Mr. Cohn. Do you remember writing this: “Good morning, Revolution. You are the very best friend I ever had. We are going to pal around together from now on.”

Mr. Hughes. Yes, sir, I wrote that.

Mr. Cohn. Did you write this, “Put one more `S’ in the USA to make it Soviet. The USA when we take control will be the USSA then.’‘

Mr. Hughes. Yes, sir, I wrote that.

Mr. Cohn. Were you kidding when you wrote those things? What did you mean by those?

Mr. Hughes. Would you like me to give you an interpretation of that?

Mr. Cohn. I would be most interested.

Mr. Hughes. Very well. Will you permit me to give a full interpretation of it?

Mr. Cohn. Surely.

Mr. Hughes. All right, sir. To give a full interpretation of any piece of literary work one has to consider not only when and how it was written, but what brought it into being. The emotional and physical background that brought it into being. I, sir, was born in Joplin, Missouri. I was born a Negro. From my very earliest childhood memories, I have encountered very serious and very hurtful problems. One of my earliest childhood memories was going to the movies in Lawrence, Kansas, where we lived, and there was one motion picture theater, and I went every afternoon. It was a nickelodeon, and I had a nickel to go. One afternoon I put my nickel down and the woman pushed it back and she pointed to a sign. I was about seven years old.

Mr. Cohn. I do not want to interrupt you. I do want to say this. I want to save time here. I want to concede very fully that you encounter oppression and denial of civil rights. Let us assume that, because I assume that will be the substance of what you are about to say. To save us time, what we areinterested in determining for our purpose is this: Was the solution to which you turned that of the Soviet form of government?

Mr. Hughes. Sir, you said you would permit me to give a full explanation.

Mr. Cohn. I was wondering if we could not save a little time because I want to concede the background which you wrote it from was the background you wanted to describe.

Mr. Hughes. I would much rather preserve my reputation and freedom than to save time.

Mr. Cohn. Take as long as you want.

Mr. Hughes. The woman pushed my nickel back and pointed to a sign beside the box office, and the sign said something, in effect, ``Colored not admitted.” It was my first revelation of the division between the American citizens. My playmates who were white and lived next door to me could go to that motion picture and I could not. I could never see a film in Lawrence again, and I lived there until I was twelve years old.

When I went to school, in the first grade, my mother moved to Topeka for a time, and my mother worked for a lawyer, and she lived in the downtown area, and she got ready for school, being a working woman naturally she wanted to send me to the nearest school, and she did, and they would not let me go to the school. There were no Negro children there. My mother had to take days off from her work, had to appeal to her employer, had to go to the school board and finally after the school year had been open for some time she got me into the school.

I had been there only a few days when the teacher made unpleasant and derogatory remarks about Negroes and specifically seemingly pointed at myself. Some of my schoolmates stoned me on the way home from school. One of my schoolmates (and there were no other Negro children in the school), a little white boy, protected me, and I have never in all my writing career or speech career as far as I know said anything to create a division among humans, or between whites or Negroes, because I have never forgotten this kid standing up for me against these other first graders who were throwing stones at me. I have always felt from that time on–I guess that was the basis of it–that there are white people in America who can be your friend, and will be your friend, and who do not believe in the kind of things that almost every Negro who has lived in our country has experienced. I do not want to take forever to tell you these things, but I must tell you that they have very deep emotional roots in one’s childhood and one’s beginnings, as I am sure any psychologist or teacher of English or student of poetry will say about any creative work. My father and my mother were not together. When I got old enough to learn why they were not together, again it was the same thing. My father as a young man, shortly after I was born, I understand, had studied law by correspondence. He applied for permission to take examination for the Bar in the state of Oklahoma where he lived, and they would not permit him. A Negro evidently could not take the examinations. You could not be a lawyer at that time in the state of Oklahoma. You know that has continued in a way right up to recent years, that we had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to get Negroes into the law school a few years ago to study law. Now you may study law and be a lawyer there.

Those things affected my childhood very much and very deeply. I missed my father. I learned he had gone away to another country because of prejudice here. When I finally met my father at the age of seventeen, he said “Never go back to the United States. Negroes are fools to live there.” I didn’t believe that. I loved the country I had grown up in. I was concerned with the problems and I came back here. My father wanted me to live in Mexico or Europe. I did not. I went here and went to college and my whole career has been built here.

As I grew older, I went to high school in Cleveland. I went to a high school in a very poor neighborhood and we were very poor people. My friends and associates were very poor children and many of them were of European parentage or some of them had been brought here in steerage themselves from Europe, and many of these students in the Central High School in Cleveland–and this story is told, sir, parts of it, not as fully as I want to tell you some things, in my book, The Deep Sea, my autobiography –in the Central High School, many of these pupils began to tell me about Eugene Debs, and about the new nation and the new republic. Some of them brought them to school. I became interested in whatever I could read that Debs had written or spoken about. I never read the theoretical books of socialism or communism or the Democratic or Republican party for that matter, and so my interest in whatever may be considered political has been non-theoretical, non-sectarian, and largely really emotional and born out of my own need to find some kind of way of thinking about this whole problem of myself, segregated, poor, colored, and how I can adjust to this whole problem of helping to build America when sometimes I can not even get into a school or a lecture or a concert or in the south go to the library and get a book out. So that has been a very large portion of the emotional background of my work, which I think is essential to one’s understanding.

When I was graduated from high school, I went to live with

my father for a time in Mexico, and in my father I encountered the kind of bitterness, the kind of utter psychiatric, you might say, frustration that has been expressed in some Negro novels, not in those I have written myself, I don’t believe. A man who was rabidly anti-American, anti-United States. I did not sympathize with that viewpoint on the part of my own father. My feeling was this is my country, I want to live here. I want to come back here I want to make my country as beautiful as I can, as wonderful a country as I can, because I love it myself. So I went back after a year in Mexico, and I went to Columbia.

