Oral History
Research Office
Columbia University
Session #3
Interviewee: Moe Foner
Interviewer: Robert Master
Place: New York, New York
Date: February 21, 1985
Q: Why don't you begin by telling me whatever recollections you have of Morris Schappes from that period.
Foner: Morris Schappes was a member of the faculty in the English department. He was a very highly regarded and well-liked teacher by the students, and even by the faculty. His colleagues respected him because he was fairly open about his years, quite open. As a matter of fact, he functioned and would speak openly about his beliefs. I can tell you very little more.
Q: Any particular reason why he was respected?
Foner: He was a good teacher. You see, I can't speak to this from first-hand knowledge, but from the responses I would get from students, see, I dealt with students since I was very often at the window at the registrar's office where students would come with questions, etc. So you got to know what they thought about different people.
Q: Were there any other personalities in that particular branch whom you have special recollections of? Particular friends of your brothers, say?
Foner: William Canning, who was the person who was the informer.
Q: What are your recollections of him?
Foner: Canning was sort of a wispy guy. I remember the woman he married, too. she was a student at City College, 23rd Street. He was shabbily dressed, he was rather poor, and I remember that my parents took him in and would feed him and often clothe him, and he was sort of close to the family. This was why the shock was even greater to my family, my parents -- of all people, him. Judas.
Q: What was he like politically?
Foner: He was a history teacher. He taught the evening session. I don't recall his outstanding political ability at the time. They don't strike me as any particular specialty.
Q: Let's move on to the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
Foner: I didn't sign it.
Q: How and when did you learn about the Pact?
Foner: I can't remember where I was at the time, at that particular moment. I remember that we were stunned by it, and then we quickly attempted to try to explain it to ourselves and then to others. It took some time, not too long. It was not that shocking to me, as I recall. Remember, before that was the invasion in Finland, but that we wiped away, because Finland was controlled by Baron Mannerheim, a fascist colonel. For some strange reason, we were able to figure that out for defense reasons. That must have happened after the Pact. Another move to protect themselves against Nazi Germany in the long run.
Q: This was also the period of the Rapp-Coudert hearings, and I guess maybe you could say something first about what you think the relationship was between the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the beginning of those kind of red scare investigations, because the chronology is quite close.
Foner: Well, the logic is also quite close. It was a good time to take off on communists, and those in the legislature, like Rapp and Coudert, who were conservative Republicans, decided that this was a good time to let go on the City Colleges. All they needed was to find the opportunity, and the opportunity presented itself with the appearance of William Canning's testimony. So he probably defected as a result of the Pact, among other things. He also was concerned about his chances of promotion in the History Department. So once they had a person who would spill the beans, it was a very, very fine opportunity to do so.
Q: What was the significance of the Bertrand Russell case, if any, to this whole process? I read somewhere recently about the Board of Higher Education had invited Russell to be a professor, and there was an outcry, "How could you have such an extremist invited to be a professor?"
Foner: Same time?
Q: 1940.
Foner: 1940. I'm trying to remember it, relate it in the period itself. However, you could still try to get civil libertarians to support you on a Bertrand Russell case, because he was a very, very distinguished person, and you were talking in a college, intellectual atmosphere. Remember that City College had a very, very strong history of free speech and fighting to defend free speech, and there were a lot of liberals there who were involved in the Anti-Fascist Association. They could be counted on to support Bertrand Russell, but not the other thing. Very few people would come out and support the thing once Rapp-Coudert got under way, because it was then very dangerous to try to do that.
Q: What are your recollections of how the Rapp-Coudert process unfolded?
Foner: It unfolded first in the press. You're talking about a lot of papers, screaming headlines in the Journal American and in the News and The Mirror and The World Telegram, names forty-three communists, that kind of thing. These were big headlines and this is big stuff. It came as a big shock to us, obviously. We weren't prepared for this.
Q: You weren't?
Foner: Oh, no. It came as a very sudden thing for us. Maybe some people may have known. I didn't.
Q: That something like this might happen.
Foner: Might happen, or that something was happening. Very often you know these things, but I did not know.
Q: Was it a shock in the sense that you never thought that being a red meant your job was at stake?
Foner: We never thought of it, at least I never thought of it that way. You did what you were doing in a free society, in a place where ideas clashed, and people had beliefs. You talked about the ideas you believed in. They were sort of broad kind of concepts. You see, this is a period of a strong anti-war movement on campus, student movement. The student union was active and big. There were student strikes. There were a lot things happening, a lot of involvement. A lot of people were sympathetic. We always worked in organizations with students, with faculty, etc., so you had a sort of protective color around it, around the work you did. And in that sense, you were well-known, respected, and liked, and you were treated as a radical, I guess, if the word means anything -- liberal, radical, progressive, etc. And in some cases you told people what you believed in and tried to work with them. But these were times when the student movement was strong. There was a general strong liberal sentiment in the country.
Q: So it came as a shock when you began to read these headlines. What was the immediate impact on you and on your brothers also?
Foner: Once we saw it, we began to examine what the possibilities were here. Then other people came forward to corroborate, lesser people. See, he named a lot of people, and some people who were named were trying to find cover for themselves, and so they testified. So they became corroborative witnesses. Now most of the stuff was leaked to the press. See, then later, they had an open hearing where the testimony was given. This was confined to the city colleges only. Then there was concern about people at the private colleges, what's going on there. There was concern about all kind of fallouts, then you began to talk to lawyers about what's happening here or what do you do. And it became clear that it was not merely a hearing, that they said that they were going to take action, and they began to call in people individually. You were called in to -- it had to be a formal kind of thing, in that sense, there had to be a member of the committee, the legislative committee, had to be present, and an attorney, and the decision was to take the Fifth Amendment.
