00:00:00RICHARD RUSK: Interview with Dean Rusk on his boyhood days in
Atlanta. A lot of these questions and material is based on Franklin
[Miller] Garrett's book called Atlanta and Its Environs. What are your first
memories of events in Atlanta, not necessarily your boyhood or childhood but
the very first things you remember as far as the public events
of Atlanta are concerned.
DEAN RUSK: I think probably the coming of World War I,
the fact that a number of my cousins went off to the
service in the Army or the Navy. Of course, during the war
we had that huge fire on the north side of town, destroyed
about a third of the city. From where we lived we could
00:01:00clearly see that smoke and sense some of the excitement and confusion
to that period. Rumors were going around that a German plane had
been seen and dropped a bomb over the city to start the
fire, which was nonsense of course. But I wasn't, as a small
boy, caught up very much in the events of the city of
Atlanta. That was fairly well removed from our lives out there in
West End. But I think those were the two things that occurred
while I was a small boy living there.
RICHARD RUSK: The section, West End in Atlanta--just some general characteristics
of West End. Again, a lot of this you have already given
me.
DEAN RUSK: In those days, West End was a very modest
00:02:00little community about two miles from downtown. Stores were one and two
story. There were no high-rises at all made up of single family
homes. There were one or two apartment houses on Gordon Street. There
was a little movie house where we kids could go for a
nickel. That was in the days of silent pictures and they had
a player piano there to play music that was reasonably related to
the theme of the movie. But West End was a considerable trading
area for farmers who lived out west of Atlanta and there was
a good deal of house-to-house selling in those days. The farmers would
load up their wagons with vegetables and fruits and drive them in
and just peddle up and down the streets like later ice cream
00:03:00carts did. And you would go out and buy what you needed
right off the farmer's wagon. Then the Jewel Tea Company had wagons
that came around through residential areas selling tea and coffee. That was
always a little exciting because when we were ready to buy a
pound of coffee off the Jewel Tea wagon, we knew there was
a stick of peppermint candy in a pound of coffee and we
always looked forward to that--but, it was pretty relaxed and laid back.
Up on Peter Street nearer town from where we lived, there was
a very substantial farmers' market where the farmers would come in with
their wagons, have their horses taken care of. There was a big
farmers' vegetable market up there and farmers came in and gathered and
gossiped with each other. But even downtown Atlanta in those days had
00:04:00very few really high buildings, or buildings like the [Joel] Hurt building
and the [Asa G.] Candler Building. They might have been twelve or
fifteen stories high, but no really tall buildings. In some respects it
was sort of like a grown-up country store kind of environment. It
was about two miles into town from where we lived on Whitehall
Street.
RICHARD RUSK: Could you think back and describe the attitudes between
different classes of people in Atlanta, between middle class and upper class
towards lower classes of people there? And are they similar to attitudes
today that we have or were they different back in those times?
Were they a little bit harsher perhaps?
DEAN RUSK: Well, we lived along the railroad track in West
00:05:00End on Whitehall Street which was the dividing line between the poor
white residential area and the poor black residential area. And these were
just two different worlds. The black shacks that the blacks lived in
right across the railroad were really in terrible condition. They had no
playgrounds, no free space, or anything of that sort. And I learned,
I think very early, although I didn't phrase it in these terms,
that the black in this country lives in two worlds. The one
world is the one in which there are white people present; there
is another world where the blacks are all by themselves. Ralph [Johnson]
Bunche used to later talk to me about this. When I was
delivery boy for Mr. Leatherwood's little grocery store, one of my jobs
was to go down into the black neighborhood there and take orders
00:06:00and then come back and fill my little red wagon with what
they had ordered and deliver it to them. There were times when
I would come along and people I wanted to see would be
sitting on the porch talking in their own group and I would
be asked just to sit on the step until they got through
talking about something. And I could hear the kinds of things blacks
said to each other when there were no whites around. They didn't
consider me a white. I was just a little delivery boy. And
that gave me a pretty strong impression of these two different worlds.
There are a good many whites over the years who have said,
"Well, we understand the blacks. We have lived with them all of
our lives." And I think that is pretty much phony because white
people never penetrate that world where the blacks are all by themselves,
00:07:00so they just don't--
RICHARD RUSK: And vice versa.
DEAN RUSK: And perhaps vice versa. But I don't recall much
crime in those circumstances. We white and black kids back and forth
across the railroad track would play together after school and on weekends
without any problems, except that about once a month we would choose
up sides and play cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers--
RICHARD RUSK: Yes, you have told us about the childhood games.
What about, in general, the attitudes, the relations with the way Atlantans
felt towards the lower classes of people?
DEAN RUSK: Well, among the whites there were still social distinctions
that were very real.
00:08:00
RICHARD RUSK: More so than today?
DEAN RUSK: I think so. You see, in those days, although
West End might have been described by some people as a sort
of well-to-do neighborhood, that is only a relative term. There were no
real mansions; there were no really rich people out there. I t
was middle class. There were some comfortable houses, but nothing like one
you would find on the north side or out on Ponce de
Leon Avenue and places like that. I have teased some of my
friends in Atlanta by reminding them that it took me forty years
to get from Whitehall Street to an invitation to the Piedmont Driving
Club.
RICHARD RUSK: I see all kinds of references to the Piedmont
Driving Club.
DEAN RUSK: It was and is an elite club there.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you have any contacts with it at all
back in those days?
DEAN RUSK: No. Well, when I went to Boys High School
00:09:00some of my best friends were from the north side of town,
whose families were members of the Piedmont Driving Club. And we got
along fine at school, and they accepted me as a friend, and
we worked together on a lot of things, but socially, we did
not get over to the Piedmont Driving Club for the dances and
tennis tournaments and things like that. But the general environment in the
society there In West End was anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic, anti-foreign. It was
really the attitudes of yeoman farmers, Protestants, clerical workers, less distinguished professional
00:10:00people: lawyers and doctors and people like that. But there were a
good many strong feelings about these outside groups--things I heard about Catholics
when I was a boy would curl your hair.
RICHARD RUSK: And the same way with Jewish people.
DEAN RUSK: Yes, right. Although there was no discrimination in the
schools among the kids towards Jewish classmates in the elementary or high
school. We had a number of Jewish children there.
RICHARD RUSK: It was more abstract than it was personal.
DEAN RUSK: Yes, I remember one would occasionally hear some resentment
over the fact that the Jewish children got a double dip on
holidays because they not only got all the Christian holidays, they got
00:11:00all the Jewish holidays, and we thought that was a little unfair.
But it was very much of a modest income, white, Protestant community.
An in those days that set the pattern of people's attitudes. Word
went around that the priest had the privilege of spending the first
night with the bride after a marriage. That's an old, old medieval
thing that's been going around for a long time.
DEAN RUSK: The Catholic Church in West End was just across
the street from the church I attended, the West End Presbyterian Church.
And it always appeared to be dark because where we had our
services they had already had their masses early in the morning and
there was nobody around. We never saw anybody stirring around there. It
00:12:00was almost like a haunted house. We would always speculate about what
might be going on inside this place. I think in my own
family these sentiments were not particularly pronounced because my father was an
educated man. He did a lot of reading, so we didn't get
caught up in a lot of these prejudices that were a general
part of the community in those days. But I must say as
kids we were pretty stirred up by this film The Birth of
a Nation when it carne in.
RICHARD RUSK: I saw a lot of evidence of that. So
you did see Birth of a Nation?
DEAN RUSK: Oh yes, as a child when it first came
out.
RICHARD RUSK: How old were you when you saw it?
DEAN RUSK: Must have been eight, or ten, or something like
that. When the Ku Klux riders began to ride to the tune
00:13:00of ''Dixie," that was very exciting. You see, there was a heavy
pall resting over much of the South as a residue from the
Reconstruction days that followed the Civil War, and we still had some
of the attitudes of a defeated people, some of the artificial pride
that is generated by people whose side lost. And mainly we just
took for granted that Robert E. [Edward] Lee's forces got so tired
winning battles they finally lost the war. We were all very proud
of Robert E. Lee. Both of my grandfathers had been in the
Civil War. So that was still very much a part of the
00:14:00things that kids talked about with each other.
