The Little Foxes Literature Ladder
Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes. Bible: Song of
Solomon
Rung One: Quotes…Explain the significance of seven of the following quotes in the
context of the play—what larger meaning do these quotes have… what is the subtext of each of
these statements?
1. Oscar: “My wife is a miserable victim of headaches.”
2. Ben: “That’s cynical. Cynicism is only an unpleasant way of saying the truth.” Oscar:
“People ought to help other people. But that’s not always the way it happens. And some
sometimes you got to think of yourself.
3. Horace: “Sure. And they’ll take less than that when you get around to playing them off
against each other. You can save a little money that way, Ben. And make them hate
each other just a little more than they do now.
4. Regina: “I hope you die. I hope you die soon. I’ll be waiting for you to die.”
5. Horace: “You tell Mander that Mr. Horace says he’s much obliged to him for bringing
the box, it arrived all right.”
6. Horace: “I’ll fix it so they can’t stop you when you’re ready to go. You’ll go, Addie?
7. Ben: “There are hundreds of Hubbards sitting in rooms like this throughout the country.
All their names aren’t Hubbard, but they are all Hubbards and they will own this country
some day. We’ll get along.”
8. Regina: “If I don’t get everything that I want I am going to put all three of you in jail.”
9. Alexandra: “You only change your mind when you want to. And I won’t want to.”
Rung Two: Personal Connection:
Clearly, the predominate theme of this play is
greed. After reading the following article, in a two-page, double-spaced informal essay tell
me about an example of greed among your acquaintances, friends, or family. Provide
specific details that make the story come alive.
America's Disease is Greed
by Andrew Greeley
The most serious spiritual problem in the country today is reckless and untrammeled greed. Greed caused the
disgraceful corporate scandals that fill our newspapers. Greed is responsible for crooked cops and crooked
politicians. Greed causes the constant efforts to destroy unions that protect basic worker rights.
Greed has produced rash tax cuts that have given money to the rich and in effect taken it away from the poor. Greed
has led to the immigration policy in which hundreds of poor men and women die every year as they struggle across
the desert for the jobs that El Norte promises them. Greed accounts for the efforts to take profitability out of the
pensions and health insurance of working men and women. Greed is responsible for the fact that so many Americans
have no health insurance and the fact that the recent reform of Medicare was a fraud. Greed causes newspapers to
overestimate their circulation.
Greed is responsible for the obscene salaries of CEOs. In the '90s the ratio of CEO compensation to average
workers' compensation was 250 to 1, meaning that the boss earned on his first day of work during a year as much as
the worker did in a whole year. In European countries the ratio is closer to 100 to 1. Recent estimates put the current
ratio at 500 to 1 -- the boss makes as much before lunch as the worker does all year. Greed is the cause of the high
wages paid to the bosses even if the company is failing.
Greed is responsible for the endless stress and ruthless competition of the workplace and the strains and tensions of
professional class marriages. Greed (in this instance another name for relentless ambition) explains much of the
cheating on college campuses. Greed is responsible for outsourcing, which is incapable of comprehending that the
employees who lose their jobs are also the consumers who sustain the economy. Greed generates the reckless
ventures that in part caused the bubble of the late '90s. Greed causes expensive wars that shatter the budget. Greed is
the reason that only the wealthy are benefitting so far from the economic upturn that is allegedly happening. Greed
drives loan sharks. Greed is responsible for the success of big box stores that tax the poor with low wages to provide
bargains for affluent suburban shoppers. Greed is the reason poor white Appalachians, poor African Americans and
poor Native Americans must fight the wars that the wealthy start. Jessica Lynch joined the Army so she could go to
college. Her Native American roommate, killed in action, joined so, single mother that she was, she could support
her children. Greed is the reason why the country is being run by those whom the president has described, however
inelegantly, as the ''haves and the have mores.''
No one said during the bizarre deification of President Reagan that he taught us that greed is good and that we
should feel good about our greedy country. Greed is the reason that the country is being run by the insurance,
pharmaceutical, weapons and petroleum industries. Greed causes worldwide sex slavery of women and children.
Greed drives the murders of the narcotics world. Greed is responsible for the exploitations of teen sports stars by
colleges and for the mess in the pro sports world. It is also the cause of the use of performance drugs by young
athletes. Greed is responsible for the bad advice lawyers gave the Church years ago to beat victims of sexual abuse
into the ground. It is behind the scam artists who steal from the elderly.
Greed may have been a more serious problem for Americans, say, in the era of the robber barons. But the Garys and
the Morgans and the Carnegies were a small bunch of men. Now their greed has seeped down to a much larger
segment of the population.
The Catholic Church speaks of four sins that cry to heaven for vengeance. Two are cheating workers out of wages
and exploiting widows and children. Both happen every day in our greedy country.