Q: Were you personally called?
Foner: Yes, everybody was called.
Q: So what happened to you when you were called?
Foner: You were called, you were asked if these statements were true, and you'd deny, you'd refuse to answer. They said, "Do you know that if you refuse to answer this could be a question of your position at the college?" And then the long procedure began of trials against people. They suspended you, and then they had to have some kind of formal proceeding. Now, what was interesting about this is that my brother Phil was able to get statements in support of him from very distinguished people--Allan Nevins, Nelson P. Mead, the head of the History Department, distinguished historians, who issued statements attesting to his scholarship, that's all, and hat he was a valuable faculty member and a good teacher, and students did that, too. There were student committees formed in support of teachers whom they had, and so there was that kind of defense thing to try to support the teachers. But you had a very strong feeling that this would not stand up because you were up against the legislature, the press, the administration of the college, everybody was going, you know. It became a question of a matter of time before the thing would unload on you.
It was at that time that Morris Schappes decided that he would be the test case, and he admitted that he was a communist, and said that he was the only member of the Communist Party. He was tried.
Q: And?
Foner: And he was convicted of perjury and he went to jail. I remember that there was a committee formed, The Friends of the Foners. We had an affair to raise money someplace, maybe Fraternal Clubhouse. I know that our band played, that there were songs sung that had been written about the thing, and Irwin Corey performed, that George Hall, comedian, whom I knew before, and George Hall later became an informer, years later. As a matter of fact, he is currently in the show Noises Off. He was very funny and he was very non-New York City. He was from out of town. Before we knew it, we were out. We were suspended, and then we were out.
Q: Let me go back for a second. Why was there a particular fund-raiser for The Friends of the Foners?
Foner: Well, I can't remember whether others had it, too, but I think that we, Henry and I, we knew people, and the students, we had close ties with students. It was, I remember, a very big event.
Q: Where was it, do you remember?
Foner: Someplace I think I have, or Henry has, the ad that was run to support it.
Q: Where was the ad?
Foner: If The Compass was published at that time, or P.M., it may have been there. I think it would have been unwise to have an ad in The Daily Worker. But I remember the event. I remember that Norman Franklin, who was in the band with us and also wrote, wrote a song called "Mrs. Foner Had Four Sons." But they were writing songs on everything.
Q: "They" being?
Foner: Normie, Henry. For example, the president of the college at that time was Wright, Harry Wright, I remember, and Normie wrote a song, "If Wright is Right, then Wrong is Wright," that kind. There were very clever songs.
Q: You don't remember any of the lyrics from "Mrs. Foner Had Four Sons"?
Foner: "Two single units and a double-decker," the twins. Then there were individual sections on each person, and I don't remember them, but my brother Henry, I'm sure, has them all. He remembers everything. He has all that. He remembers all the songs of this period, of every period.
Q: When was it that you and they were actually suspended and lost their jobs, do you remember?
Foner: I think it would be around '41, '42.
Q: Well, by '42 already we were Allies.
Foner: But it would be '41. I think it's '41.
Q: The date I have was that the Rapp-Coudert Committee turned from Brooklyn to CCNY in March of 1941.
Foner: Yes. All right.
Q: So the suspensions probably followed.
Foner: Followed some time thereafter, yes. Then the war came.
Q: First came the invasion.
Foner: Pearl Harbor.
Q: First came the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Foner: I remember I was driving in a car. I was out of town at one of these summer camps, I think, and I heard the news on the radio.
Q: What was your reaction?
Foner: That was a shock. That was a real shock. You think the Soviet Pact was a shock? Oh! This was a real shock.
Q: In what sense?
Foner: Well, first, it was a total surprise. Although if you had read carefully, you wouldn't have been surprised. But it came as a shock, and also the question then came up very, very sharply -- could the Soviet Union stand up? You remember, they had been moving through like paper, and the question was -- could the Soviet Union stand up? Could socialism be destroyed now? Was this the end of the Soviet Union? That obviously presented a problem. But then quickly thereafter, the change in the political situation in the beginning. Then you had all of the campaigns for Russian War Relief and all that kind of thing, so you had a change in the situation, although generally many of the political operators were very, very cautious about anybody who came from the past into this thing, your background.
Q: What do you mean?
Foner: Well, cautious about the communists being involved in it, the new anti-Hitler, anti-fascist, see.
Q: When you say political operatives?
Foner: I mean the newspapers, the Times. Also socialists, you know, any liberal left kind of thing, a rather complex kind of thing. But on the other hand, there was this enormous outpouring of support, particularly as they went right through the Soviet Union and you got reports of the number of casualties and that kind of thing, and the Soviets standing up. This was a period where you're getting visitors from the Soviet Union to win support here too, and the government itself was becoming sympathetic.
See, when we were knocked out, the first question was jobs, among other things. We had the band, we could manage a little bit, summertime.
Q: Let me ask you one question. Was the band now called "Suspended Swing"?
Foner: Right after the suspension, we got the name "Suspended Swing." We got it into Leonard Lyon's column, the item that a group of teachers from City College, who have been suspended have formed an orchestra, and they're called "Suspended Swing." And we started again trying to get jobs as "Suspended Swing." And remember, the left still had influence with unions, etc., and we could get jobs. I was in charge of getting jobs.
Q: So it was an orchestra, just the four of you?