RICHARD RUSK: I suppose it was necessary to invent the glory
and the chivalry of the Old Confederacy to cope with those wounds
and pain of having lost.
DEAN RUSK: Yes, particularly since the Civil War was followed by
that period of Reconstruction. Had Abraham Lincoln lived and worked with Robert
E. Lee on the reconciliation of the North and South, the whole
history of the South, I think, may have been different.
RICHARD RUSK: You think so? You have enough respect for the
power of government and leadership to think that that section of history
DEAN RUSK: The Influence of those two people, don't want to
sound too southern here, but at the end of the Civil War,
northern radicals took over the Congress and insisted upon all sorts of
punitive measures against the South. And that left a residue of bitterness
that lasted a long time. It was not really until World War
00:15:00I that that began to ease up some. But it was not
really until World War II that it disappeared.
RICHARD RUSK: What about Birth of a Nation?
DEAN RUSK: That film made a tremendous impact in the South
when it was first produced and stirred everybody up, stirred old memories.
No, it created quite a sensation when it was shown.
RICHARD RUSK: Now this cross that came out of the hills
of Scotland--you mean to say that the Ku Klux Klan's famous symbol
is derived from Scotland? The burning cross7
DEAN RUSK: It is possible. The original Ku Klux Klan was
a more respectable and well-thought-of organization than it came later to be
when it was organized by a bunch of racketeers. But it was
the South's response to military government and a good many of the
00:16:00abuses that occurred during military government during the Reconstruction period. Oh, I
think in those early days the Ku Klux Klan had a lot
of popular support.
RICHARD RUSK: Old family or good friends, relatives ever have any
strong dealings with them back in your time?
DEAN RUSK: I never knew any relatives who were members of
the Ku Klux Klan. Of course, it was very secret in those
days, because riding with them was a crime. But later on, we
had a boarder in our home. Forgot his name now and what
he did, but I suspect that he was a member of the
group that lynched Leo [M.] Frank because he was out that day
and night and when he came home he had what he claimed
00:17:00was a piece of the rope that they had used to hang
Leo Frank.
RICHARD RUSK: They never did catch those twenty-five fellows. There was
a whole crowd of them and they never were prosecuted. Do you
remember his name?
DEAN RUSK: No, no. We occasionally had a boarder just to
help make ends meet. We had a number of cousins who boarded
with us at times from Cherokee County.
RICHARD RUSK: That ticket for Birth of a Nation was two
bucks a shot. Are you trying to tell me that back in
those days that was an enormous sum of money?
DEAN RUSK: Oh, we saw it in our little neighborhood theater:
kids for a nickel. It was a rather crude silent picture in
00:18:00terms of technique but it made its point and stirred up everybody.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you have the feeling at the time that
it was kind of a naughty movie, that it did bring out
some prejudice? Because apparently the North reacted pretty strongly to it.
DEAN RUSK: No, no. The mood of the community was all
with Birth of a Nation.
RICHARD RUSK: Got a question about these class distinctions in Atlanta.
Now the fact that the Rusk brothers and sisters worked so hard
due to the influence of your folks and the education that you
had to move on in life and move on to different things,
would part of that have been an incentive to climb out of
that class that you folks found yourselves in when your dad [Robert
Hugh Rusk] first moved out of Cherokee County? Obviously you had to
start from scratch there in West End.
DEAN RUSK: Well, we were Scotch-Irish, and on my mother's [Frances
Elizabeth Clotfelter] side German and Scotch. But we were not members of
00:19:00the old families of Atlanta. There was kind of an automatic elite
in Atlanta based upon some of the old pre-war families, and we
were not that. But we knew we were what people called "good
stock": It's Scotch-Irish stock, and we were proud. We were poor, but
if anybody else had called us poor we would have socked them.
Again, in my family there was a kind of recognition that my
father had gone to college and we read widely. And we were,
in that respect, perhaps a cut above some of our neighbors in
the place where we lived.
RICHARD RUSK: Were you a little embarrassed by that part of
town where you lived?
DEAN RUSK: I was never embarrassed by it. You see, from
00:20:00the very beginning in Cherokee County and in Atlanta, we were poor
to the point where I had to wait two years until my
father felt that he could spend two dollars for a bicycle tire
to put on our bicycle, and we finally got one at Christmas
time. But our house was always impeccably clean and mother always had
flowers around somewhere. Every Monday we would scour down the floors in
our house. I remember that because when you wash pine floors, on
Tuesdays there would be splinters. But there was no lack of pride
00:21:00and a recognition of the importance of keeping clean. Our clothes were
clean, the house was clean, it was tidy, the yard was kept
clean. On Whitehall Street we had some grass on the front lawn,
and that was kept cut and the backyard was kept raked.
RICHARD RUSK: Were your neighbors living the same way, or did
they let things slide a bit?
DEAN RUSK: Pretty much. We had a little bit more of
a yard than some of them had, but we didn't feel there
was anything much to be ashamed of.
RICHARD RUSK: And as such, you wouldn't have felt that compelling
need to lift yourselves out of poverty or anything? Your ambitions came
from other sources?
DEAN RUSK: No, we had this--passion for education was more of
a factor. Of course, we had ambit ion because it was--a great
00:22:00many families that each generation would do a little better than the
previous generation. You would keep moving up in terms of Income and
professional standing and things like that. I mentioned earlier that there was
very little crime where we lived out at West End. Don't know
why or anything like that. I am not enough of a sociologist
to figure it out. But we left our doors open; we didn't
lock them; things weren't stolen, didn't have a drink of alcohol until
00:23:00I got to Oxford at the age of twenty-two. I never heard
of narcotics in those days. It was just absolutely beyond the pale.
So, crime was of an incidental sort, coming more out of high
spirits and things like that than out of any systematic desire to
commit crimes as such.
RICHARD RUSK: Every American city has spawned its exotic, quaint characters
in any given neighborhood. I see references to some people there who
were known for their eccentric ways: [William Jasper] Franklin the Goat Man,
for example, and some others. Did you have any neighborhood types around
00:24:00there that were so pegged that you recall?
DEAN RUSK: No, I don't remember anything of that sort. From
that point of view suppose life where we lived was fairly dull
in the sense that there was nothing to excite the news media
or anything like that. Suppose if we could look at it now
a lot of things would be quaint and unusual. Just the business
of my going with my uncle in his wagon to Fort McPherson
from his farm just a few miles west of West End to
pick up the slop from the army kitchens to take back to
feed the hogs. That sort of thing doesn't happen these days. But
we were very simple in our standards when time came in school
00:25:00to put on a play or a pageant or something like that.
Our costumes were homemade by our mothers. I remember Mother made me
a costume once to play the role of an ear of corn.
But we just made do with what we had; we didn't go
fancy on all sorts of costly things, we did it the easy
and cheap way. But on the other hand it gave full room
for the imagination to play, and I think that that was very
much of a plus when I was growing up. So much was
built upon imagination.
RICHARD RUSK: Were the roads there in your end of Atlanta?
DEAN RUSK: Well, the street in front of our house, Whitehall
Street, was paved with cobblestones. And that at least kept the wagon
00:26:00Wheels from cutting deep ruts in the roads, although, unfortunately, you couldn't
skate on it and it was a little bumpy for automobiles. But
as soon as you got beyond the cobblestones it was dirt: dirt
roads. They gradually sort of put gravel on it and things like
that, but you get a mile or so away from West End
and you were on dirt roads.
RICHARD RUSK: The crossroads at West End were also out of
cobblestone?
DEAN RUSK: Yes, cobblestone.
RICHARD RUSK: When did you get your first macadam road? I
guess it would be concrete first, huh?
DEAN RUSK: I think that they put macadam on tar over
these cobblestones just before we left West End. And, of course, that
was a big day. But we had sidewalks, but again made up
of slabs of concrete, maybe a foot and a half across. And
00:27:00the cracks between the slabs meant that roller skating was kind of
difficult because it was not really smooth like the later all-concrete sidewalks
came to be. There were a lot of trees around and that
helped. In our backyard we had two huge cottonwood trees which were
great for climbing and for building tree houses and things like that.
