00:00:00SHALETT: Now, I think we're on the air, Senator. This is
just a test. This is the second session on July eighteenth.
[Pause in recording.]
BARKLEY:--at all, but I have no desire myself.
SHALETT: Which dry goods store have we been talking about? That
wasn't the place where you had your first experience of what you
call crawly sugar?
BARKLEY: No, no. No, that--this dry goods store was in Paducah.
SHALETT: Where did you get the crawly sugar?
BARKLEY: The crawly sugar was in Lowes. That was a store
run by J. R. Lowe & Son, who was the son of
the original settler of Lowes who established the store. And I think
I mentioned it there, but if I didn't I'd like to, that
I believe it's the only community in America where--
SHALETT: You tell that ----------(??).
BARKLEY: I think I do, yes.
SHALETT: Now, the crawly sugar--
BARKLEY: The crawly sugar was a brown sugar, coarse brown sugar
that was shipped to Paducah in hogsheads--that's a big barrel, oh, two
or three times as much as an ordinary barrel--and Lowes store in
wagons. And they'd sell it to the people. And after it got
00:01:00empty, why, they'd roll this barrel out in the backyard. And there's
always some brown sugar left in the cracks and crevices, and I
used to go out into the backyard and
crawl into that hogshead and pick out this brown sugar from these
cracks and crevices and eat it. And the reason we called it
crawly brown sugar, you could take a cup of this old-fashioned brown
sugar and lay it out on a table or put it in
a plate, and it'd just move around, sort of crawl around like
it was alive, and it got to be called crawly brown sugar.
SHALETT: Are you sure it wasn't alive?
BARKLEY: Well, it was the--it was pretty good, and it stimulated
life with us, especially. We didn't have too much sugar at home
for me to steal and eat like many kids used to do,
so I invaded the hogsheads around Lowe's store.
[Pause in recording.]
00:02:00
OTHER VOICE: This is the end of side two, reel one,
Barkley tapes.
[Pause in recording.]
BARKLEY: --became somewhat tired and exhausted and sent word down on
the floor of the convention and asked me if I would come
up and preside for an hour while he rested. I went up
and took charge, and he was gone two days instead of an
hour. And I was--
SHALETT: You were a member of the House of Representatives.
00:03:00
BARKLEY: I was a member of the House of Representatives, and
a member of the Kentucky delegation from the state at-large. During the--all
of the balloting, there was great confusion. And especially after John W.
Davis was nominated as a compromise candidate, due to the fact that
neither Al Smith nor W. G. McAdoo could ever obtain the necessary
two-thirds. And so after Smith was--after Davis was nominated for president, the
question arose about his running mate. Nobody knew precisely whom Davis wanted
as his running mate. And usually the nominee for president consulted about
who was to be nominated for his running mate. So without any
word coming to the convention, there are at least a dozen candidates
being voted for. And on the first ballot, I think nobody got
much more than two hundred votes, so finally the word came to
00:04:00the convention that Mr. Davis desired Charles W. Bryan, brother of William
Jennings Bryan, to be his running mate. And before there was any
announcement of the first ballot, after that word came to the convention,
delegations all over the convention hall were asking recognition to change their
votes from somebody to Charles W. Bryan. And in the confusion, there
was a great deal of impatience, because at one time there were
at least eighteen delegations on their feet at the same time. And
I was in the chair, and finally I got a little impatient
and I said, "Damn it, can't you wait?" And we went on
and finished the ballot. There were enough changes of votes on that
first ballot to nominate Bryan on the first ballot. So the record
shows he was nominated on the first ballot. Well, the next day
I got a telegram from Texas from somebody saying, "Be careful of
your language up there, you're on the radio."
00:05:00
SHALETT: (laughs) Last night you mentioned a Thomas Corwin, C-o-r-w-i-n. Who
was he?
BARKLEY: Thomas Corwin was a very famous Ohio politician, I might
say statesman. He was in the House of Representatives for a good
many years and was in the Senate from Ohio following the War
Between the States. And he had a great ambition to be president
of the United States, which is a very worthy ambition--many men have
had it and did not realize it--but he was quite ambitious. He
was a great humorist also, and because of his great humor, he
was not taken too seriously. He would get votes at the conventions,
but not enough, and finally when he realized that he was not
going to be nominated or elected president, he gave vent to a
sentiment which no doubt he harbored because of his disappointment, and he
00:06:00said--having in mind his humorous character, he said, "If a man desires
to have the reputation of being a profound scholar, statesman, or philosopher,
he must always be as solemn as an ass." He said, "Every
monument that has ever been erected in the history of the world
was erected to some solemn ass." Well of course, that's not true,
but it showed that--there is an element of truth in it. I
don't know that there have been any--very many monuments erected to humorists
or jokesters. There may have been some erected to men who--of a
serious nature who used the story and humor to illustrate something, but
fundamentally, I think Corwin may have something there, that monuments are erected
to serious men.
SHALETT: Isn't there a monument to Irvin Cobb?
BARKLEY: No, there's not a monument to Irvin Cobb, there is
not. There's a hotel built in Paducah named for him. That might
00:07:00be a monument but, why, when the proprietor or the owner wanted
to build it and he went to Irvin and asked if he
might name it the Irvin Cobb, he said, "I want to know
what kind of hotel it's going to be first." (Shallet laughs) They
did name a cigar for him down at Paducah, but it wasn't
much of a cigar, but the hotel is a very good one.
SHALETT: The cor--we might throw a corollary between Corwin and Adlai
Stevenson. While Stevenson did get the nomination, actually he was criticized a
good deal for his humor and lightness.
BARKLEY: Well, yes, he was criticized for it, but I think
the humor of Adlai Stevenson was of a more subtle character than
that of Thomas Corwin. I think that the humor of Stevenson comes
naturally. It's a trait that has gone back all through the Stevensons,
even to William Stevenson, the original Stevenson in North Carolina, who was
the common ancestor of both Stevenson and me, and of Senator Dick
Russell of Georgia. Now, he was a great singer. I think I
00:08:00state all that probably in the manuscript that I've written.
SHALETT: Would you like to gather your thoughts a moment?
[Pause in recording.]
