Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Moe FonerMoe Foner
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Session:         Page of 592

They said, Okay.”

Then I went to El Diario, and we said, “I'll bring some of the workers with me, and you'll talk to them.” One day I said, “Hey, what if I bring together the checks and I give you the checks and maybe you could make a picture of them and reproduce them?”

They said, “Yeah, that's okay.” The only trouble was, they were paid once a month, so you had to explain that this was once a month, see, but they did that Then they interviewed people, and we were getting some things there, and it was nice. We thought that we were really doing fine. It's helpful for organization because the workers read it. But that wasn't enough. So I called Jimmy Wechsler of the New York Post, and I went to Jimmy, I called him up and asked him if I could come to see him, and I told him. Jimmy was the sort, he had a very soft heart He was very touched, but he was looking always for things like this. And he started questioning me to find out whether I was lying to him, you know, and he would ask me the questions. I knew all the answers. He'd say, “Have you spoken to Mrs. Roosevelt?”

I said, “How can I speak to Mrs. Roosevelt?”

So he arranged it, and that day I was talking to Mrs. Roosevelt. He said, “You go back to your office and I'll have her secretary call.”

Her secretary called me and said Mr. Wechsler called, and can I come to see Mrs. Roosevelt. She said, “When can you come?”

I said, “I can come any time you want.”

“Can you come now?”

“Sure, I can come now.” So I went to talk to her. But then Jimmy decided that he was going to undertake this, and he started doing editorials and columns. And that was good.

Then a friend of mine said, “You know, if you call Evans Clark at The New York Times, he might help you get a letter published.”

So I called Evans Clark, who was a member of the editorial board. He turns to be the husband of Freda Kirchway, who is the publisher of the Nation. Evans Clark was also a Norman Thomas socialist, who had taught economics at Princeton and was now on the editorial board. He had been the director of the Twentieth Century Fund. He was a rather distinguished person. He wrote editorials on American economic problems and occasionally on labor. So on the phone I told him, and





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help