RICHARD RUSK: How big was your yard in general? What about
the density of that in West End?
DEAN RUSK: Well, our lot must have been seventy-five feet across
and one hundred fifty feet deep, or something like that. We had
one of the larger lots on that particular block. And then there
was an alley which ran alongside of our house and then made
00:28:00an "L" turn and went over to cut into the next street,
which was used by delivery trucks bringing in coal and things like
that. There was a rear access as well as a street access
to our place, and we used that alley for a lot of
things. In the corner of the alley we would dig forts, and
all sorts of things figured greatly in our playing procedures.
RICHARD RUSK: I noticed in the Cherokee Advance and also this
book that back in those days there was an awful lot of
reference in the media, newspapers, advertisements for different cough syrups and tonics
and various things. And at the same time you'd see lots of
obituaries of young children who had died. I guess the real appeal
for ads and that type of medicine was trying to do something
for the sickness that did exist, particularly the young children, when in
00:29:00fact medical science had not been developed and you really didn't know
what things were caused by and how to care for the young
and care for yourselves.
DEAN RUSK: Well, we had a good many simple remedies in
terms of medicine. This was long before modern drugs: penicillin and things
like that. We took a lot of calamol and castor oil and
Epsom salts. There were a good many tonics.
RICHARD RUSK: I guess there was just a lot of what
we would call today ignorance about what caused diseases. Was there a
definite relationship established between sanitary conditions and getting sick?
DEAN RUSK: We had begun to understand that. There was an
appreciation of the germ theory of disease, but the remedies were not
00:30:00all that effective. If we had a sore throat, my father would
maybe put some soda in a little bit of sorghum syrup and
heat it up on the top of a kerosene lamp and it
got all foamy, and we would take that by spoon and that
would tend to ease our sore throat. Sometimes these rumors are not
all that unscientific. During the flu epidemic that came along during World
War I, which was really a very serious one, we all wore
bags of asafetida around our necks. Now, actually that had a little
scientific base to it because asafetida smells so bad that you stayed
away from each other. You kept your distance from each other. So
that helped restrain the spread of the flu. But there were such
things as seven-year itch and occasionally there were mites or lice to
00:31:00have to think about and get cleaned up on. Bedbugs were always
a problem. We had to keep cleaning out the mattresses and featherbeds
and things like that to get r id of these bedbugs.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you have screens on your windows back then?
DEAN RUSK: No, not on Whitehall Street. We did later but
not there, nor in Cherokee County. But we made double use of
flyswatters. We had kind of cloth screens that we would spread over
food and things like that to keep the flies away. By the
time I got to Atlanta, automobiles were not all that unusual. You
would see a good many of them. One of our Sunday afternoon
00:32:00activities--Sunday being a day when we were not allowed to do very
much--we could sit on the grass out in front of our place
and make a list of the different makes of cars that drove
by our house. We would keep scores on these things.
RICHARD RUSK: Steam-driven and gas-driven?
DEAN RUSK: Yes. But we had a great variety of automobiles
in those days that you don't have any more, like Winston, and
the Poetry of Motion, they called it, and Stutz Bearcat, and the
Austin. We learned to recognize all these makes of cars--the Rio, the
Franklin. But they gradually consolidated into the larger units--the Nash, lots of
different makes of cars.
00:33:00
RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever ride on a steam car?
DEAN RUSK: No.
RICHARD RUSK: Dueling tradition in the old American South and the
last instance of it in Atlanta in 1889. Go ahead, Pop.
DEAN RUSK: Well, dueling had passed away before I was born,
but feuding had not disappeared. Up in Cherokee County we were in
the foothills and on the edge of the feuding country. And one
of my father's brothers, one of my uncles, got into a feuding
situation with a nearby family. There was really bad blood between these
two families and my uncle was going over toward Woodstock in horse
and buggy and coming toward him to a very narrow bridge across
00:34:00a little creek there came the other fellow. And they just stopped
on each side of the little stream and each got out and
started shooting each other, and my uncle killed the other fellow. But
they didn't even take him down to Canton for a trial. The
unwritten law was very much a real thing in those days.
There was still a good deal of that southern tradition of chivalry
around in those days: insults to your women folk, and things like
that. I remember when I was in the second grade of school,
I fought all afternoon once with another guy because he had called
00:35:00out to a girl that I thought well of, "You're just like
a cash register, it takes money to open your drawers." That was
a deep insult and I took him on and we fought all
afternoon.
My father had a revolver in the house, and in Cherokee County
he had a shotgun. But he had the revolver because there was
a time when he was a kind of a police officer or
something, and he used this. But I remember his getting it out
only once the whole time in my life. There seemed to be
a prowler outside of our house one night in the alley and
he wasn't sure who it was. So he got his pistol and
00:36:00went out to look round to see who was prowling around the
house. We were all pretty scared inside the house there because we
didn't know what might happen. Firearms up in Cherokee County you hunted
rabbits and things like that, but they were never a big deal
with us.
RICHARD RUSK: I was reading an Atlanta history about Henry [Woodfin]
Grady.
DEAN RUSK: Well, there were voices in the South in those
days looking toward the future and trying to put the past behind
us and get a fresh start. Henry Grady was one of the
best known of those voices. You might be interested to know that
when my father was at Davidson, each student had to present a
senior oration before graduation. And my father's senior orations was very much
along the lines of Henry Grady's approach. Now that was in 1894,
00:37:00long before he was married and I was born.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever see a copy of his speech?
DEAN RUSK: Yes, it's around somewhere. My sister Margaret [Rusk] had
it and it is in one of these boxes somewhere, or Parks
[Rusk] may have it. We had a good deal of singing in
our family. My father was a pretty good tenor. My mother was
a nice a l to, and we children sang a lot; church
songs, folk songs. Spirituals, things like that. We had an old piano,
but nobody really knew how to play it very well. But my
00:38:00father played a violin, and he had done that in college a
bit. I remember when the first phonographs came in. That was a
great invention as far as we were concerned. The records were cylinders
and you had this horn sticking up like you could see the
Victor advertisements. We had a fair amount of music that way. It
was not very technically efficient. but we could listen to [Enrico] Caruso
and all sorts of people.
One of my regrets is that I never learned to play a
musical instrument, when I was in high school. Four of us boys
in my church decided that we would like to put together a
barbershop quartet and we went to a music teacher to see if
she would help us. She listened to us and said we didn't
00:39:00have a quartet because we were all baritones--we didn't have a tenor
and we didn't have a bass. So we forgot about that.
The first house we moved into in Atlanta was on Fifth Street--long
since overrun by Georgia Tech. But even there, in what seemed to
be almost the middle of the city, we still had an outdoor
privy. Well, the stench of that tank truck was hard to describe.
When the tank truck would come around, my mother would get the
shovel by the fireplace and put some raw cotton on it and
set it on fire, and we would sit around that shovel smelling
the burning cotton rather than the tank t ruck. But both my
older brothers had typhoid fever while we were living there. For some
00:40:00reason I escaped it, but both of them had it and had
a very tough time with it. But then when we moved to
Whitehall Street in West End there was a flush toilet and this
was really a miracle from our point of view. I remember that
we kids would slip in and pull the chain just to see
it happen, just to see it flush. That was really something. We
had never seen anything like that.
RICHARD RUSK: Talking about the emergence of a black lower and
middle class coming out of slavery and able to prosper in the
times--
DEAN RUSK: We didn't see much of that in West End
where I lived, but downtown in Atlanta we could see it. For
example, the Herndon's Barbershop, right there at Five Points in Atlanta was
one of the most elegant barbershops you ever saw in your life.
And this was owned and run by blacks. And the bluebloods of
Atlanta would go in there to get shaves and haircuts, get your
00:41:00suit pressed, get your shoes shined, manicure if you wanted it. And
he died a very wealthy man. His barbershop was a great tradition
in Atlanta for a very long time. But black businessmen did not
really begin to make their dent until substantially later.