SHALETT: Senator, we're jumping around before our chapter on memorable personalities
you've met. Let's put in the anecdote on Rene Viviani, I believe
that's R-e-n-e V-i-v-i-a-n-i, who was a foreign minister of--
BARKLEY: France.
SHALETT: --France. Yes.
BARKLEY: Well--
SHALETT: You met him with--
BARKLEY: I met him with the French delegation that came over
after we entered the World War I in April of 1917. Delegations
came over from Belgium and from England and from France, because we
had gotten into the war and there had to be conferences between
the governments as to the procedure and methods by which the war
could be won. And one of the first delegations that came over
was the French, and on that delegation was General Joffre.
00:09:00
SHALETT: J-o-f-f-r-e.
BARKLEY: J-o-f-f-r-e, who had been the hero of the Marne. He
was a one-armed man, lost one of his arms. And there was
a--of course, these delegations were invited through their chairman or head to
address the House of Representatives. And Rene Viviani, who was at that
time supposed to be the greatest orator in Europe, spoke for the
French delegation. He spoke in French. He was a very eloquent man,
and he had beautiful gestures and a very impressive manner, so much
so that all through his speech, though most of us could not
understand the French language, we knew instinctively when to applaud him. And
he was applauded all through his speech, because there was such a
sort of intellectual connection between him and his audience that they knew
that it was appropriate to applaud him.
SHALETT: Would you say that that is a happier method of
00:10:00spontaneous applause than today's radio and television, where they hold up a
placard telling the sheep when to clap?
BARKLEY: (laughs) Well, it certainly is more spontaneous. And when a
speaker is addressing an audience out in front of him, and he
gets enthusiastic applause, he knows that he's getting it and it stimulates
him, whereas no matter how much he may be approved by an
unseen audience over the radio, he doesn't know whether he's getting any
applause or any approval, and he doesn't know how many people are
turning off the radio because they may not like him. Anyhow, it
was a very inspiring thing to see a Frenchman addressing an American
House of Representatives in French. And I imagine there were only a
few of the members, really, who could understand French, there were undoubtedly
some. But it was a very thing--a very inspiring thing, and one
that impressed me very much and one that I've remembered ever since.
SHALETT: I believe it was on your inspection of the World
War I battlefields that you met General Syringee, that's S-y-r-i-n-g-double-e for Edward,
00:11:00or--
BARKLEY: I think it was -g-y.
SHALETT: -g-y.
BARKLEY: I'm--the spelling, I would have to check up on.
SHALETT: We'll check that.
BARKLEY: But after--of course, afterwards, this was--these delegations of which I
speak came in April or May, in the spring.
SHALETT: Of 18--
BARKLEY: Of 1917. We entered the war in April of 1917.
Wilson delivered his war message to the Con--joint session of the Congress,
I think, on the sixth day of April, 1917. The next day,
I think, or the day after, we declared war or accepted a
status of war that really already existed. Well, in August--July and August
to September and maybe up into October, this delegation from the House,
made up of six members of whom I have spoken, went over
to Europe to make some investigation on its own. We had all
voted for the war and for the appropriations, and we had a
00:12:00desire to see something of it and see what was happening. So
on--we made our headquarters in Paris, and we would go out in
fan-shaped type through various fronts. And we had a desire to see
the great cathedral at Rheims, spelled R-e-a--R-h-e-i-m-s, but in French it's called
Rheims. And on our way from Paris out to Rheims to see
this cathedral, which had been practically destroyed by the German Army, and
the priceless rose glass, which was very famous, had been destroyed. And
the process by which it was made had been also lost to
mankind. On our way out, this General Tyringee was in command of
that sector and invited us to come by his headquarters. And on
the way out, we were very much depressed by what we saw,
shell holes everywhere in the land, the beautiful trees which lined the
00:13:00French roads all cut down by shells, and camouflage on either side
of the road, so that travel could take place without being detected.
We went into General Tyringee's headquarters. He had lost two sons in
the war. And in view of all that we had seen on
our way out to this destroyed--greatly damaged cathedral, some member of our
party--I don't recall who it was--said to him, "General, when you get
into Germany, we hope you will do to the Germans what they've
done to France." Well, he straightened up and looked into our faces
and said, "Gentlemen, when we get into Germany, there's one thing we
will not do. We will not destroy her churches. For," he said,
"religion is not the property of any nation, but the boon of
all mankind." And under the circumstances, with that devastation everywhere, gloom everywhere,
I thought that was one of the most inspiring sentences that I
00:14:00had ever heard, and coming from what was supposed to be a
hardball military commander.
SHALETT: Was he an impressive figure?
BARKLEY: Very impressive figure, a handsome man, a very fine face,
and very sincere. Of course, he spoke to us in French. We
had an interpreter.
SHALETT: Who spoke up and made the suggestion that France might
be revengeful?
BARKLEY: Well, I don't recall.
SHALETT: Some--not you.
BARKLEY: I don't know. It may have been I, but it
may have been any one of the other five.
SHALETT: It might be appropriate here to jump a generation and
to give your impressions of seeing the horrible extermination camps, that after
the last war tell how two senators, who went over cynical, came
away convinced.
BARKLEY: Well, as soon as the American Army began to drive
the Germans back out of France and on through Germany, General Eisenhower
00:15:00cabled General Marshall and asked that a joint committee come over to
view these atrocity camps, because they were so atrocious and so horrible
that he didn't think anybody would believe that such a thing existed
unless they saw it themselves, and he wanted a joint committee of
the two houses of Congress to see what he had uncovered. Well,
General Marshall took it up with me as majority leader of the
Senate, and in two days we were on our way, a committee
from the House and Senate. And since I was majority leader, I
was the chairman of the committee. Well, our first visit was to
Buchenwald, just outside of Weimar, spelled W-e-i-m-a-r. Weimar was the seat of
the first German Republic created after World War I. And Fredrick Ebert,
E-b-e-r-t, was the first president of the German Republic. And it seems
00:16:00ironical--and that was the home of Goethe, the great German poet. It
seems ironical that outside that city there should be this Buchenwald, which
was a hell on earth. Well, we went through this Buchenwald camp,
and we saw things that were so terrible that you could hardly
believe that in any civilized country or any civilized age they could
be tolerated. We saw the results of their murders of the Jews,
men and boys. We saw dead bodies piled up out in a
court just like cordwood. We saw suffering, disease, hunger, and hopelessness. And
after we had gone through the first one--
SHALETT: Made you feel like wanting to hit somebody or ----------(??).