Foner: No, it was more than the four of us. The numbers increased depending upon the kind of affair that was involved. It could be as many as twelve people, which was a lot of people for us, but I think I remember we got the job playing at Manhattan Center as the relief band. It was UOPWA, their annual event, that's their big shindig. You know, dances were popular at that time.
Q: The UOPWA?
Foner: United Office and Professional Workers of America. It's a big union. They hired our band and also Louie Prima. Or they hired Louie Prima and also our band. We were the relief band. That is, we were the second band. Louie Prima was there.
Q: So it's you and Louie Prima with the office workers.
Foner: Now, you've got to see this. See, when we got the band together again, we had to get uniforms, meaning that everybody had the same dark blue jacket. Sammy Levenson, one of his brothers was in the clothing business, so we went to him for suits. Everybody got suits, dark blue suits. We decided that we would all buy the same colored tie, a red tie. That was our uniform. We weren't going to get tuxedos or anything like that. That was good enough. We would play all kinds of affairs. But let me come to this one. The Prima band dressed in scarlet jackets, you know, they really were uniformed. I would tell people we were in uniform, we all had the same colored tie. I remember the first set he finishes, he's playing the last number, and he says, "Take it away. You pick it up." Oh, was he surprised! But anyway, that was one example. But we played a lot of dances. That's the band thing.
Q: A little bit more on that. You told me once that you played a lot at the 65 Nightclub.
Foner: At the Penthouse Ballroom. The 65 Nightclub is when I got a job running the nightclub at 65. That's different. At the Penthouse Ballroom. Because 65 would rent out their ballroom to other organizations, who would run dances, and I at various times would run upstairs and find when Al Berknopf who was secretary-treasurer, was not there, and I would look at that red appointment book. You know those big red books. I would just keep going through to see who he had booked far in advance, get their name and address, and I'd call them and say, "Are you looking for a band?" Of course, he had a house band, and I was cutting in on them. They didn't know. They didn't know. People never know. So anyway, we got jobs that way. That was, I think, later on, but we got jobs on the basis of our name, not on the basis of our ability. Our ability was fair. We could play, but we weren't great. We would get orchestration, music try to get music for it. You could either buy orchestration, which we never believed in doing, or you could go to various friends, or else you could duplicate letters, for example. One good friend who was in the music business, worked for Harry Goodman, Benny's brother, who had a publishing firm, was Harold Leventhal. Of course, I'd known Harold since in '39, '40. Harold's parents died when he was very young, and he was brought up by relatives, and is relatives lived in Ellenville, right near Arrowhead Lodge, and that's how we met Harold. We became good friends. When Harold got the job with the music publishing company, I used to go up to Harold and say, "Harold, I've got to get this." Okay, good.
He would take me around to different places, or else he would swipe orchestration. He would say, "I need orchestrations for my friend." Okay. We'd go as far as we could that way. Then he'd say, "What you got to do, I can't get to it all. You need a letter."
So we got stationery from The Daily Mirror. I don't know how we got it, and we drafted a letter. We signed it "Nick Kenny." He was a radio columnist. "This is to introduce a very unusual group of musicians whom I'm very much interested in." We'd send another updated letter. Very often it worked, sometimes it didn't. If it didn't work, it didn't work, that's all. So we would collect orchestration and have music for the band.
Then occasionally Norman Franklin would write arrangements for things. We would try to have, for example, after the Soviet war effort, we got Soviet swing. We arranged all the well-known Soviet songs into an arrangement for dance purposes.
Q: Well-known Soviet songs?
Foner: Well, at that time. Remember, the Soviet Union was invaded, and on the radio and everything, Russian War Relief, you're hearing songs from the Soviet Union. This was a very unusual period. Joseph Davies, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, comes here. Government people are making speeches about the Soviet Union and about our wartime alliance must continue in the future, and the great heroes, etc., etc., it's a big deal.
Q: You're talking now after Pearl Harbor.
Foner: Obviously. I'm talking about after the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Q: Of course, that six-month hiatus, we're already past.
Foner: We're playing in the band, but that's not sufficient.
Q: One last question. Any other notable people in the band?
Foner: In the band? Well, trumpet player, Herbert Birch later became a very important psychology professor. With us during that period, even in that period, not playing with us, but friends, was Sam Levenson. We start him on his career.
Q: How did that happen?
Foner: We knew Sam in the late Thirties, and we were very friendly with Sam. We were great admirers of him as a storyteller. He was very funny. We'd go away on vacations together in the wintertime up in the mountains, to places. Sam would always enliven everything by telling stories. His wife Esther was his greatest audience there. But anyway, so one year I'm at Arrowhead Lodge, and it may be '39, '40, I can't remember the year, and the band makes a very small amount of money, but you're given the right to have an affair for the band where you can charge the guests money, and that money will add to your income. Well, it's a tradition that you must have outside talent, because you can't do the same thing and charge for it. So this is done by all bands around in the resorts. So they tried to arrange to get outside talent from other resorts. That summer, my brothers were not playing. My parents had a place in the mountains there, a place where we'd go for the summer. Sammy rented a place right nearby to be near them. Henry and I were in the band. Henry may not be in, but I think he is. I'm not certain of it. So I go to Sam and I say, "Sam, I want you to come. We're going to advertise you as coming from the Hotel Glass in Fallsburg. It's so far away, nobody will know. You come and you tell stories."
He says, "Absolutely not! I don't do it in front of strangers. I just talk to small groups of people."