Relics were a matter of some interest to us. In Cherokee County
the relics that we were interested in were Indian arrowheads and things
like that. We found a good many of those. But when we
moved to Atlanta the relics were Civil War relics--spent bullets and things
like that. As a matter of fact, after I married you mother
00:42:00and we paid our first visit to my family in Atlanta, the
first thing my father did was to take her out In back
and show her some Civil War trenches behind our house. She was
a Yankee, you see.
RICHARD RUSK: Was there a strong interest in the past--for example,
your forefathers up there in Cherokee County and prior to that--back in
those times? I know Margaret expressed terrific interest later on that. Did
you have a real curiosity about your immediate forefathers?
00:43:00
DEAN RUSK: In those days, when the family would gather, uncles
or aunts coming to visit, or you go visit them, or that
sort of thing, the older people would sit around on the porch
and just exchange stories that had been passed down mouth to mouth
from one generation to the next. So there was a lot of
that kind of talk around. But that was all part of it.
RICHARD RUSK: That tradition is kind of breaking down. My next
question would be the fact that you left Georgia, went to Davidson,
Oxford, never went back South until fifty or sixty years had gone
by. Guess you were pretty unusual as far as the Rusks were
concerned in Georgia and for families in the South at that time.
00:44:00The tradition would be to stay pretty close to home, I suppose.
DEAN RUSK: Well, I stayed out of school for two years
between high school and college and worked in a little law office
in Atlanta, Augustus [H.] Roan's law office. But then in 1927, I
went off to Davidson and I didn't really come back to Georgia
to live until 1970. So during all those years I would come
home to visit occasionally for two or three days at a time,
but I spent most of my time in Washington, D. C. and
California, New York and places like that. But always found, and still
do, that when I would come back home, it didn't take me
but an hour or two to become a Georgian again, in accent
and in things you talked about and were interested in. And I
00:45:00never felt any estrangement with my country cousins in Cherokee County. And
I must say, your mother has always been exactly the same person
with my country cousins as she was with princes and potentates and
presidents. She was just always herself. No, I lost touch with a
good many friends and people, relatives, that sort of thing, because I
was away for so long, but it's really quite extraordinary to see
how quickly things revert to normal when you get back to see
them and talk with them. You get around them a little bit
and it was just as though you had never been away.
RICHARD RUSK: Back in the old pictures of those times, I
see men dressed in top hats and coats, very formal it seems,
most of the time.
DEAN RUSK: Well, that's true. You would dress that way when
you'd go to Sunday School and church and for any kind of
00:46:00official gathering of any sort, including family picnics and things of that
sort. In between times, when you were just out playing, you wore
whatever you wanted to. But typically in the summertime, of course, in
those days all the kids went barefooted from the first of May.
The first of May was generally the date that going barefooted started.
RICHARD RUSK: Traveling downtown from West End, for example, to do
some shopping you would put on your coat and top hat if
you were of a certain age? That kind of formality.
DEAN RUSK: Well, the grown men usually wore hats. We kids
didn't, but the men folk did. If my father went downtown for
something he would wear a coat and hat. We didn't really know
much about things called sport shirts in those days or t-shirts and
00:47:00things like that.
RICHARD RUSK: Fireworks in the times in which they were used--
DEAN RUSK: Well, we typically had fireworks for the Fourth of
July and New Year, and often on Christmas. They were legal in
those days and [there were] various sizes of firecrackers, of course a
lot of sparklers and rockets and things of that sort.
RICHARD RUSK: The biggest one we had as a kid was
what they called an ash can, which was about two inches long
and cylindrical. Now did you have anything bigger than that?
DEAN RUSK: Oh yeah. And sometimes we would use a big
firecracker to launch something into the air: put in in one end
of the tube or a cardboard tube of some sort, light the
00:48:00bottom and see how f.ar you could shoot something through the air.
We made a Tot of toys in those days: wagons, dolls, scooters.
You would find an old skate somewhere and you would make yourself
a scooter that you propelled with one foot on the scooter and
using one foot as a propeller. But you see, we tried to
make do with what we had because we didn't have any money
to buy these things, and so we'd make a lot of things.
We were constantly whittling and hammering and putting things together and making
all sorts of things.
RICHARD RUSK: What about prohibition?
00:49:00
DEAN RUSK: I am sure that in Cherokee County a good
many people, including perhaps some kinfolk of mine, had little stills out
in the woods somewhere, but I never saw any of them. And
as say, I never had a drink of alcoholic liquor until I
got to Oxford at the age of twenty-two. So we were pretty
law-abiding, straight kind of people in those days. The injunctions of the
Bible were serious to us and we didn't fool around very much.
RICHARD RUSK: What about the open air open classroom concept at
lee Street School and the fact that it was a normal school
as well for elementary school teachers.
DEAN RUSK: A fair amount of experimentation went on there for
the benefit of these teacher candidates. Of course since it was a
00:50:00teacher training school, we had--
RICHARD RUSK: You must have had a lot of class room
aides.
DEAN RUSK: We not only had very select teachers for our
own classroom on a regular basis, but we had these teacher candidates
around to help out on all sorts of projects. So it was
really very good. It was a very good experience. Do you remember
I mentioned the streetlamps? The street lamps were gas in those days
and at certain times of the day; the lamplighter would come along
and light the things. This was done by hand.
RICHARD RUSK: Did he have a little torch or something? A
burning torch?
DEAN RUSK: He'd have a flame on the end of a
long stick that he'd--but we moved from that into arc lights.
RICHARD RUSK: While you were there you made that transition?
DEAN RUSK: Yeah. And then you got to the modern, incandescent
kind of lights.
00:51:00
RICHARD RUSK: Bicycles. Did you Rusk kids have your own bikes
and get around quite a bit with those?
DEAN RUSK: Yes, we always had one bike. Once In a
while something might happen and we would pick up a second one
in a trade or something, but we always had a bike. The
bike we had was one that we were proud of because it
was a very thin-wheeled bike that was a racing bike. Of course,
that was something special for us to be riding a round with
the other kids with a racing bike. Both with bicycles and automobiles
in those days you always had around with you some tire patch
to do your own patching if you got a puncture because all
00:52:00those horse wagons and buggies and things like that get running around,
nails would drop out of their shoes and then you'd pick them
up in your tire. But we were expert and we had our
own pump to pump air. If you went by automobile, say from
Atlanta up to Cherokee County or down to Conyers, you just assumed
you would have at least one flat tire on the trip. So
everybody knew how to fix their own tires and had pumps to
pump with.
On Whitehall Street, we started out there without any electricity in the
house. We had flush toilets and running water, no hot water unless
we boiled it ourselves. But our lighting was from kerosene lamps--I washed
00:53:00thousands of chimneys of kerosene lamps to get the soot off of
them for the next day -or by throwing some pine knots into
the fireplace. But then I got a job at the Western Electric
Supply Company, about a block away on Whitehall Street, as an office
boy. And while I was there I discovered that I could buy
electric fixtures and materials for factory price. And so on that basis,
we wired our house on Whitehall Street for electricity and for the
first time had electric lights: not many appliances, but at least we
had the lights. We also could run an electric fan.
RICHARD RUSK: Were you the first house in your block to
wire up like that?
00:54:00
DEAN RUSK: Probably. That happened only because we could get it
so cheaply at factory prices. My father did the wiring himself.
RICHARD RUSK: Just ran all the wires exposed, I suppose. What
kind of voltage did you have going through your lines back in
those days?
DEAN RUSK: 110 volts, but the wiring had a good insulation
on it. Some of it was run through cables up through the
walls to cut back on the possibility of fire.
RICHARD RUSK: As your mother and dad began to get these
electrical appliances over the years, it must have cut down on the
housework for your mother. As a matter of fact, that was one
of the reasons you moved from Cherokee County to Atlanta, to try
to escape the backbreaking--
DEAN RUSK: That's right. That little farm in Cherokee County was
a backbreaker for my father and it was a real killer for
my mother. She had to work so hard to keep things going
up there. And so my father moved to come to Atlanta as
00:55:00much for my mother's sake as for anything else.