BARKLEY: Oh yeah, surely. It was just indescribable and incredible. Well,
00:17:00after we went through Buchenwald, we talked among ourselves, and two or
three of the senators--and I'd rather not call their names--said, "Well, we
think this is just fixed up for us, it's all planned here,
planted. We'd like to see something else." Now, at Buchenwald they killed
them in the most horrible way, by dropping them down through a
concrete chute onto the concrete floor in the basement. And if they
were not dead, they'd beat them over the head with an enormous
club. And we saw those clubs hanging from the wall, and we
saw the hooks on the wall, similar to hooks from which hogs
are hung when they're killed, to dry or to set, before they're
cut up into different parts. They said, "We--."
SHALETT: I didn't know that.
BARKLEY: "We want to see something else, we--this may be planted."
So we went up to Nordhausen, where they hanged them out in
an open court, and they required every able-bodied man or boy who
00:18:00could walk or stand up to go out and watch those executions.
And they executed them at the rate of 150 a day. Well,
that was pretty horrible, and they still piled them up because they
had run out of fuel and the incinerator wasn't working. They had
to pile these dead bodies out until they could get fuel to
put them through the incinerator where they burned them. Well, they still
wanted to see something more. So we took them down to Dachau,
just outside of Munich, and there they killed them by gas chambers.
They would say, "We want you go into a theatre. We're going
to put on a show," or something. And they'd herd them in
there, anywhere from 150 to 250, just like herding cattle, and then
they'd close all the openings and all the escapes for air and
turn on the gas. And then they would, through the windows, watch
the arrivings of these victims. And all along as they went down
00:19:00on the railroad or drove down, they saw on the sides of
the railroad tracks dead bodies that had been thrown off because they'd
been hauled down there in boxcars and crowded in, standing up without
food or anything. It was a horrible thing. Well, after that Dachau
experience, all of these senators said, "We don't want to see anymore.
We're sick of these sights, and we're convinced that it hasn't been
planted." And so we didn't go anywhere else, and we went back
home and wrote the report. And all the senators who were there
and the members of the House--I want to include them because it
was a joint committee--participated in the drawing of the report, which I
made to the Senate after we had finished it. It was one
of the most horrible things and the most horrible experiences through which
I ever went.
SHALETT: We'll obtain that document.
BARKLEY: Yes. Oh yes, it's available.
SHALETT: Relating what you saw there to present-day problems, doesn't it
make you a little uneasy that the people who engineered this, some
00:20:00of them may have escaped and are now operating with us?
BARKLEY: Well, yes, there is that danger, and you never know
in a widespread program like that. And these atrocity camps were not
set up by Hitler just because of the war, the war didn't
come until '39. He began setting up those atrocity camps in 1933
after he went into power, immediately. They were set up in order
to destroy the Jewish people. He said he would destroy all of
them, and he was on his way toward doing it, as far
as Germany was concerned. These things happened long before the war, and
they were not a war measure at all.
SHALETT: And the bulk of his people went with him. They
may have been unhappy ----------(??).
BARKLEY: Well, they went with him, but it was a strange
thing. Many of them claimed they did not know what was going
on. Even in Weimar, people said they didn't know that this thing
existed outside the city limits. Well, that's almost incredible that a thing
like that could exist for years within the shadow of a great
00:21:00historic city without everybody knowing what it was. But I, of course,
can't prove that.
SHALETT: Do you think a man in political life could ever
have his mind so rigid that he has a preconceived notion that
anything that he doesn't believe in may be planted, or may take
the cynical view?
BARKLEY: Well, I--
SHALETT: You never have.
BARKLEY: I think that a man takes a long risk in
having such a mental rigidity that when he sees something that is
obvious that he will not be convinced by that, that it--it's a
general pattern, in that he has to be shown over and over
again this horrible experience in order to believe that such a thing
could exist. And you can't blame a man, really, in a sense,
because it was so incredible in this age in which we live,
to believe or to see anything like that. I wouldn't have believed
that anything like it could happen in this so-called civilized age unless
I saw it. And it was so much worse that I had
00:22:00ever heard it was that it left a deep impression on me
and on everybody else. Those who came to scoff remained to pray,
as the poet said.
SHALETT: Well, you've been a regular Democrat throughout your whole career,
but you've never been what we'd call a party hack who would
just go along or ----------(??), excuse me, or oppose something because the
other party in power was advocating it.
BARKLEY: Oh, I hope I've never been a party hack. I've
been a loyal, regular Democrat. I believe in the principles of the
Democratic Party and have all my life and have advocated them. But
that has never precluded me from recognizing a lot of good things
in the opposition party. And when we have been in the minority,
since I have been in Congress, from forty years ago, have always
supported any good measure that I thought was beneficial to the people,
even though it came from the opposition. And I'm doing the same
thing now, though I'm not any longer in public office.
[Pause in recording.]
00:23:00
SHALETT: Senator, let's jump way back to the day you were
born. What was your name on birth?
BARKLEY: (laughs) Well, I had two uncles, one on my father's
side of the family and one on my mother's side. Their names
were William. William Barkley and William Smith. My mother's name--maiden name was
Smith. Strange to say, both of them were called Willie. Instead of
Bill, they were given the name Willie as babies. You know how
it is, you call a baby--if you name him James, you call
him Jimmy. Or if his name's John, you call him Johnny, and
so forth. Well, these two uncles I called Uncle Willie, both of
them. And when I was born my parents named me Willie Alben.
Well, they were calling me--they were going to call me Alben, and
I always did think it was a little awkward to call a
person by his middle name, so if he had an initial that
he wanted to put in, he had to put his initial first
00:24:00and then his name. But I went by the name of Willie
Alben until I got old enough to realize that I thought that
that was an awkward name. And I changed it myself to Alben
William Barkley, and I was never called Willie. It was incongruous to
me, it seemed, even as a boy, robust and strong as I
was, to go around with the name of Willie attached to me,
so I changed it.
