I first heard the McGrady story in 1931, second hand. It happened in 1929 over in Elizabethton, Tennessee, but I heard about it when I was at Mt. Alto Hospital in Washington, D. C., where my war wounds were giving me a little trouble. As in all veterans' hospitals, the doctors were quite leisurely, so the patients had plenty of time to talk.

There had just been some first-rate killings in Southern mill-towns. A woman had been killed, which I did not consider to be the very best type of Southern chivalry, and I here make the bold statement, Sir, that the man who murdered her was not a Southern gentleman. Workers were attacked and killed, and the National Guard had been called out in numerous cases, although the mill-town sheriffs had generally been able to do enough shooting themselves.

So I asked a fellow patient, a lawyer from North Carolina, "What is all this shooting about, my friend?"

"You see," he promptly exclaimed, "those strikers are advocating communism—we can't allow that."

"My God," I said, "Southerners talking communism?"

"Not exactly. But they are being led by Commiunists. Like yourself, Mr. Maverick, I am a Legionnaire and must help preserve the country. In fact I am one of the big leaders in the Legion. I have helped run some of these Communists out of town.

"What right," he demanded, "have these Communists coming into our state and agitating our people?"

"How about that woman being killed?" I asked.

"Well, she ought to have been at home," he answered, "we have to enforce the law—besides it was just an accident."

"Were any mill owners accidentally killed?" I asked.

"Hell, no," eyeing me suspiciously, "they are good citizens. They weren't out picketing their own plant! That woman was a picket."

Here was a born Southerner talking like that—and concerning his own people. For the sake of getting his story, I found out that he had a very low earning capacity; and got a little business now and then from local businessmen connected with the mills. The strikers, he assured me, were "poor white trash."

"Besides," he continued, "we need capital in the South. Most of these labor organizers are Communists and Jews, financed directly from Moscow, preaching the overthrow of our Government, and making niggers equal."

He told me the story second hand about Ed McGrady.

"The Chamber of Commerce, and the best people in town, ran that God damned bolshevik out of town," he said.

Several veterans, unemployed and disabled by the war, were listening. I asked:

"What communist organization did he represent?"

He answered, "The American Federation of Labor."

"A Jew?" I said.

"No," he answered, "but he was a radical, under Jewish influence, and I have it on good authority, in the pay of Moscow."

But a true story, as I later got it from McGrady himself, is that the workers in an Elizabethton, Tennessee, rayon plant were getting such wages as five to eight dollars a week. The factory was German-owned and was not, at least publicly, averse to organization and better wages. In fact, wages had been lowered at the request of businessmen on the plea that to pay "these hillbillies too much money" was causing people everywhere to demand more pay, and that many workers were leaving to go to work at the rayon plant.

The workers asked for an organizer. McGrady, one of the most level-headed of labor organizers, went there. He saw the workers, then he saw the leading businessmen, explaining higher wages meant more money spent in town, that to keep lower wages was merely to send more money to Germany. Why not keep the money at home?

McGrady told me smilingly that he felt quite proud of himself and was sure he had made a real impression. So he went to his hotel, going to bed and falling into blissful sleep. But at three A.M. a mob came, took him, committed brutalities, threatened murder and death, then kidnapped him out of the state. These were not ordinary criminals—they were actually the leading businessmen, bankers and others who called themselves the Christian gentlemen of the town.

There were indictments, troubles, ill-feelings, a suicide—a long miserable story of the aftermath of mob violence and hatred.

This is a kind of idiocy I cannot understand. Low purchasing power destroys the small and large local merchants. These were the men who formed the mob—and harmed themselves, not only morally, but in dollars and cents.

That idea is the last act of a drama which is actually played, or which represents the dominant thought, in many a Southern mill town. The first part of the drama is about like this:

The factory, good or bad, locates in town. Then the news spreads like wild-fire through the countryside that lavish wages rising to the gigantic heights of ten or fifteen dollars a week are to be paid in town. This is unheard of—it means from five hundred to seven hundred dollars in a year!

The farmer reflects on his present cash income—from seventy-five to two hundred dollars a year, and on his diet of grits, turnip greens, and fat-back. In town he can eat sto' bought food, good bacon, candy. Out in the country he wears brogan shoes, no socks, overalls and often no underwear, and he lives in the poorest house of any class of people in the United States. To town! Here he can have good shoes, wear socks, Sunday-go-to-meetin' clothes.

Thus is accomplished the tragedy of the South—up-rooting the farmer from the land, and giving him nothing in return. For he soon finds that his city housing is really no better, and considering the congested conditions, often worse.

Having rushed to the city full of hope, he only gets half started, and the mills close. But he is determined not to go back to the land, which means agricultural peonage and dread isolation. That is not how he expresses it. One told me, "I ain't goin' back and starve. I'd rather starve in town, it won't be so lonesome."

