Idler

Idler

From "Multitudes: An Unauthorized Memoir"

by Sam Smith

 

Copyright 1998 Sam Smith

Shortly before I left the Coast Guard in the early 1960s, the cutter Spar's crewmembers were presented the Defense Service ribbon in delayed recognition of the fact that at some point whatever had been going on in Vietnam had turned into a war. We were now officially -- although the actual phrase had yet to be born -- Vietnam era veterans.

Besides, I had spent three and a half years thinking about what I wanted to do with the  rest of my life. As I did, the excitement of my broadcasting work wore off; it now seemed a life full of the shallow and cynical. In its place, as first sporadically and eventually compulsively, came visions of Sid Yudain publishing Roll Call and Ronnie Dugger putting out the Texas Observer, and of me sitting like them in some office doing what they were doing, only my way instead of theirs. It was odd to be in uniform on the bridge of a United States naval vessel thinking of such matters but I realized the ease with which I had adapted to the Coast Guard reflected as much as anything skills I had learned during the discipline of my childhood. They had little to do with what was in my heart. What I could do, even well, and what I wanted to do, even poorly, were far apart. Like Thoreau I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet stool.

Once unleashed, ideas for a publication poured into every vacant recess of my brain. Together they began to create the notion of an elegant, funny, literary yet journalistically hard-hitting monthly. Its saints would range from Samuel Johnson and Mark Twain to the guys I would later come to think of as The Initials: A.J. Liebling, E. B. White and H.L.Mencken. From Dr. Johnson, I even stole a name: The Idler.

I put together The Idler like I was assembling a hunting shack. My friend Dick Sullivan had just purchased the Warren Printing Company in the next town over from Bristol. Figuring that I would do much better getting my printing done in a small New England town than in DC, I contracted for the presses. I wrote friends to ask them to subscribe and to contribute; more than a few would, although John Neary, already at Life, reminded me that it was Dr. Johnson who had said that only a blockhead wrote for other than money. I asked Hugh Haynie, cartoonist for the Louisville Courier Journal, to let me use his cartoons and I sought out the columns of Charlie McDowell of the Richmond Times-Gazette.

Hugh was not only a cartoonist but a fellow Coast Guard hooligan with whom I had successfully conspired to defraud the government of a number of flights to Louisville in order to design a boating safety manual based on his drawings. In fact, my time there was largely spent enjoying the gestalt of a town which centered, without distraction, upon enjoyment. One Saturday we did wander down to the paper and Hugh drew a few sketches, but we quickly tired of the effort and went home to prepare for that evening's party. Standing in the lobby, the elevator door opened and a young black man bounced out, bragging loudly, and causing all eyes to turn his way. It's that new fighter, Hugh explained, a guy by the name of Cassius Clay.

McDowell I had not met, but I thought I knew him, which was easily the case for anyone who had read more than a handful of his columns. These columns had been required reading for those of us at Officer Candidate School who retained a thirst for words written by someone other than the US Government. We somehow found time to grab a Richmond Times-Dispatch from the paper box and read Charlie's column between breakfast and having to fall into formation again.

Haynie and McDowell readily agreed to my request. John Perts, the caricaturist for Roll Call, was a bit more cautious. A conservative Virginian, he sought to find out more about my politics before committing his drawings to my care. I wrote him in March 1964:

Among those who responded to news of my impending return to DC was my friend Larry's mother and my ex-landlady, Olive Smith. Mrs. Smith offered me the whole first floor of 125 5th Street NE for $110 a month.. I now not only had a place to stay but an exceedingly inexpensive office.

The initial reaction was favorable. Ron Linton, clerk of the powerful Senate Public Works Committee, called to find out who the hell was putting out such a magazine and invited me to lunch to find out more. We became lifelong friends. It was not long before articles and short items from The Idler began appearing elsewhere, from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Reader's Digest to the members' bulletin of Washington's Cosmos Club.

The monthly also included whimsical and humorous pieces including those of McDowell, a wry column by an old leftist named Sam Darcey, and a character named Uncle Abner who reported regularly from Saltlickham and answered letters from imaginary readers. Perhaps the most unusual contributor was Madeleine Dion of Federalsburg, Md. Mrs. Dion was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1890 and had resided in various places around Europe, including a stay in Vienna from 1908 to 1913.

When I tumbled upon her, she was living in greatly reduced conditions with a collection of cats (including her favorite, Oliver Wendell Holmes) and writing a column for the local paper under the name of Lorelei. Her style was so mercurial, prejudiced and unpredictable that I suggested that she write me regularly and let me excerpt the letters at will.