Ambition is not evil within limits. The struggle for success is not bad within limits. Hard work and fair rewards are
good within limits. It is not good to take from the poor and give to the rich, and that's exactly what this country is
doing today.
Don't let anyone tell you that lust is the most deadly of the deadly sins.
Copyright 2004, Digital Chicago Inc.
Rung Three: Original NY Times Movie Review-A. After reading the following review choose three of the characters:
Regina, Ben, Oscar,
Addie, Alexandra, Horace, or Leo to compare and contrast the film version vs. the play
version in two-three paragraphs for each character. How much were the characters
that you’ve chosen as you had imagined them when you read the play?
B.
List five significant differences that you found between the play and the film.
' The Little Foxes,' Full of Evil, Reaches the Screen of the Music
Hall -- New Film at Palace

By BOSLEY CROWTHER
Published: August 22, 1941
Lillian Hellman's grim and malignant melodrama, "The Little Foxes," which had the
National Theatre's stage running knee-deep in gall and wormwood the season before
last, has now been translated to the screen with all its original viciousness intact and
with such extra-added virulence as the relentless camera of Director William Wyler and
the tensile acting of Bette Davis could impart. As presented at the Music Hall yesterday,
under the trade-mark of Samuel Goldwyn, "The Little Foxes" leaps to the front as the
most bitingly sinister picture of the year and as one of the most cruelly realistic
character studies yet shown on the screen.
No one who saw the play need be reminded that Miss Hellman was dipping acid straight
when she penned this fearful fable of second-generation carpet-baggers in a small
Southern town around 1900. Henrik Ibsen and William Faulkner could not together
have designed a more morbid account of inter-family treachery and revoltingly ugly
greed than was contained in Miss Hellman's purple drama of deadly intrigue in the
Hubbard clan. And with a perfect knowledge of the camera's flexibility, the author and
Mr. Wyler have derived out of the play a taut and cumulative screen story which exhales
the creepy odor of decay and freezes charitable blood with the deliberation of a
Frigidaire.
Frankly, there is nothing pretty nor inspiring about this almost fustian tale of Regina
Giddens's foxiness in planting figurative knives in her own deceitful brothers' backs, of
her callous neglect of her good husband when he is dying of a heart attack, all because
she wants to grab the bulk of the family's rising fortune for herself. The whole suspense
of the picture lies in the question of who's going to sink the last knife. Even the final
elopement of Regina's appalled daughter, for whom the film conveniently provides a
nice romance, adds little more than a touch of leavening irony. Regina is too hard a
woman to mourn much for anything.
Thus the test of the picture is the effectiveness with which it exposes a family of evil
people poisoning everything they touch. And this it does spectacularly. Mr. Wyler, with
the aid of Gregg Toland, has used the camera to sweep in the myriad small details of a
mauve decadent household and the more indicative facets of the many characters. The
focus is sharp, the texture of the images hard and realistic. Individual scenes are
extraordinarily vivid and compelling, such as that in which the Hubbard brothers plot a
way to outdo their sister, or the almost unbearable scene in which Regina permits her
husband to struggle un-assisted with death. Only when Mr. Wyler plays obvious tricks
with mirrors does a bit of pretension creep in.
And Miss Davis's performance in the role which Talluluh Bankhead played so brassily
on the stage is abundant with color and mood. True, she does occasionally drop an
unmistakable imitation of her predecessor; she performs queer contortions with her
arms like a dancer in a Hindu temple, and generally she comports herself as though she
were balancing an Academy "Oscar" on her high-coiffed head. But the role calls for
heavy theatrics; Miss Davis is all right.
Better than that, however, are the other members of the cast. Charles Dingle as Brother
Ben Hubbard, the oldest and sharpest of the rattlesnake clan, is the perfect villain in
respectable garb. Carl Benton Reid as Brother Oscar is magnificently dark, sullen and
undependable. Patricia Collinge repeats her excellent stage performance as the faded
flower of the Old South who tips the jug. Teresa Wright is fragile and pathetic as the
harassed daughter of Regina. Dan Duryea is a shade too ungainly as Oscar's chickenlivered son, and Herbert Marshall is surprisingly British for a Southerner born and bred,
but both fill difficult roles well.
"The Little Foxes" will not increase your admiration for mankind. It is cold and cynical.
But it is a very exciting picture to watch in a comfortably objective way, especially if you
enjoy expert stabbing-in-the-back.
Rung Four: Comparison to Real-Life Greed--
In the spring of 1927, after weeks of
incessant rains, the Mississippi River went on a rampage from Cairo, Illinois to New Orleans, inundating
hundreds of towns, killing as many as a thousand people and leaving a million homeless. In Greenville,
Mississippi, efforts to contain the river pitted the majority black population against an aristocratic
plantation family, the Percys-and the Percys against themselves. The following transcript, from the PBS
documentary is the dramatic story of greed, power and race during one of America's greatest natural
disasters. After reading about this event, highlight five places within the text and parallel what
you’ve highlighted with a direct quote from the play as I have done twice in red as an example.
