and newly acquired

181

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 129.

182

Ibid., 42-44, 52, 129; Capaldi, “Wasn’t that A Time!,” p. 3; Fred C. Smith, “Delta and Providence Cooperative

Farms,” The Mississippi Encyclopedia, last modified April 13, 2018,

https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/delta-and-providence-cooperative-farms/. The names used for the

cooperative vary from source to source. As example, Dunbar gives the name of the cooperative as Rochdale.

Dunbar, Against the Grain, 118.

183

The synopsis of the film was is dated January 30, 1937, at which time it bore the title, Eight Million Americans,

series 3, box 3, folder 69, Hays Papers.

understanding of labor drama, in the scansion of southern preaching the synopsis combines

biblical quotations, union events, the great zipper hymn of the STFU “We Shall Not be Moved,”

and the cry, “Strike! Strike!” reprising the audience’s spontaneous chant at the January 6, 1935,

performance of Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty.

184

That Hays’ and Hacker’s enterprise was dangerous came as no surprise; Hays had

anticipated trouble. “We are counting the chances of getting run out,” he wrote to Kester, and

“We are making plans accordingly.” He was not wrong. Hays was beaten by riders from “one of

the big plantation owners” who raided their camp in Mississippi, stole Hays’ shooting script,

notebooks, continuity logs, and other materials. They ran out of film and had trouble ordering

more from New York from local merchants who did not, or refused to understand what they

wanted, and they were concerned about the desperate needs of sharecropper families —

especially the children. Letters to the Sharecropper Film Committee discussed sending two boys

to New York for schooling. Food for Hays and Hacker was likewise in short supply. “We are

living on canned foods and the occasional cabbage,” a letter from Hillhouse in September

informed the Committee. “No fresh vegetables and no milk in this land of cotton.”

185

Hays and Hacker were not alone in filming at Hillhouse the summer of 1936; Dorothea

Lange shot many of her best-known photographs at Hillhouse that summer. As Hays summarized

four decades later, “the great American photographers . . . went out and photographed the face of

184

“Rejoicing as a strong runner” appears to be a paraphrase of Psalm 19:5. On the fourteen-hundred-member

audience chanting “Strike! Strike!” following the January 6, 1935, performance of Waiting for Lefty, see Denning,

The Cultural Front, xiv-xv. Hays would have been aware of this event since the performance was staged as a benefit

for New Theater, and Hays, in his letter to Kester of April 21, 1936, stated the critic for New Theater might travel on

the filming expedition to help publicize the film. On “We Shall Not Be Moved,” see Michael Honey,

Sharecropper’s Troubadour: John L. Handcox, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, and the African American

Song Tradition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 56, 64, 142; Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton, 84-86; H. L.

Mitchell, Mean Things Happening in this Land: The Life and Times of H. L. Mitchell, Co-founder of the Southern

Tenant Farmers Union, paperback ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 87-89, 142-143.

185

Hays and Hacker to Contributors and Friends of the SFC, September 17, 1936, series 3, box 3, folder 69, Hays

Papers.

America during the ‘30s, when for the first time America got a good look at itself.”

186

Forwarded

by the confluence of technological innovation with commercial and New Deal funding from the

Resettlement Administration, Lange, Hays, and Hacker were part of a Depression-era

“documentary impulse” to represent “the people” Michael Denning posits as characteristic of

1930s American culture.

187

The photographer Ben Shahn captured images of Arkansas

sharecroppers the previous year; Pare Lorenz’ film, The Plow that Broke the Plains, premiered as

Hays and Hacker traveled South, and before America’s Disinherited was completed, the March

of Time series began filming in Memphis, Land of Cotton, a half hour newsreel featuring scenes

of the STFU with Claude Williams, as himself, reenacting his beating at the hands of planters

just the week before.

188

By October Hays and Hacker were in Colt, Arkansas where, having received word that

the raw footage had been viewed with approval by Willard Van Dyke, they made plans to go to

Memphis and “thence to Dyess to view the effects of paternalistic concern for sharecroppers; and

then home.”

189

Letters to the committee over the course of production show Hays’ concern for

186

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 42; Memoirs Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers; “Death

Versus Dignity: An excerpt from Patsy Watkins’ It’s All Done Gone: Arkansas Photographs from the Farm Security

Collection, 1935-1943,” Arkansas Life, November 27, 2018, https://arkansaslife.com/death-versus-dignity/; Library

of Congress, collection, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives,

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/ (accessed February, 2020).

187

Denning, The Cultural Front, 118-120, 259.

188

Ben Shahn, “Cotton Pickers: Pulaski County October, 1935,” Farm Security Administration/Office of War

Information Black-and-White Negatives, LOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/docchap1.html;

Denning, The Cultural Front, 81, 261; Robert J. Snyder, “The Plow that Broke the Plains,” Library of Congress,

2015, LOC https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/plow_broke.pdf;

Dunbar, Against the Grain, 128-130; Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 68-69, 82-83; Grubbs, Cry

from the Cotton, 112-113. The first sixteen-millimeter film kit suitable for amateur filmmakers like Hays and

Hacker was available through RCA in 1935. See Alan Kattelle, “Once, There Was Film: Looking Back at Amateur

Motion Picture Technologies,” in “Rethinking the Amateur: Acts of Media Production in the Digital Age,” ed.

Broderick Fox, Spectator 24 (Spring 2004): 62, https://cinema.usc.edu/archivedassets/098/15847.pdf. Scenes from

the March of Time reenactment of Claude Williams’ beating featuring Williams and Willie Sue Blagdon may be

viewed at https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/willie-sue-blagden-reverend-williams-in-arkansas-news-

footage/509281531?adppopup=true.

189

Lee Hays and Alan Hacker to Contributors and friends of the Sharecropper Film Committee, October 20, 1936,

series 3, box 3, folder 69, Hays Papers. After a career in still photography and film, Willard Van Dyke went on to

sharecroppers’ children may have provided impetus for teaching plans of his own. After

reporting the less-than-satisfactory outcome that children would be attending a county school

that winter to which they would have to walk seven miles, Hays continued, “Plans are being

made to attack this problem on a wholesale basis, probably through the establishment of a strong,

socially conscious hill school.” Concluding, “It will be good to see you all being educated by

your film.”

190

In the spring of 1937, Hays’ impulses were more educational than documentarian. His

plans to establish a “strong, socially conscious hill school” were put on hold, however, to

hitchhike to Highlander to work on a project planned during his visit the year before — Gumbo,

a southern labor drama about the plight of sharecroppers written and produced with Zilphia

Horton and the Highlander labor dramatics students in a collaborative methodology Hays would

carry to Commonwealth College and throughout the rest of his life.

191

From Highlander, Hays

wrote to the Williamses for help.

Dear Claude or Joyce or both:

I started over to Arkansas to live in Cross County, but I’ve been delayed here for a month

or so to help Zilphia put on the new sharecropper play . . . . I’m writing on it, helping

direct it, etc. . . . . Now, because of our poor state, we are wondering if we can use your

gorgeous red curtains, those things you got for the Paris church . . . . I remember seeing

them in that old trunk and while I do not know their size, Zilphia says they would do well

. . . It is for the sake of the r-r-revolution, comrades, that we ask . . . . Claude, I don’t

know where the hell you are, but if you do get this, kindly let me know when I’ll see you.

Things to talk about, pal.

192

become Head of Films at the Museum of Modern Art from 1965 until his death in 1979. See, Douglas C. McGill,

“Willard Van Dyke, Ex-head of Films at Modern Museum,” New York Times, January 24, 1986, p. 17,

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/01/24/obituaries/willard-van-dyke-ex-head-of-films-at-modern-museum.html.

190

Hays and Hacker to the Contributors and Friends of the Sharecropper Film Committee, October 20, 1936, series

3, box 3, folder 69, Hays Papers; Rockwell Kent to Lee Hays, October 10, 1936, series 3, box 3, folder 69, Hays

Papers.

191

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 46-47; Poster for Gumbo, series 1, folder 27, Kester Papers.

192

Lee Hays to Claude and Joyce Williams, n.d., box 17, folder 21, Williams Papers.

On neither the poster for Gumbo, where he is listed in the roles of both Mr. Bagley (the

villain planter) and Brother White (a white union sharecropper), or on the script of the play does

Hays take a writing credit. However, the play’s final funeral scene — both a reprise and

extension of the synopsis for America’s Disinherited — reflects what would become Hays’

trademark blending of southern religious radicalism with elements of left-wing theater in

dramatic-musical form.

193

The funeral scene is the dramatic climax of a plot surrounding the

murder of African American STFU organizer Frank Newell by white planters; in it, Hays, as

Bagley, delivered a line reminiscent of but more menacing than the film synopsis. “There’s goin’

to be an end to this union stuff around here — or I’ll build me a dam across the Arkansas River

with the bones of you union n*****s!”

194

Coming after the revelation that Newell has been

apprehended and killed, leaving a wife and child, the funeral scene — on a stark set with

mourners, a pulpit, and a coffin — interweaves Hays’ synopsis ideas of “rotting wealth” with

Old and New Testament Biblical references, the call and response of African American

churches, spirituals and songs, “the Social Gospel of a “kingdom of God on Earth,” and a call to

union action: ending, as had America’s Disinherited with the STFU zipper hymn, “We Shall not

be Moved.”