RICHARD RUSK: Talking about piano playing for the silent movies
DEAN RUSK: Yes, in some of the movies they would simply put
on rolls of music that would be reasonably consistent with the theme
of the movie. But occasionally they would have a live piano player
there following the movie and playing whatever music seemed to him to
be appropriate.
RICHARD RUSK: The Atlanta race riot in 1906. Precipitating factors were
the demagoguery of [Thomas E.] Tom Watson and also some alleged assaults
of black men made upon white women, for instances--
00:56:00
DEAN RUSK: Even the rumor of an attack by a black
man on a white woman would really set everything on fire, and
there were some real rebel rousers in those days. We had a
congressman in Atlanta when I was in high school named [William David]
Willie D. Upshaw. He was lame, he moved around on a crutch.
But he was a rebel rouser of the old school. If there
was any prejudice around he knew where it was and how to
make use of it. It was not until later that we began
to get a few statesmen to Washington like Richard [Brevard] Russell [Jr.]
and Walter [Franklin] George.
There were a lot of people, particularly in the churches, who did
00:57:00not fall victim to all these extreme prejudices, who took a very
calm, dispassionate view of such things as the Leo Frank case involving,
allegedly, Mary Phagan. So there was more normality and decency around that
found public expression through politicians and people like that.
RICHARD RUSK: Of course the media back in those days would
be the same as the media today. They would tend to sensationalize.
Leo Frank was killed in 1913. You would have been a four-year
[-old] boy. You mentioned that you might have a had a boarder
that participated in that--
DEAN RUSK: Well you see, that came later. The actual lynching
of Leo Frank came later than 1913.
RICHARD RUSK: A couple of years later anyway: 1915. August 1915.
[break in recording]
00:58:00
RICHARD RUSK: Tell me about the Leo Frank incident back in
Atlanta in 1915 where a Jewish superintendent of labor was convicted of
murder and later lynched by a mob. You said earlier that possibly
a boarder in your house may have participated in that mob action.
He brought home a little chunk of rope one night.
DEAN RUSK: He brought home a chunk of the rope which
he claimed was a part of the rope that had been used
to hang Leo Frank.
RICHARD RUSK: That's about as far as your recollections of--
DEAN RUSK: Except there was a lot of talk. It was
a very exciting subject around Atlanta for a brief period--
[break in recording]
DEAN RUSK: --in Atlanta largely through my brother Parks who was,
00:59:00among other things, a cub reporter for the Atlanta Constitution. He covered
the police beat, and he would come home and tell us things
that were happening, and he kept us informed about interesting things going
on around town. But then when I was in high school I
got a much stronger sense of Atlanta as a city because my
high school was right in the middle of town and there were
boys there from all parts of the city, and we talked a
lot at school. And I had jobs that gave me some impressions
of Atlanta. For example, I worked at the [Walter O.] Foote and
Marvin H. Davies Printing Plant as an office boy. I had to
leave that job because, even under the child labor laws in those
days in Georgia, which were not very much, they decided that I
01:00:00was too young to be wandering around among all those heavy paper
cutting machines and printing presses and things like that, so they decided
it was too dangerous for me.
When I was about fourteen I answered an ad in the Atlanta
paper for an office boy. I went to the office there on
about the second floor of the Flatiron Building on Peachtree Street and
they hired me. But I found myself working for something called the
Knights of the Mystic Kingdom which was an offshoot of the Ku
Klux Klan. They would go out and recruit members, charging them ten
dollars for membership on an anti-black, anti- Jewish, anti-Catholic program. Then the
organizers would keep about eight dollars of that and leave two dollars
01:01:00in the organization. But they had me running errands all over town,
carrying packages all over town. And one day I discovered that I
was carrying boot leg liquor, so I figured that job was not
for me. And so I quit that particular job. One of the
recipients made some comment to me about it once, and that was
that.
I had an uncle who had a large number of bales of
cotton. I forget now which one it was. Cotton went to twenty-something
cents a pound and he wouldn't sell. He was going to hold
it 'til the price went to forty cents a pound. Instead it
dropped, and he finally had to sell it at eight or nine
cents a pound.
01:02:00
This Southeastern Fair, which was held in Atlanta every year, was a
great event for us. We kids always went to the Southeastern Fair.
There you had not only all the agricultural exhibits, but the midway
with all the games and things like that, plus all the rides:
the Ferris wheel, the shoot- to- shoot and all sort of things.
That was always a great adventure to go to the Southeastern Fair.
We kids thoroughly enjoyed that. It didn't cost all that much. There
was a lot to see.
RICHARD RUSK: The question is, did the earlier Ku Klux Klan
group that formed in the 1870s or 1880s have any useful function
there in the South?
DEAN RUSK: Well, the first KKK, at least, helped resist Reconstruction.
The military government that--
01:03:00
END OF SIDE 1
BEGINNING OF SIDE 2
DEAN RUSK: --bigotry and race and religious hatred for profit, was
the dominant theme in the revived KKK in later years.
I have told you about the Wren's Nest which was the children's
library in my day. It was the home of Joel Chandler Harris,
the author of the Uncle Remus stories. These days you are not
supposed to talk about Uncle Remus, and there has been a cultural
censorship, in effect, in knocking Uncle Remus stories out the window. I
don't, myself, like to see that kind of revision of the real
world. When I was growing up Uncle Remus stories were there. They
were enjoyed; they developed a friendly attitude toward blacks among children. And
01:04:00in any event, I don't think we ought to try to erase
parts of our genuine history. As you know, the Georgia football marching
band does not play Dixie because there are a good many blacks
in the band and there are many in the student body, and
they don't like to have Dixie played. As it began there's a
problem there, it seems to me, of cultural censorship. It is ironic
that the Georgia football song is the Battle Hymn of the Republic
which was the northern marching song during the Civil War. But no
SEC [Southeastern Conference] marching band now plays Dixie, except at the University
of Mississippi where Dixie has always been their football fighting song.
01:05:00
RICHARD RUSK: Did I ever tell you about the incident when
I was at training camp in the Marine Corps between our Syracuse
tank battalion [New York] and the group we were training next to,
which was from Birmingham, Alabama? And every morning we ran up the
stars and stripes, and every morning those fellows ran up the Rebel
flag. One night a couple of our black fellows got a little
angry with that and went over there and took their flag down
and stomped it into the ground there. And we had a terrific
rumble between two battalions of marines over the Civil War that was
fought a hundred and twenty years ago. I was on guard duty
at that time.
DEAN RUSK: Well, I think--I'm sure that's disappearing very rapidly. When
I was Secretary of State I visited Davidson College. And my old
fraternity, Kappa Alpha Fraternity, asked me to come over to the house
for lunch or something. And when I got over there they had
only a Confederate flag flying out in front of the house. And
01:06:00I said, "Now wait a minute fellows. Fun is fun, but I
am Secretary of State of the United States, and you will either
have to put up a United States flag there or take that
flag down." Since they didn't have a United States flag, they took
the flag down. Now, a lot of that is prankishness and that
sort of thing. It is not serious.
RICHARD RUSK: Did you ever get involved with or witness any
violence between Yankees and Rebels over the Civil War fought a hundred
years ago?
DEAN RUSK: No. A lot of this was what, in another
circle, you'd call "tea table conversation." These are things that people said
and you were sort of expected to go along with it as
part of the mythology of the community in which you lived. But
it wasn't taken seriously.
RICHARD RUSK: About World War I, and the armistice after World
01:07:00War I, and celebrations in Atlanta in 1918. Go ahead.
DEAN RUSK: Well we bought all the war propaganda in World
War I: the Huns and all their atrocities and things like that.
We celebrated the end of World War I--Armistice Day--with a lot of
whoop-de-do. And shortly after the end of the war, General [John Joseph]
"Black Jack" Pershing, who had commanded our forces in World War I,
came to Fort McPherson, and that brought him right past Lee Street
School. And we were all out there lining the streets with American
flags and we gave him a great welcome. One of my teachers
that I remember--
RICHARD RUSK: Students turned out for it, huh?