Transcript
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flood/filmmore/pt.html
Billy Payne, Resident: Well, the winter of '27 it started raining early in the year that year. January, February, it rained it seemed like every day.
Sarah Percy, Resident: It rained and rained and rained and rained some more. It just looked like it would never stop.
Mildred Commodore, Resident: The river kept coming above flood level and it was rumored in all of the papers and things that if this levee
would break we'd have a flood that would wash away from Memphis to New Orleans.
Narrator: On April 15, 1927-Good Friday-as another violent storm battered Greenville, Mississippi, a party held in one of the town's finest
homes. As the rain intensified, guests were drawn to the windows. Just beyond their view the Mississippi River was rising to unprecedented
heights. A burst of thunder shook the house and the party fell silent. All eyes turned to one man-LeRoy Percy. The former senator was one of the
most powerful planters in the Mississippi Delta. "Senator Percy," one woman asked, "will the levees hold?" Percy gathered a group of men and
rushed to the levee protecting Greenville from the river. The levee was holding, but barely.
Staring at the angry water, Percy could see that an epic battle was looming-pitting man against nature. What he couldn't see was that a human
storm was also approaching-one that would pit money against honor, black man against white, even father against son.
Narrator: The people of the Delta fear God and the Mississippi, a saying goes. The river punishes with great destruction and rewards with great
wealth. Floodwaters leave behind some of the most lush and fertile soil on earth. For half a century after the civil war, Delta planters had been
richly rewarded by the river. By the early 1900's, they presided over one of the most productive cotton growing regions in the world. In an age
when cotton was king, self-styled planter aristocrats ruled their domains like feudal lords.
The most ambitious of them all-was LeRoy Percy. His empire extended far beyond the cotton fields to the boardrooms of railroads and banks. As
a prominent lawyer and businessman, he was determined to bring the plantation economy into the twentieth century.
John Barry, Historian: LeRoy Percy saw the Delta as this great, bursting, industrial region. But the industry in the Delta was agriculture. That
did not mean that it would be any less efficient than a Northern factory. It would operate with every bit as much efficiency. And of course the
labor was the key to that.
John Tigrett, Resident: It was mighty easy to...to make a living with cotton. And you had the benefit of human labor there that was about as
inexpensive as you could get. And these big plantations, they'd have thousands of these blacks that worked on there. I mean that you couldn't
raise it without the blacks, without human labor there, you couldn't exist-not only important, it was vital.
Narrator: The plantation system offered African-Americans work-but very little else. Most families scraped out a living from sharecropping.
The planters provided a small plot of land. Everything else was advanced on credit and deducted from the worker's share of the crop. It was a
system ripe for abuse.
Mildred Commodore, Resident: It was known on some plantations that the only thing that the people would gather in life is what you would
call three m's-meat, meal and molasses. And they would work from sun up to sun down and when the season was over the only thing they had left
was an indebtment of $400-$500-something they couldn't afford. Because the white owners, see, during the time they had worked for the seed
that season, they had used up all the meat, meal and molasses. But they had nothing, and when I say nothing, I mean nothing.
Pete Daniel, Historian: The planters looked at black people as workers. They looked at black people as people who should be willing and eager
to work for them to produce their cotton and when they weren't eager they could be coerced.
Maurice Sisson, Resident: Well, I won't call his name, but there was a plantation owner that carried a bullwhip all the time and he spoke with
that whip. And I seen him beat the blacks on Washington Avenue because they didn't get out of his way.
Narrator: Like his fellow planters, LeRoy Percy feared losing his black labor force. But unlike many, he believed, the best way to keep AfricanAmericans in the Delta was to treat them fairly. Decency, Percy insisted, was part of the Southern code of honor.
Margaret Washington, Historian: The Percys had a sense of noblesse oblige. They thought of themselves as having more empathy with people
of African descent. They saw themselves as being more understanding, more tolerant of them, more friendly with them, they saw themselves as
being noblesse oblige incarnate.
Maurice Sisson, Resident: They were real business people. The Percys were real business people. They knew that their livelihood came from the
blacks, so why destroy what makes you money? That's how I looked at it. So it was all business.
Narrator: In 1910 LeRoy Percy took his views on race relations and business to Washington, when he was appointed to a vacant Senate seat. A
year later, Percy ran for reelection against a bitter political enemy. Former Mississippi Governor, James K. Vardaman, was a populist and an
unapologetic racist. "If it is necessary," he warned, "every Negro in the state will be lynched to maintain white supremacy." Vardaman defeated
Percy in a landslide.