195

193

Poster for Gumbo, series 1, folder 27, Kester Papers; Gumbo, Highlander Folk School, folder 1, box 57,

Highlander Research and Education Records, 1917-2005, Wisconsin Historical Society, University of Wisconsin-

Madison Libraries, Madison (hereafter, HREC Records); Mary McAvoy in Rehearsing Revolutions states Hays

acted in the role of Riding Boss, Big Boy Stokes. While the poster for Gumbo in Howard Kester’s files lists

Herschel Williams in that role, it is possible Hays could have played Stokes in another performance.

194

Gumbo, 4.

195

Gumbo, 6; The passage combines verses James 5:4, “Look, the wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed

your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty,”

Matthew 6:19-21, and James 5:1. Spirituals and songs include, “Oh Freedom,” “No More Mourning,” and “Mean

Things Happening in this Land;” words for the latter two are credited on the play’s cover to John Handcock.

As Brother White, Hays pronounced the union call in the play’s final soliloquy:

reprising sharecropper identity as “the disinherited,” assigning to them true ownership of the

planter’s land, and through the power of union organization, the future.

However in this world did ol’ man Bagley git the idea he could beat down a power like

that! Where did he git the ground he walks on? We give it to him, didn’t we? We worked

it and give it to him. But the union books tell us: To the Disinherited Belongs the Future!

Hit don’t belong to Bagley and them, their day is gone! . . . Oh, the union stands like a

mighty tree by the rivers of waters, and we shall not be moved! They can run us down

and beat us and kill us, but we shall not be moved! This dead man here is our brother, and

he’s gone, but his spirit is still marching with us, and we shall not be moved—

196

Gumbo toured to unions in Tennessee and to ILGWU and auto workers unions as far

distant as Atlanta. With its messages of religious radicalism and unionism, spirituals zipped with

new words, and original music — the “title song” Gumbo was composed for the play itself —

Gumbo represents the work of a nascent uniquely southern cultural front. Hays and Horton, at

the forefront, used “art as a weapon” to educate and inspire southern workers to the potential

power union organizing could provide.

197

As work on the play drew to a close, Hays began formalizing plans for the “strong,

socially-conscious hill school” he had discussed with Sharecropper Film Committee the previous

October. From Highlander on April 2, he disclosed to Willard Uphaus and Laurence Hosie plans

to establish a school in East Arkansas on Crowley’s Ridge for a biracial group of sixteen STFU

families. The idea of service had become both real and compelling, he confided, and, with the

help of Highlander friends, he had realized a practical way to serve. To begin, Hays hoped to

“buy land and build a place to live, for myself and for one or two other families,” develop

resources to farm sub-marginal land, study the people’s educational needs and develop a

196

Gumbo, 7-8; The Disinherited is the title of a 1933 proletarian novel about coal miners by Jack Conroy whom

Hays would come to know within the year, and who, within two years, would publish Hays’ writing.

197

McAvoy, Rehearsing Revolutions, 159; Gumbo, cover.

program of workers’ education to “aid the Union struggle for socialized agriculture” and

improved living conditions, and “To develop my own mental and physical resources, now sadly

lacking.” He confessed he feared becoming “one of the cranks who infest the movement, without

purpose,” and believed his plan provided “the fairest chance to regain my strength while at the

same time laying the basis for my life work . . . . . I am beginning to live in this way and believe

that, considering the depression, it is the best way to live. I hope the project will educate me

more thoroughly than ten years of university study.”

198

Hays also wrote Kester, addressing him now as “Buck” — the nickname used by Kester’s

friends and associates. Writing from Sonora, Kentucky on April 30, where he was working on a

farm and “trying to get well,”

The time has come when I can tell you about my plans to work near my home in East

Arkansas. I didn’t want to take your time in consideration of these plans until I was pretty

sure of my ground. The folks in Cross County with whom I lived and worked on the film

last summer asked me repeatedly to start a ‘school’ for them and their kids. They don’t

know what they mean by ‘school’ but they do have a conviction of inadequacy to face

their problems. Several of them have asked me to teach them to read and write so that

they might organize for the Union. All of them need education in subsistence living,

health, recreation, and the like.

Having no capital, he would not attempt a comprehensive project, Hays said, but

felt capable of doing “these few things:” buying a “little land to build a home for the project. To

begin to grow vegetables. To direct social recreation. And to give a few hours to these men who

want to learn to read and write for their union’s sake — I should not presume to take part in

Union affairs, or even to give Union teaching until the project had proven worthy. But I should

hope that ultimately my place might become a Union center.” The Highlanders pledged help

with books and materials, and Hays had “the support of a good many people who will see me

198

All quotations, Lee Hays to Laurence Hosie and Willard Uphaus, April 2, 1937, series 4, box 5, folder 40, Hays

Papers.

through, but more important, I have the support of the folks on Crowley’s Ridge. Perhaps the

plantation workers are the backbone of the union, but the hill farmers have a little security left,

and afford the only basis for workers’ education. At any rate, I am closer to them than to the

others.

199

After months in the East working with the National Committee for the Support of Claude

Williams, the NRLF, and “trying to help the union in various ways,” including producing a film

and co-writing and producing the first sharecropper play, Hays, having passed his twenty-third

birthday the month before at Highlander, wanted to return to Arkansas and establish an outpost

for workers’ education beginning on the most basic level — growing vegetables and teaching

people to read and write. Cross County on Crowley’s Ridge was a logical location for Hays’

school for a number of reasons. As Hays had seen, there was real need. Farmers hit hard by the

flood of 1927 and the drought of 1931 now struggled to survive the Depression. Having

witnessed the scarcity of fresh food while filming the summer before, growing vegetables on

sub-marginal land was, for Hays, a project aimed not only at improving living conditions but

chances for survival. That he felt “closer” to the hill country farmers was likely not only because

he had spent time with them filming but because he was known to them as the son of a Methodist

minister remembered for dedication to education and working among rural churches. As

presiding elder for the Forrest City District in the North Arkansas Methodist Conference,

William B. Hays would have frequently traveled to area towns along the ridge, including not

only Forrest City, but Colt just ten miles distant (and fourteen miles from Cross County) where

Hays had written the Sharecropper Film Committee the previous October. With his family, Hays

199

Lee Hays to Howard Kester, series 1, folder 15, Kester Papers. The letter is dated April 30, 1935, but this appears

to be a misdating by Hays, who refers to the sharecropper film more than once, closing by asking for Kester’s

critique of it. Discussion of the hill school first appears in the October 1936 letter to the Sharecropper Film

Committee of which Kester was a member.

had lived in towns within twenty-nine to sixty miles from Cross County — Forrest City,

Paragould, and Newport. As further incentive, Memphis, where the STFU headquarters had

moved in 1935, was just fifty miles away across the Mississippi River. From “his home in East

Arkansas,” then, Hays’ plans to establish a school of basic education which would be of service

to those around him and a potential outpost of workers for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union

were both reasonable and pragmatic.

200

How much Hays knew of the turmoil within the union surrounding Claude Williams

during this time is not clear. He never alluded to it in letters to Kester, and there are few existing

letters between Hays and Williams from this time. While Hays was writing the synopsis for

America’s Disinherited in January of 1937, Williams “fell apart with rage” at the third annual

convention of the STFU in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Pressures — national, local, and from within

— were fracturing the southern radical coalition along the fault line of communist affiliation.

With increasing national coverage of the STFU, sharecropper evictions, and issues of farm

tenancy, Franklin Roosevelt, facing an upcoming election, “ordered Henry Wallace to name a

President’s Committee on Farm Tenancy.”

201

Roosevelt’s decision, in turn, refocused attention

on issues of communism within the union. The alliance between the STFU and Commonwealth

College splintered as the college faced accusations from the pulpit, press, and state legislature —

in the form of the Horton sedition bill — of practicing communism, racial equality, and free

love.

202

The STFU was under pressure from not only local sources but from Socialist Party

200

In his letter to Hosie and Uphaus, Hays provided the location of the land: “On the map you will see Highway 1

between Wynne and Forrest City,” [the land was] “off the road East of Colt, a few miles out of Wynne.” Hays to

Laurence Hosie and Willard Uphaus, April 2, 1937, series 4, box 4, folder 40, Hays Papers; Nancy Hendricks, “New

Deal,” The Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Central Arkansas Library System, last updated, September 9, 2020,

https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/new-deal-4852/.

201

Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 79; Dunbar, Against the Grain, 130-135, quotation, 130.

202

Dunbar, Against the Grain, 130-135; Attacks came from the pulpit and in pamphlet from Mena Baptist pastor L.

D. Summers. In January1937, Herman Horton, a state representative from Jonesboro the same age as Hays (twenty-

officials in New York and Chicago who wanted the union free from CP influence. Questions of

communism likewise arose from powerful leaders in the religious left. When asked by Reinhold

Niebuhr to explain the differences between the STFU and the Alabama-based Sharecroppers’

Union (SCU), Howard Kester, who had founded the Tennessee Socialist Party local in 1932,

responded the STFU was larger, multi-racial, and “non-political” while the SCU was

“communistic.”

