On the tail end of the Bootleg Decade, before I was in Congress, I saw the depression hit like a cyclone, a real old Texas twister, just as it did in every other part of the country. It was such a sudden, strange affair, that we couldn't realize it.

Here I was, a "professional politician." I had quit the law business because I didn't like it. Then I left the lumber business—and though politics is a pretty cruel affair, I thought I was suited for it.

About the middle of 1932 the effects of the depression began to be terrifying. There is no question that people were starving, and that we were at the lowest ebb in our national history. Prosperity kept coming around the corner, but it never arrived.

As Tax Collector, I received a salary of $12,500 a year, and in business on the side I made five or six thousand a year, which meant that I had $18,000 a year. Proportionally, it was about five times more than a Congressman gets. Here in Texas, anyone who has $5,000 a year is living on double velvet, because it is comparable to $15,000 or $25,000 in New York City. With the five you can afford to have a good town home, an automobile, a servant, and a place in the country. And it's being plenty rich to be making anything around eight or ten thousand dollars a year.

But the times were hard and I was spending my money night and day, lending it here and there, kidding myself that it would be paid back, and knowing very well that it would not. Politicians never save money. I was a "commander" of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and several regiments, divisions and armies of comrades came to me with their troubles. It was all day long and all night long.

Times got plenty hectic. I decided to go out and find what it was all about. During that period, while a commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Bonus Army was gathering to meet in Washington. The South, but especially Texas, was becoming the refuge for every transient in the United States.

We heard a great deal about there being a "revolution"—though we know our country has never been near a real revolution. There was so much talk, however, I thought it worthwhile to read my history books about revolution again and make some comparisons.

Our American Revolution was caused by economic discrimination against the colonists, more than likely because of conditions caused by their isolation. Historically we must view the American Revolution as being only a "separatist" movement in so far as many of its leaders were concerned. That it was such is demonstrated by the fact that immediately after the Revolution the propertied classes got together and wrote a Constitution for the protection of their property, and didn't even so much as want a Bill of Rights or any protection for the liberties of the people.

The new American Tories were worse than the British Lords—and some of them, including the arrogant, swell-headed, lace-collared John Hancock, merely got out of paying their debts. They quickly proceeded to exploit their own people at home.

In our history there have been minor revolutions, or seditious violations of the law, such as the Whiskey Rebellion. But throughout all our bankruptcies, foreclosures on farmers, periods of falling prices and increasing concentration of wealth, the various depressions up through the last (or present) one, there has never been developed any economic philosophy of the people.

We have had populist movements, the rise of Molly Maguires, the Dynamite Period ending with the McNamaras, crack-pots like Coughlin and Townsend, and able erratic geniuses and leaders like Huey. But as for any movement based on any theory of government or economics, there has never been one of any strength. The following of old Bob LaFollette was "progressive" all right, but it was all based on confidence in him personally. Many voted for Gene Debs out of a vague belief in Socialism, but his vote was mainly protest and sentiment.

With a head full of history, I started to scrape around on the bottom and find out if the people really had any idea of "revolution" or just disorder, or change.

So I got to making hobo side-trips around San Antonio, and making my own personal investigations in other parts of the country. It was interesting to change clothes and go out and talk to people without being known. In that way I saw more, and got frank answers. I rode freight trains and visited in hobo, slum, Negro, and poverty areas. Close investigation in "my own home town" showed me conditions I did not believe existed anywhere. I later found such conditions to be ordinary and usual. I had started by considering the transient problem, and getting further and further into it, I found rotten conditions for those who were supposed to be home-owners or regularly established families—people who were either wholly or partially empolyed.

But my real study was of the moving populations. I watched as people came into San Antonio on freight trains; and I talked with them. Trains which came in from New Orleans on the Southern Pacific ordinarily had from fifty to a hundred men, but sometimes as many as two hundred and fifty on big nights. The train coming in from Los Angeles by way of El Paso, through the Western district of Texas, generally had almost as many, although the transients, when leaving Los Angeles, attempted to travel the Northern route, instead of going over the open plains and into West Texas, which can be hot and deserty or cold and blustery, depending on the season.