Finally, he agreed. He comes and he gets up and he starts talking, and he just kills everybody. The owner is there, and after it's over, he invites the band, everybody comes into the kitchen for cookies and milk and that kind of thing. And I could see that the owner Begun -- the brother -- I forget his first name, but the brother of Isidore Begun, the head of the Communist Party in the Bronx. He's not a political person, but his family is. Well, anyway, he approaches Sam and he says, "How would you like to come back next year on the staff?"
He says, "Yeah? With my wife?"
He says, "Yes, your wife can come, too."
And Sam says to him, "You know, I play the violin. I can play dinner music, too." So he came back. That was his first job.
Q: As a comedian.
Foner: As a storyteller, yes, a comedian. We would bring up in the summertime Irwin Corey, Josh White was around at that time, a lot of people. "Leadbelly," I think, came. All kinds of people were coming that we would bring up to perform. In one year, this was before the war, about '39, I am there and we have a social director who gets fired and I am now the social director doing his routines, and doing anything else we've got to do and using the band on sketches. That beginning, really, of becoming involved in performance and that kind of thing, but I'd been through bands already, so I knew a little bit about it.
Q: But in that period, you're beginning the role of being the impresario.
Foner: Emcee, that kind of thing, yes. But let me come back to the job thing after we were suspended. Now Phil -- it goes back and forth here on the time -- Phil is married and has a child. Jack is not married. Henry is not married. I am not married. So there's an agreement that the first job that comes will go to Phil. The first job is an offer to me to become education director of the Fur Floor Boys. The Fur Floor Boys is the young people in the Furriers Union, the left thing. Nwo, they come to me because I'm known in the student movement. And we huddle and we say, "The job is for Phil." So Phil takes that job as education director, and he makes the job fit his needs, and he starts writing, and he ends up with a history of the Furriers Union, and he's lecturing and writing. He designed the job for himself, but that's the job he took, and he got that job.
I was offered a job with the JPF, or the Jewish People's Fraternal Order, to be their organizer in Cleveland. I decided against it. I got married. I met Anne playing in the band. I met Anne. Anne was active in the student movement, Queens College. 1939, we were playing in a resort in the Peekskill area, Blue Mountain Lodge, right near the Blue Mountain reservation, which is a state-supported place, which has cottages and stuff and is like a conference center. Going on is a training school for the ASU. Anne is there, and the people would come over to our place, and that's where I met Anne. Not too long after, we got married.
Q: When, exactly, did you get married?
Foner: In '41, in the winter of '41. I don't have a job, playing in the band, and Anne is working, she's graduated, she was an economics major, and she's working for Moody's Investment Service. She lives in Flushing. When I'm going out with her, I'm coming all the way out here to visit. Flushing. When I mean "all the way out here," this is like virgin territory at the time. But I had been to Flushing when I was a kid. We used to come out here for vacations. But anyway, this is the point where I first turned off, and I'll tell you of the job. We go on our honeymoon in the wintertime. Of course, the band has a job that week, it's Christmas week, playing at Arrowhead Lodge, and the honeymoon --
Q: Christmas week, 1941?
Foner: Right. It's at Arrowhead Lodge, where we are put up not at the hotel, because it's overcrowded, we're put up at the Kleinman's, that's the relatives of Harold Leventhal, in like almost a dormitory situation, we're all in there, Sammy and his wife, my wife, you know, and it's like an open shop kind of thing. And Anne never forgave me for the fact that that entire week, the honeymoon, was spent -- I was in the band playing. I guess she forgave me, but she never forgot it. So then I'm drafted.
Q: And when is that?
Foner: I'm drafted shortly after we're married, and I'm drafted and I am in basic training, you know. I'm sent to Fort Dix on Long Island, and suddenly I am sent back to New York, and I'm sent to 65 Broadway, Special Services. I am assigned to the company that is preparing the Irving Berlin show for the Army, directed by Kurt Kasnar, all the big names were there.
Q: How did this happen?
Foner: On my background, it must have said that I was a musician who had done programming, social, that kind of thing, I was an emcee, that kind of thing. It was like a mini-computer that was pulled out and I was sent there. I was there for no more than a week when my records caught up with me, and I remember Kurt Kasnar came to me and said, "Look, there's a problem. You can't stay here. It's against the rules because of your background. We'll send you in the command to Governor's Island. If you want to, we'll send you to the band."
I said, "Don't send me to the band."
"He said, "Okay, we'll sign you then to--"
Q: To which band?
Foner: To the band at Fort Jay, Governor's Island. I didn't want to be in the band. So I was sent to the headquarters post, and I was assigned in the commissary. I was a clerk in the commissary.
Q: Where was this?
Foner: Fort Jay. And what had happened is that, meanwhile, Anne had moved in with three other women, from the student movement -- Terry Sadin, Maia Turchin Scherrer, who is now dead, died recently, was head of the ASU, and Barbara Wolcott, she is the niece of Alexander Wolcott. She was married to Nat Brooks at that time, who was from the student movement. It was like the same group, and we live at 299 East 11th Street, and they take the place together because everybody is away. So I come back, I'm there, so I can come home several nights a week. At that time, Third Avenue L, you take the ferry, and you get to the Third Avenue L, and at 11th Street, and twelve, thirteen minutes, I'm home. So I'm back, and we get the bedroom. I come back three times a week, that kind of thing. So I spend the entire war there.
Q: On Governor's Island.