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Biographer: The effect of the defeat of 1911 on LeRoy Percy was to send him into the deepest gloom he'd probably
ever experienced. He felt that he had let down the side so to speak, that his honor had been violated. Because not only had he lost the election, but
he'd come in third. A sitting senator coming in third.
Narrator: Retreating to Washington County, LeRoy resumed his work and consoled himself with the diversions of a country gentleman.
John Barry, Historian: LeRoy was a classic man's man. Hunted, fished, played poker and he knew how to operate. He was not naive about
anything. And as his son said, no one ever made the mistake of thinking he wasn't dangerous.
Narrator: LeRoy's commanding personality was altogether different from that of his only son and heir, William Alexander Percy. Soft-spoken
and introspective, Will was ill-suited to the stringent code of Southern manhood.
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Biographer: He felt himself an outsider, almost from the start. He worshiped his father. He thought he was the grandest
man, and the most heroic that one could possibly have. At the same time, he thought I'll never be like him, and I should. It's my duty as a Percy to
be as much like my father as possible, but he couldn't. It wasn't in his nature.
John Barry, Historian: He was smaller, physically. He saw no pleasure whatsoever in hunting or fishing. Would never go on these trips, even as
a young boy he...he wouldn't go with his father. He was a poet and he was he was gay.
Narrator: Will had tried to live up to his father's expectations. He went to Harvard, earned a law degree, served with valor in WWI, and joined
his father's law practice in Greenville. But, in his own mind he never measured up.
"It was hard having such a dazzling father," Will recalled, "no wonder I longed to be a hermit." Will often walked alone on the levee, his thoughts
turning to poetry.
"What I wrote," he explained, "seemed more essentially myself than anything I did or said."
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Biographer: Will Percy wrote a piece called "Falling Leaves." And he wrote about how he was walking along the
riverbank and he says, "I know it is Fall because I am loneliest now. I go home to my family and I see my mother pacing up and down, and my
father saying hush, don't say those things." It's a very moving piece of writing, but it indicates how he recognized his parents' dissatisfaction with
him, and his inability to do anything about it, and even to speak of it was impossible.
Narrator: Despite his feelings, Will continued to live in his father's house on Percy Street-placing the family empire above his own happiness. In
the spring of 1922, that empire would come under direct attack. The Ku Klux Klan was gaining ground throughout the country. Klan supporters
dominated the state governments of Colorado and Indiana. They helped elect the governors of a dozen states. By the 1920's, the Klan had swept
over the Mississippi hill country and several counties in the Delta. They now challenged LeRoy Percy in his own domain. Percy despised the
Klan. They attacked those closest to him. His wife was a Catholic. His business partner - a Jew. His empire dependent on black labor. When he
learned of a planned Klan rally in Greenville, LeRoy decided to fight back. On March 1, 1922 a tense crowd packed the Greenville courthouse.
The Klansman spoke first.
John Barry, Historian: The Klansman starts out with his usual spiel. He's against the Catholics, the Pope's got this plot here, the Jews are doing
that, the blacks are a threat to Southern womanhood-it was a rousing speech. It had never been opposed.
Narrator: Will watched his father step up to the podium. No one knew what to expect.
John Barry, Historian: He starts out with humor. He goes on to say that he's got a partner who's a Jew, and he agrees that the Jews need to be
held in line because he points out, that his Jewish partner had loaned $150,000 to people who had lived in Washington County at below market
interest rates. And Percy had a real problem with that. Uh, so all of a sudden he's got the audience laughing. And he starts mocking the Klan. In
the end however, he gets serious.
Narrator: "I know the terror the Klan embodies for our Negro population" Percy declared, "and I am here to plead against it. We have feasted
together at the weddings of our young people. We have stood together around the graves of our loved ones. We have stood together and
undivided."
John Barry, Historian: And he asks even the Klansman, he said, we want you to come home, come back to this community, leave the Klan. It
was just a tremendous speech.
Narrator: "At the close of Father's speech," Will wrote, "the crowd went wild-shouting and cheering." That evening, they passed a resolution
condemning the Klan.
Tony Dunbar, Author: This didn't happen anywhere else in the South. That the leadership of a rural community would stand up and confront
and defeat the Ku Klux Klan at that period is unprecedented.
Narrator: "Our town was saved," Will wrote, "righteousness had prevailed." LeRoy's victory had brought the Percys closer together-uniting
them with a sense of honor and purpose.
But the Mississippi River would soon threaten Greenville and test the bond between father and son.
Narrator: In the autumn of 1926 violent storms pelted the northern United States engorging streams and rivers. The arteries drained south
funneling the waters of a continent into the Mississippi. By March 1927 huge swells reached the top of the Delta. Greenville was only a hundred
miles down-river.
John Barry, Historian: Just imagine a force that's more than a mile wide, maybe a hundred feet deep and it's moving at nine miles an hour.