At Columbia University in New York City where I had never been before, but where I heard there was practically no prejudice, by that time wanting to be a writer and having published some papers in Negro magazines in this country, I applied for a position on the staff of the Spectator newspaper, I think that they had at the time, and I think they still do. Our freshman counselor told us the various things that freshmen could apply for and do on the Columbia campus, and I wanted to do some kind of writing, and I went to the newspaper office. I was the only Negro young man or woman in the group. I can not help but think that it was due to colored prejudice that of all the kinds of assignments, and there were various assignments, sports, theater, classroom activities, debating, of all the various assignments they could pick out to assign me to cover was society news. They very well knew I could not go to dances and parties, being colored, and therefore I could bring no news, and after a short period, I was counted out of the Spectator group at my college.

When I went into the dormitory my first day there, I had a reservation for a room. It had been paid for in the dormitory–the correct portion was paid for–it was Fardley Hall. I wasnot given the room. They could not find the reservation. I had to take all of that day and a large portion of the next one to get into the dormitory. I was told later I was the first to achieve that. In other words simple little things like getting

a room in a university in our country, one has to devote extraordinary methods even to this day in our country in some parts.

I am thinking of the early 1920’s. I did not stay at Columbia longer than a year due in part to the various kinds of little racial prejudices that I encountered.

Senator Dirksen. I think, Mr. Hughes, that would be adequate emotional background.

Mr. Hughes. No, sir, that would not explain it all, how I arrive at the point that Mr. Cohn, I believe, has asked me about.

Mr. Cohn. Could you make it briefer, please?

Senator Dirksen. Do you think we need more background to tell what you meant by USSA?

Mr. Hughes. I think you do, sir. Because a critical work goes out of a very deep background, it does not come in a moment. I am perfectly willing to come back and give it to you later, if you are tired.

Mr. Cohn. No, we will sit here as long as you want to go on. But you are missing the point completely. What we want to determine is whether or not you meant those words when you said them.

Mr. Hughes. Sir, whether or not I meant them depends on what they came from and out of.

Mr. Cohn. Did you desire to make the United States Soviet, put one more “S” in the USA to make it Soviet. “The USA, when we take control, will be the USSA.”

Mr. Hughes. When I left Columbia, I had no money. I had $13.

Mr. Cohn. Did you mean those words when you spoke them? We know the background. I want to know now, did you mean the words when you spoke them? I am not saying you should not have meant them. I am asking you—-

Mr. Hughes. Yes, sir, and you gave me the permission to give the background.

Senator Dirksen. That answers the question.Mr. Hughes. I did not say “Yes” to your question. I said you gave me the chance to give you the background to the point.

Senator Dirksen. We have had enough background.

Mr. Cohn. Would you tell us whether or not you meant those words?

Mr. Hughes. What words, sir?

Mr. Cohn. “Put one more `S’ in the USA to make it Soviet. The USA, when we take control, will be USSA then.”

Mr. Hughes. Will you read me the whole poem?

Mr. Cohn. I do not have the whole poem. Do you claim these words are out of context?

Mr. Hughes. It is a portion of a poem.

Mr. Cohn. Do you claim that these words distort the meaning?

Mr. Hughes. That is a portion of a poem and a bar of music out of context does not give you the idea of the whole thing.

Mr. Cohn. At any time in your life did you desire to make the United States of America Soviet?

Mr. Hughes. Not by violent means, sir.

Mr. Cohn. By any means.

Mr. Hughes. By the power of the ballot, I thought it might be a possibility at one time.

Mr. Cohn. Did you want to do it? Did you desire that by the ballot, not by violent means? Would you give us a yes or no answer to that?

Mr. Hughes, you say you have changed your views. You say you no longer feel the way you did in 1949 when you made that statement in defense of the Communist leaders, and said the things we read you. Will you give us some evidence of that and be frank with this committee?

Mr. Hughes. Evidence of what, sir?

Mr. Cohn. Will you be frank with this committee and give us some straightforward answers? Did you ever in your life desire the Soviet form of government over here? That is a very simple question, Mr. Hughes, for a man who wrote the things you did, and we have just started.

Mr. Hughes. You asked me about the poem, and I would like to hear it all.

Mr. Cohn. I would like to know right now whether you ever desired the Soviet form of government in this country, and I would like it answered.

Mr. Hughes. Would you permit me to think about it?

Mr. Cohn. Pardon me? Mr. Hughes, you have belonged to a list of Communist organizations a mile long. You have urged the election to public office of official candidates of the Communist party. You have signed statements to the effect that the purge trials in the Soviet Union were justified and sound and democratic. You have signed statements denying that the Soviet Union is totalitarian. You have defended the current leaders of the Communist party. You have written poems which are an invitation to revolution. You have called for the setting up of a Soviet government in this country. You have been named in statements before us as a Communist, and a member of the Communist party.

Mr. Hughes, you can surely tell us simply whether or not you ever desired the Soviet form of government in this country.

Mr. Hughes. Yes, I did.

Mr. Cohn. The answer is yes. I think if you were a little more candid with some of these things, we would get along a little better, because I think I know enough about the subject so I am not going to sit here for six days and be kidded along. I will be very much impressed if you would give us a lot of straightforward answers. It would save us a lot of time. I know you do not want to waste it any more than we do. We know every man is entitled to his views and opinions. We are trying to find out which of these works should be used in the State Department in its information program.

In the course of finding that out, we want to know whether you ever desired the Soviet form of government in this country. I believe you have said just a minute ago your answer to that is yes, is that right?

Mr. Hughes. I did desire it, and would desire—-

Mr. Cohn. That is an answer. That is what we want.

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