Foner: On Governor's Island, until one day I'm on the post basketball team and I'm playing a basketball game, and I go to bed at night, and in the middle of the night I wake up with a fantastic pain in my neck, going down my arm. I didn't know what it was. It was just terrible pain. The morning comes around. It was a Friday night, I remember. The morning is inspection, I just can't stand and I'm looking like that, and I can't wait until sick call comes. I go to the post sick hall thing, the hospital there, and so for the next nine months, I moved around from place to place being diagnosed as acute neuritis, cause unknown. I'm losing feeling in this hand, and atrophy, and I can't sleep, I'm living on codeine, and I'm seeing doctor after doctor, and nobody knows what -- I remember I come home and people look at me, and they get sick, and they're worried and everything. Finally, I'm sent to Staten Island to a hospital called Halloran General Hospital, which existed on Staten Island. It was a converted thing for kids, because I remember we used to bend to the drinking facilities--and I'm examined by a neurosurgeon, his name is Sidney Gross, and asked me to come in, he has all my X-rays, etc., and I go through the whole routine with him. And he says, "Bend down and lace your shoes."
I said, "Are you kidding?" And I can't.
He described things, what's happening. He says, "Look, I think I know what you got. You have a cervical disk. What I want to do, it's far advanced now, we have a whole ward here of disk cases, and what I'd like to immediately schedule a mylogram for you. If the mylogram shows what I think it is, I think you should have it operated and remove it. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of trouble."
I tell Anne about it, and we decide that we're going to go ahead. I can't do anything else. The mylogram shows exactly. I remember they're looking at the mylogram, he said, "See it? See the curve?" You know what it means. And they said, "Okay, we're going to operate on you in two days."
I said, "Okay, I want you to leave word with my wife that I'm going to be operated on the following week." Of course, while I was there, she would come out to visit me, and it was a big schlepp, and a lot of our friends, I remember, used to come out. You know, people would come to visit me because I was in the hospital. But anyway, so the operation was a success, unusual, unusual, because at that time, paratroopers were falling and they were diagnosing everything as disks. They didn't know their a-- from their elbow on disks, and they were experimenting in operations, and they were getting a lot of operations done. Most of them were on the lumbar spine, cervical disks problems were very rare. So that's why Gross was excited. He had a cervical.
For about weeks after, every time there were visitors of surgeons, they would come to me and say, "Okay, Corporal Foner, tell 'em how it used to be." And I'd go through my whole routine.
Anyway, I was returned to the post.
Q: Let's stop for a moment for chronology. You'd been going around with this for nine months?
Foner: Yes.
Q: It's already 1944.
Foner: 1944, yes. I'm out around late '44, '45.
Q: You don't recall exactly when the operation is?
Foner: No, I have it at home, because I remember one thing they did, we used to fool around in the ward, of course, everybody was a disk case, see. They called me "Crooked Neck," because I used to stand like that. So I prepared a diploma and the seal was a disk. That used to get around people as a side effect.
Anyway, so I am back at the post. At the post, and the big advantage I have at the post, it's a commissary for officers, and it's food, where the officers are buying for people who live on the post, and also there's a place where you can buy everything. This is during the war. Food there --and there's a shortage of food -- it's dirt cheap, the best steaks in the world. I would take them out. Of course, at the end of the month, to keep the inventory down, they would tell everybody, "Now look, get the things out of here." I'd go home with steaks like that, you know, I remember I once gave a steak to my mother, and my mother salted it and ruined it, made it like rubber. But anyway, so that's how I fought.
By the way, of people on the post, the only name person I can remember was Emmanuel Muravchik, the head of the Jewish Labor Committee. He knew the name Foner. Anyway, but my records were there. People in the headquarters, they knew who I was.
Q: You didn’t have any of this discrimination because you were a so-called premature anti-Fascist?
Foner: No. Only that first job. Because, remember, I was out of sight of anything. Nothing was happening there. Then an order came down that all people who had had disks removed were to be discharged from the Army because the experience was very, very bad, the figures showed that they would have to have another operation. I was discharged with a pension. It was 30%. It was then cut to 10%, and I never complained. I could have kept the 30%. I still get a 10% disability pension. So I came out and eventually got involved in unions.
[SECTION CLOSED AT MOE FONER'S REQUEST]
Q: So now you're becoming more active in the trade unions.
Foner: I'm playing in the band because I don't have a job, I come back. I don't go back there, there's no job there. I come out of the Army, and the job I get is through a friend of mine, Hy Wolf, whose brother is very wealthy and in the woolen business, in the garment industry. They're making a fortune selling woolen goods, because they have access to woolens. Hy Wolf was hired by his brother into his own company, Valerie Maid. I know Hy. Hy's wife, Arlene, was a Hunter College student, that's where I knew them from. Hy gets me a job in his shop, and what I'm doing, I'm picking things off hangers and packing them and shipping them. I'm making like seventeen, twenty dollars a week, and he's passing money to me on the side, because they're making money hand and fist. He's giving me five dollars here and eight dollars there. And we're living in Flushing with my in-laws after the war. We lived there for about a year, and then we get an apartment, and then my first child is born.
Then I'm playing in the band on a Lincoln's birthday weekend in Arrowhead Lodge again.
Q: '45 or '46?
Foner: '46, probably.
Q: The war is over.
Foner: The war is over, yes. '46. I'm sure it's '46. I'm playing in the band, and a guest there is Nick Carnes, president of Local 1250, department store union. I think I'd told you I had given courses for department store unions. I still was doing one or two after the war, too, so he knew me. In the intermission, Nick comes to me, and he says, "How would you like to be education director for Local 1250?"
I said, "Are you sure you need a full-time?"
He said, "Yes. Local 5, Sterns, will cover part of it. I'd like you to think about it." I think to myself, "I'm going to do it because he's a musician. He plays the guitar, but he's studying the sax." He says, "If you take the job, we can play duets."