203

At the Muskogee convention where the STFU hoped to cement an alliance with the CIO

through UMWA representative David Fowler, mounting pressures exploded. After ill-advised

interviews by the Commonwealth delegation were used by local press to support swirling

accusations against them, Williams, campaigning for directorship of Commonwealth, sided with

the college delegation; Fowler, Williams’ combatant since the Paris days, walked out claiming

love of “God and Country” prevented his association with such radicals. Kester, Mitchell, and

Gardner Jackson, fearing Fowler’s negative influence on a CIO alliance, signed an agreement

Mitchell later described as an “asinine [sic] collection of words with very little meaning” to

disassociate the STFU from political parties and labor schools — specifically Highlander Folk

School and Commonwealth College.

204

Williams took this as a personal affront: not only because

of his enmity with Fowler, but because he had been covertly selected as Director of

Commonwealth; recently elected national Vice President of the American Federation of

Teachers; and because he took the agreement as sign Mitchell, Kester, and Jackson were forcing

him out of the union per Fowler’s directions. Hoping to maintain his status through popular vote,

three) announced he would introduce a sedition bill aimed directly at the school and by implication at its ally the

STFU. Cobb, Rural Education, 173.

203

Robert F. Martin, “A Prophet’s Pilgrimage: The Religious Radicalism of Howard Anderson Kester, 1921-1941,”

The Journal of Southern History 48 (November 1982): 519.

204

Dunbar, Against the Grain, 152-153, quotation, 152; Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 76-79; H.

L. Mitchell to the National Executive Council of the Socialist Party of America, February 2, 1937, series 1, folder

27, Kester Papers.

Williams accused Mitchell and Jackson from the floor of the convention of fascist appeasement

by supporting “racketeering, red-baiting, and dictatorial Dave Fowler,” ran for the union’s

executive council, lost, and left, still angered by the convention, for another speaking trip to the

east coast.

205

It is not surprising that support for Williams for the Directorship of Commonwealth was

far from whole-hearted within extended radical coalition. Though they claimed admiration for

Williams, neither Roger Baldwin, tasked with granting monies to Commonwealth from The

American Fund for Public Service (AFPS), Norman Thomas, H. L. Mitchell, nor Howard Kester

supported Williams’ hiring: fearing his damaged relationship with the UMWA and Arkansas

Federation of Labor would impede his ability to administer Commonwealth and that his

flamboyant volatility might not only fracture any possible alliance between the STFU and CIO,

but incite further red-baiting. Reinhold Niebuhr, who just three years before had written in

support of Williams in the Christian Century, now wrote Kester, “Is that school going to the

dogs completely. He certainly lacks the balance to run a school.”

206

Doubts extended not just to Williams but to the viability of Commonwealth itself. Based

on recommendations from Kester and Mitchell the year before, Baldwin informed Charlotte

Moskowitz a complete reorganization of the College, entailing “a responsible board composed

chiefly of southern backers, better selection of faculty and student body . . . and less emphasis on

politics,” was required, that the appointment of Williams was “very unfortunate,” and that “it

should be clear that that school has been too radical for the movement it professes to serve.”

Even Kester questioned Williams’ involvement in the union without direct control. For six

205

Claude Williams quoted in Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 79; Cobb, Rural Education, 181.

206

Cobb, Radical Education, 181-182; Reinhold Niebuhr quoted in Dunbar, Against the Grain, 165; Reinhold

Niebuhr to Howard Kester, August 1937, series 1, folder 36, Kester Papers.

months, as his hiring appeared to be postponed pending reorganization, Williams worked behind

the scenes to secure Commonwealth’s directorship by discrediting supporters of the Muskogee

Fowler document — particularly H. L. Mitchell. Mitchell and Kester were not serving on the

STFU Executive Council in June 1937 when, as the March of Time reenactment of Williams’

beating hit the nations’ theaters and his notoriety reached an all-time high, Williams requested

and received approval from the STFU for his plan to reorganize Commonwealth — and with it,

union sanction for his “candidacy for directorship.” Upon discovering Williams’ fait accompli,

Howard Kester proffered an olive branch: nominating Williams to the union’s Executive

Council. Six months after Muskogee, the August 15, 1937, edition of the Commonwealth

College Fortnightly announced Williams as Director of Commonwealth College. By September,

Hays was working with a “socially-conscious” school in Arkansas though not in the way he had

envisioned. The September 1, 1937, Fortnightly announced Lee Hays, the college’s new

Instructor of Workers Dramatics.

207

Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 82-83; Cobb, Radical Education, 181-182; “responsible board,”

“very unfortunate,” Baldwin quoted in Cobb, Radical Education, 181; Roger Baldwin to Charlotte Moskowitz,

February 3, 1937, series 1, folder 27, Kester Papers; “professes to serve,” Roger Baldwin to Charlotte Moskowitz,

February 18, 1937, series 1, folder 27, Kester Papers; Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 51; “Arkansan Will Lead Labor

Dramatics,” Commonwealth College Fortnightly, September 1, 1937, p. 2.

Chapter 3

We Are Not Alone

Michael Denning posits theater as the “model for collective activity” among radical

artists of the cultural front. Hays’ Workers Dramatics program — focused on collective creation

to meet the needs of students, the local community, and southern workers — created a new

model for southern labor drama: ushering in a “cultural renaissance” at Commonwealth so

successful the New Theater League hoped to make the college a center for labor drama in the

South.

208

When Hays took the job in September 1937, however, he was absorbed with developing

curricula for a flagging program. “Emphasis will be placed upon the drama as a weapon for

union organization,” Hays wrote in the Commonwealth Fortnightly, to “meet a need long felt in

workers education in the South.” Students of Workers Dramatics would study plays with “social

content” pertinent to labor; those produced by workers groups, labor schools, and unions; the

influence of the film and theater industries in shaping public opinion; as well as “labor songs,

mass chants and other theatricals.” “Most important,” Hays concluded, students would write and

produce the plays themselves, learning “to use dramatics in attacking their own social, economic

and organizational problems.”

209

The immediate demands at Commonwealth gave Hays little time to ponder pedagogy. He

was responsible for producing a popular weekly program of performances each Saturday,

performed both on campus and off, for Commoners and the neighboring community. In October,

he put out a call in the Fortnightly for donations of plays to the Commonwealth Library. By

208

Denning, The Cultural Front, 366; McAvoy, Rehearsing Revolutions, 193-195; “Arkansan Will Lead Labor

Dramatics,” Commonwealth College Fortnightly, September 1, 1937, p. 2; Hays, “Workers Dramatics,” p. 2; Lee

Hays, “Dramatics at Commonwealth Must Serve Needs and Aspirations of Labor Audiences,” Commonwealth

College Fortnightly, January 15, 1938, p. 2; Cobb, Radical Education, 192.

209

Hays, “Workers Dramatics,” p. 2.

January 1, 1938, he had received over two hundred, including the complete collection of plays

published by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) sent by the union’s

educational director, Mark Starr. Two months after his arrival, the Commonwealth dramatics

program mounted its first production — a skit adapted from Florence Lasser’s ILGWU

pamphlet, “Who’s getting excited?” The second, 97¢, written and produced by Hays and the

dramatics students, was performed for the Commonwealth Association meeting on December 4

and 5 less than a month later. These initial performances set the pace of Hays’ productions:

numbering well over fourteen during his two years at the college.

210

Hays was not the only instructor whose classes were announced in the September 1

edition of the Fortnightly; the paper confirmed Winifred Chappell would be teaching courses in

Labor and the International Scene.

211

Chappell, who worked with Williams and Hays at New Era

School in Little Rock, taught classes at Commonwealth in 1934, and enthusiastically supported

Williams’ hiring when questioned by Roger Baldwin, had left her position with the Methodist

Federation for Social Service in June 1936 after coming under fire from conservative Methodist

laymen attacking the Federation. Williams hired her as Commonwealth’s faculty chair, in which

role she ran the college during his frequent absences. Their partnership grafted a radical religious

character onto Commonwealth and cemented a friendship between Hays and Chappell that lasted

until her death in 1951.

212

210

McAvoy, Rehearsing Revolutions, 190, 185, 196-197; “Dramatics Teacher Asks Copies of Play Scripts,”

Commonwealth College Fortnightly, October 15, 1937, p. 2; “Dramatics Class offers Skit by Florence Lasser,”

Commonwealth Fortnightly, November 15, 1937, p. 2. The December 1, 1937 Fortnightly informs the play, 97¢,

was based on a pamphlet written by Thomas L. Stokes for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Carpetbaggers of

Industry. “Dramatics Students to Produce Original Play for Commonwealth Association Meeting,” The

Commonwealth Fortnightly, December 1, 1937, p. 4; “Plays Contributed in Response to Appeal,” The

Commonwealth Fortnightly, January 1, 1938, p. 3.

211

“Tentative Classes for Fall Term Announced,” Commonwealth College Fortnightly, September 1, 1937, p. 1.

212

Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 86-87; Cobb, Radical Education, 189; Miriam Crist indicts the

Methodist laymen as both “reactionary” and “red-baiting.” Miriam Crist, “Winifred Chappell: Everybody on the

Despite the turmoil of the college’s reorganization and ongoing attacks, Hays

remembered Commonwealth as one of his “golden places;” his two-year residence at the college

marked the longest period he had lived in any single place since leaving Ohio three years before.