I thought that leavening the portentous with such pieces might remind the reader of something that I had learned from my time in rural Maine and from writers like E.B. White: that the great is only the aggregate of the small and that the detailed is often a far better window onto truth than the most elegant abstractions. Lorelei, I thought might help keep my readers, and me, in our place.

Not everyone, however, enjoyed The Idler. Rollin, my Coast Guard journalist's mate from St. Louis -- now on his way to becoming a fundamentalist minister -- wrote me a three page single-spaced letter in September 1964:

Dear Sam,

Thank you for the first copy of Idler and the subscription. Needless to say, your entire publication is contrary to my very existence, but that only signifies we live in America. You are very intelligent and witty. I am sure you have put on paper your philosophy for our troubled nation that you are sure is our panacea. But please remember even Voltaire, Napoleon, Caesar, Hitler, Tojo, Lincoln, Kennedy, and the odds-makers at Las Vegas have been mistaken; some incredibly so.

I initially saw myself more as an unconventional member of the establishment rather than its opponent. Early on, I tried to explain to readers who I suspected were considerably more traditional than myself some of the remarkable changes that were occurring in America and how they might best adapt to them. If anything, my view of American radicalism was that of a sympathetic, albeit sometimes patronizing, observer. Among other things, The Idler in its three short years of existence, tracked my sometimes awkward, equivocating, and even pompous pilgrimage away from what I had been taught and still in many ways believed I was. In June 1965, for example, I wrote:

There is a new radical spirit. It has drawn much of its strength from the civil rights movement, but it goes far beyond that. challenging not just America's racial attitudes but some of her most cherished and smug assumptions. …  It protests the whole humdrum, humbug world of white urban American sophistication with its self-serving definition of success, its indifference towards the socially and economically disenfranchised of the country, its phony values and its 8 oz. drip-dry culture.  It is as purposeful as a March on Montgomery and as pointless as an obscene sign on the University of California campus.

It may provide some perspective to quote a small item that appeared in a box in an issue:

We sent a classified ad up to the Saturday Review not so long ago and got back a reply which said, in part, "After careful consideration, our Acceptability Board came to the conclusion that it would prefer not to run your ad."  We had hoped that the Saturday Review would be able to find a little space for us amongst their other ads concerning Sell's Famous Liver Pate, WBAI-FM, exotic tropical fruit, work for an ex-convict, sex education records, and a private party wishing to buy Horatio Alger books. So we called them up to find out what was wrong.  Nothing wrong with the ad, the lady told us. "The board just decided your magazine was a little too liberal."

 

o

There was a story that wound its way across the pages of The Idler. It was first expressed in a moving fashion in letters written from Mississippi in the summer of 1964 by my college roommate, ex-wrestler and ex-paratrooper Gren Whitman. From Biloxi on August 8 he wrote:

Fear cannot be described, only felt. I have been frightened many times In my life in varying degrees, in varying circumstances. And courage is not the absence of fear. Fear is the essence of courage. What are your emotions now, driving with us along a lonely highway in rural Mississippi, in an integrated car? It you are frightened, you are with friends, and you are sane. If you are not afraid, you know nothing about Mississippi. You have never heard of the Free-dom Rides and how they ended in Jack-son. You have never heard of Herbert Lee and Louis Allen, and countless oth-ers. You have not heard of Neshoba County. You have never talked with a Mississippi Negro or a civil rights veteran.

And if your fear has overcome your convictions, you have no business with us. Go home.

Our three colored companions are profoundly aware that two whites are in the car with them and what this will mean if we are stopped for any reason. The two of us, likewise, know that though we are white, we become as black as tar once we are known to be CR types.

In January, I got a chance to help plant the seed. The notorious DC Transit wanted to raise its fares and the local chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had organized to stop it. They urged citizens with cars to drive bus passengers during a one-day boycott.

I joined the volunteers. On the morning of January 24, 1966, 1 hauled myself out of bed, swallowed a cup of coffee, warmed up my '54 Chrysler, and made my way to Sixth and H Streets Northeast, one of the assembly points for volunteer jitneys. A boycott organizer filled my car with three high school girls and a middle- aged and rather fat woman.

A bus drove by and it was empty. If both the fat lady and her husband worked, the five cent fare increase DC Transit was seeking would cost them two week's worth of groceries over the course of a year.

At the delicatessen at Twenty-fourth and Benning, one of the assembly points, a young black who worked with SNCC greeted me: "Been waiting all morning for a car to work from here; said they were going to have one, but they didn't send it. Want a cup of coffee?"

"Thanks."

"I'm tired, man. Been up all night down at the office. We got some threats. One bunch said they were going to bomb us, but they didn't."