DEAN RUSK: Oh, all of us turned out. Sure. The whole
school turned out with American flags and so forth. And my classroom
teacher, I remember her telling us afterwards, "He looked at me and
smiled." And she was so proud of that. General Pershing was a
01:08:00great hero in those days, very good looking, stern of visage. He
was quite a fellow.
RICHARD RUSK: We were comparing the jingoism and patriotism of Americans--World
War I versus World War II.
DEAN RUSK: The attack of the Japanese on Pearl Harbor tended
to draw the country together in large part and create a good
deal of war fever and so forth. Then there were lots of
people working on the production lines: all kinds of arms needed by
the troops. We mobilized something like thirteen million people, although the last
time I looked at the figures back in the late sixties, the
desertion rate in World War II was higher than it was in
01:09:00Vietnam. But of course, in World War II deserters had many more
places to run to than they had in Vietnam. But no, there
was rationing, and there were movie stars selling war bonds in factories,
there were troops marching through cities on parade. The Ninth Division put
on a parade up In Seattle, Washington on one occasion, I remember.
A lot more was done to stimulate the people to feel directly
involved in World War II than we did in Vietnam. Now some
of us who did our duty in World War II were pretty
teed off about it because we thought that was a war which
could have been prevented. The year in which I graduated from college,
01:10:00in 1931, the Japanese seized Manchuria. The impression was that Secretary of
State Henry [Lewis] Stimson thought that was a very serious matter and
that something ought to be done about it. But apparently President Herbert
[Clark] Hoover pulled on his coattails. So Stimson finally was able to
do no more than to declare the so-called Stimson Doctrine that we
would not recognize any situation brought about by the illegal use of
force. And my generation of students lived through the attack on Manchuria,
the Spanish Civil War, [Benito] Mussolini's seizure of Ethiopia, and then [Adolf]
Hitler's move Into the Rhineland, into Austria, Czechoslovakia, and finally the attack
on Poland. But the breakdown of collective security under the League of
Nations and the isolation and indifference of the democracies of the period
01:11:00produced World War II in a larger measure, and so a good
many of us were conscious of the fact that this was a
war that did not have to happen.
RICHARD RUSK: My dad's comment that he felt that one of
the main differences in the American people between these two world wars
was the greater sense of unity and involvement in the second as
opposed to the first.
DEAN RUSK: Fort McPherson was about two to three miles away.
It was within what we considered easy walking distance in those days.
The kids would go out there and we would look through the
fence and see these German prisoners working. And we looked upon them
as men from Mars and they were really spectacles to us. Then
01:12:00there were also some German prisoners over in the Candler warehouse, which
was even closer to our house.
RICHARD RUSK: Were they released from prison to do work there?
DEAN RUSK: They were kept there under guard, but they worked.
You see, you can work prisoners of war. We did some of
that. But life was pretty good to them at Fort McPherson and
the Candler warehouse as distinct from the prison camps in Europe. My
father bought a new Ford automobile, a T model, for $298 once.
RICHARD RUSK: I thought the beginning price of those was around
$600.
DEAN RUSK: No, they came down. At one point they were
selling for--now I think there was added onto that some transportation costs
to get them to Atlanta and that kind of thing. But that
was the windshield price in those days.
RICHARD RUSK: How old were you when you learned to drive?
DEAN RUSK: I started driving when I was about ten years
old. There wasn't any requirement for licenses in those days, but there
01:13:00wasn't much traffic. And when I was around, say, fourteen --between twelve
and fourteen --I was state president of the Junior Christi an Endeavor
Society in the Presbyterian churches and I would drive all over the
state: myself driving at fourteen. There were no license requirements. Of course
you couldn't go very fast. I remember it was a very exciting
moment when I first went forty miles an hour in an automobile.
It was an open touring kind of car. My head was stuck
out the side and the wind was whipping past. I remember I
never thought any human being could move so fast. [The roads] were
all dirt. If you were lucky they had been graveled. But you
see the farm wagons with their loads would travel those same roads
01:14:00and would cut pretty deep ruts in them, and in rainy weather
they got to be pretty uncomfortable to drive on. But gradually in
the twenties and thirties macadam tar, and then in the thirties concrete
pavement, came in.
If you were traveling in a horse and buggy or horse and
surrey--Uncle Willie had a surrey--or horse and wagon, in the beginning you
would have to get out a hold your horse while one of
these early automobiles came by because it would scare the horses.
RICHARD RUSK: Did they have mufflers on those things?
DEAN RUSK: They had mufflers to a degree, but they still
made a lot of racket. The mufflers weren't very good. And the
thought was in those days that the muffler cut down on the
01:15:00power of the car. So if you wanted to get more power
out of your car, you unhooked the muffler.
RICHARD RUSK: Well, some things don't change over the years. Was
that the Model-T you first learned to drive?
DEAN RUSK: Yeah.
RICHARD RUSK: Your brother Parks must have shown you the ropes.
DEAN RUSK: Of course the beauty of the Model-T was that
you could keep it in repair yourself. You had the transmission, which
was operated by three pedals: one for reverse, one for forward, and
one for a brake. They were connected to the transmission by bands,
and those bands wore out and you had to open those things
up and replace your own bands ever so often. And we did
that ourselves. There was no business about going to the shop for
that. The mag needle was right there under the dashboard. We knew
how to fix that. Everything we did, we did on our own.
We almost never took the car into a garage to have anything
01:16:00fixed.
RICHARD RUSK: At age ten, how did you ever reach the
pedals and see over top of the dash?
DEAN RUSK: Put a cushion behind you.
RICHARD RUSK: [William Ashley] Billy Sunday visited Atlanta, and the revival
there attracted a total of 30,000 Atlantans--one of Atlanta's great emotional experiences.
DEAN RUSK: Well, Billy Sunday was a renowned evangelist known all
over the country. He was very eloquent, dramatic in his preaching. He
came to Atlanta when I was a small boy and I went
to a special service that he held downtown for children. It was
from that that I became interested in the Seventh Commandment, "Thou shall
not commit adultery." Because he had a table up there on the
platform with him, and he had standing on this table at the
beginning of this service ten colored vases. These were long, tall vases
01:17:00that people had in those days to put long-stemmed flowers in. Then
he told a story about a little boy who did this, and
did that, and did the other thing, played hooky from Sunday School,
and told a lie to his parents, and did all sorts of
things. And after he got through telling the story, Billy Sunday took
a hammer and went over to this table of vases and went
right through the Ten Commandments. Every one of the Commandments that this
little boy had broken that day; he took his hammer and smashed
that vase. But there was one vase left standing: the seventh vase.
So I had to go home and found out what the Seventh
Commandment was all about. He was a powerful preacher in those days.
RICHARD RUSK: What was his religion, do you know?
DEAN RUSK: He was Protestant. I don't know whether he was
01:18:00denominational. If I had to guess, I would guess he might have
been Baptist, but I can't be sure of that. But people really
turned out for him. He was the Billy Graham of our day,
but much more dramatic and oratorical.
I also went once, with my father I think it was, to
hear William Jennings Bryan. He came to Atlanta and gave his famous
"man or a monkey" speech about evolution.
RICHARD RUSK: Prior to the Scopes trials?
DEAN RUSK: Yes. I remember the way he closed his speech.
He said, "They call me an ignoramus." Then he started listing all
of his honorary degrees. He had dozens of them. When he got
through with them he said, "Now I challenge any son of an
01:19:00ape to match degrees with me." And we loved it. We just
roared.
RICHARD RUSK: Speaking of evolution, at what point in your own
life did you begin to question the biblical story of creation?
DEAN RUSK: Well, I became familiar with the theory of evolution
in high school and studied it again in college. Actually you know,
if you think of the rhetorical account in the book of Genesis
as metaphoric, it follows the sequence in general about the creation that
evolution teaches. So if you give some rhetorical evaluation to the way
01:20:00it was actually put into the Bible by those who wrote those
book, there is not all that much of a discrepancy between the
account in the Bible and the theory of evolution. Now it is
rather silly for people to follow Bishop [Brandram Boileau] Ussher's dating of
the creation of the earth at 4000 B. C. or something like
that.
