Clarence Hemmingsen Narrator Tom O'Connell Interviewer 1978? CH: ...every nickel that you can get, when I was going with my wife there, if I could get her a hot tamale on Saturday night when we was going together, that was a tremendous week, you know, just 25 cents, you know, and so... TO: How old are you about now? Minnesota CH: Now? in TO: Must have been 30. CH: Then? Society Project TO: Yeah. Radicalism CH: At that time? TO: Yeah. HistoryHistorical CH: Yeah, I was in the 30s,Century yeah, so I was always a strong man, I was trained for heavy weight fighting and I could, I strayed [unclear]Oral nothing, I never, from a kid in school I never was pushing anybody around, [unclear] losing anybody, but if anybody done anything unfair I wasn't afraid to fight for myself and I never knew that about myself, but I had this school chum by the name of Tom Brown and he had a restaurant over in Michigan, over in the upper part of Michigan and he came up here about five years ago andMinnesota he worked here in town, he was a hotel cook you know and he said I come up here I wanted to see you and he said I was always jealous of you, he said because my mother hadTwentieth usually one child every year and he said she used to stand with one child on the left shoulder turning pancakes and fork them to the rest of the family around the table and keeping them going with pancakes and she said she was always bragging about Clarence Hemmingsen and he said if you kids had any guts like Clarence had, he says I'd talk about you once in a while, and he said you go pushing Clarence around and he says you'll get a clout in the mouth and so he said he's worth talking about. Well this kid come up here a full grown man, and he said I came up to see it, but he said I'll only tell you this story, us kids was always jealous of you because my mother was always bragging about you. TO: That's great. 1 CH: And so I guess, I must have been, I had quite a bit of courage you know, I wasn't easily pushed around. Well, so that's what brought me up here, it's like Professor Scott Nearing, I'm sure you know about him, he played a big part in our education [unclear] from Chicago and Clarence Darrow the same, he said Clarence Darrow said like this, he said everybody in life he said is influenced by the economic facts and the realities of the economics that surround them and Clarence Darrow said I was raised in Terra Haute Indiana and he said I got married and promised my wife everything and he says a new bungalow and roses around the door, and he said a nice carriage standing in the yard and well dressed children. He said living at the Darrow home, he said, I was practicing law down there and he said there was no way of making a dollar and so then he said I went to Chicago in response to the economic insecurity of life in Terre Haute, Indiana, and I got a job driving a taxicab and then he said I went to law school and he said many people write the story about their success and he said they want to show their superiority, and he said I'm not one of those, he said I was just lucky, he says I got a court case he says to represent a wealthy corporation that had a fairly just case he says in court and I was smart enough to win it, and he said that made my reputation in Chicago, and whenever thought about an attorney, they thought about Clarence Darrow, [unclear] Cricket and the rest and he says if it wasn't for that lucky break he said I mightMinnesota have been one that starved to death around here just like I was starving in Terre Haute, Indiana.in So... TO: Why did you choose Minnesota to come to though specifically? CH: Well, the first reason is that you have to survey what you like and I'd already spoken in Minnesota and I'd spoken in, I spoke on a soap box along side of the SocietyRyan Hotel in the campaign that we was directing I think it was in 1923 and we was tryingProject to organize the national Farmer Labor Party in these five states, somebody had to go around and campaign and tell them on what basis they could send delegates. We had toRadicalism pretty damn liberal about that, letting delegates come, so we invited the Sick and Death Benefit Society, fraternal organizations, labor unions and political groups to send delegates to Chicago on the Historyfirst, no the second, third and fourth of July and we held a meeting in the streetcarmen's auditorium there andHistorical so the Communist Party, they made up their mind they was going to controlCentury the [unclear] thing you know, they suffered from that crazy idea in them days that they were going to takeOral control of every damn thing and so they tried to do that with the Workers League out there on the northwest side of Chicago and they had unemployed councils in the city of Chicago, they was going to go over there and take control of it, and so, but I said I'll show you fellas something that you never seen before, I said you'll do what I tell you and I said they can come right to the meeting andMinnesota I said we'll let them speak as long as they want to and I said when they're through speaking, we won't deny them that, I said we'll tell them your time is up and the meeting isTwentieth ended and we're going to resume the conduct of our regular business meetings around here and I had a guy already, a husky guy, he could take an ordinary guy with one hand like you're carrying a sack of groceries and set them outside of the door and say so long, I'll see you later. So, I got the membership secretary to stand by the door when everybody came in I said put a red ribbon on their coat, and you ask them to see their card so when I'm speaking from the audience I'll know exactly I got out there, so I says if it comes to such a thing as a vote. And so we never had to do that and he was not going to give up the meeting, he was going to start disrupting tactics and I said nothing like that goes on in our meetings and I don't give a damn who you are and I said you've been given your time, you've said what you had in mind during that time and I said if there's anything additional that you want to speak about and tell us that might be helpful in the future, if 2 you make arrangements with the proper people, we'll still give you another hearing, so I says you're time is up and I said if you don't want to go out of the hall and let us resume our business I says we got enough force here to carry our wishes out and that, so we had a guy there we called him the missing link, 300 pounds and Christ almighty... TO: That's great, the missing link. CH: All we had to do was say Link send him outside. When that was necessary to do that, one look at him and he went out there willingly. Well that's why I come up here, I had relatives in Duluth, my brother lived there, and he was in business up there and I'm a pipefitter and so he was in a companion business that I could get a few days work out of there for a while. Well you know how it is, life shows that when you work for relatives, unless you're god damn independent and already well fixed, there get's to be hardships from that, they overemphasize the fact that they're doing something for you and so Edman I said well the thing didn't work out good, I stayed there about two months and then we come up the North Shore, we borrowed my brother's camping outfit and my wife is an artist you know, she's a very idealistic girl and soMinnesota she had it all to learn so she wanted to live up here because it's such a beautiful country and then I figure that like Scott Nearing said and Clarence Darrow said if you go to the hinterlands, that'sin what Scott Nearing said, you go to the hinterlands during the Depression, you can live on odd jobs and you can live on nature see, you can live on the fish and you can live on the animals and so that's what we came here for and to make a new start. And I had the right to work at my trade of pipefitting that was, then I can lead the rest of my life, I think I have lost because of the dirty tricks that GeorgeSociety Meany and the official[?] family of the union, I didn't merit anything like that at allProject by any stretch of the imagination regardless of how conservative or whatever their philosophy was, I never merited anything like that because I've never done anything against theRadicalism union and if they would have accepted my advice in the controversy about them two members, there would have been peace in the family and while they wanted me, they wanted to control me,History I could have made an arrangement so I could say well this is my way of making a living and you put the restrictionsHistorical on what I'm going to say and I will do the best I can to conform toCentury them, but I do not and I will not accept any position of leadership in this official family.