And so I take the job, and I am the education director for Local 1250, which is outside the AFL-CIO, it's part of the unions that had been kicked out of the CIO.
Q: They hadn't been kicked out at that point.
Foner: Give me a year. When were they kicked out?
Q: The purge of the CIO unions was not until 1949.
Foner: That was before '49. They are independent, they are part of the Distributive Trades Council. Oh, they had left the Wolchock International. There was a fight there, a left-right fight, and they left. It's before the others are kicked out. So we are independent, and we're being raided by Amalgamated Clothing workers, which has tried to get in department stores at the request of the CIO. We withstand the raids.
Q: You represent workers where?
Foner: We represent workers in stores all of which have disappeared. In fact, I have the Midas touch. Hearn's, Namm's, Loeser's, Oppenheim-Collins, Norton's, every single one of those stores disappeared. I was there during the Taft-Hartley affidavit period. What year is that?
Q: The Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1948.
Foner: I'm there before that. Maybe I don't get there until '47. It could be that I don't get there til '47. I'd have to find out. It's easy for me to figure that out. So I'm in the union doing education classes, putting out a bulletin, leaflets, that kind of thing, and then I get an idea, because we have a loose council of all the department store unions, Macy's, Gimbel's as well, and by this time, we've moved. Our office was always at 13 Astor Place on one of the floors, rented space. I then proposed that we should do a musical review, an original review. So they agree, and each of the locals puts in a small amount of money, and we get Henry and Normie Franklin to write it, Liz Lampell, Millard Lampell's wife, is an organizer at 1250, so she says, "My husband would like to help on this." So I meet with Millard, and Millard helps me set up an advisory board. Millard, Arthur Miller, Marty Ritt, Peggy Clarke, who's a lighting person, those are the people I remember. I have pictures of them meeting. We meet to discuss this labor musical, the first labor musical since "Pins and Needles". They discuss what it should be, and Henry and Normie proceed to write a show called "Thursdays 'Til Nine". The stores are open til 9:00 o'clock. It's a book musical about the housing shortage, a department store worker who can't find a place to live, and so he lives in the store at night. So things happen at night and day, and it's "I want, gimmee, gimmee." It's very, very clever. The cast -- we auditioned members of the union. We had a cast of about forty people. We brought in professionals -- David Pressman, he's a big TV and movie guy now, his son is a big TV guy, was the director, Robert Lenn was the musical director, Peggy Clarke was lighting, Bob Hart was the stage manager. It was a real show, with rehearsals four times a week at the union headquarters, meeting with the advisory board. I remember Marty Ritt -- we were meeting one night, Friday night, he at that time was a baseball buff. Every time he has a different thing. Now it's horses. Then it was baseball. He'd say, "Look, you've got to finish fast, I've got to go to the Yankee game at 8:00 o'clock." They're telling him what the show is about, and he says, "Show's got no guts." Right? So they're working on it, and they keep working on it, and finally, the show, we found a place for it. We get the Fashion Trades High School, 225 West 24th Street, that was the beginning of my dealing with the Fashion Trades High School. We book it for four nights, and there's a preview, Sunday night preview, and then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday nights. We sell it out to members. We're doing PR on it, and being interviewed on radio. There was someone working on PR. I remember one of the things, I'm brought to "Luncheon at Sardi's," which was a famous radio show, and I'm there, I'm the guest being interviewed by the show. It's getting publicity in unions, and there's a preview Sunday night , and to which we invite all the bigshots in the theater -- Harold Rome, Irving Berlin, you name it, they're all there. Bill Michaelson, who was the head of Local 2, and I are sitting in the balcony, like five hundred people at this show, and they do the show, and the curtain comes down, and this audience of big shots gets up and gives it like ten curtain calls. I'm looking at him, and I say, "I can't believe it's that good."
He says, "Moe, we're going to have to take this to Broadway." That was the last time.
Anyway, it got reviewed in The New York Times, it got like a three-paragraph thing, a factual thing. Seymour Peck at that time was with either The Compass or PM, whichever was around at that time. He reviewed the show. Of course, he had been a department store worker, so I got to him. The show created a tremendous amount of excitement among the members. It really was good. I still have the songs, the lyrics -- "The Ballad of the Bra," "It's Closing Time," "How Long the Day." Very clever music, music and lyrics, clever. "Taft-Hartley Rumba."
Anyway, there were costumes, sets, the whole works. For the leads, we didn't have good enough people, so we planted people. We went around trying to get people with talent, and they had to get jobs in the store, and we'd pull them out. I remember the lead, we got him a job at Hearn's. See, that was a period when a lot of people -- now they work in restaurants and they worked in department stores, people, frustrated actors, actresses, who had given up on the idea. We put them all together in this thing. Then the sets, we had to get rid of everything. How do you do it? We'd just junk it. We had no place to put all this stuff.
Two months after we'd gotten rid of everything, I got a call from Dumont Television, the big television, "We would like to televise the show."
I said, "You've got a shovel?" That was the end of it. But "Thursdays 'Til Nine," was very important.
Q: Let me ask certain things. When you put together an advisory committee, how did you have access to --
Foner: Millard. Millard. But I'm getting to know these people, too, you see, and I'm getting credibility with people that way. You see, through the student movement, I've known certain people. Zero Mostel, when we were playing in the band, Zero, virtually every place we'd play, every time we'd play at an affair, Zero was the entertainer, Harry Mostel. One day we're playing at Webster Hall --I forget, at 8:00 o'clock, we're setting up, Zero comes running in, "Oh, fellows, fellows, fellows, I'm going into Cafe Society." He'd gotten his break. So you know, Corey, Gilford, a lot of people, Sammy Levenson, I knew already.
