You know, like radios. You remember at that time, they used to take
the radio and put it in a cabinet that would cost $200 or so. The cabinet was the big thing. These people paid off the bedroom set and the dining room set. Next thing they’d want is a nice radio. The radio was put on the bill and boom! everything, the whole inventory, went.
It was a pretty rough deal. But we arranged that we left a lot of things there. On the inventory, we overlooked the beds and some of the other stuff. When we got enough, we said that the mattresses were unsanitary and we weren’t gonna take it. If we had our way, we’d see that these people—if the original bill was $500 and they paid $350—we’d figure, well, you could leave a bed for $350 and you could leave a table. Or we’d say the mattress was full of cockroaches. We’d never touch the stuff. I’d just put down: bed missing. I’d ask the guy, “Can you identify that bed as the one sold?” And I’d say to the guy, “Hey, that ain’t your bed. Say your brother-in-law’s got it, and he gave you this one instead.” Or something like that.
I mean, we always had an out. It was a real human aspect. If you really wanted to help somebody, you could. By making it easier for them, you made it easier for yourself. In most cases, people had plenty of warning that if they couldn’t pay it, something would have to be done. They were broke and they were holding out as long as they could. But when it came around, a lot of cases they just gave up.
Some of the most pitiful things were when you went into a fine home, where if they were able to sell an oil painting on the wall, it could more than pay their judgment. When you went into factories, where the guy pleaded with you, so he could have his tools, understand, and do his work at home. When you took inventory, if you let him take his stuff, you know, if there was a beef, it’d be bad. But if you let him take what he needed, he didn’t care about the rest. ’Cause he’d have bread and butter to go. So you’d use your head in a lot of cases.
It was a question of going in like a
mensch.
There was a rewarding part of it. If you treated that guy good, he appreciated it. And in the long run, we did better than any of the guys that went out on the muscle stuff. When we took inventory, it was our inventory that stood up. I could open a brand new box, say in haberdashery, for shirts. What’s to stop me from marking one box “partly full?” All I had to do is take out a shirt and throw it out and I can call it “partly full.”
We’d even go out at night to repossess cars in a different way. The attorney would want this or that car, and he’d give you an order to take it. But if we thought the guy was a nice guy and he could get some money up, understand, and he needed the car for his business, we’d tell him to park it half a block away and be sure to get hold of a lawyer, or otherwise we’d tow it in the next time. You see? We did some good.
At that time, they tried all their pullers, the companies, they tried to recover on their own. So they wouldn’t have to file in the municipal court.
They tried to save that. They had their own pullers. We put a check on them and we took all kinds of phony stars away from them. Chicken Inspector 23, you know. They tried everything. It got so, people were so mad at me—or, you know, anybody to come out. These guys would come out with their fake stars and say they were deputies. Then when we come out, they were ready to shoot us.
One of your greatest guys in town, a fella that’s a big banker today, when we went to his home, he met us at the head of the stairs with a rifle. And my boss at the time said, “Yeah, you’ll get one of us, but we’ll get you, too. Why don’t you cool off, and maybe we can discuss this. We don’t want this place. We knew you had the money, we knew that. Why don’t you get together with the lawyer and work something out? What good would it do if you shot us? We didn’t ask to come here.” People would get emotionally disturbed.
One time I went to take out a radio and a young girl undressed herself. And she says, “You’ll have to leave. I’m in the nude.” I said, “You can stay,” and we took it out anyhow. All we did was throw her in the bedroom and take the thing out. But we had to have a police squad before the old lady’d let it out. Screamed and hollered and everything else. It was on the second floor and she wanted to throw it downstairs. There were many times we had sofas and divans cut up by a person in a rage.
The only way to gain entrance is if people would open the door for us. Whoever wouldn’t let us in, we’d try to get it another way. There are ways, if you want to get it bad enough, you can do it.
I used to work quite a bit at night. We’d go around for the cars and we’d go around for places we couldn’t get in in the daytime. We did whatever the job called for.
Remember your feelings when you had to go out on those jobs?
In the beginning, we were worried about it. But after you found out that you could do more good and maybe ease somebody’s burden—and at the same time, it was very lucrative as far as you were concerned—why then you just took it in your stride. It was just another job. It wasn’t bad.
But we had places where we had to take a guy’s truck and take his business away, and he’s gone to the drawer and reached for a gun. We’d grab him by the throat, you know what I mean, and muscle and something like that. I don’t know if he reached for the gun to kill himself or to scare us or what. Anyway, he went for the drawer and boom! I slammed the door on his hand and my partner got him around the neck. I opened the drawer, and there’s a gun there. I said, “Whataya goin’ for the gun for?” He said, “I’m going for my keys.” (Laughs.) The keys were in his pocket.
We’ve had guys break down. We’ve had others that we thought would, and they were the finest of the lot. No problem at all. No matter how much they were burning on the inside.
There were some miserable companies that wanted to salvage
everything.
When we got a writ from them, we didn’t want it. But we had to take it. Some of ‘em really turned your guts. And there were others, it was a pleasure to know. All in all, we used to look at it and laugh. Take it for whatever it was. If you got so, you knew how to allay hard feelings there, and you knew how to soft soap ’em, you did all right.
Aside from the bed, the table—I suppose the humiliation
…
We tried to keep it down. That they were sending the stuff back or that they were gonna get new stuff. Frankly, their neighbors were in the same classification as they were. It was things that people knew. It was part of the hardship.
When you saw guys around the house, they’d just stand by …
?
Depressed … if you came in there and they thought they were failures to their wife and children. But like everything else, they always got over it. Look, people were trying to get by as best they could, and this was our way of getting by. We might as well make it as pleasant as we possibly can. And that’s what our boss wanted: less trouble. Because after all, he held a political office and he wanted good will.