Besides the excitement of developing a new dramatics program, Commonwealth’s rustic campus

in the Ouachita Mountains had much to offer Hays, for whom “the whole idea of a group of

people living together and working in a joint effort” was an ideal way of life.

213

He was often the

center of campus life. Waldemar Hille, dean of music at Elmhurst College who spent time at

Commonwealth, remembered Hays “was able to lead and make everything hum.” Donald

Kobler, who had been with Hays and Williams at New Era School and moved to Commonwealth

as Secretary, recalled “boisterous occasions” when, while working in the common room at

“some mindless job like getting out a mailing,” Hays led group singing. Improvising in ways that

were “often amusing,” and “sometimes inspired,” Kobler recalled, “the Commons would ring

with the excitement of a revival meeting as Lee led us, his ‘audience,’ through variations of a

folk song or hymn” later performed by the Almanac Singers and the Weavers.

214

Everyone

worked at Commonwealth. The farm allowed Commoners near-self-sufficiency and plenty of the

vegetables Hays craved. This was fortunate since, in addition to teaching dramatics, Hays did

much of the cooking — a job requiring rising at 5:00 A.M. to prepare meals to feed the fifty or

more students and faculty in a dining hall adorned with a forty-four-foot-long mural painted by

muralist, Joe Jones, the summer of 1935. However “golden,” Commonwealth’s rustic setting

posed practical challenges to Hays’ developing dramatics program. Labor audiences were in

Left Knew Her,” 26-27. Chappell’s influence was felt at Commonwealth prior to Williams’ formal appointment. See

“Tennessee, Arkansas Students Addressed by Com. College Teachers,” Commonwealth College Fortnightly, June 1,

1937, p. 1. Among her other contributions, the October 14, 1937 Fortnightly reported the MFSS donated one-

hundred-eighty-three volumes to the Commonwealth library.

213

Hays quoted in Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 59; Lee Hays to Myles Horton, n.d., series 4, box 5, folder 40, Hays

Papers; Capaldi, “Wasn’t That A Time!,” p. 5.

214

Waldemar Hille and Donald Kobler quoted in Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 53-54.

short supply, as was theatrical equipment. Students and instructor alike were distracted by the

multiplicity of duties required to run the Commonwealth plant, and rural performances meant

sometimes staging plays in locales where “hogs had taken over the building and released a

brigade of fleas.”

215

Though years later Hays professed to know little about labor drama, correspondence from

the Commonwealth years presents a different view. Following the production of Gumbo, Hays

wrote Zilphia Horton a lengthy critique of the play’s productions, tour schedule, and overall

efficiency: revealing not only Hays’ practical understanding of stagecraft and seriousness of

purpose but the wit, humor, and friendship in his relationship with Horton — and by extension,

Myles Horton and Ralph Tefferteller who performed in and toured with Gumbo. The letter

likewise reveals something of the previous experience and theoretical grounding Hays brought to

Commonwealth. “I once produced JOURNEY’S END,” he confided to Horton. “Starting with

burnt tin we built half a set but finished with black drapes. The effect was startling, and a bit

confusing. There is a unity in play production which should control every task.” Finally, Hays

addressed what he felt was Gumbo’s greatest flaw:

The most important thing about the play which requires discussion is its use of blackface

. . . . do you consider it legitimate? I do not. From your position at Highlander, with its

race policy as it is, you may consider it necessary to use black face as you perchance go

into race problems as they relate to Southern labor. From my position, I would plan to use

Negroes for negro parts, thereby further illustrating the reality of the problems of labor

and race.

216

215

Cobb, Radical Education, 111, 121-125, 128-132; Hays quoted in McAvoy, Rehearsing Revolutions, 199; Lee

Hays, “From 97¢ to Hushpuppy: Report of the Dramatics Director to the Second Annual Meeting of the

Commonwealth College Association February 25-26, 1939,” St. John Collection, Commonwealth College

Collection, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, p. 2; Max Brantley, “UA-Little Rock

unveils restored Joe Jones mural,” Arkansas Times, August 22, 2018, https://arktimes.com/arkansas-

blog/2018/08/22/ua-little-rock-unveils-restored-joe-jones-mural; Memoirs, Excerpts 1 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder

63, Hays Papers.

216

Lee Hays to Zilphia Horton, folder 2, box 58, HREC Records.

Hays’ correspondence with members of the New Theater League shows his ongoing concern about appropriate

racial representation in southern workers’ dramatics. See Jaquish, “An Examination of the Mythic Frameworks,” 26.

The complete script of One Bread One Body may be found in full in Jaquish, Appendix C, 141-162.

Hays’ “position,” however, was, at the time of writing, a purely theoretical one; it would

be five months before he was hired as Dramatics Instructor at Commonwealth — an institution

with its own strict racial policies. Within the year, however, Hays had put many of his

recommendations to Horton into practice. As the popularity of the Workers Dramatics program

caused its extension to all students on campus, in January, Hays delegated: dividing students and

faculty into groups to organize and write three plays simultaneously. Less than a year after

Highlander’s productions of Gumbo, Commonwealth presented its own sharecropper play, One

Bread, One Body — a sequel to Gumbo written by Hays in collaboration with Dan Burnet,

Commonwealth staff, and the dramatics students — at the February 26, 1938, STFU convention

in Little Rock. Though different in tone from Gumbo, the play shows Hays’ continued

commitment to religion-labor work as a means to reach southern workers. One Body incorporates

humor in a way Gumbo lacked, often against the still menacing character of Planter Bagley,

reprised by Hays. The principal difference between the two plays, however, is message. Gumbo

ends with a funereal call to union; in One Body, the power of union triumphs as members

demand and receive a contract from Bagley for the season. Incorporating STFU hymns and

songs soon to appear in Hays’ first edition of the Commonwealth Labor Songs, at its STFU

convention premier, union members appeared on stage as extras: suggesting African Americans

and whites performed together. The point appears confirmed by the February 26 program listing

O. H. Whitfield — initials used by Owen Whitfield, organizer of the Bootheel named second

vice president of the union at the convention — appearing in the role of “Bill Stepps, a

sharecropper.” A year after the tumultuous Muskogee conference, having just returned from

another speaking tour in the East, Claude Williams took the boards as “the STFU organizer.”

Whether or not Hays was indeed able to cast African American performers, at the February 26

performance, there was no blackface.

217

Hays’ two years at Commonwealth were a period of vital creativity in areas not directly

related to the Workers Dramatics program; his work collecting folk songs was among that which

most influenced his later work in the cultural front. In addition to his teaching duties and work in

the kitchen, office, and writing for and often editing the Fortnightly — Hays sought out Emma

Dusenbury, the beloved blind folk singer of the region, who promptly told him she was his

distant cousin.

218

Hays frequently brought Mrs. Dusenbury to sing at Commonwealth’s Saturday

night gatherings, once stood guard with a shotgun on her porch all night when her daughter felt

menaced by ruffians, and, with Waldemar Hille, collected some one hundred of the five hundred

folk songs she kept in her memory: later teaching one of the best-known, “The Candidate’s a

Dodger,” to the Almanac Singers in New York.

219

217

“Two Classes Added as New Term Opens,” Commonwealth College Fortnightly, January 15, 1938, p. 1;

“Sharecropper Play to be Given Campus Production,” Commonwealth College Fortnightly, March 15, 1938, p. 1;

Barbara Jaquish, “An Examination,” 95-96. The cast list, including Lee Hays, Claude Williams, and O. H.

Whitfield, is found in Jaquish, p. 142, as is the New Testament verse, 1 Corinthians 10:17, from which the play’s

title is drawn; Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 90; Dunbar, Against the Grain, 167-168; Grubbs,

Cry from the Cotton, 183n49.

218

Memoirs, Excerpts 1 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 63, Hays Papers; Lee Hays, untitled column in People’s Songs

Bulletin, April 1947, p. 11.

219

Vance Randolph, “Ballad Hunters of North America,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 7 (Spring 1948): 7.

Randolph states Hays “wrote down more than one hundred” Dusenbury Songs for the Commonwealth College

library that were lost when the school closed, and that Waldemar Hille’s recorded interviews with her from these

years were also lost. Lee Hays, untitled column in People’s Songs Bulletin, April 1947, p. 11; Lee Hays on Woody

Guthrie, series 5, box 5, folder 49, Hays Papers; Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 53-54; Robert Cochran, Our Own

Sweet Sounds: A Celebration of Popular Music in Arkansas (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1996),

36-37. Though others collected Dusenbury’s songs, including John Lomax, Vance Randolph, and Sidney Robertson

Cowell for the Resettlement Administration under Charles Seeger, the Almanac Singers learned “The Candidate’s a

Dodger” directly from Hays who had learned it personally from Dusenbury in 1938 while at Commonwealth

College. See, Stephen Winick, “The Candidate’s a Dodger: An Electoral Folksong Tradition from Oral Tradition to

Aaron Copeland,” FolkLife Today, American Folklife Center and Veterans History Project, (September 29, 2016)

Library of Congress, https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/09/the-candidates-a-dodger-an-electoral-folksong-from-

oral-tradition-to-aaron-copland/; Lee Hays on Woody Guthrie, series 5, box 5, folder 49, Hays Papers; Koppelman,

Sing Out Warning, 161.