Think of what's behind that. Clearly, it is something to be feared. I mean it's the greatest geological force in the United States.
Narrator: It was a force the Army Corps of Engineers thought it could control. The Corps had built levees, some four stories high-on both banks
of the river-running the 1,100-mile span from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans.
John Barry, Historian: If you looked at these levees at low water, they looked like great, impregnable, fortresses. In 1926 for the first time in
the official report of the Army Engineers, they say that they are now in a position to prevent the damaging impact of floods on the lower
Mississippi Valley. Classic hubris.
Narrator: April brought record downpours. By the middle of the month, the first government-built levee crumbled in Dorena, Missouri. The
surge of water pushed south bursting more levees, flooding more than a million acres of land and leaving 50,000 people homeless. The Delta was
next.
Pete Daniel, Historian: So here comes this crest down the river at such a volume that some rivers are actually backing up because the
Mississippi is so full of water that, for example, the Arkansas River, it starts flowing backward because the Mississippi is so high it pushes it
back. So that's the kind of water we're talking about, this enormous amount of water coming down the river.
Irene LeLouis, Resident: When that river gets to the top of the levee is lapping over, it is guarded. Arkansas people guard the levee against
Mississippi people; Mississippi people guard the levee against the Arkansas people. Afraid somebody will blow the levee and turn the water loose
on the other side. If I blow your side of the levee, you're going to get washed off of the face of the Earth and I'm going to stay dry, because the
water didn't come my way. It went your way.
Narrator: The wall of water kept pushing south. Levees began to collapse along the Arkansas River. It was already the worst flood on record and
it was aiming all its force at Greenville. In desperation, Percy and his fellow planters pulled their workers from the fields to do battle with the
river. They became part of an army of 30,000 men, including convicts, who struggled to raise the height of the levees with rows of sandbags.
Still, the river continued to rise. When even more men were needed on the levees, Greenville's police resorted to force.
Mildred Commodore, Resident: They started going through Greenville and taking all of the black men-this is another thing that I can remember
so plainly-all of the black people, even kids out of school, to go and protect the levee and almost man for man or boy for boy the whites had guns
on and the others had nothing but picks and shovels.
Maurice Sisson, Resident: Shotguns, they just herded them up and drove them to the levee. Right down Nelson Street, that was the Negro drag
at the time and they just got them off the streets and just carried them right down to the levee, started them to work.
Narrator: White residents began to panic. Those who could afford it boarded trains leaving the region. Upriver from Greenville, at a great bend
in the river-the Mounds Landing levee was showing signs of trouble. On Good Friday, the Delta was battered by the most savage storm of them
all. As much as 15 inches of rain fell in 18 hours. One resident recorded in his diary, "Heaven spare us!" The Mounds Landing levee was
beginning to crumble.
Pete Daniel, Historian: It's cold, damp, raining. The break is increasing. The water's washing over top of the levee and, according to some
accounts, the-the levee starts feeling loose.
John Barry, Historian: The water started rising an inch an hour. That's fast. That's two feet a day. There is a limit to how high you can build
sandbags.
Billy Payne, Resident: They didn't think it was going to hold. In fact, it was getting worse by the minute. They throwing all the sandbags in there
they could, and it just, but it just kept getting bigger and bigger and they...they couldn't stop it.
John Barry, Historian: The men working on the sandbags know full well that there's no way that this thing is going to hold... and they start to
abandon their position, and the national guard officer orders rifles held on them and threatens to shoot them if they leave.
John Tigrett, Resident: And these fellows were filling their sacks with sand. And my stepfather, he noticed that...at the bottom of the levee
some water started coming out. And he grabbed my hand. Grabbed my arm I guess and he said, run Johnny boy. Run for your life.
John Barry, Historian: And the levee starts shaking and rumbling. And men start running and all of a sudden, a big section of the levee, several
hundred feet wide, just sort of pushes out, and carries men with it.
John Tigrett, Resident: You could hear them screaming, yelling, blood curdling levels. And uh, they were gone. See, you let the Mississippi out,
and uh, you could almost hear it yelling. It's free. I'm free again. And man it came out with a roar. Oh. My step-father said to me, God damn, now
remember Johnny boy, you'll have a lot of close calls in your life, you're not going to have any closer one than this one tonight.
Narrator: The break at Mounds Landing released more than double the volume of Niagara Falls. It flooded an area 50 miles wide and 100 miles
long. It put water over the tops of houses in Yazoo city- seventy-five miles away. The deluge was cascading south through the cotton fields of
Washington County. It was only a matter of hours before the water reached Greenville-inundating the city from the rear. LeRoy Percy now faced
total disaster. The river was seizing his empire. Up in his room, LeRoy's son was writing poetry. Will had been working feverishly through the
night. "I was in a writer's tantrum," he would later confess. The water rolled towards Greenville, wiping out whole forests and farms.