We got into my car and continued east on Benning. Lots of empty buses.

"We've got to live together, man. You're white and you can't help it. I'm Negro and I can't help it. But we still can get along. That's the way I feel about it." I agreed. "You ever worked with SNCC before?" "Nope," I said.

'Well, I'11 tell you man, you hear a lot of things. But they're a good group. They stick together. You know, like if you get in trouble, you know they're going to be in there with you. If you get threatened they'll have people around you all the time. They stick together. That's good, man."

People stuck together that Monday, I carried seventy-one people, only five of them white. SNCC estimated that DC Transit lost 130,000 to 150,000 fares during the boycott. Two days later, the transit commission, in a unanimous but only temporary decision, denied DC Transit the fare hike. The commission's executive director dryly told reporters that the boycott played no part in the decision. He was probably right. The commission worried about such things as cash dividends, investor's equity, rate of return, depreciated value, and company base. The boycotters worried about a nickel more a ride. And in the end, the commission was to approve the fare hike and then more; a few years later the fare was up to forty cents.

But the boycott was important, anyway. Never had so many Washingtonians done anything so irregular and contrary to official wishes. The assumption that DC residents would passively accept the injustices of their city was shattered. SNCC and the Free DC Movement had laid the groundwork for future action.

After the bus boycott, I wrote a letter to its leader congratulating him and offering to help in the future. Not long after the leader, Marion S. Barry, and his colleague, L. D. Pratt, were sitting in my living room talking about how I could help in SNCC's public relations. I readily agreed; for the first time in my life I had joined a movement.

Three years earlier Barry had quit his $5,500 a-year post teaching chemistry at Knoxville College in Tennessee and joined the SNCC. He soon showed up in Washington to head the local office. Barry early formed an improbable and ultimately nearly explosive partnership with an erstwhile farm implements manufacturer, salesman, self-styled nutrition expert, and economic theoretician named L. D. Pratt. Barry was lean, black, soft-spoken, self-contained, and given to wearing a straw plantation style hat; Pratt was husky, white, excitable, demonstrative, and covered his baldness with a felt fedora that made him appear a character out of a one-column cut in a forties edition of Time magazine.

Barry and Pratt both worked themselves to the marrow and it was during those months that Barry first gained a long-lingering reputation for always being late for appointments, news conferences, and actions. "I work on CPT-- colored people's time," explained Barry. Part of my job was to stand on the street-corner and convince the press that Marion really would show up if they just waited a bit longer. The reporters would bitch, but since Barry was shaking up the city, they mostly waited anyhow.

Barry's subsequent moves in his drive for passage of right-to-vote legislation in Congress included an effort to get businessmen in downtown stores and along H Street (a black shopping area second only to downtown in commercial importance) to support the movement by displaying its sticker in their windows. Hundreds of orange and black stickers with the slogan "Free DC" below a shattered chain went up in store windows; but the threat of a business boycott led other merchants to cry blackmail, and some of the more traditional civil rights and home rule leaders began to back away from Barry's tough tactics.

In the coming months, Barry and his organization would disrupt the calm of the city with increasing frequency. A number of Free DC supporters were arrested at the annual Cherry Blossom Festival. By the following fall, Barry would have been arrested three times, for failing to "move on," for disorderly conduct, and for holding a Free DC block party without official sanction.

Marion was leading a movement, but it had some of the intensity, closeness and spirit of a rebellion. Barry enlisted into the cause anyone he could find. You would be talking on the phone and a special operator would break in with an "emergency call" and it would be Barry or Pratt or someone else with the latest crisis or plan. There were black cops who had been spiritually seconded to the movement and ministers who served as a link between the radical Barry and the more moderate civil rights movement and friendly reporters who still believed there was an objective difference between justice and injustice,. And through it all was movement, excitement and hope, not even dampened by the thirtieth chorus of "We Shall Overcome" sung in a church hall while waiting for Marion finally to show up.

While the 20-something Barry was an anathema to the white business leaders and considered a rogue by the local civil rights establishment, as early as 1966 a poll found him ranked fifth by black residents as the person who had done the most for blacks in DC.

o

In 1965, the US Civil Rights Commission announced that it would hold hearings in Mississippi -- at a time when the governor of the state had warned of "civil war" if the federal government dare send registrars in to put blacks on the voting rolls. I covered the hearings and the result was a whole issue that summarized one of the grimmest and least known stories of failed democracy:

Henry Rayburn, a 63-year-old farmer from near Charleston, was approached by a man with a club when going to vote. Rayburn says the man told him "he would kill me if I tried to vote."

