Poetry
Thompson, Kit
triumphant recording of Smith's first-ballot nomination in it had not been for me the U.S. would have given up the gold Houston. He refuted the attacks on Smith's affiliation with ...
...If an election ever came down to choosing between a A house is being razed...
...It is almost unbeliev- be displayed in many windows," he said, "where a black vulable how great this prejudice is...
...And if His last notebook entry is dated November 1935, less than a month before his death...
...Also, if I am not elected grass will grow in the streets...
...Our former president said things like unprofessional stains appear: `read my lips.' In your day I guess that was something said wayward ashes only to the hearing-impaired...
...Our lives are worlds apart, yet his past lives in my present, and his notes give me a better understanding of that part of me...
...I only wish I could write back...
...14: 10 September 1993 Commonweal...
...In either case, I'm thankful that a common man of common I mark annotations with ruler and pencil sense took the time to build a bridge across the generations...
...said many things, such as times might have been much worse...
...Iines like capillaries spider loose across the page...
...Tammany Hall...
...that sold for less than they could be made in this country, with Four years later he was amused by echoes from Hoover's the result that several American factories had to close, which losing campaign against Franklin D. Roosevelt: "Mr...
...I'd like to tell him: "Well, here and there, mothers and sons, grandfather, we don't have many one-room schools any more, cousins and daughters, and we have herds of school buses, but there are still lots of kids, a few from the outer branches...
...Grandfather urged his audience to patronize busion the religious question and particularly between Catholics nesses that displayed the Blue Eagle, the NRA's symbol, but and Protestants," he observed...
...Between generations, I water the plants...
...with cheap, inferior electric lamp globes ry to win more votes than Smith received in 1928...
...quota bill...
...When he filled his notebooks, did he realize he was writing Kit Thompson to descendants like me to give us some idea of where we came For Jean MacDonald...
...ture lurks within the walls...
...Or was it simply a way to gather his thoughts in the midst of a busy life that had been diverted by economic necessity from Genealogy: they have a word for the science the schoolhouse to the workaday world of the lumberyard...
...left to the professionals...
...This is so general that it is a warned of dishonest use of the emblem...
...The Blue Eagle will menace to the freedom of the country...
...of searching backwards for ourselves...
...New Deal...
...It was a prayer of thanksgiving "to a merciful God who has bestowed so many favors and blessings upon us...
...After the 1928 election, grandfather consoled himself by In that speech grandfather said people should buy Americannoting that Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, and Warren made goods rather than cheap foreign products...
...Grandfather died before Roosevelt completed his first term...
...If Smith is elected," he wrote, "this country is in no more danger from Tammany than it will be from any After Roosevelt's election grandfather backed the of the various Republican machines throughout the country...
...what he thinks of today's political scene where Catholics can I never see them fail, sweep then, later, vie for a presidential nomination without raising a religious palm into palm and dream past the window-grate: storm...
...Pat Buchanan and a Jerry Brown, which way would he vote...
...would have given up the gold Houston...
...In his notebooks is the text of a speech Religious bigotry played a major part in the 1928 campaign he gave to a Holy Name Society hailing FDR's in Kentucky, as it did in other parts of the South...
...I'd like to ask grandfather The leaves curl in, like tongues, darkened...
...El Bud Johnson, a former editor and special assistant to the mayor of Milwaukee, is now a full-time free-lance writer...
...The family gone, the view is hollow: Did he envision a day when Catholics can feel so remote from painted squares of black job discrimination that some can attack a civil rights law as a have sucked away a year of sun...
...He refuted the attacks on Smith's affiliation with standard in two weeks...
...as well as adults, who can't write as well as Bertha Fowler...
...He accused Japan Harding were the only three presidential candidates in histo- of flooding the U.S...
...Or a day when other Catholics look upon abortion I think of falling leaves, as the only defining political issue...
...from the lowlands and moors to root again I can see him shaking his head when I tell him that nowaclasping their own distances days most ordinary people I know, people like lumber dealas far from me ers, think talking or writing about politics is something better as the haunt of their keenings...
...It is not sur- National Recovery Act as "the greatest law for the relief of unprising that he wrote a short essay on "Prejudice," dated employment and distress that has ever been passed in the November 4, 1928...
...As for the Japanese, no one today ancestors blown like heather calls their products inferior...
...Hoover threw many people out of work...
...And the gold standard has been gone for a long time but The lines converge and disappear, no one seems to miss it...
...The greatest example of prejudice is found United States...
...b. 1910 from...
Vol. 120 • September 1993 • No. 15