Maurice Sisson, Resident: It was a sight to see, there's no doubt about it. It's hard to describe. It's just...it just had a force to it. It was just
(MAKES NOISE).
Josephine Thomas, Resident: Oh, my Lord. It was coming from every which way. I was so scared. I didn't know what had happened. I'll tell
you the truth. Come late that evening, you couldn't see nothing but water, and you had people hollering, you know scared and running every
which way, you know. And people get in their boats and things and go searching for them.
David Cober, Resident: When it got light enough for us to see, you could see horses, cows and dogs and everything else, right in that water,
drowning. I thought we was all going to drown.
Narrator: The flood finally reached Greenville in the early morning hours of Friday, April 22.
Sarah Percy, Resident: I looked up and said, oh, I see it coming. It's coming. And it was creeping into the gutters. But it was coming fast. Not
heavy waves, just seeping in, but I tell you, seeping in a hurry.
Narrator: Ten feet of water inundated downtown. The current at the intersection of Broadway and Main turned deadly.
Maurice Sisson, Resident: You could just see the livestock floating dead in ... in the waters. You know young children at that time knew
everybody's horse and everybody's cow, you'd say, there goes Mr. Fowler's cow, there goes Mr. Williams' horse, you know just bloated and
floating.
Narrator: Some residents found safety in the upper floors of stores and churches. Others clung to rooftops. Anyone with a boat was pressed into
service.
John Tigrett, Resident: I had a sea sled at that time with about a 25 or 30 horse power motor ... and I became a rescue captain. Which was a
great event for me at that time, fourteen. And so every day we had...assigned certain routes, and we'd go out, pick these people up and bring them
back to the high grounds and keep going on my route.
Well I saw these three people. Two kids and what I thought was a very fat black woman on top of a cotton house. She got in. She said, fore god
that child my baby's coming. And I said what did you say? She said, I said fore god my baby's coming. Well I said, can you just wait. It'll only
take forty minutes to get to get you to the high ground and they'll look after you. She said no. She said he's coming now. And I thought what in
the world. What I do? And she said don't worry, said just be real gentle with it. Said just take his head and pull him slowly, and said he'll come on
out. I'll push. And she pushed, and I pulled, and here was a little baby boy. I then dipped him in the Mississippi River floodwater and uh, hit him
a couple times, and he started crying. And she says give him to me, I'll take him on my breast, and she lay down, she's still in the dirty water, and
she took this baby and put him on her breast.
Well, I think I cried. That's all I remember. Uh, my first experience at being a midwife. Anyway, I untied the boat and when we got close to the
high ground I hollered I said look I've got a new baby, just born, got the mother up, and as she stepped out of the boat, she turned to me and said
what's your name son? I said John. She said, I'm going to name this baby John. That's the last I saw of her. An amazing woman. Bless her.
Amazing woman
Narrator: "For thirty-six hours the Delta was in turmoil, in movement, in terror," Will wrote. "Then the water covered everything, and a great
quiet settled down."
"Father looked somberly over the drowning town," Will noted. "He was tired."
But there was work to do. LeRoy immediately began raising money for his devastated community, and appointed his son head of the flood relief
committee.
The task before Will was enormous. Up until now, Will was known only for being his father's son. Now at age forty-two, he would have the
chance to prove himself worthy of the Percy name.
Narrator: Within days, the deluge had covered twenty-seven thousand square miles, an area the size of four New England states. "The flood,"
one preacher said, "had spread as wide as God's arms." More than a thousand people were dead. Washington County was hardest hit. The water
washed away twenty-two hundred buildings; damaged or destroyed thousands more. It displaced tens of thousands of people.
Josephine Thomas, Resident: We lose a few clothes and furniture. We lost everything we had. What little we had. Ain't nobody had too much,
but you know whatever it mean a whole lot to you because you ain't had nothing else.
Narrator: As the rescue efforts expanded, rowboats and skiffs followed power lines to farms and houses.
Many whites were evacuated from the region. Blacks were rounded up from the countryside and deposited on Greenville's levee- a narrow island
of high ground with the river on one side, and flooded land on the other.
Two days after the Mounds Landing break, more than ten thousand refugees crammed the eight-foot-wide crown of the levee- in a line that
stretched over five miles.
Pete Daniel, Historian: There were no tents to start with. It was just a few blankets to start with. You can see them stretching across a little
frame to try to make a tent-like place to stay out of the weather, which was really bad. It was April. It was rainy. It was cold. These people had
been out in rescue boats. It was miserable.
The city's water supply was contaminated- its food supply destroyed. With no sanitation facilities, the refugees were at risk for typhoid and
cholera.
For Will Percy, there was only one honorable course to take. Evacuate the black refugees to safer havens down-river.