RICHARD RUSK: Well, there must be a way of making the
connections. Your brother Roger--
DEAN RUSK: Yes, he has done a good deal of work
on scientific explanation of the accounts of the Bible--come up with some
pretty interesting ideas.
RICHARD RUSK: --Current events teachings in Boys High--
DEAN RUSK: In high school we did not get into this
current events business too much. We studied history, and in those days
01:21:00anything that was nearer than twenty-five years ago was not history. We
didn't have these courses that sort of tried to stimulate your interest
by talking about things that were in the newspaper every day. I
still have some doubts about that kind of teaching because I suspect
it is used in the theory that you somehow stimulate interest by
going into things that are happening each day, but there is so
little that you really know about a lot of that stuff. I
am not sure how valuable it is--
[break in recording]
Just learning how their shoes are going to be able to solve
the Middle Eastern problem--
[break in recording]
RICHARD RUSK: We're talking about Pop's introduction to the airplane.
DEAN RUSK: My first airplane ride was across the channel from
01:22:00Paris to London. I had crossed the channel several times by boat
and it was always stormy and was always seasick. So I decided
to take this short flight from Paris over to London. I t
had about six passengers. It was a one-engine plane, and won't forget
it because as we were over the channel the engine went off.
And the pilot looked back at us and pointed downward with his
hand and we all started getting green because we thought we were
going into the drink. But then after he got down a few
hundred feet over the water, he started his engine up again and
went on into London. We asked him what was the trouble. He
said, "Oh, that was nothing. There was a ship in trouble down
there and I wanted you folks to have a chance to see
it.'' But it sure scared us.
RICHARD RUSK: That wasn't an open cockpit type of plane? It
01:23:00was enclosed?
DEAN RUSK: No, It was a cabin, but only six passengers
and a very small plane, and we bounced around a good deal.
But I liked it better than going by boat when you crossed
the channel. My experience was that the channel was always rough. So
I didn't take that channel boat crossing anymore after that.
Then my next flight was when I was at Mills College. And
the President of the College, Mrs. [Aurelia Henry] Reinhardt wanted me to
go back to Chicago to attend an educational meeting of some sort.
And I flew from Oak land to Chicago and it took about
sixteen hours. We were in an old DC-3 plane. We made almost
every stop one could think of, but we had to stop several
times for fuel. And that was a pretty tedious affair. So passenger
aviation at the beginnings was a pretty primitive business.
01:24:00
RICHARD RUSK: Did you have any contacts with it at all
in Atlanta? You must have had barnstorming pilots.
DEAN RUSK: No, I never took a flight when I was
in Atlanta. I might say one thing about growing up in Atlanta.
Those were the days when there were old-fashioned orators around: eloquent, persuasive,
a great demand. For example, I remember two particularly. Superintendent of schools
during my period was Mr. Willis A. Sutton. He was tall with
a big shock of white hair. He was a great orator and
was in great demand all over the city. And then when I
was school page editor for the Atlanta Journal where I would go
down once a week and get all the letters that had come
in from kids who were correspondents from different grades of different schools
01:25:00around town. I would read these letters and edit them a little
bit and paste them together to make up a school page. My
desk doing that work was right under the rail where the city
editor Harlee [W.] Branch [Jr.] sat. And just a few feet away
were two very well -known sports writers. One was Morgan Blake. He
was a great orator as well and was a famous teacher of
a men's class at Sunday School at the Baptist Tabernacle there on
Luckie Street. He was in great demand as an orator. And then
right next to him was [Oscar] O. B. Keeler, who followed [Robert
Tyre] Bobby Jones everywhere and kept everybody--
RICHARD RUSK: You didn't really have electronic amplification back in those
01:26:00days. So, if you had a speaker come to Atlanta, if you
weren't up there in the first few rows of the crowd, you
likely would not hear them.
DEAN RUSK: There were some speakers, though, who didn't need it.
Morgan Blake didn't need it; Willis A. Sutton, William Jennings Bryan, Billy
Sunday, they didn't need amplification. They had voices that would reach the
crowd. Of course, that business about necessity for speaking loudly in those
days was what took my father out of the ministry because he
had a problem with his throat and he simply couldn't speak up
and preachers were expected to speak up in those days.
RICHARD RUSK: His voice was so weak that if there were
a crowd of people in the room, for example, they would all
have to be quite silent in order for him to be heard.
DEAN RUSK: Yes, but when he spoke we all became silent.
When he spoke it was for real, and he didn't banter around
01:27:00very much. But he had no trouble in terms of making himself
understood. His voice was rather soft. I never heard him call my
mother by any name. When he spoke without calling somebody's name, we
knew he was talking to her. He would call us by our
names. He would talk at meal time occasionally on various subjects. I
still remember with the family there around the fireside, his reading the
Psalms in Hebrew. And he would chant them in Hebrew, more or
less like the original Psalms were written. And we were very much
engrossed with that. He had studied Hebrew at the Theological Seminary and
he had a Hebrew Bible there which we looked with great wonder
01:28:00at times.
[break in recording]
DEAN RUSK: Not many churches in those days could afford a
full-time preacher, so preachers would move from church to church, maybe meeting
in each church about once a month or something like that. So
my father was that kind of a visiting preacher there for a
time. But there was almost no income for preachers in those days.
Typically, people in the congregation would bring in chickens or vegetables or
fruit or something like that. So it was hard going.
RICHARD RUSK: When the preacher passed the plate, which I presume
was traditional with most services there, was that his income, whatever was
on that plate?
DEAN RUSK: At least that was where he got such cash
income as he got. But the local church would usually keep some
of that to keep the church in repair and that sort of
thing.
[break in recording]
01:29:00
--before I was born.
RICHARD RUSK: I see. You did hear him preach one time
when you were a kid?
DEAN RUSK: You see, in the Presbyterian Church preachers are called
teaching elders, and the elders who were simply responsible for the governance
of the church are called the ruling elders. He remained a teaching
elder for the rest of his life.
RICHARD RUSK: Talking about the transition from the horse-drawn fire wagons
to the motor-driven wagons--
DEAN RUSK: We kids were a little sad about that because
the horse-drawn fire trucks were very exciting and great fun. And also
I spent a lot of time down at the firehouse on the
corner watching them groom and train the horses and that sort of
thing. So when they went to motors I sort of felt we
had lost something.
RICHARD RUSK: Talking about the train down at Whitehall Street in
winter time and the need to get some coal for the stove--
01:30:00
DEAN RUSK: After World War I, there was a very severe
coal shortage and the price of coal was out of our reach.
So I and other kids there my age--seven or eight years old,
that kind of thing--would watch for a coal train coming by and
we would throw rocks at the men on the coal train and
they would throw coal back at us. Well, the policeman on the
beat was usually sitting there at the firehouse chewing the fat with
the firemen and he saw all this and just laughed because he
knew that we weren't trying to hi t anybody. We were just
trying to gather some coal. These days you would get out the
police and the social workers and the juvenile authorities and everything else
and make a big deal out of it. All we were doing
was gathering some coal.
RICHARD RUSK: Did the train men know what you were doing?
DEAN RUSK: Oh, I think they did.
RICHARD RUSK: It was probably their way of trying to help
out, in a way. It's the only way the company would let
them.
DEAN RUSK: And of course these trains loaded with coal would
01:31:00occasionally drop off some coal along the way, simply rolling off the
train. So when they would go by we would rush out and
run along the railroad tracks picking up any pieces we could find.
RICHARD RUSK: What about welfare back in the early days of
Atlanta and the fact that they had a much more primitive set-up
then than we have now.
DEAN RUSK: Well, in a sense each church tended to take
care of its own people. I remember there were two or three
times I was, for example, given a suit of clothes by some
member of the church who had an extra suit of clothes or
someone had outgrown it. They would pass it around. Of course, as
the third son in our family, I always had the hand-me-downs: very
seldom got things that were new.