As 1938 became 1939, Hays and Hille collaborated on another project showing both

Hays’ growing connections with the cultural front in the North and his desire to further the work

of Commonwealth and the STFU in those circles. Hitchhiking to Chicago, Hays and Hille

performed on January 22, at the Chicago Repertory Group theater, a program for striking

newspapermen to benefit Workers Education Libraries they titled, We Shall All Be Free.

220

Alongside a caricature of “Big Lee Hays,” the flyer for the event announced, “Commonwealth

College Comes to Chicago. Arkansas Dramatist Collector Southern Songs to Give Program.”

Introduced by Jack Conroy, author of the novel The Disinherited and editor of The Anvil, Hays’

performance script describes a radical hope for the future in a remarkable combination of

religion, humor, and “labor-Chautauqua” style lecture recital that would become a Hays

trademark.

221

“An amazing thing is happening in the South,” it begins. “We are moving from the old

boss-slave economy into a new South — a South of struggle against tyranny, of militant union

action. For we have heard the good news of unionism, that if we stand like a tree by the living

waters, we shall all be free.” With more humor, it continues, “Two great southern industries:

Cotton and hymnbooks. We have always sung hymns,” and “The Commonwealth College

collection of southern labor songs contains hymns and spirituals and their parodies, folk songs

220

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 56; Draft copy of script for We Shall All Be Free by Lee Hays and Waldemar Hill,

box 13, folder 664, Jack Conroy Papers.

221

Flyer, Commonwealth Comes to Chicago, January 22, [1939], box 13, folder 664, Jack Conroy Papers.

Chautauqua variety entertainment and lecture series was a form of entertainment and education with which Hays

would have been familiar. Founded by Methodists in Chautauqua, New York, Chautauqua was especially popular in

the 1920s. Between 1920 and 1924, over ten thousand communities sponsored a program each year; in 1924, the

“Jubilee Anniversary” of Chautauqua, an estimated forty million Americans attended Chautauqua circuit

performances. See John E. Tapia, Circuit Chautauqua: From Rural Education to Popular Entertainment in Early

Twentieth Century America (North Carolina and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 1997), 7. McAvoy

provides a thorough discussion Labor Chautauqua, (acts alternating with songs) originating at Brookwood Labor

College and written and performed at Highlander Folk School on pp.151-152, 156-158, as does Colette A. Hyman

Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1996), 212-215,

who informs Brookwood employed puppet troupes in its performances, as did Hays in his second year at

Commonwealth.

and their parodies, original folk songs of social content.” Hays’ script could well have been

describing his work with the Almanac Singers and the Weavers over the next three decades.

Interspersed with spoken word and examples of parody songs — he had not yet begun using the

term “zipper song” — Hays ended the program with the song he taught the Social Action

Fellowship at Judson Street Church two years before. His “parody” demonstrates how new

words in familiar settings transform a song’s meaning from powerlessness to empowerment:

creating a vehicle for both union organizing and a sustaining “culture of unity.”

222

Hungry, hungry are we —

We don’t get nothing for our labor, so

Hungry hungry are we.

Angry, angry are we —

We don’t get nothing for our labor, so

Angry, angry are we.

No matter that they used to sing:

Weary, weary am I —

For they have a new song:

Landless, landless are we —

Homeless, homeless,

Raggedy, raggedy,

Hungry —

Union members are we,

Just as union as union can be,

We’re gonna get something for our labor,

For union members are we!

223

222

Draft copy of script for We Shall All Be Free by Lee Hays and Waldemar Hill, box 13, folder 664, Jack Conroy

Papers; Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth

Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 66, 1-2; Lizbeth Cohen, Making a New

Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 333;

Michael Denning, The Cultural Front, citing Lizbeth Cohen, 20; Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 57.

223

Flyer, Commonwealth Comes to Chicago, January 22, [1939] and Draft copy of script for We Shall All Be Free

by Lee Hays and Waldemar Hill, box 13, folder 664, Jack Conroy Papers.

Jack Conroy further cemented the alliance with the southern coalition by taking Hays out

for drinks with New Anvil co-editor Nelson Algren to their “favorite saloons,” where, as part of

their W.P.A. Writers Project assignments, Hays recalled, Conroy and Algren recorded graffiti

from “washroom walls.” The following March, Hays’ first published prose appeared in the

inaugural edition of The New Anvil. That Hays chose as his first publication “Two Dreams of

John Riley,” his account of an African American STFU organizer’s prophetic visions for

pollical, social, and economic justice, shows Hays’ ongoing determination to educate the

northern cultural front to the struggles of sharecroppers and the southern radical coalition.

224

“Two Dreams” was not Hays’ first publication in the “little mags.” The previous January,

New Masses editor Mike Gold published Hays’ trenchant “Wants Communist Poetry” in the

letters to the editor section. Critiquing New Masses featured poets, Hays declared, “Their poetry

does not sing to me, Awake! Or shout, Arise! or thumb its nose at my masters, or help me aim

my kicks at my masters’ britches . . . . It is too much to ask that some communist poetry be

written for workers and worker-audiences . . . . that some communist poetry speak to me and

other rank-and-file workers of a Soviet America — and of our own bloody struggle for

democracy!”

225

Hays’ critique may have had results, for in August, his prose piece “Let the Will .

. .” appeared on the page following the poem “Red Clay Blues.” Co-authored by Richard Wright

and Langston Hughes, the poem’s lines “I want to see the landlords runnin’ cause I/Wonder

where they gonna go!” dovetail like a single song into Hays’ opening “In Cotton Plant, Ark., I

224

Lee Hays, “Two Dreams of John Riley as recounted to Lee Hays,” New Anvil, March 1939, p. 12. The New Anvil

replaced The Anvil which ceased publication in 1935. The first edition, in which Hays was published, stated, “The

New Anvil is launched at a time in which the issues of three years ago have been immeasurably intensified.” Among

these issues were the increasing power of world-wide fascism and reaction, the resistance of trade unionism, and the

actions of the Dies Committee; the editors encouraged support of Federal Arts, Writers, and Theater Projects, and

pledged “as much as writers may, [to] assist in shaping the course of events toward a democratic victory over the

dark forces of oppression and aggression.” New Anvil, March 1939, pp. 3-4; Capaldi, “Wasn’t That A Time!,” p. 3;

Algren may be best remembered for his 1955, novel, The Man with the Golden Arm.

225

Lee Hays, “Wants Communist Poetry,” New Masses, January 11, 1938, p. 21.

heard a Negro congregation singing an old hymn, ‘Let the will of the Lord be done.’” Hays

describes in print, as he had in the Chicago performance, the process of creating from hymns and

spirituals, “good union song(s).” As the song phrase “the will of the Lord” is changed, first, to

“the will of the union,” then “the will of the People,” and finally, the single word “Organize!,”

the hymn’s meaning shifts from resignation to empowerment through organized labor and

democratic dissent. In creating new hymns of dissent, Hays was following in a long line of

Dissenters, among them, the Wesleys, for whom hymns provided not only a means of devotion

but a means of “collective identity.”

226

Hays was still educating the cultural front about STFU struggles and the power of

collective singing in 1947. In a February-March People’s Songs column, he described the terror

of driving through a dark Arkansas night. Riding in a car known to local planters, with an

African American man, a white woman, a young boy, and a union organizer “hated . . . . so much

that riding bosses had caught him and flogged him with the belly band of a mule harness,” Hays

was afraid. He could sense the man and woman in the back seat beside him “tightening up every

time we passed a car or went through a town.” To strengthen their resolve on that night, they

sang, not the “good union songs,” but hymns with “harmonies swelling and breaking . . . bass

voice giving way to sweet soprano, the organizer’s raspy baritone coming in with a verse or a

chorus one hymn after another, and all the voices searching, working for harmonies unheard and

unknown, perfect blends of tones and feelings and fears.” It came to him that night that the

words did not matter; it was the “drawing together of inner strengths, and what mattered was that

226

Lee Hays, “Let the Will . . . :,” p. 15; On Methodism and dissent, see, Jay R. Case, “Methodists and Holiness in

North America,” and D. Densil Morgan, “Spirituality, Worship, and Congregational Life,” in Oxford History of

Dissenting Protestant Traditions eds. Timothy Larsen and Michael Ledger-Lomas (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2017), 211-213, 519-520.

each offered his voice to the others, and his own strength.”

227

It is a prescient column: one that

reveals Hays’ beliefs not just about the power of music, but about the workings of humans’

interwoven relationships and his conviction that an “ideal way of living” meant gathering

strength from cooperative collaboration — merging the creative, political, and religious, into a

singular life work.

Hays’ flurry of performance and nationally published writings in 1939, documenting the

work of Commonwealth and the STFU, may reflect a realization that his “golden period” at the

college was coming to an end. Claude Williams’ problems with the union only intensified after

becoming Commonwealth’s Director. In the aftermath of Muskogee, as anti-communist feeling

increased both within the union and — with the formation of the Dies Committee — the nation

at large, H. L. Mitchell accused Williams of Communist Party membership. Responding,

Norman Thomas suggested Mitchell bring formal charges of holding dual party membership

against Williams to the Arkansas Socialist Party, and “make sure that some of our colored

friends” knew Williams was now director of a whites-only institution.