SHALETT: Now what did your father call you?
BARKLEY: Well, he called me--he had a peculiar pronunciation of my
name. It's spelled A-l-b-e-n, and he called me Aben, just as if
it were A-b-e-n. Now that was just a rather brief way of
pronouncing the name Alben. Well, I never realized the significance of that
until I got old enough to get up and make the fire.
We lived in the country and had a fireplace, an open fireplace,
and as soon as I got big enough to make a fire,
my father would call out for me to get up and make
the fire in the morning instead of doing it himself. I could
00:25:00very well understand that, because I hated to get out of bed
and I could understand that he did. So he would shout to
me from his room into mine, "Aben, Aben, get up and make
a fire!" And when I heard him say Aben, I knew he
meant it. It was like the fellow who had two holes in
the bottom of his door in his bedroom, and somebody asked him
why he had two holes. "Well," he said, "When I say 'scat,'
if there's a cat in here, I mean it. And I've got
two holes so that they can get out one or the other."
And when I heard my father say, "Aben, Aben," I knew exactly
what he meant, and sometimes I had one foot out of the
bed before he finished calling me.
SHALETT: On page ninety-one of your manuscript, you have the story
of the first telephone you saw. How many years, roughly, would you
say it was before you used one of these devices?
BARKLEY: Well, let's see, I was about twelve years old then.
And I don't think I used one of them until I was
about seventeen or eighteen years old, because there was no telephone at
Lowes at that time, and I moved away from Lowes to Clinton
00:26:00when I was fourteen, and it was some time after I moved
to Clinton before they put in a telephone system at Clinton.
SHALETT: Ah-ha.
BARKLEY: And the first--the strange thing is, the first time I
talked over the telephone from Clinton after they had installed it, I
went up to the operator's office--the telephone exchange with my guitar. At
that time, I was a pretty good hand at a guitar.
SHALETT: Oh, I didn't know that.
BARKLEY: Yeah, I was quite a hand at the guitar.
SHALETT: Six-string or twelve-string?
BARKLEY: Six-string. So I went up into this exchange and called
up my girl who lived three or four miles out in the
country, and I played her a tune and sang it over the
telephone. (Shalett laughs) That was my first experience in actually talking over
the telephone.
SHALETT: What was the tune?
BARKLEY: I think it was "Sweet Marie, Come to Me, Come
to Me, Sweet Marie." A very old song, very popular at that
00:27:00time, and an awful pretty one too.
SHALETT: Oh, that's wonderful. Do you ever play the guitar now?
BARKLEY: No, no, I can't even play the chords now. No,
I--you have to keep up practice on those things, but I really
did enjoy it and got a lot of fun out of it,
but after I got busy and tried to make a living and
raise a family, I didn't have much time for the guitar.
SHALETT: Plus, as a country boy, you probably picked up the
guitar yourself.
BARKLEY: Oh yes, I picked it up myself.
SHALETT: Watching people--
BARKLEY: Watching people, and I got so I could use the--of
course, the left hand to move my fingers up and down the
strings so as to make a tune out of it.
SHALETT: Ah-ha.
BARKLEY: I was pretty good, but I didn't have one of
these steel instruments either, I did it with my fingers.
SHALETT: Yeah. Yeah. Another little bit of Americana, we all see
in the movies now when the father takes his son in the
old dry goods store to buy the year's supplies, and the little
boy looks in the candy counter, and then finally the storekeeper gives
him the peppermint stick free. That ever happen to you?
BARKLEY: Oh, yes, many times there at this old Lowes general
00:28:00store with the familiar country advertisement up front, "dry goods and notions."
And I never had a very clear idea what notions meant, but
it means dry goods and nearly anything everybody would want. And so
when we'd go in and buy supplies, usually there at the local
place, they'd give me a stick of red candy, red and white.
It was just--it looked like the walking canes that Uncle Sam is
supposed to use on the Fourth of July. Very good. And you'd
suck that thing. It's sticky and get all over you, but when
we went into Mayfield or Paducah to buy the supplies for the
winter, why, frequently the merchant, if my father bought me a suit
of clothes, it was customary to give the purchaser a pair of
suspenders as a gift, or a necktie, something like that.
SHALETT: A harmonica?
BARKLEY: No, they never gave me a harmonica, I bought that
myself. (Shalett laughs) They always had suspenders around, but they didn't have
00:29:00any harmonicas. But it was customary, when you bought a suit of
clothes or a big bill of goods, the merchant would give you
something as a token of his appreciation.
SHALETT: When did a boy get his first pair of long
pants in those days? At what age?
BARKLEY: Well, I got mine when I was about--I guess I
was eleven years old when I got my first pair of long
pants. They get them much sooner now.
SHALETT: Up until then you wore the black leg stockings?
BARKLEY: I wore the--well, they were not always black, they were
brown. You know, my mother knitted all of my stockings when I
was a boy, and she knitted all her children--and she knitted my
father's stockings and--socks, we'd call them. Of course, when I had on
knee pants it was stockings, because they had to come up above
my knees for protection. But she would card her own wool. That
is, that's a term, an old-fashioned term, where a woman gets a
couple of carding instruments and cards the--as they call it, cards the
wool. Straightens it out, gets the seed out of it, or any
cockleburs or whatever may be in it, and then she would spin
00:30:00that yarn, that wool, on the old spinning wheel and make her
own yarn out of which she knitted the stockings and socks for
all the family. Now, that was in a natural wool color. She
colored that brown by use of the seed of the sumac bush.
I would frequently go out into the woods or the fields and
gather a basket of sumac, S-u-m-a-c. And she would boil that and
make a brown dye out of it, and she would dye all
these white wool socks in that pot of brown dye. They were
all the same color, but it was a good looking brown. And
usually there were--I wore brown stockings until I put on long pants,
and then even then I wore brown socks because she still continued
to knit them.
SHALETT: Did you use anything else for homemade dye, like butternut,
or was that just Civil War?
BARKLEY: No, we didn't use that. We didn't use anything except
00:31:00the juice of the sumac berry.