[break in recording]
DEAN RUSK: --in 1918 was a very severe one, killed an
awful lot of people. It was during that epidemic, as I told
01:32:00you the other day, that we wore the bags of asafetida around
our necks. Strictly speaking, that probably didn't have any medical effect, but
asafetida smelled so bad that when people were wearing those things, they
tended to keep a distance from each other, and that helped to
limit the spread of the flu. But it was bad smelling stuff.
RICHARD RUSK: Lot of deaths in your part of the neighborhood?
DEAN RUSK: I don't remember our losing close relatives or neighbors
to the flu. But we wore something around our nose and mouth,
tied behind our ears to cut down on the possibilities of contagion.
But it was pretty primitive stuff. No shots or things like that.
01:33:00
Times were pretty rough after World War I but there was one
bonus that my family made a lot of use of. That is
the army had a lot of surplus food, canned food, to sell
and it was very inexpensive. Since Atlanta had been a hub of
a number of training camps, we had a lot of that food
around and we bought a lot of canned roast beef hash that
was very good and canned fruits and other things. And we got
along pretty well by buying army surplus food.
RICHARD RUSK: The infestation of the boll weevil in 1920. They
had moved from Texas into the east toward Mississippi and Georgia.
DEAN RUSK: The boll weevil was a great boon to those
red clay hills of north Georgia because that was poor cotton country
to start with and the cotton took the nutrients out of the
01:34:00soil at a great rate. And so you had to work like
the dickens to keep the soil in condition to grow cotton. And
it made no sense for those people because everything was done by
hand. We didn't have tractors or anything of that sort. It was
backbreaking work for very little return. The boll weevil forced those farmers
to turn in other directions, to grow other crops and turn to
chickens, fattening cattle and things of that sort. So they ought to
erect a monument to the boll weevil in north Georgia.
RICHARD RUSK: What about the early beginnings of radio in Atlanta?
DEAN RUSK: Well, in our family we kids made our own
little crystal set radio stations ourselves. You could wrap electric wires around
an oatmeal box and get yourself a coil. And we had a
01:35:00little crystal, and you would scratch a cat's whisker wire over the
crystal and pick up radio stations. We had earphones. We used to
tune in on KDKA of Pittsburgh, which was one of the first
strong radio stations in the country. I remember hearing the first broadcast
of WSB in Atlanta. For a time there, if you could get
anywhere near a telephone, you could call a certain telephone number and
listen to KDKA in Pittsburgh. I remember growing up with radio. And
WSB soon began to broadcast the Cracker baseball games and things like
that. And they did it quite well because it was their habit
that when our own team, the Cracker Team, got a hit, they
01:36:00would strike a gong: one gong for a single, two gongs for
a double, three gongs for the triple, and four gongs for a
home run. It was very exciting to listen to those gongs going
on.
RICHARD RUSK: You grew up in a time of great technological
change in this country. I am sure that all of these things
were regarded as really marvelous new inventions. What among all the technology
really stands out in terms of the wonder, the excitement that that
particular invention may have created among people in genera l? I suppose
the car would be right up there. Probably radio as well.
DEAN RUSK: Yeah. I saw the beginnings of the automobile in
terms of ordinary people. The radio was really quite exciting because it
sort of had a sense of mystery about it. How on earth
could you sit down and listen to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, just by scratching
01:37:00this little wire on that crystal? But the telephone also made an
impact.
RICHARD RUSK: When was the telephone really established in a practical
way for long distance calling?
DEAN RUSK: I would think it began just before World War
I, but really didn't catch on and become widespread until after World
War I. I don't remember that we ever called. Maybe it was
because of the cost. I don't remember that we telephoned our kinfolk
in Cherokee County, Georgia and in Rockdale County from Atlanta. And for
a long time there on in Atlanta Whitehall Street we simply didn't
have a telephone.
01:38:00
RICHARD RUSK: What about communication in the earlier days?
DEAN RUSK: A lot of it was by word of mouth.
In Cherokee County there was postman of the Rural Free Delivery, RFD,
Postal Service. He would move from farm to farm, and if you
had a message for some of your neighbors a few miles down
the road you could tell him and he would pass it on
to them. Or if you wanted a lift into town to do
a little shopping, you could ride in with the postman, stay with
one of your kinfolk overnight, and then drive back with him the
next day. You see, families saw a good deal more of each
other than they came to in later years. They were visiting back
and forth, and there was a good deal of communication simply by
word of mouth.
When the Biltmore Hotel was built on West Peachtree Street, that was
quite a striking place for Atlanta and looked upon as a luxurious
hotel. My brother Parks was for a time the public relations man
01:39:00for the Biltmore Hotel. It looks like a rather--well, they refitted it
lately--but for a long time a pretty rundown old place. Couldn't keep
up with the times.
During the Florida land boom, my father, who was a mail carrier
and earning less than $200 a month, nevertheless found a way to
put five dollars a month into some land he had bought in
Panama City, Florida. He said that he bought it as pecan acreage.
Well, a good many years later he went down to visit this
land that he had bought and found that half of it was
under water. But after his death, a good many years later, my
mother sold that acreage in Panama City, Florida for a very handsome
01:40:00amount and it came in very handy for her. But how in
the world my father squeezed out five dollars a month to buy
that acreage, will never know.
When my brother was publishing this little paper called Atlanta Life, a
weekly--
RICHARD RUSK: Do you remember the years for that, Pop?
DEAN RUSK: No, I don't. He could tell you. But he
had to spend a fair amount of his time selling ads. And
he would sell ads for barter, In exchange for things. He used
to tell the story--I don't know whether it is true or not--that
he had one subscriber who wouldn't pay and he dunned him on
it. He finally told--this was a farmer--and he told the fellow, "Bring
me in some vegetables or fruits or anything." And he said, "Well,
I just don't have any vegetables or fruits." And my brother, a
little bit exasperated, said, "Well then, why don't you bring me in
a load of corncobs?" And this fellow said, "Well, if I had
01:41:00corncobs, why do you think I would subscribe to your paper?" In
those days, many people used corncobs for toilet paper.
Big league teams would come through for exhibition games and I saw
Babe Ruth play once.
RICHARD RUSK: Let's see, would that have been for the old
Yankees back then in those days or Boston Braves perhaps?
DEAN RUSK: Yankees. I don't want to leave the impression that
because we were poor that everything was drab and dull. Life was
very stimulating and exciting and happy. A lot of good humor around.
01:42:00I had a very happy childhood.
RICHARD RUSK: I must say I'd have to concur with your
comment to me as we were leaving your neighborhood back there the
other day that a good deal of what I've learned about Atlanta
and Cherokee County and the rest of the story, whatever you had
back there was every bit equal to or better than what we
kids had at Scarsdale.
DEAN RUSK: There was so much to stimulate one's imagination. So
every day was a fresh adventure, and it really was a very
exciting and stimulating boyhood. I think I can honestly say that in
my seventy-five years I have never had a dull moment, and I
am grateful for that. There was always something interesting going on or
interesting to do. And if you didn't have it at your fingertips,
you would create it--figure out something interesting to do.
RICHARD RUSK: --my dad's first day at Lee Street School.
DEAN RUSK: I skipped first grade because I had learned to
read and write at home. My mother had been a teacher, and
01:43:00my older brothers and sisters were all around. So I took a
test to see whether I should be entering the second grade. I
remember the test because the only thing I missed was the teacher
asked me to spell "girl" and I spelled it "gal". She smiled
and passed me on it. But my first day at school I
won't forget, because nobody told me about the boys room. And in
01:44:00the middle of the school day I had to take a leak,
and I didn't know what to do, so I just--so there was
a puddle under my desk. And the other kids started snickering and
the teacher, bless her heart, brought me up to the front of
the room and explained to the rest of the class that I
had never been to school before and didn't know about such things
(laughter) and not to worry about it.
RICHARD RUSK: (laughter) That would be embarrassing.
DEAN RUSK: Yes, that was very embarrassing to me. Nobody told
me about the boy's room! (laughter)
RICHARD RUSK: (laughter) I'll be durned.
END OF SIDE 2