228

Williams’ suspected CP

membership incited not just local disruption. His fund-raising stop in Cleveland, a week before

Kester’s for National Sharecroppers Week, was interpreted by Harriet Young, director of NSW,

as calculated communist sabotage. The STFU alliance with the CIO through the United Cannery,

Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) was likewise souring over

perceptions of a communist takeover designed to eliminate the STFU. Kester, suspicious and

angry after being “kicked out” of a meeting of the UCAPAWA executive board meeting in April

227

Lee Hays, untitled column in People’s Songs Bulletin, First Anniversary Issue, February-March, 1947, p. 15.

Claude Williams who was beaten in 1936 with a mule harness, was, no doubt, the union organizer Hays describes in

his column. On the beating, see Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 68-69, and Cobb, Radical

Education, 111-113.

228

Dunbar, Against the Grain, 165-169; Norman Thomas quoted in Dunbar, 165-166.

of 1938, declared the STFU “must fight back or be ‘smashed like a potato bug,’” while H. L.

Mitchell privately asked Gardner Jackson if John L. Lewis might not want to use the conflict

between the unions as an excuse to purge communists from the CIO.

229

Thus, the stage was set when J. R. Butler, STFU President and Williams’ frequent

defender, found the morning of August 21, 1938, a detailed proposal addressed to the Central

Committee of the Communist Party seeming to propose a takeover of the union for the CP in

exchange for a $500.00 grant to Commonwealth College. The document was in the pocket of a

coat Williams, who had stopped at Butler’s home to rest on his way to Missouri, had accidentally

left behind.

230

Stunned, Butler reacted: first, calling a press conference where he accused

Williams of being “red,” then writing Williams requesting his immediate resignation from the

union’s National Executive Council — and that “Lee Hayes” and others “remove themselves

immediately from the field of the STFU and that they desist from making or showing any

pictures that may in any way purport to represent the activities of the Southern Tenant Farmers’

Union or the Southern Labor Movement.”

231

Williams convinced Butler to withdraw the request, explaining the document as a

misguided, unauthorized student project, but when the question of his continuing on the

Executive Council and in the union, itself, were put to a vote at his trial before the Executive

Council in September, Williams was expelled by unanimous vote. Hoping for reprieve, he

229

Dunbar, Against the Grain, 168-169; Kester quoted in Dunbar, 169; Robert F. Martin argues Kester, who in 1934

considered himself a “revolutionary socialist,” became increasingly disillusioned by political activism, and,

following a nervous collapse and extended period of rest and reflection in 1937 (possibly beginning with his re-

ordination as a Congregational Minister in 1936) reoriented his ideas of southern activism toward religious rather

than political action. This change coincided with a “violent opposition to Communists, real or imagined during the

late thirties.” See Martin, “A Prophet’s Pilgrimage,” 525, 528-529.

230

Gellman and Roll contend Williams was on his way to the Missouri bootheel to assist Owen Whitfield in

speaking engagements to publicize the plight of evicted sharecroppers. See Gospel of the Working Class, 93.

231

J. R. Butler to Claude Williams, August 22, 1938, series 2, folder 265, Kester papers; Cobb, Radical Education,

120-121, 192-197; Dunbar, Against the Grain, 170-171.

appealed to the full union at the annual convention in Cotton Plant in December 1938 and was

expelled by a vote of fifty-eight to seven.

232

As Commonwealth, now without funding from the

AFPS or organized labor, canceled its winter session to regroup, Hays and Hille hitchhiked to

Chicago to perform the We Shall All Be Free. In the middle of the program, Hays said, “This

song illustrates an important characteristic of hymnology: the role of the leader . . . . I have heard

Claude Williams — Commonwealth’s director — improvise a whole song with three hundred

sharecroppers, singing out verses like these: Join the union. It is able. It will help you. Get a

contract. Boss won’t like it. Make him like it.”

233

On February 26, after returning from Chicago, Lee Hays delivered at the second annual

meeting of the Commonwealth College Association a report on the prolific work of the dramatics

program from 1937 to 1939 — a period so successful, one scholar now argues Hays’

experimental approach placed Commonwealth not only at the vanguard of “southern labor

drama,” but “perhaps even theatre practice as a whole.”

234

In less than two years, Hays and the

Commoners created well over fourteen productions. Plays on topics of northern takeover of

southern industry, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, planter abuses of tenant farmers and

sharecroppers, the poll tax, farm relief, and May Day were performed for “farmer’s union locals

in East Arkansas and Calhoun County, for “local people,” and, Hays noted, four were published

and “produced elsewhere.”

235

The report also noted the performance of numerous skits and

232

Cobb, Radical Education, 198-200.

233

Ibid., 200; Draft copy of script for We Shall All Be Free by Lee Hays and Waldemar Hill, box 13, folder 664,

Jack Conroy Papers.

234

McAvoy, Rehearsing Revolutions, 196.

235

Lee Hays, “From 97¢ to Hushpuppy,” 2; McAvoy, Rehearsing Revolutions, 196-197. Commoners performed for

the Farmers Educational and Cooperative Union, the Indiana Farmers’ Union, and the Dallas Civic Federation; plays

were published by the National Religion and Labor Foundation and the Midwest Daily Record. McAvoy,

Rehearsing Revolutions, 199. The Midwest Daily Record (1938-1939) was a radical newspaper published by the

Communist Party. See, Christopher H. Sterling, The Encyclopedia of Journalism (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

Publications, 2009), 79; Midwest Daily Record, (Chicago, IL) 1938-1939, Library of Congress,

https://www.loc.gov/item/sn86086388/.

100

innovative development of marionette theater, both of which were components of the “Oklahoma

show,” Hushpuppy—a four-part production the labor dramatics classes toured to striking Tulsa

oil workers in December 1938 before Hays and Hille traveled to Chicago. All in all, Hays

reported, “We took our plays to 3000 people, 2000 saw them produced by other groups. All our

published plays have been sold out. The market for workers’ plays — easy to produce, well

planned to meet the money limitations of workers’ groups and with specific appeals — is wide

open.”

236

With pride, he reported one play particularly effective:

WE ARE NOT ALONE: About the Blytheville Boys, falsely accused of rape. Published,

used by the NAACP as a reading. Sent to a large number of Arkansans, urging them to

free the boys by protesting. Apparently they did, for Governor Bailey’s secretary wrote

me asking me to ‘tell my friends’ to stop writing the governor; and indicating that

popular protest was having its effect.

237

When Hays presented his report in February 1939, he did not yet know the outcome of

the case that began in 1935 and continued to haunt him during his blacklist period fifteen years

later. In many ways, We Are Not Alone was Hays’ final act before closing the curtain on

Commonwealth. In the last months of its existence, the college became involved in the struggle

to stop the execution of Jim X. Carruthers and Bubbles Clayton — two young African American

men accused of raping a white woman in Blytheville. An April article in the Blytheville Courier

announced Governor Carl E. Bailey had received a letter signed by Winifred L. Chappell,

stating, “The students and staff of Commonwealth College through our joint action committee,

urge you to use your influence in behalf of complete justice for the two Blytheville negroes, Jim

236

Lee Hays, “From 97¢ to Hushpuppy,” 3. Hushpuppy, comprised of two full plays, one marionette piece —

complete with a fire-breathing dragon, as the “spirit of capitalism,” that breathed real fire — and numerous “Toby

Skits and songs,” represented a significant production in dangerous territory. The shows were presented in a rented

hall with set and stage equipment brought from Commonwealth; the home of the organizer in which Hays and the

students stayed was raided and the organizer arrested by police the day after the Commoners left Tulsa. Willens,

Lonesome Traveler, 54.

237

Lee Hays, “From 97¢ to Hushpuppy,” 3.

101

Carruthers and Bubbles Clayton. We do not want another Scottsboro Case; we do not want any

negro left without the protection due him.” Having investigated conditions in Scottsboro with the

Scottsboro-Herndon Delegation in 1934, Chappell was likely aware the case of Carruthers and

Clayton had already been named “The Second Scottsboro,” by the Philadelphia Enquirer, the

Atlanta Courier, the Chicago Defender, and other African American newspapers across the

country.

238

We Are Not Alone, published on May 4, 1938, depicts Clayton and Carruthers in poignant

conversation with their lawyer, Luther, about possibilities of their pending execution or

release.

239

Closing with a call to action, the last page urges readers to “USE THIS PLAY!” in

local union meetings, in traces councils, and in churches; to mail letters of protest to Governor

Carl Bailey; and, “Most important,” to send donations to Mr. Luther Moore, the President of the

local NAACP — concluding, “Time is short. “Help the Negro people to secure justice for

themselves by freeing the innocent Blytheville Boys.”

240

The Arkansas Gazette reported

hundreds of letters from across the country flooded acting governor Bob Bailey’s office

demanding a stay of execution based on unfair trial practices and new evidence. On the night of

the execution, however, in a special report from Russellville, the Gazette assured its readers,

“Bob Bailey went to bed tonight with a clear conscience.” After years of staunchly maintaining

his innocence, the Gazette reported, James Carruthers, seated in the electric chair at Tucker

238

“Commonwealth College Pleads for Negro Pair,” Blytheville (AR) Courier News, April 20, 1938, p. 1; Stephen

A. Smith, “Arkansas ‘Scottsboro’ Case,” Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Central Arkansas Library System, last updated

January 24, 2012, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/arkansas-scottsboro-case-6452/. The Scottsboro-

Herndon delegation traveled first to Georgia to investigate the treatment of Angelo Herndon then to Alabama to

investigate the prison conditions under which the Scottsboro defendants were held. See A Southern Welcome, 3.