In town after town which I visited I saw huge families in tiny houses. In all this Southern region the birth rate is the highest in any part of the nation. For besides the other crops, the baby crop keeps coming regularly, bigger and bigger.

When Cotton was King, there had to be large families to do the picking. Now with the new mills, it is the same way. So huge families go to town, all work on miserable wages, and they huddle toether in a lousy, bad smelling slum. There is your free born American, and your high American standard of living!

In this very generation, the South has not only furnished all its own growth for the expanding industry, but it has sent over a fourth of the increase in population, or some three and a half million people, to the industrial furnaces of the East. They have left behind the very old and the very young—increasing the problems of the South.

Besides this, around three million youths grew up between 1930 and 1935—nearly two million on the farm—a million or so moved to town, and most of them in both places not decently adjusted to life. They are our lost generation, but they are just a part of our huge youth problem which includes many millions more over the whole nation.

I have been talking about Southern trends in the past decade. They were dangerous before the depression set in, and were made immeasurably worse by the economic collapse. The only improvement was the short-lived NRA.

The gross failure of industry to providce the expected relief from rural oppression and poverty has slowed the heavy immigration to the cities, leaving heavy and increasing populations on the land, and naturally, greater and greater pressure upon it.

And land is still being misused. The only ray of light is the work of the Soil Conservation Service in establishing new methods. But the only hope is a unified plan—for that region as in all parts of the United States.

This is a black picture I have painted you. What can anyone do about it? I am going to put down the things that can be done, and in some cases are beginning to be done. Here they are:

1. Co-operate with the rest of the United States; work for Federal action such as TVA.

2. Labor to organize for collective bargaining; share-croppers and agricultural groups in general to do the same.

3. Professional groups to get out of their lethargy.

4. Flood control, reforestation and so on.

As to the professional groups, we'll take the professors first. The best work seems to be coming out of North Carolina, through the University at Chapel Hill, Howard W. Odum las year produced Southern Regions, the most monumental work ever done in the South. Published just now in 1937 is Landlord and Tenant on the Cotton Plantation, by another Chapel Hill man, Dr. T. J. Woofter, who has done this work with the WPA.

Several professors have also organized the Southern Policy Association, and now the membership is large, including a substantial group of Congressmen.

Odum, in a southern regional study, lists some of the factors of the South as follows:

(1) Natural resources-Superabundance.

(2) Population-Abundance.

(3) Science, skills, technology, organization-Deficiency.

(4) General economy-Waste.

(5) Culture-Richness, combined with immaturity and multiple handicaps.

(6) Trends-Hesitancy and relative regression in many aspects of culture.

Put in plain American language, this means the South has plenty of natural resources, but they are being wasted; that in skilled trades the region is low; that the population is too great, and although there is a culture of a kind, this culture is unsatisfactory. And it also means the South could be a prosperous and happy place, but isn't.

The picture is painted, that is something.

Besides the professors there are the lawyers and the doctors. The Southern lawyer has been filled since his college days with every kind of idea injurious to the South-and these ideas have been accepted by many. The leadership of the Southern lawyer is just now at a lower ebb than at any time in history-which is true of lawyers throughout the country. The doctor, just coming into wide and very powerful influence, probably has the biggest problem of all-the health of the South. The doctors, too, have some mental hurdles they will have to jump.

As for co-operating with the rest of the United States-I am afraid that I will be accused of "politics," or at least of being opportunistic. I will explain by example: Certain Southerners loudly demand appropriations for the TVA. But when someone else wants a dam, or if coal is to be regulated, these "certain people" begin to yelp about "State's rights" and the Constitution. So the South must have a national outlook, and the "Solid South," insofar as solidity concerns outworn ideas, should be buried in the American sand pile.

As for labor, I find not a single state which has a minimum wage law. Only one, Arkansas, has approved the Child Labor Amendment. Labor is generally in a bad shape. And it must be organized, so that it can build up a purchasing power, buy itself out of hock, and trade with the rest of the nation as an equal. This needs progressive labor legislation, with decent pension laws.

The Negro must be recognized in labor. This can be stated selfishly, for if the Negro is not given economic justice, the white man must go lower and lower, too.

Then, of course, we get back to the soil. Like any other part of the world, the South is dependent on it; more than any other section of the United States, the South must rely upon it, whether it gets "new industry" or not. Some five or more million acres have been ruined in the Black Bottoms, the Mississippi keeps rolling along with its floods—and millions of tons of fertilizers wash down to the sea in rains. The South is forced to use huge quantities of fertilizer. Per annum it uses five and a half million tons. All of the rest of the nation uses only two and a half million tons.

The racking of the land, the exploiting of the people, must stop. As a Southerner, I can only conclude we must clean our own skirts, badly muddied in spots. For surely, our Southern skirt affects the whole nation.

I am always swinging emotionally from the South to the Southwest. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Texas and the Great Southwest is more spectacular, we can fight in the Texas Revolution, ride the plains, and whoop it up with the Indians.