Will immediately called a meeting of the town's relief committee. Convinced that he spoke for his father, the committee agreed to Will's call for
an evacuation order.
When a group of planters learned of the plan, they were furious. Afraid that they would lose their workers, they demanded that Will rescind the
order.
Pete Daniel, Historian: The planters reasoned that if these people ever got away, they may never come back. They wanted to ensure that they
had laborers to try to finish out their cotton crop if the water went down that year.
This was a perfect example of that mentality that Mississippi planters had. It didn't really matter if these people were uncomfortable. It didn't
really matter if they were starving. It probably wouldn't have really mattered a whole lot if a lot of 'em had died for one reason or another. They
were gonna keep their laborers and that's just ruthless contempt for human beings.
Narrator: Will was appalled by the planter's demands, and refused to budge. Undaunted, they took their case directly to his father. The next
morning, LeRoy Percy went searching for his son.
John Barry, Historian: LeRoy finds Will on the levee. It's a war scene. There are refugees everywhere. They begin to take a walk. LeRoy is
suggesting gently that perhaps evacuation was not the best decision to make. Will is saying it's the only decision. LeRoy disagrees. Will is
stubborn, insists, there is no way he could do anything else.
Narrator: While they are talking, 500 white women and children are loaded on one of the barges and the loading of the blacks has begun.
Steamers and barges had come from all over the river. There are enough steamers essentially to evacuate the entire city in a day. The captains are
told to stand by. Finally LeRoy gets out of Will one concession, that he will meet with that committee once again to discuss the decision before
everyone is loaded.
Then, without Will's knowledge, LeRoy approached each member of the relief committee. He too, feared that an exodus of blacks would prove
disastrous. His son, he said, had spoken only for himself.
When the committee reconvened a few hours later, they dealt Will a stunning blow. To a man-the members now opposed the evacuation.
John Barry, Historian: Although he does not admit it he had to know right then at that moment that the only way this committee reversed
himself, was because his father had betrayed him. Had betrayed him personally. Had chosen Washington County and the empire he...he had built
over his son. The evacuation is canceled; the steamboats that are standing by leave empty. Every captain absolutely infuriated, over the waste of
time and resources.
Narrator: For Will, it was a wrenching moment. Ever since he was a young boy, he had tried to live up to his father's ideals of honor and
decency. Now those principles seemed to have lost their meaning.
The next day, April 26, an emissary from the federal government was on his way to Greenville. Secretary of Commerce-Herbert Hoover. He was
in charge of coordinating what had become the largest rescue and relief operation in the nation's history.
There were 600,000 refugees in the flood region. Food, supplies, and medical care would come from the Red Cross, which was setting up tent
cities on high ground.
By the time Hoover arrived in Greenville, he was expecting to see an evacuation underway. But when he met the younger Percy on the levee,
Will proposed a completely different plan: Greenville would become a Red Cross distribution hub. The blacks on the levee would provide the
labor. Hoover approved the new plan, then left town.
For the whites who remained in Greenville, daily life was settling into a dreary routine. A boardwalk was built throughout the downtown area.
Some merchants opened up their doors for business.
For African-Americans, life was very different. The lucky few found shelter in towns. Most others were herded into tent cities patrolled by the
National Guard.
David Cober, Resident: You were on the levee and you stayed on the levee unless you got a pass to be able to go in to town. You had to have a
tag on you. You was tagged. When you got ready to give you a...a...a...a shot, you had to get another tag. Your chest was full of tags. You don't
go nowhere unless you got permission to go. You had to have a tag on you. And it was just...it was really slavery.
Narrator: Some guardsmen began to abuse their power. Reports spread of beatings and rapes in the tent cities. Blacks outside the camps were
infuriated, but powerless to help.
David Cober, Resident: My own brother come down there to see about us, but he couldn't come in the camp. So I went down in the bushes to
see him. While I was down there. One of them soldiers walked up on me, get up. Put the pistol on me. And my brother had a pistol too. Now my
brother wasn't a...wasn't a refugee, but my brother put the pistol on him and made him leave me alone. And of course my brother hit the road,
went on, came on back to Greenville. But it was...it was...it was...it was some awful times.
Narrator: A week into the flood, life in the camp was becoming unbearable. Beyond the lines of tents, thousands of starving livestock shared the
narrow stretch of levee. Dead animals were thrown into the foul water. The stench was overwhelming. When the first Red Cross supplies arrived
in Greenville, they were not distributed on the basis of need.
Mildred Commodore, Resident: The whites would take it, take what they wanted or give it to who they want, and naturally the whites had
better means of getting it.
Maurice Sisson, Resident: First come first serve with the whites. Blacks, they were at the end of the line. They got whatever was left. Sometime
there was nothing left.
Narrator: The National Red Cross grew concerned about Will's leadership and launched a secret investigation into profiteering and theft in
Washington County.