Literally nothing was being done for the unemployed. Every side trip I took indicated this. So to get some more knowledge, I struck our for a real hobo trip. I slept in jungles, got lousy, and, what was worse, got preached and lectured at by four-flushing racketeers who called themselves preachers, men who were a disgrace to any religion. It was a dreary, but very valuable experience. I had as my companions Pat Jefferson, a friend who was a member of the State Legislature, and Harry Futrel, a veteran from way back, out of the Bonus Army.

The first town we hit was Houston, which I had previously "investigated" in clean clothes. We just walked around the streets and acted the part of freshman hoboes. This was in December of 1932. Mr. Hoover was still in office, but a dead duck.

On the Courthouse square, I walked over to the Salvation Army and played the part of a hobo the best I knew how, although I had been shaved the day before and looked too clean.

It was lunch time. The "Sally," as all hungries call at Salvation Army station, was upstairs. Men were gathering in clumps, shuffling about in an uneasy manner. Finally, some assistants came out in uniforms and began ordering the men into lines, piously insulting us by their condescending manners. The Sally was feeding in relays of about sixty or seventy; there were three or four relays.

We stood there in the cold. It was drizzling, and some sleet came down. A youngster about thirteen years of age stood by me, hatless and coatless. The sleet fell on his hair.

I had an uneasy feeling, because I felt sorry for the kid and the shivering men—and also because I was being eyed suspiciously. The man standing next to me commented on my weight—I am not quite as light as a feather—and wanted to know where I got the shave.

I pretended not to understand, but I was undoubtedly the fattest tramp in the crowd. Pat had already been a hobo over the country and so had Harry. I was jealous of their professional, and I thought supercilious, air. At any rate, we filed in and before we ever sat down we were given free lectures on our manners. Our host of the Sally said grace and thanked God for us, but while his head was bowed, he stole glances at us covertly. I ate a good meal, but I could not help thinking of the insanitary appearance of the kitchen, which was opposite me. The food was really bad. Besides, it was the first hobo meal that I actually had to eat. I had to eat it, in order to prove I was hungry. As soon as I got out I knew I was going to vomit.

However, I felt a high degree of morale. I had learned in the army that if you are sick or scared, you must not communicate it to the other soldiers. To vomit in a public street would have been to cause demoralization similar to a rout in battle; in my case, a chorus of vomiting. Hence, with my compatriots I rushed to the alley. In this secluded spot I fed the fish. I thought of our old college song, which we always sang when drinking:

Theta Nu Ep forever,
Theta Nu Epsilon,
Salvation Army,
Tra, la, la, la lum,
We'll variegate our festive state,
With bibulous buns and fun,
And observe the ancient customs
Of the Theta Nu Epsilion!

Pat jumped up and down and nearly laughed himself to death. Harry, however, as sympathetic soul, looked on and suddenly he joined in. It was a fine duet. I feel sure that Harry must have done this as a gesture of true brotherhood.

Then we went out to the jungle. Out there were camps spotted along the Buffalo Bayou and the tracks. Also moving or temporary groups. Some of the men were by the Bayou, and some on higher land, further off. Some under sheds by the tracks. Others had made dugouts in the banks immediately next to the water, and had put old pieces of tin above. A few had even chiseled blankets. The law of the jungle was that a man should cook his food and leave whatever can or receptacle he had, so that the next jungeleer could cook in it.

In a group under a shed there were about twenty-five men. One seemed to have pneumonia. I came up and insisted that the man go to the hospital, but all said that there was no use, that he had already been refused because he was not a resident of the town. I never found out whether this particular incident was true, but widely, all over the country, "transients" were denied hospitalization even in the gravest emergency cases.

Nearly all in the group were veterans, and most of them were talking about getting their bonus, so they could quit riding freight trains. I sat and listened to them talk, and I figured then, as I did later on after I met hundreds and even thousands of others, that they were not men with the slightest criminal intent, but good fellows and willing to work.

Helpless, broke, and not professional hobos, they had no views; neither had they resentment. They did not know why they were hungry and unemployed, and did not seem to care. They did not even discuss solving their problems; although some had a vague idea "the bonus" might help.