SHALETT: You were telling me yesterday about your mother, who was
a wonderful person and lived to ninety and how she came to
see you when she was well up in years and ----------(??)----------. What
did you call her?
BARKLEY: I called her Mommy. All--she and my father taught all
of us children to call her Mommy.
SHALETT: How about your dad, what did you call him?
BARKLEY: We called him Poppy. When I got older, Mommy and
Poppy sounded a little bit puerile to me, and I began to
call them Mama and Papa. I never did say Dad to my
father, it was always Papa, and then Mama. Sometimes Ma, maybe sometimes
Pa, which was an old-fashioned country appellation.
SHALETT: Would you call her Mommy when she came to visit
you?
BARKLEY: I did. Of course, you know, I had gotten so
used to calling her Mommy when I was younger that I never
00:32:00really did break my habit--myself from that habit. So when she came
to Washington to visit me and my wife and children when I
was in Congress, I still called her Mommy about half the time.
And she stayed up there a month or so and had a
wonderful time. She enjoyed Washington, I took her over to the White
House. I think Coolidge was president at that time, I'm not quite
certain because I've forgotten what year, but I think it was Coolidge.
And my wife and I took her out to the White House,
and Mr. Coolidge was very gracious, very courteous. He displayed a human
aspect that most people didn't ascribe to him at all. My recollection
is that he rushed over to a table in the White House
office and grabbed a red rose and handed it to my mother,
and maybe pinned it on her.
SHALETT: Really?
BARKLEY: Which was a very gracious little touch of courtesy. My
mother, of course, appreciated that, coming from the president of the United
States.
SHALETT: What did she call you?
BARKLEY: She called me Alben.
SHALETT: She got away from Willie.
BARKLEY: Oh, Lord, she got away from Willie. Well in fact,
00:33:00they never did call me Willie, even when I was a baby,
because Willie was the first name and they had decided to call
me by my middle name. And that's one reason why it sounded
so awkward to me to be called by my middle name and
have Willie in front of it. And if I signed it that
way, it would be W. Alben Barkley, or Willie Alben Barkley. And
I made up my mind when I was about six that I
wasn't going through life with a little Willie Alben stuck onto me,
so I changed it to Alben William.
SHALETT: What was the thought you gave me last night about
sparing children names until they could pick them ----------(??)?
BARKLEY: Well, I--in view of the ridiculous names that I've often
seen given to innocent babies who can't help themselves, I have suggested--and
I have frequently thought and suggested that a child be allowed to
name himself or herself after he gets old enough to know what
kind of a name he wants. And yet I realize the difficulties
of that, because the parents and friends and the family have got
to call the child something, and if they just call it Baby,
00:34:00why, first thing you know it'll be Babe, and he'll go through
all his life like Babe Ruth. That wasn't a bad name for
Babe, but as big and as robust as he was, Babe sounded
a little odd for a great big robust, double-jointed fellow like Babe
Ruth. But anyhow, great injustice is done to perfectly innocent babies by
the ridiculous names that their parents sometimes in great affection give them.
SHALETT: But you have to say, "Here ----------(??), come eat your
cereal."
BARKLEY: Yes, I realize it would create an awkward situation, but
I don't know what the remedy is. I suppose they'll go on,
as they have throughout the generations, giving perfectly innocent babies ridiculous names.
SHALETT: I'm going to break off recording here and take a
tablet note on how many of your brothers and sisters are surviving.
[Pause in recording.]
SHALETT: While we've been off the tape, you've told me about
your grandchildren and your children and their names. Your grandchildren, do they
visit you on the farm in Paducah a lot?
00:35:00
BARKLEY: Not too much now, because they're pretty busy, they've been
pretty busy during the summer on their father's farm down in Southern
Maryland. But they have managed to come see me, I would say,
on the average of once a year when I've been at home,
and I haven't been at home too much.
SHALETT: Have you been a more indulgent grandfather than you were
a father? Do you spoil ----------(??)?
BARKLEY: Well, I'll tell you, there's a funny thing about grandchildren.
People enjoy frequently their grandchildren more than they do their own children,
because they don't have the responsibility of rearing them. They get all
the joy out of it but no responsibility. And I imagine in
that sense I have been more indulgent, of course, with my grandchildren,
because I was not charged with the responsibility of training them. And
when I have visited with them or they've visited with me, we've
all had a lot of fun together, and I never had any
occasion to chastise them much, because they are pretty well-behaved boys. And
the girls too, the girls are lovely, lovely girls, and I never
00:36:00had any trouble with any of them.
SHALETT: What do your grandchildren call you?
BARKLEY: They call me--well, Mrs. Truitt's boys call me Gramps, G-r-a-m-p-s.
The others call me Granddaddy, and they call me Granddaddy too part
of the time.
SHALETT: Were you a strict father?
BARKLEY: Well, I tried to be, but I wasn't too much
of a success at it. (They laugh.) I find that I probably
was like my own father. He became more indulgent, the more children
he had. He was much more strict on me than he was
on my youngest brother. By that time, he seemed to have mellowed,
and they got away with a lot of things that I couldn't
get away with when I was growing up.
SHALETT: One of the sad things I've seen about some of
the political figures I've known is that they get so busy they
don't have much time for their family.
BARKLEY: Well, that is a tragedy, because--
SHALETT: Did you have any time with your children?
BARKLEY: Oh, I had--yes, I had a great deal of time
with my children, because I kept my family in Washington. My children
00:37:00were in school from the time they got old enough to go
to school, and I kept them in Washington the whole school season.
I would not take them out of school in the middle of
the season to go back home and start over again in a
new circum--new environment. So from September until June, I kept my family
in Washington so that the chillins could go to school there. And
I was there during the session, which usually lasted, at least every
other year, up until June or July. And sometimes before this amendment
to the Constitution that abolished the so-called lame duck session, when Congress
had to adjourn the fourth of March every other year, whether they
were through or not, I would go home sometimes after that adjournment.
Sometimes we'd take a trip, maybe to Panama during the Easter vacation
of the schools, and while Congress was being reassembled, maybe, by a
special call of the president.
SHALETT: You'd take the kids to Panama.