The poor people took it easier and were able to much better understand than the people who were in the middle or better classes.
If I walked in a house, say, where they had furniture from Smyth
177
and you come into them … first of all on account of being ashamed of never having had things of this type … they were the ones who hit hardest of all. They never knew anything like this in their whole career. They’d have maybe a Spanish cabinet, with all the wormwood and that. And realize that if they could have sold that, they could have paid their bill what they owed, what the guys were closin’ in on ’em for. We had men walk out of the house with tears in their eyes. And it was the woman who took over. The guys couldn’t take it. Especially with cars, you know what I mean?
The poor mostly would make the best of it. They knew it was gonna be taken. They knew what they were up against and they knew it was only a matter of time, you know, until somebody took it away. We had less trouble with the poor. Not, I mean, that we enjoyed going against them, ‘cause if they were poor, you had to help ’em more than anybody else.
It was a real rough time, but we tried to make it along with a smile. Instead of being a vulture, we tried to be helpful. But they were interesting times.
Did you encounter much resistance in your work?
No. I’d say one in a hundred.
If you’d walk in another room and somebody all of a sudden gets hot and grabs a knife and goes for one … I mean this can happen. But you usually get ’em when they start crying, understand. When they start crying, they’re already spent. Most of all, it was surprising how they accepted their fate.
What we did then, I don’t think we could do today. With the way the people look at the law. And with their action and their feeling, you know what I mean. They wouldn’t accept today as they did then. What we did then was different. People still respected the courts and respected the law. They didn’t want to revise our laws to satisfy them. (Weary, resigned.) What am I gonna tell you?
Today you get a guy in court, you don’t like what the judge says, he calls him a
m f
, you know what I mean? So how can you go in a house, understand, where we had law-abiding citizens like we had in the Thirties? Today we’d possibly run into a lot of trouble. If we started these evictions, we’d move ‘em out on the street, they’d move ’em right back in. Whataya gonna do then? Today I think it’s different, a different type people.
Before if you wore a badge, it meant something. Today you wear a badge, you better watch out, ’cause somebody’ll try to take you to see if they’re as good a man as you are. And we’re getting older, not younger. (Laughs.)
Today it’s tougher for evictions than it was in our day. Today if you evict anybody, you not only have to evict the people, you have to evict about seven or eight organizations that want the people in there. And each can come up with some legal point, why they should remain without giving the landlord any rent. Now I’m not for the landlord. They bled ’em in some of these buildings, I understand. They may be perfectly right. But as far as following the law is concerned, that’s something else.
Max R. Naiman
A lawyer. He is sixty-five, though his appearance is that of a short, forty-year-old wrestler.
“I was a restless youth. In 1918, at the tender age of fourteen, I shocked and thrashed grain. I made three treks to the Western states. I worked the harvest fields of the Dakotas, Montana and so on. I used to ride the rods and the blinds. I was a hostler
178
in the freight yards of Idaho. I met the Wobblies. I lived in jungles. They were great educational centers.
“As a farm worker I was victimized. One farmer beat me out of my pay. Where was I gonna find a lawyer to defend me … ? I graduated
law school in 1932. Out of a class of eighty-five, there was just six that threatened to shove off. The mailman stayed on his job, the bank clerk stayed on his job, the policeman on his job, follow me? But I joined the International Labor Defense.
179
Defending workers. My clients educated me. We spent many hours, waiting to be called. This was the practice of the court, to keep us waiting….”
THERE WERE quite a bit of evictions taking place. As good fortune would have it, the Unemployed Councils developed. They were a bunch of Robin Hoods. They would wait until the bailiff put the furniture out in the street and put it right back where it came from. If there was a padlock in the way, well, then, it was removed, you see? The people were placed back in to the despair of the landlord.
Sometimes these Robin Hoods were so forthright and brazen, they put up a label, stick it on the door: This furniture was moved back by Local 23 of the Unemployed Council.
There was a case where the bailiff and his deputies came to move out a Negro family. The family was a little bit on the alert. They were expecting some legal action, not having obeyed the court’s order to get out. The head bailiff shoved his foot in the door and yanked out his pistol to command attention. And also to compel the people to open the door. A struggle developed between the bailiff and the lady of the house. In the course of the struggle, the plank that constitutes the outer edge of the door came off. So the woman picks up the plank and—in the language of the streets —socked him across the wrist and forced him to drop his gun. With the leader of the deputies being thus disabled, they abandoned their attempts to remove the people.
Naturally, warrants were issued for the arrest of this lady and a male companion. It might have been her husband. My clients. It was my practice in those days, trusting very few judges, to always demand a jury trial. It was a long process as against bench trials, where you stand up and give your ditty and it’s all over in a matter of minutes. Both my clients were deeply depressed. It’s common knowledge when an officer is a victim of bodily harm, of course, a job is done on ’em. There was confusion, the lying that went on. The prosecution’s witnesses were thoroughly discredited. The jury found my clients not guilty.
I was hurrying down the corridor to get over to another court. My client had her arm wrapped into mine. She was trying to hold me still for a minute. Finally she stuttered and she says, “Counsel, I loves you so much, I wish I had you in the bushes.” (Laughs.) Cases such as those ran into the hundreds. This was my greatest reward. (Laughs.)
Another type of arrest was where clients used to sit at relief stations and wait all day in distress. The distress could be a baby left at home. It could
simply be the red tape in getting processed. I had a woman who asked for an increase in the supply of milk for her children. She became very impatient and began to remonstrate. The relief staff could become irritable if the clients attempted to be persuasive. Naturally she was arrested.