Q: These people were essentially friends that you had from the student movement?
Foner: Or from playing in the band, seeing them here or there, you know, student movement. The student movement had a lot of cultural people, too, "Pens and Pencils." I talked to Joe Klein, he did the book on Woody Guthrie, you know, the New York magazine. The other day he says to me, "Hey, were you involved in 'Pens and Pencils'?"
I said, "How do you know?"
"You know, I did the book on Woody. I learned everything about the cultural movement of the left to do this book. I read everything there was."
So I'm telling him about "Pens and Pencils."
Q: What was "Pens and Pencils"?
Foner: "Pens and Pencils" was a review for the ASU. It was a musical review about the student movement, and it was one show. "Pens and Pencils" was on the Marx Brothers. Leo Rifkin, who died recently, wrote it with Frankie Tarloff and Irwin Shaw's brother, Dave Shaw. Irwin Shaw, remember, went to Brooklyn College, too, you see. So this show comes out at the time I'm working at City College, and I raise a hundred bucks to finance the show. I'm like the angel for the show, and it's a great show. It's the Marx Brothers in college, with Leo playing the role of Groucho, and it's clever. Henry writes songs, everybody is writing songs. This was a period when people were writing things. It was a period when before that, the Theater Arts Committee, had a TAC, a cabaret TAC, and Mike Stratton and Saul Aarons are writing "The Horse With the Union Label," and 'The Capitalistic Boss," and "Old Paint." You know, this is a period when the left is involved, because it's a broad united front, democratic front thing, the arts, the New Masses, you know, a lot of stuff was being done around that kind of thing, so you were into that kind of thing, you hear it, you see it, you feel it. So when you come into the labor movement, you begin to think, "Okay, now we do it here, too." So that's how that worked.
Q: So there was a cultural milieu, basically?
Foner: It was, sure. There was a cultural milieu.
Q: It was not destroyed, apparently, by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, because, you know, in a lot of the histories, the intellectuals left in droves at that time.
Foner: Some stayed. Remember, some of the far left people stayed, in the theater, in the movies, John Howard Lawson, you know, The Hollywood Ten, they went through the Pact in that period. As a matter of fact, later on, I'm at the department store union, and the department store union at Locals 1250 and 5 are under heavy attack. This is the McCarthy period. It's still going on, Local 65, with its tentacles always looking to take in, absorb, and later on, 1250 and 5 and Local 2, agree to become part of 65.
Q: Let's get our chronology straight. When exactly does that happen? Can you try to pinpoint it?
Foner: Maybe '50, '51, '52.
Q: 65 is also outside of the CIO?
Foner: 65 is outside, yes. It's outside, but functioning. It's the bastion for the left. This is a period when there are young people are working in the shops, and they live in New York City, and the building is like a home. The building's got a consumers service, you know, where you can buy and shop. It's got everything in there. It's got classes, it's got all kinds of things going on.
Q: Stop for one second. During this period, you went to work -- we should pinpoint it later on -- '46 or '47, and were there other things? I mean, that department store local must have had tremendous resources to put on a play like --
Foner: It didn't have resources.
Q: How did you do it?
Foner: We did it. Remember, you had a headquarters, so you rehearsed. You had a lot of people volunteering. We signed contracts with the director, 250 dollars. They rehearsed for like four months, first to cast the show, then to rehearse the show, I mean, to do the show. I remember one of the things that struck me, 65 was very, very jealous all the time of anything that was not 65. It was like not made in America, they were very critical of. They reviewed "Thursdays 'Til Nine," and Irving Baldinger, the editor, reviewed it under a different name. I didn't know at the time. Whereas everybody was excited about the show, 65 gave it sort of a standoffish kind of review because they weren't doing it.
Q: When exactly was the show produced?
Foner: '51, '52. I have it at home. At this stage, I don't know -- maybe '49, '50, '51, something like that.
Q: Is there anything in particular that you'd like to point out about the kinds of education that you did, anything notable about that, the things that you enjoyed a lot?
Foner: Well, you see, I remember a lot of classes, fairly traditional, labor history, you know, the kind of traditional kind of thing, nothing terribly exciting, the history of department stores, that kind of thing, women, blacks. But I also remember that to fight off against the raids, literature you had to put out, and I remember putting out pamphlets for a big campaign. For example, Local 5 was Sterns. They were being raided. That's where I first dealt with Stanley Glaubach. He was an artist, member of Local 144, the display union that was in that building, later became part of 65. He designed for the paper. I remember I worked on him on a booklet, Five For Five. It was two colors, and inside on each page was a picture with a statement with big quotations, but a well-designed thing. I don't remember the guy's name now, but a guy came in from the West Coast, and he was a cartoonist, and he had done a cartoon history of the unions out on the coast; longshore was one of them. I looked at that, and I said, "Gee, that's terrific. Can you do it for us?"
He said, "Sure."
"When you go back?"
"No, I'll do it while I'm here." And so we put out -- I have them at home -- a cartoon history of the union that we got out to members.
I remember, later on, part of the CIO Council, the period after the war before we left the CIO. This was right after the war. I remember that Ben Shahn had done all these posters, CIO PAC, and we used to drive around in a car and drop off 150 at each place. Today, if you could get a copy of these things, heavens, they're worth a lot of money. So those things always appealed to me, that kind of thing.
Q: It sounds to me that the other stuff was what you had to do, but the stuff that involved --
Foner: Education.
Q: Art, especially.