Going from group to group, then and later, I found one thing that was not known in the South, and is probably not known now: all race barriers were completely broken down. There was no more difference between a black Negro, than there was with a white graduate of Harvard, or a blue-eyed New Englander, eligible to be a Grand Sachem in the Sons of the American Revolution. In fact, they called each other sons—but of entirely different kinds. There was no race feeling, very little suspicion, and a considerable amount of good will.

That afternoon I went down by the Bayou and worked myself into the good graces of a group of five, two of whom were white and the other three Negroes. I insisted on having a place to sleep that night, but they said that they were very poor and didn't know what to do about it. I assured them that I was a good panhandler, and that I would go to town and beg anywhere from fifty cents to a dollar and a half. They regarded this as a boast, for the town was full of panhandlers and the police had recently made raids. However, they said that if I returned that night they would try to find a place for me, and possibly for Pat and Harry—should my panhandling turn out to be sufficient for a contribution to the General Fund. I told them that I might be very late. But as I already had plenty of money, I felt assured of a bed for the night—i.e., and hereinafter stated, as we lawyers and congressmen say, of a place on the ground upon which to lay my said body, in a dugout by Buffalo Bayou, being a part and parcel of that body of water and land, though several miles therefrom, where the brave Texans disposed of the Mexican tyrant, Santa Anna, a century before. Historic ground, indeed; once for heroes, now for bums.

So Pat, Harry and I went back to town again and tried to find a place to eat. We did not want to go to the Salvation Army again, so we went to the "Star of Hope" about seven o'clock.

There I saw, and later in many other cities, one of the worst and cruelest rackets that ever has been practiced on men. You enter these "missions," and then you listen to a long bull-dozing sermon and prayer. If you listen long enough, show the "proper attitude," and get converted, you will then get something to eat—ordinarily very little, sometimes only a sandwich and sorry coffee.

In the "Star of Hope" I listened to the most ignorant, brutal cowardly cur that ever delivered a "sermon" to me in my whole life. He bellowed like a bull, about how sin was the cause of it all. He was not quite thirty; a sick youngster yelling that they who sat before him, most of them physically weak from undernourishment and much older than he, were men who had gone back on Jesus, their mothers, and their homes. He assured us that if we were not sinners, we would not be in such shape. Return to Jesus, he said, and everything would work out.

The racket in this particular place was that when "enough" men had been converted, the whole crowd would then be taken back and be given something to eat. I was confidentially informed by the hobo next to me that he was only coming there because no other place was available that night. He had been thrown out of the Houston Transient Bureau, also the Salvation Army, and he had to eat this horrible grub and listen to this roaring bull and be converted again, because he couldn't get anything to eat any other way.

Pat and I secretly decided that Harry should be converted. We sat and listened. The big-mouthed fakir who styled himself preacher denounced the Catholics and every religion that he could think of, except the one he claimed as his own, although he had not yet denounced the Christian Scientists.

We then continued to insist that Harry go forth and be converted, but he said that he did not want to and would rather go somewhere else. This was our only chance for a hobo meal and to find out how things were done. We finally pushed Harry out into the aisle and he went up to be converted.

As soon as he got up in front of the rostrum, the preacher made poor Harry kneel down, held his hand on Harry's head, and made a sermon: Oh, God, forgive this poor sinner. Oh, God, forgive this boy for leaving his mother. Oh, God, let this boy go back to his mother. Save him, oh, God, save him.

Then he began to make another long sermon, which I could not see was relevant to Harry, about the evils of Christian Science, which he said "wasn't no religion a tall." However, when he called it the religion of the devil, I understood the relevancy of Christian Science as far as Harry was concerned.

Harry rose, as angry a person as I ever saw. He bellowed: "This here is an insult! My Ma was a Christian Scientist. Don't say nothing about my Ma's religion." It was rather tragic and brave.

About that time Pat and I got to laughing. Harry was enraged at the preacher. The rest of the sinners got to laughing and then someone mentioned the police. We broke for the doors as did several others. We ran through the alleys of Houston.

I was in something of a panic, because I did not want to get caught and written up in the newspapers. I am no shrinking violet in publicity, but I would surely have been accused of seeking it, and besided, it would have given too many people a good time.

My Ford was in a parking lot. We got in, and then beat it. The police had come soon after us, and no doubt if we had not been fleet of food was a car and some money, I might have been put in jail.