The Commission wanted to know if the police had been notified of the threat. No, Rayburn replied, because "the law coincides with what the other side does insofar as Negroes are involved."

Another man named John Brewer went to sign up. He and his friends were met by a crowd of whites:

One of them said, "You niggers get away from the courthouse. You don't have no business here,"

For the next three weeks trucks with gun racks on the back repeatedly drove up and circled Brewer's house. He finally registered on the fourth try.

Brewer is a World War 11 veteran. He told the Commission, "The only time I felt like a man was when I was in the Army, After I got out it seemed my freedom run out."

And he added, "I want to vote because there are some things I want to get straight."

o

A few years later, I found no shortage of stories or causes. In November 1965, I broke with my political heritage and called for "neo-populism" in a piece titled Where are the Gutbucket Liberals?  A couple of months late I went further, attacking the chief icon of liberalism. Hubert Humphrey. But few things startled my friends and readers more then an article in February 1967 issued called Keep the Seat, Baby, defending Adam Clayton Powell's right to remain in Congress. The article produced a phone call from Powell's top aide, Chuck Stone, beginning a friendship that in itself justified the article. Stone arranged with me to meet with Powell. I walked in about 10 am one morning. His suite had the longest office bar I had ever seen. Powell opened the cabinet doors to display a generous selection of liquors. "This, Sam," the Reverend Powell said, "is what comes of serving the lord."

Meanwhile at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Lyndon Johnson, who was helping to create the Great Society with no little help from Powell, was serving the Lord in his own bizarre way. Stories abound -- from Johnson holding high level conferences while seated on a toilet to an alleged Oval Office tete-a-tete with Liz Taylor and Richard Burton during which Johnson leaned over to Burton, put his hand on his knee and said, "I figure that between the three of us we've fucked just about everybody."

o

When people would write about Marion Barry years later, they wouldn't mention the good part because they had never seen it. All they saw was the cynical, corroded shell of a man they hadn't known and thought it had been that way all along. Like an old car rusting in a pasture.

As Barry moved into politics, first on the school board, then the city council, then the mayor's office I had moved my support and enthusiasm with him, and without apologies. Once in the top job, however, his weaknesses quickly lost their constraints and whatever greatness Marion might have possessed started to disintegrate.

I had been close to Marion, but there came a time when I remembered Jack Burden, the journalist turned henchman to Willie Stark in "All the King's Men" and I told myself I didn't want to end up like him. And so I let increasing distance grow between us until finally there was nothing except the passing reference to times of which I suspect both of us were prouder.

Later I would sometimes tweak him when we met.

"What's happenin', Sam?"

"Not much, Marion. Just staying home with the wife and kids. How about you?"

One February of an election year, he told me at a party, "We've got to have lunch, Sam." I replied, "Marion, we don't have to have lunch until at least July."

Yet there was a portion of the bond that remained unbroken. I would sometimes describe Barry as a drunk uncle you both liked and hated. He introduced me once as "one of the first white people who'd have anything to do with me" and to his new third wife he said, "Sam and I go back a long time. Over the years he's become more radical and I've become more conservative."

When Barry ran for reelection the last time, I took the position that I was all in favor of redemption; I just didn't see why you had to do it in the mayor's office. With a straight face, I suggested as an alternative that he follow the example of an Irish bishop whose long-ago love affair had just been exposed. The bishop had gone to Guatemala to care for the Indians in the mountains. The thought completely broke up the show's host.

During the campaign I appeared on a TV show with Barry. In a more serious manner, I pointed out to him that he had never apologized to the people of the city for the pain he had caused them. He went into his redemption speech and ended by saying that he hoped some day "Sam would consider me redeemed, too."

That was the end of the show, and we walked out together and sat down in the lounge next to the studio. "Marion," I said, "I wasn't talking about your redemption. There are a lot of people in this town who were embarrassed and hurt by what you did and I don't see any sign that you even recognize it." Barry still didn't seem to understand what I was talking about and so I said, "Look, isn't it one of the twelve steps that you're meant to make amends to those you have harmed along the way?"

For a moment, he connected: "You mean I should tell them that I'm sorry.?"

"It might help."

Barry nodded and excused himself, but he hadn't really heard. As I looked into his well-trained eyes I realized I had sought something beyond his vision. For him there were no others.

o

And yet I still think of the good years. The years in which Barry was one of a handful of people who made self-determination for DC possible, the years in which he was the voice of progress and sanity on the school board and city council. I think of a man who was willing to risk his life for the freedom of others, who was willing to go to jail on the chance it would help others gain a measure of liberty. And like Jack Burden writing of Willie Stark, "I have to believe he was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn't anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that."