BARKLEY: Take the kids to Panama, yes. We were pretty closely
associated together.
00:38:00
SHALETT: They were never afraid of you.
BARKLEY: No. No, they weren't. If they did, they never showed
it (laughs). I remember one time I was giving my boy a
spanking. He was about six years old, he'd done something for which
I thought he needed a little chastisement and I was spanking him.
And he said--looked up at me, he said, "Are you playing, Daddy?"
And I said, "No, I'm not playing." And he looked at me
again, and he said, "Are you playing, Daddy?" I said, "No, I'm
not playing." And he looked at me the third time and said,
"Are you playing, Daddy?" I said, "Yes, I'm playing." (both laugh)
SHALETT: Did you put--all the children went through college?
BARKLEY: Yes. They didn't all graduate. They--the two girls graduated at
Holton-Arms School there in Washington, which is a very fine girls' school.
And Marian went out to the University of Wisconsin for a while,
but didn't graduate. And Wahwee, the younger daughter, went to Sophie Newcomb
for a year, and then back--she came back to Washington, went to
00:39:00George Washington University, but she didn't graduate. My son went to the
University of Virginia four years, but did not graduate.
SHALETT: That kept you over the barrel, right?
BARKLEY: Oh, kept me over the barrel with three children in
college all at the same time on a salary of seventy-five hundred
dollars a year. It was pretty tough. And I look back on
it, and I don't really see how I got away with it,
how I got by.
SHALETT: Well, do you want to tell us some of the
things you had to do to supplement your income?
BARKLEY: Well, I had to speak, lecture, a good deal, which
I did. After I'd been in Washington a few years, I began
to look around to see if I couldn't supplement my salary by
speaking before different kinds of organizations and also do a little bit
of writing. So I was able to, by the hardest, to make
enough extra money to pay for their tuition and give them all
a very good education. And I'm very glad of it, because there's
00:40:00no hardship, in my judgment, that a parent can undergo that is
not worthy of his effort to give his children an education. And
that's about all I expected to be able to give them was
a good education.
SHALETT: You had no outside income from a law practice?
BARKLEY: No. When I left Paducah--I was a judge when I
was elected to Congress. And while I could practice law in the
circuit courts--and I had a fairly good law practice following my four-year
term as prosecuting attorney, and while it was in existence I could
practice civil law. I couldn't practice criminal law because I had to
prosecute. But that didn't bar me from taking civil lawsuits. But when
I left Paducah, after being elected to Congress and resigned as judge,
I turned over all my business and my library to another lawyer,
and I never attempted to practice law after that because Wilson had
kept us pretty busy. He came in, you know, in 1913, and
00:41:00there was so much to do that we were pretty much in
constant session of the Congress. And then when World War I came
along in '17, it was more so, so I was kept in
Washington nearly all the time. And a lawyer has to be at
home if he gets in a law practice, because if a client
has a lawyer, he wants him to be at the courthouse when
his case comes up. So I never made any effort to practice
law, and I haven't practiced law since I was first elected to
Congress.
[Pause in recording.]
SHALETT: This is a rather somber personal note, but I remember
the first Saturday Evening Post article about you told how when the
first Mrs. Barkley was so ill you were absolutely--it was almost a
matter of desperation, you would make speeches, and you'd go out with
a briefcase and lunch sack to do your duty. That kept on
for several years, didn't it?
BARKLEY: Well, my wife--my first wife was ill for at least
five years, and during the last three years of that illness, it
00:42:00was necessary to have a nurse day and night with her. And
the nurses' bills amounted to more than my salary as a senator.
SHALETT: The nurses' bill--
BARKLEY: The nurses' bills, yes. And doctor's bills added onto that.
I had to supplement my income, and I did it by lecturing
and by writing. And frequently after the session of the Senate would
end in the afternoon, I'd take an airplane to some nearby place,
New York, Pittsburgh, or Chicago sometimes, and make a--deliver a lecture or
make a speech before a Chamber of Commerce or a college or
any legitimate organization that wanted to have a speaker and pay him
an honorarium. And I supplemented my salary in that way, which was
necessary, because I had no outside income by investment, or by any
ownership of property that I had that would have drawn any income
to me. And I was glad to do that, because I felt
that I--in making that effort, I was prolonging the life of my
00:43:00wife. And while the doctors gave her two years to live when
she first had this heart attack, she lived five.
SHALETT: Have you ever made any effort or could you reconstruct
how many miles you've flown? You're one of the most traveled men
by air in the country.
BARKLEY: Well, I imagine that I have flown over the United
States and over the ocean more than any other civilian in the
United States.
SHALETT: I remember Wilson talking--
BARKLEY: I have crossed the Atlantic Ocean fourteen times by air.
SHALETT: Back and forth.
BARKLEY: Back and forth. Seven round-trips.
SHALETT: Seven round-trips.
BARKLEY: Seven round-trips. That was fourteen crossings.
SHALETT: How about the Pacific?
BARKLEY: And I've crossed the Pacific twice, that is one round-trip.
I went to Korea and Japan and the Philippines in the fall--in
November of 1951. I--
SHALETT: South America?
BARKLEY: I've been to South America, but I've never flown. I
wouldn't know how to guess how many hundreds of thousand miles I
00:44:00have traveled by air. I--during the campaign of 1948 when I was
running for vice president with Mr. Truman, for six weeks I flew
all over this country. We chartered an airplane, and I campaigned all
together by air. We had a regular crew, and we kept the
same plane during the whole campaign.
SHALETT: Let's save that for a concentrated chapter.
BARKLEY: Yes. Yes.
SHALETT: That's going to be a wonderful chapter.
BARKLEY: I imagine that I have flown, oh, it'd be purely
a guess how many hundreds of thousands of miles I've flown, I
just wouldn't know how to guess at it. But it runs up
into the hundreds of thousands of miles. I travel altogether by air
now, except in some case where I have to take a train
for connection, because I can't get where I'm going and get back
without flying.
SHALETT: And you told me you don't even take insurance. You
just get on and go.
BARKLEY: Oh, no. I get on a plane and I never
think about taking insurance.