239

Jules Koslow and the Students of Labor Drama, We are Not Alone, (Mena, AR: Commonwealth College, 1938),

William Gilbert Papers, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville. We Are Not Alone was,

in Commonwealth’s collaborative fashion, credited to Jules Koslow and the Students of Labor Drama; nowhere does

Hays’ name appear.

240

Jules Koslow and the Students of Labor Drama, We are Not Alone, title page, 3-4.

102

Prison Farm, had confessed. “I don’t mind admitting that confession was a relief to me,” the

acting governor told the Gazette the day after the execution. “There was a tremendous amount of

pressure on me and I did very little sleeping last night, pondering the case, but I couldn’t see my

way clear to take any action.” Carruthers’ confession, the governor believed, was the “best

answer” to those demanding a stay. Bubbles Clayton maintained his innocence to the end.

241

In 1953, while blacklisted and supporting himself primarily by writing, Hays mailed

Robert Hille of Ellery Queen Magazine a letter, background information, and draft short story,

asking for his opinion. In his cover letter, Hays confided, “I was very close to the case at the time

. . . . I know I have not done justice to the case itself, which is a long tale of manufactured rape

charge, heartbreaking legal battles, and final defeat when the youngsters were executed.” His

explanatory notes continued:

In the late 1930s two Negro boys, Bubbles Clayton and Jim X. Carruthers were executed

in the electric chair near Tucker Farm, near Little Rock. They had appealed their case and

fought for their lives for about three years after their conviction. That they kept going so

long was due to the efforts of their lawyers and also to the efforts of several white

ministers who had become convinced of their innocence . . . . I got into this case in a very

slight way when one of the ministers asked me to write a one-act play about the case,

which I did. It was mimeographed and sent to churches in East Arkansas where it was

either performed or read from the pulpit. I promptly received several insane letters from

irate citizens and at least one threat, but also a number of warm letters thanking me for

writing the play.

242

On June 29, 1939, the night before the execution, Hays rode a bus “halfway across the

state to Little Rock.” Reading accounts in the Gazette the next day, he was undone. “I stood

reading it on Main Street crying,” he wrote, “for I was so shocked at the cruel story they printed.

The reporter had obtained a list of foods the boys had ordered for their last supper and it was a

241

“Carruthers Confesses as He Dies, “Arkansas Gazette, July 1, 1938, p. 7; “Carruthers Confesses as He Dies,”

Arkansas Gazette, July 4, 1938, p. 13; Stephen A. Smith, “Arkansas ‘Scottsboro’ Case,” Encyclopedia of Arkansas,

Central Arkansas Library System, updated January 24, 2012, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/arkansas-

scottsboro-case-6452/.

242

Lee Hays to Bob Mills, November 5, 1953 with undated explanatory notes, series 3, box 4, folder 1, Hays Papers.

103

big joke — they had ordered things they could not have seen, ever, but only heard about; and

they had to die to get all the good things.” Hays tried for years to write about the case and could

not find a way to craft words to convey the tragedy or, perhaps, his epiphany about it. The story,

he realized, could not be about himself, “a white southerner,” and his reactions, but “was the tale

of two hungry boys, sacrificed to ignorance and bigotry.” Of the story he titled A Banquet and a

Half he wrote, describing their “last supper is only a tiny part of their agony.”

243

Ellery Queen Magazine published Banquet and a Half and included it, and Hays,

alongside Ray Bradbury and Margery Allingham in the magazine’s honor roll of short stories for

1953. The story, based on the “last supper” of two young African American men falsely accused,

draws a thread from Hays’ childhood haunted by lynching to his personal experiences of hunger

hitchhiking the country, the want he found among sharecroppers while filming at Delta Farms,

his hopes to alleviate suffering through religion-labor work with the STFU and radical religious

coalition, to the Commonwealth years, and finally, the urban cultural front in New York.

Throughout all, the suffering of disinherited, disempowered, and disenfranchised dominated his

thinking, as did the idea that people organized and working collectively had a better chance at a

better life, and that cultural work, both creative and performative, could bring people to a unified

vision, inspiring a unity of action, that might just make a better life possible.

Banquet links Hays’ religious, political, intellectual, and artistic praxis across time and

distance from the southern radical coalition to northern cultural front — from the “Old Left” to

the Cold War Era of Civil Rights; it is but one such link, however. The best known are the

twenty pages of Commonwealth Labor Songs Hays carried in his pocket, with those of Emma

Dusenbury he carried in his mind, hitchhiking from Mena to Philadelphia and New York the

243

Hays to Mills.

104

summer after Clayton and Carruthers were executed. Through Hays’ work with the Almanac

Singers and the Weavers, these southern union hymns and folk songs were grafted onto the

cultural front during Denning’s “age of the CIO.”

244

In some cases, the Hays-Dusenbury-

Almanac connection is inseparable. Hays wrote “Union Train” — one of his best-known vocal

performances recorded on the Almanacs’ Talking Union — based on “The Old Ship of Zion”

Dusenbury sang.

245

Two Dusenbury songs he taught the Almanacs, “The Dodger Song” and

“The State of Arkansas,” moved with him into the Weavers Cold War period. Hays’

Commonwealth compilation contained other union and folk standards performed by the

Almanacs, the Weavers, and later performers of the folk revival — “Roll the Union On,” “We

Shall Not Be Moved,” “Casey Jones,” “Solidarity Forever,” “The Riddle Song,” “Crawdad

Song,” and “No More Mourning.” The original vision with Seeger was to create a “singing labor

movement.”

246

Seven years later, during the Wallace campaign, Hays’ “Sermon for Songwriters”

dreamt of “a great people’s song, of our marching song which will come again, but hasn’t yet, of

the great song which is still unsung.” It would be a “battle hymn” sung in days of defeat and “on

the day we celebrate our victory.”

247

In New York’s urban cultural front, Hays embodied the southern religious left:

encompassing in his background, work, and life experience the southern ministerial class;

Methodist hymnody and spirituals expressing unity and dissent; southern socialism; labor

colleges; and the STFU. To these, he added his talent, desire for community, creativity, skills,

acquired knowledge, a pressing need to be of service, and a belief that art could be the vehicle

244

Denning, The Cultural Front, 68.

245

Capaldi, “Wasn’t That A Time!,” p. 3; The Almanac Singers, Talking Union, Keynote, 1941.

246

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 62, 69; Commonwealth Labor Songs: A Collection of Old and New Songs for the

Use of Labor Unions (Mena, AR, 1938). Two editions of the Commonwealth Labor Songs were published; the first

during the college’s 1938 spring quarter was followed by a second edition in the fall. Song adaptations are credited

variously John Handcox, Claude Williams, Lee Hays, and Mark Starr of the ILGWU.

247

Lee Hays, “A Sermon to Songwriters,” People’s Songs Bulletin, The Wallace Campaign, April 1948, p. 11.

105

for rendering it. In the years prior to 1940, tracing a path of study, work, and publication between

North and South, Hays contributed to both the development of a nascent cultural front in the

South and to the urban cultural front in the North. In folk circles obsessed with “authenticity,”

Hays’ Arkansas pedigree and southern labor work granted verisimilitude. In New York’s urban

cultural front, Hays was the southern left. Thus, he not only brought north southern leftist

culture, practices, and techniques; he was the perfect transmitter to convey them.

He was already in the East when the auctioneer’s gavel fell, and Commonwealth

College’s three-hundred-twenty acres sold to the highest bidder. The school’s prized library of

over five thousand volumes — to which Hays’ efforts had added some two hundred labor plays

and over one hundred songs by Emma Dusenbury — was purchased by L. D. Summers, the

Baptist pastor whose attacks from pulpit and pamphlet had precipitated the college’s downfall.

The forty-four-foot mural, “Struggle for the South,” Joe Jones painted on the walls of

Commonwealth’s dining room, survived. Painted on the Masonite walls of the Commonwealth

dining hall, it made suitable building materials for a closet in Mena. In a brief but serious attempt

to recreate the college as a New Theater School, the New Theater League began operations on

the property deeded to them by Commonwealth on September 25. The experiment was over by

October 12, when the League was charged with operating the school without a license.

248

By the

summer of 1940, when Lee Hays and Millard Lampell met Pete Seeger, Commonwealth College

was gone. Hays’ correspondence from the ensuing years shows, however, that his connection to

the people and ideas of the southern radical religious coalition remained.

248

Cobb, Radical Education, 207-208; Leslie Newell Peacock, “A Mural to Move Little Rock Forward: Restored

Joe Jones Painting Centerpiece of new UA Little Rock Downtown,” Arkansas Times, December 27, 2018,

https://arktimes.com/news/cover-stories/2018/12/27/a-mural-to-move-little-rock-forward.

106

“After the experience at Commonwealth,” Hays said of the reason for his journey north,

“it seemed to Claude and me some of the others that the only way in which to spread our music

was for me to go to New York and form a group and sing.”