Foner: Well, the art was later. The art was later. Art was different, but in a cartoon illustration. But, you see, what happened, we got absorbed by 65, and then the question came up, what is Moe to do? He can't be the education director for 1250 and 5. No, he's going to be in the education department of 65. What is he going to do? He's going to be in charge of education and programs, social and cultural programs. But 65 had had a history of that kind of thing, way back to the "Wholesale Mikado," but it was not going big now. They'd had dramatic groups and that kind of thing. So I was assigned to the dramatic group and, I forget, different kinds of things. They also had a children's program every Saturday at 13 Astor Place, at 12:00 and at 3:00, admissions like for fifty cents or a quarter, and you had to have a program for it. So you had to have a magician, a puppeteer and stuff. We would get Pete, Woody, and while I'm talking to Joe Klein, he says, "Didn't Margie come with him and do dance?"
"You're right. Woody and Margie."
"Because I have it in the book. You've got to read my book." You know, today I went to the library and got the book out. Okay.
Then I get the idea, we have a dramatic group, and we have a physical space, and I don't know, I think I got the idea we should have a nightclub. We'll call it the "65 Saturday Night Club." And organizationally, it worked the following way: every Saturday night, like you'd figure out thirty Saturday nights, right, after it got too hot, there was no air-conditioning, thirty Saturday nights, a different area would take over the nightclub a different night, then they would return again. Four hundred tickets at fifty cents you'd sell. All right. The dramatic group, the variety group that I'm responsible for, they will be responsible for putting on the show, you see. We'll have to hire a band. What about tables, waiters, waitresses, bar? Rank and file committees, they will check the coats, they will wait on tables, and they will serve the drinks, etc., that kind of thing. All right. Okay. That means you had to have rank and file committees set up that would be available every Saturday night. You had to have a show, and the Saturday morning and afternoon you had the kiddie program going. Then I decided we would do the show. I remember Earl Shendell was the band, the three-piece band. He later became an officer of the Local 802. I used to chisel him on the price, how much the band was going to cost. "It's for the union. Remember the union. This is the union, you know." And I said, "We will get for the show, in addition to us, we will get a guest star every Saturday night." And so I would get a guest star every Saturday night, either Sammy, Jack Gilford, Louis Nye. By this time, I'm getting to know people -- Zero Mostel, Harry Belafonte is then just a singer, you know, coming down with dark glasses, breaking in. A lot of people. I have the list at home of who appeared. George Hall, Irwin Corey, they're performing gratis as guests. They come as an extra added attraction. We're packing them in, and I'm going crazy. On Saturday, I come in in the morning for a staff meeting at 9:00, and I have to leave at 11:30, prepare for the kiddie program, and then I have to work with the committee setting up the tables, and you're there until you get home like 3:00, 4:00 in the morning. We have a child, and we're living in a garden apartment in Flushing. During the week, I come home around 11:00, 11:30, and I come home on Saturday at 3:00, 4:00 o'clock, and I have to sleep on Sunday, and I'm groggy on Sunday, and then start again. So it was awful for about two, three years. But it was very -- you know, you were serving the cause of humanity.
Q: You felt that?
Foner: It was such excitement. But you see, from 9:00 to 11:30, when I would miss part of the staff meeting, that was the terrible thing, because those staff meetings, Arthur Osman was the president of the district, of Local 65,and he was an organizational genius. He was crazy, but he was a genius. The first time I came there and I had to make a report for the council, the stewards, he made me rewrite it like ten times, and he was really playing with me. It was to no avail, I had to keep writing, and change this, change that. I'd keep coming back to him, and he'd say, "That's good, but change this." He was like making me jump through hoops to show who was in charge here. Okay. But David Livingston was under him. You have very, very top, able people. You just sit there and just breathe, and you imbibe a lot of stuff of how you can run a democratic union, or how you can run a union.
Q: Why do you make that distinction?
Foner: Well, it's democratic to a degree, you know. It's tightly controlled, although they would go out elections and to make sure that members -- you couldn't be elected unless you had more than fifty percent of the workers voting for you.
Q: That was a by-law?
Foner: Yes. And organizing, you know, the union was a very, very exciting place to be, and I'm living in a small apartment at the time, writing articles for the paper about this at the same time, and living that kind of life. There comes a time after a while where there's a split inside 65.
Q: Let's hold that for just a second. A couple of things occur to me. First of all, you're talking --
Foner: '51, '52. I come to 1199 in '54, in September '54, so I'm there. I may have upped my date. I have started too early, because I left in '54. I don't think I was in 65 more than two years, at the most, and maybe two years before, so it may be '50 that I first start in the labor movement, closer to that, '49, '50.
Q: So you come into the labor movement at the very point at which it's under a fierce attack?
Foner: I'm in department stores at the time of the Wallace campaign, so I'm there in '48.
Q: Okay.
Foner: Because I'm there in the Wallace campaign.
Q: Okay. So that is the period, at a time when the unions are being driven out, there's a fight over the Marshall Plan.
Foner: Yes.
Q: The left is being isolated.
Foner: But remember, 65 is like an island. It still has its membership and its strength.
Q: How big was it?
Foner: At that time, maybe 65 was around fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, maybe. It's a big union, it's an important union. It's not an industry. A department store could have been, but they never made it there. Michaelson and Livingston couldn't get along, so Michaelson pulled the department store people away.
Q: I want to talk about that, but maybe next time. You speak, though, still even as if the Taft-Hartley stuff isn't even happening. What is the impact?
Foner: It's happening. It's happening. I remember votes on signing the affidavits in 1250, that the members supported the union, not to sign it.
[END OF SESSION THREE]