SHALETT: I believe you told me--
BARKLEY: I think it's silly not to take it, but I
00:45:00don't. I may take it up from now on. It's a good
idea.
SHALETT: I believe you told me one of the amusing mishaps--and
you've had very few mishaps--was when you got on a plane for
Rochester, New York, and wound up in Rochester, Minnesota.
BARKLEY: No, no, I tell you, I was due to speak
in Rochester, Minnesota. I was due there at a luncheon. It was
a Democratic rally. I was to be at the luncheon and then
I was to make a speech to a big crowd at three
o'clock in the afternoon. And I got on the plane at Chicago
where they told me and went through the gate they told me,
and the porter took my bags and put them on the plane,
and I went out. I noticed in a few minutes after we
got into the air that the plane seemed to be flying across
the south end of Lake Michigan. That made me a little suspicious,
but I didn't say anything. Finally the hostess came to me and
said, "What is your name?" And I told her. She went back
up in the cabin and came back, said, "We don't have your
name on our list." I said, "Well, I don't understand that, because
00:46:00I'm on here." She said, "Where is it you're going?" I said,
"Rochester." She said, "Rochester, what?" I said, "Rochester, Minnesota." She said, "This
plane goes to Rochester, New York." I said, "They told me to
get on this plane." "Well," she said, "we'll have to put you
off at South Bend and let you fly back to Chicago to
get a plane for Rochester." So they let me off at South
Bend, I caught the next plane back to Chicago, and when I
got there they had discovered their mistake and they had a special
plane waiting for me to take me to Rochester. And while I
missed the noon-day luncheon, I got there in time for the three
o'clock speech.
SHALETT: What airline was this that provided this special plane?
BARKLEY: Oh, I'm not certain whether it was the Northwestern or
the United. I'm not certain about that. It's been a good many
years ago.
SHALETT: What were you, a senator then?
BARKLEY: I was a senator.
SHALETT: Um-hm. Yeah.
BARKLEY: It was back around--somewhere around 1940, I've forgotten what year,
00:47:00but I was campaigning, as usual, for the ticket.
SHALETT: Well, let's go back to 'My Old Kentucky Home' in
the manuscript. On ninety-five, you have this fascinating reference to the stick-and-dirt
chimney. And you've already told me that despite the fact that this
sounds very shaky to me, you had very few fires from a
stick-and-dirt chimney, so they're not too ----------(??).
BARKLEY: Well, you mean conflagrations?
SHALETT: Conflagrations, yeah.
BARKLEY: Well, a stick-and-dirt--I don't know why that is. A stick-and-dirt
chimney is a frail sort of construction and a stick-and dirt house.
Now, we lived in a one-room log house with a frame addition,
which we used as a kitchen. And a--the logs were, of course,
hewn out of the wood close by. We didn't build it. But
it was a primitive sort of thing, not only the cracks between
00:48:00the walls, which were chinked with dirt and sticks, which gives it
its name of stick-and-dirt, but the chimney for the fireplace and the
escape for the smoke in this log room was made of sticks
and dirt. No bricks, no mortar, no cement, just sticks and dirt
built up, with sticks of course to hold the dirt together and
make it solid. Now, I don't know why it is that--as far
as I can recall, very few fires ever happened in one of
those stick-and-dirt houses and chimneys. But the result was--the reason, I guess,
was that the chimney was sufficiently substantial that all the sparks and
the flames and the smoke found its way out through the top
and didn't set even the wood afire that was in the stick-and-dirt
chimney. But you see, on the inside of the chimney, this dirt,
mud really it was and then dried, covered up the sticks so
00:49:00that they couldn't catch fire.
SHALETT: Um-hm.
Pause in recording.]
SHALETT: --like a clay.
BARKLEY: Yeah, like a clay, that's right.
SHALETT: I wonder if you can give a little of your
personal touch to this story on page ninety-eight about how barefoot Alben
used to have to walk in the other kids' tracks in the
snow.
BARKLEY: Well, this all happened while we were living in this
stick-and-dirt log cabin with a stick-and-dirt chimney. The schoolhouse was known as
Breckinridge's Schoolhouse. It was named for Mr. Breckinridge, who was a farmer
00:50:00and a very well-to-do man in the neighborhood. And as a matter
of fact, we rented this little log house from Mr. Breckinridge. It
was a tenant-house on his place. Well, my father and mother hadn't
gone to town to buy the winter supplies, and my feet had
been growing so that I couldn't wear the shoes of the previous
winter. And so we--I started school there, I was about six years
old.
SHALETT: I suppose your parents were too thrifty to cut the
toes out ----------(??).
BARKLEY: Well, I think, as a matter of fact, I'd worn
them out before the previous spring. But school began along in Sept--August
or September, and when November came and the frost began to show
up on the ground and the grass, I still had no shoes,
because my parents hadn't gone to town with the crop to buy
the winter supplies. So these frosts got pretty heavy and I think
there was a light snow that took place in November. And the
00:51:00result was, I was still barefooted. And in order not to frostbite
my feet, or freeze them, I walked along in the tracks of
those who had shoes, stepping in their tracks all the way from
my home to the schoolhouse. That--now that sounds fantastic in a way,
and my children, even to this day, make fun of me when
I say that. And they have exaggerated into the story--into the statement
by them that I was twenty-one years old before I had on
a pair of shoes. Well, of course, that's just a joke in
the family, but that was literally true that I had to walk
in those tracks where the frost--the light snow had been knocked away
so I could step in with my bare feet.
SHALETT: You deny categorically that they had to tie you down
to get that first pair of shoes on you.
BARKLEY: Oh, yes. I deny that. As a matter of fact,
I was always very proud. What they usually bought for me at
that time was not shoes, but boots.
SHALETT: Leather boots?
BARKLEY: Leather boots. And they had a certain type of boot
known as red-top and brass-toe. There was a little brass piece around
00:52:00the toe that keeps from wearing the toe out when we were
crawling around on our knees and hands, and this red top was
just an ornament. So that's what I usually wore, and I was
very proud of those brass-top and red-top boots, so they didn't have
to lasso me or run me down to get a pair put
on me.
Pause in recording.]