249

That Chappell, Williams, and the

Commoners sent Hays — with sixty-five dollars and twenty pages of Commonwealth Labor

Songs — hitchhiking thirteen hundred miles toward New York speaks to their view of both his

resourcefulness and the strength of the radical web along which he traveled. After two years at

Commonwealth, it likewise may have seemed Hays’ chances of success, and possibly of

survival, were better outside Arkansas. Written in November 1950, eight months before her

death, Winifred Chappell’s letter to Hays reveals much about her early confidence in his

abilities, the ongoing connections within the radical coalition, Hays’ life in the cultural front, and

his view of the political purpose the Weavers’ commercial success might serve.

Lee, it was because I believed in your talent that I gave you a little lift to get from C. C.

to NYC. I remember remarking to you that the time would come when I would be retiring

without enough to retire on; and that by then you would be realizing your creative gifts.

Now that time has come and I am warm with satisfaction that you wanted to send me this

check. I do not need it for necessities of the body, but I do for cultural food, so I am

buying me a phonograph . . . mainly so that I can have some Robeson . . . some of Earl’s

[Robinson] some Almanac pieces and some of your new things.

250

Hays, whose work with the Weavers allowed him a degree of disposable income for the

first time, had mailed Chappell a check for thirty dollars. From the Chicago Deaconess Home

where she then lived, Chappell responded cheerfully to Hays’ other inquiries; her trip to see him

in New York last year had been a highlight; yes, she was still in touch with Harry Ward; was

delighted Lee was in close contact with Mike Gold; and yes, “sarcoma is a kind of cancer, but

one that responds marvelously well to radiation — especially when, as in my case — it is in the

lymph system.” One response reveals much about Hays’ conflicted views of the Weavers’

249

Capaldi, “Wasn’t That A Time!,” p. 4; Memoirs, Excerpts 2 of 2, series 3, box 3, folder 64, Hays Papers.

250

Winifred Chappell to Lee Hays, November 8, 1950, series 1, box 1, folder 15, Hays Papers.

107

commercial success and the purpose he hoped it would serve. “I am so gratified that you are in

what you are in and that you are succeeding,” Chappell assured. “I think most of us should have

stayed in the bourgeoise field so that we could keep our purpose clear and bright. You are. We

have isolated ourselves too much, and as you imply, have had to be supported in some fashion by

the movement.”

251

In 1950, at the height of the Weavers’ success, Hays’ praxis was little

changed. He lived cooperatively, worked collaboratively for “the movement” within a broader

coalition, and still experienced its concomitant dangers. Though not on stage with Paul Robeson,

he had “run the gauntlet”— with Guthrie, Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman — at

Peekskill the year before.

252

Ten years before Chappell’s letter, in April 1940, she and Hays became charter members

of Claude Williams’ new venture in Memphis, the People’s Institute of Applied Religion:

pledging to “assist its director in formulating the plans and policies of the organization; and to

cooperate in its program.”

253

Williams, who had suffered periodic bouts of tuberculosis since the

1920s, resigned from Commonwealth in August 1939 on the verge of nervous and physical

collapse. Joyce Williams had likewise been diagnosed with the disease and spent much of the

winter of 1939-1940 in the Arkansas Tuberculosis hospital. Hays never knew when he contracted

tuberculosis, but in 1941, his selective service medical examination acknowledged probable

vestiges of the disease in one lung.

254

251

Ibid.

252

Capaldi, “Wasn’t That A Time!,” p. 6; Lee Hays, “Simon McKeever at Peekskill,” Sunday Worker, September

13, 1949 reprinted in Koppelman, Sing Out Warning, 96-99; Lee Hays to Mother [Bloor], n.d., (copy of original)

received by United States Government Federal Bureau of Investigation, September 12, 1949, file no. 100-86568-

1A2 also included in United States Government Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Division, Consolidation

Memo, on Lee Hays, reference number 100-86568-29, February 17, 1953, FBI Records—100-NY-86568.

253

The People’s Institute of Applied Religion Charter Membership form, box 1, folder 16, Claude Williams Papers;

Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class, 108.

254

Willens, Lonesome Traveler, 76; United States Government Federal Bureau of Investigation, Lee Hays Selective

Service Record Review, completed, October 20, 1952, file number, 100-86568-29, FBI Records—100-NY-86568.

108

Throughout his life, Hays remained loyal to Williams: defending him and supporting him

financially with small contributions when he was at last able to do so. In 1962, when interviewed

about charges of communism against Williams and their effect on Commonwealth, Hays

responded that Williams had briefly joined the Party under the name Galey, but “let his

membership lapse” when, as Director of Commonwealth, he had pledged to keep the college

nonpartisan. “Everyone who knew Williams,” he continued, “recognized that, for him, program

was everything and party was nothing; therefore, any concern with a man’s party affiliation was

contemptible ‘red-baiting,’ the cheapest and most emotionalized form of attacking labor

unity.”

255

In 1979, Hays mailed a small contribution in response to a printed newsletter sent by

Williams and his supporters about increasing expenses; Williams concluded the newsletter,

“please let me hear from you again soon when possible. There’s still a lot to be done in this

continuing struggle of ours for economic security, lasting peace, and world brotherhood.” Under

this, in a handwritten note to Hays, he added, “Thanks for the ‘ten spot’ but the communication

in words was the treasured message.”

256

Hays’ tribute, written from Croton-on-Hudson and read, with many others, at Williams’

memorial service on August 4, 1979, reveals an influence on Hays more personal than political.

“If I know Claude,” Hays wrote, “he died laughing . . . . Claude took me in during the

depression. He and Joyce put me to work, taught me and kept me laughing during some of the

hardest times the country has ever known . . . . Of course I tell people about the man who opened

255

Hays quoted in Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton, 173n28.

256

To colleagues and friends of Claude Williams from Scott Douglas, Director, Paul Robeson Social Club, Stephen

F. Vause, American Federation of Teachers, and Judy Hand, Southern Organizing Committee, with second page

note by Williams, May 1, 1979, series 1, box 2, folder 20, Hays Papers.

109

doors for me that led into the whole wide world of thought, ideas and love for humanity . . . .

Aren’t you glad he was here? I am.”

257

However “anathema” were thoughts of memoirs in 1977 when Hays told Doris Willens

he was giving up the project, his letter to Myles Horton, written after the documentary “Wasn’t

That a Time” and the Weavers Reunion Concert of November 1980, showed the prospect

seemed brighter. “In my ‘posthumous memoirs,’” Hays wrote Horton,

I am reaching back to a lot of golden places like Highlander, Commonwealth, the Seeger

Compound and others. The point will be that the most golden place of all is right here in

Croton — like that famous old lecture Acres of Diamonds. Each of my golden places was

a place I grew and learned, and I’m still doing that. I figure if I have about 80 more years

on top of my present 67 I may get Just enough education to start living. My ignorance is

astounding.

258

Writing to Horton about Highlander’s upcoming fiftieth anniversary, Hays was flooded

with memories. “I remember Zilphia poaching eggs in milk and I have done the same ever since.

And I shall never forget her dancing on the lawn in her billowing peasant skirt. Blouse too, of

course.” He spoke of her influence and that of Claude Williams on his life and work. Through

her, he had discovered the work of the New Theater League and the process of “using art as a

weapon;” her uses of music, drama, and dance “opened up windows on a whole new world.”

And she had introduced him to Claude, whose vision — not in politics, which Hays confessed he

never fully understood — but in “his ability to reach for the talent in people,” remained with him

still.

From reminiscing with his old ally, Hays swooped back to the present. Pete had come

and worked with him editing the documentary the night before and “munched steadily until his

departure around midnight.” The freezer was full of good things from last summer’s garden, and

257

Memorial Service: Claude Williams, 8-4-79, series 1, box 2, folder 20, Hays Papers.

258

Lee Hays to Myles Horton, n.d., series 4, box 5 folder 40, Hays Papers.

110

Hays was planning the sowing for the spring. “Times like these,” he concluded, “I wish I were

rich. I wish you could have heard the whooping and hollering at Carnegie. Even Pete says he has

never experienced anything like it. I’ll have to settle for riches like that.”

259

Ibid.; Acres of Diamonds is a lengthy speech by Russell H. Conwell positing the true riches in life come from

doing good in one’s own community. Between 1870 and 1925, Conwell reportedly delivered the speech more than

six thousand times to over thirteen million people on the Chautauqua circuit and by radio: a feat by which he earned

eight million dollars toward the founding of Temple University in Philadelphia. See A. Cheree Carlson, “Narrative

as the Philosopher’s Stone: How Russell H. Conwell changed Lead into Diamonds,” Western Journal of Speech

Communication 53 (Fall 1989): 342-355; Acres of Diamonds by Russell H. Conwell, founder of Temple University;

His Life and Achievement by Robert Shackleton (Project Gutenberg, 2008),

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/368/368-h/368-h.htm.

111

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Media

Denning, Michael, “The Accumulation of Labor: Rethinking Work and its Representations,”

Institute for Comparative Modernities, Cornell University, Fall 2016 Lecture Series, Thursday,

November 10, 2016, uploaded, uploaded by William R Kennon, Jr. Professor of American

Studies Yale University, accessed, May 1, 2019, https://youtu.be/Q6aFvcdvYIE.

The Weavers: Wasn't That A Time, 1982; Directed by Jim Brown, Screenplay by Lee Hays,

produced by Harold Leventhal, George C. Stoney, and Ginger Brown