SHALETT: Senator, you wanted to go back and amplify what you
said yesterday about early boyhood fights, fisticuffs.
BARKLEY: Well, I intimated that my father, who was a very
religious man, had a rule that I should not provoke fights among
my schoolmates and the neighborhood boys. I don't mean--I didn't mean to
say--to intimate by what I said that he was cruel or anything,
but he had a rule. He didn't proscribe my defending myself, but
he did not approve of me provoking fights. And it was when
I provoked one that he would punish me with a second one
00:53:00if I got home and he learned about it. In addition to
the feud between the Harlan Mill boys and the Lowes boys that
I spoke about, there are two or three others that I think
are worth mentioning because they illustrate the fact that no matter how
bitter, temporarily, boys may become toward each other in their boyhood, that
they may later become the greatest of friends, and very intimate. Now,
I lived about a mile from Lowes, north of Lowes, and out
beyond me and between Lowes and my house there were other boys
and other girls. There was a drove of students, every afternoon when
the school was out, I would say ten or twelve, they all
walked along together. Among them was one bully. His name was Tom
Herd, H-e-r-d. He was a bully, and he had everybody afraid of
him. And he imposed upon us because he knew we were afraid
00:54:00of him and we knew it, because he was a bully, and
you're always scared of a bully until you learn that he's not
as dangerous as you think. So he would inflict his punishment, his
exasperations, his teasings, upon me and the rest of them. One day
his father had told him to buy a horse collar at the
store in Louisville, which he did, and all the way home he
threw that collar over my neck and prodded me from the rear
as if I were a horse pulling a two-horse wagon. And when
we got nearer to my house I got tired of it, and
I turned on him and I gave him the darnedest licking that
any boy ever got. We fought in the road, we went over
into the field where my father had a tobacco crop, and we
tore down at least a quarter of an acre of tobacco, but
I finally licked him.
SHALETT: Excuse me.
Pause in recording.]
SHALETT: Did this character call you ignominious names as he was
prodding you?
BARKLEY: Yes, he called me ignominious names, which I wouldn't mention,
00:55:00and you know, you can just drive a boy so far and
then he revolts. Well, the result of this was that I gave
him a tremendous thrashing, and that, of course, stimulated my own self-confidence,
and it helped every other student who walked out that road. He
never bothered any of us after that. And then there was another
episode I think I should remember--mention, because the boy with whom I
fought then is still living, and he's one of my devoted friends.
His name was John Elliott. In the country, boys have a very
bad habit, or used to have a very bad habit, of calling
one another very vile names. And there was a certain appellation which
always meant a fight, because it reflected upon a parent. You know
what I'm talking about. Well, John Elliott and I got into a
controversy, and one or the other of us called the other one
that name. We fought all over the livery stable. We just fought
00:56:00and fought and fought, and the object was to make the boy
who called the other one this vile name take it back. Well
we fought and fought and fought all over the darn livery stable,
and the result was that finally, whichever one had called the other
one the vile name took it back, and that ended it. We
got up and went on about our business. Well, this John Elliott,
who figured in this episode, has all his life been--and all my
life been one of my most intimate friends. He's still living at
Lowes, and he married Emma Rust, the daughter of Mr. Bill Rust,
whose fictitious bumble bee's nest figured in my facial disfiguration when I
got home from the Harlan Mill.
SHALETT: ----------(??) What's he doing in Paducah now?
BARKLEY: He's a farmer. He lives at Lowes. Still lives there,
he's a farmer. Well, the other episode that I had in mind
took place after I went to Clinton and I was a janitor
at Marvin College, as a student there. We played football out on
the campus. We didn't have any uniforms, and we didn't play according
to the rules of football now. We kicked the ball and we
00:57:00ran with it and we grabbed one another and we tried to
interfere and all that kind of thing, and we--it was ----------(??) football
rules similar to that which they play now, but a little different.
Well, I had only one suit of clothes, and I wore it
at school, and I wore it out on the campus, and I
wore it when we were playing football. And there was a schoolmate
of mine named Dick Hayes, and he was a very robust fellow,
and he was not afraid of anything. And I was running with
the ball, and he grabbed me in my pocket of my coat
to stop me, and he pulled the pocket out and pulled off
the tail end of my coat, the only coat I had. Well,
it made me so mad that I lit into him and I
called him every vile name that a country boy could lay at
somebody(??). Really, it was terrible. And he just stood up and looked
at me, and he said, "Do you mean what you're saying?" I
said, "I certainly do." "Well," he said, "That's all right if you
00:58:00mean it," but said, "I don't take any foolishness." (Shalett laughs)
Well, by that little quirk of his, both of us avoided a
terrible fistfight, and both of us are glad of it. And to
the day he died, he was my devoted friend, which shows that
boys, young people, in their boyish controversies, their bitterness, turn out to
be great friends and devoted, intimate companions. And it leads me to
the suggestion that if the world could do that, if nations could
do that, what a wonderful thing it would be, and how many
lives it would save, and how much precious treasure you'd save if
nations could come to an agreement and forget their difficulties and be
friends. Don't you think so?
SHALETT: You mean if Malenkov could say to Eisenhower, "Do you
mean what you say? And then, "It's all right, I don't take
any foolishness."
BARKLEY: That's right. "If you mean what you say, why, we'll
00:59:00agree. I don't take any foolishness." And Eisenhower would say, "I wasn't
dealing in any foolishness," and then get together.
SHALETT: Well, that's the trouble. The United States, I think, now
does mean what it says.
BARKLEY: Of course, the United States means what it says.
SHALETT: And they don't believe us.
BARKLEY: And I would hate to think it didn't mean what
it says. Trouble is they do not believe it, and they don't
believe it because they don't want to believe it. They want to
indulge in a false propaganda, a false assumption, a false front toward
the rest of the world, toward our sincerity and our devotion to
peace. As you know, we are devoted to peace. Our people are
not a warlike people, though they've never avoided a war if it
was necessary to defend our rights and our institutions.
SHALETT: Wonderful.
[Pause in recording.]
SHALETT: This is Sidney Shalett. This is the end of the
recording at the Chateau Frontenac, Quebec City. End of side one, reel
number two.
[End of interview.]
01:00:00