John Barry, Historian: Will lost control of the situation. There were ultimately 154 refugee camps run by the Red Cross. Greenville, Mississippi
became the single worst refugee camp of 154.
Narrator: LeRoy Percy was not there to help his son. He was crisscrossing the country trying to rebuild the Delta's finances. "To falter or fail
now, he warned, "would mean the abandonment of an empire."
In June, two months after the Mounds Landing break, the flood finally started to recede. Some residents began returning to their homes.
More and more boatloads of Red Cross supplies were now arriving on the levee. Will desperately needed laborers to unload the cargo. Once
again, city blacks were pressed into work gangs.
Maurice Sisson, Resident: They forced them into service and I think they could have gotten enough without it. But that was the only way they
knew, and that was the quick way to do it, by force.
"I became a dictator," Will recalled. "But the consciousness that my judgements were often wrong was a continuing nightmare."
John Barry, Historian: There's all this internal hostility. He could not take this frustration out on his father. Will had been humiliated, and in his
humiliation he began to humiliate uh, the black men and women and children on the levee and there was no place else for this frustration to go.
Narrator: An influential black newspaper proclaimed that Will Percy's prejudice against blacks "is as bitter as gall."
Two-and-a-half months into the flood, racial tensions came to a boil.
John Barry, Historian: There was one black gentleman who actually had just gotten off the levee after working all night. He had gone back to
his house to sleep. The police were going through the black neighborhoods, going looking for men to bring back to the levee. A police officer
went up to this gentleman on his porch and told him to get into the truck.
Mildred Commodore, Resident: He told him, "You get up and go to work." And the answer was, "No. I've been to work." So he says, "You're
supposed to work. Go when I tell you." And the man got up to go in the house and he shot him down on his front porch. And I don't think it was a
black person with dry eyes in that town.
John Barry, Historian: All of a sudden in Greenville the whole city is electrified, incredibly tense over all this. Uh, there is real fear in the white
community that, who are vastly outnumbered, that there is going to be a race war.
Narrator: Will Percy marched into the center of the storm. He called a meeting of the black community at a local church. When he arrived, the
church was empty. One at a time, the black leaders began to enter. Amid an uneasy silence, Will rose to the pulpit. The quiet poet suddenly
transformed himself into an angry preacher.
"You sit before me sour and full of hatred," Will declared. "You think I am the murderer. I am not the murderer. That foolish young policeman is
not the murderer. The murderer is you! Your hands are dripping with blood."
Margaret Washington, Historian: It was the most amazing speech that he could have made to the African American community. After all they
had endured, after all the work they had done. He told them that the city of Greenville had done them a great service. The city of Greenville had
saved them, and how did they pay people back? They paid them back by being lazy, being indolent, and refusing to work.
Narrator: He demanded that they all get on their knees and pray to God to forgive them for the murder of that poor black man. If you're going to
keep your heel on the neck of thousands and thousands of people, and keep them as downtrodden laborers, ultimately you can't be nice about it.
And that's what LeRoy Percy knew when it came down to it. And that's what Will Percy was finding out, and going along with. The fragile bond
between the Percys and Delta Blacks was broken.
"Our people have the most troubling road to travel," LeRoy Percy wrote to a friend. "Some will be able to make it. Many, broken and
discouraged, will fail." In a year and-a half Leroy was dead-his dream of empire swept away with the torrent of water.
Shortly after his speech at the church, Will Percy resigned as head of the Greenville Relief Committee. The following day, he left the Delta for an
extended trip to Japan.
He would return to Greenville to rebuild his father's plantation. There, Will would live...and die in the house where he was born. He would never
write poetry again.
For many African-Americans, the flood of 1927 marked the end of an era and the start of a journey. As the Mississippi River finally retreated to
its banks, they began heading north.
Mildred Commodore, Resident: When you go North, there were chances of work, you know, getting something. If they had remained there
with cotton 50 cents a pound and meat, meal, and molasses, how long could they have existed?
Maurice Sisson, Resident: So many people wanted to leave here to go to Chicago. I believe some of them rode free so many got on the trains. In
Greenville you had the train was at ground level, and they were pushing to get on the train. I surely wanted to go to Chicago. Everybody was
going but me. They just knew they were going to the promised land.
Narrator: A great river of humanity was flowing out of the Delta. Within a year of the flood, tens of thousands of sharecroppers would turn their
backs on the planters of the Delta. The exodus LeRoy Percy had feared so long could not be stopped.
"Evil flourishes when good men do nothing."
—Edmund Burke
Rung Five: Thematic Significance—Fight or stand by and watch? Read the
infamous true story of Kitty Genovese. Then click onto the Carnegie Web Site: A Century of
Heroes. Listen to any seven of the stories. Write several paragraphs responding as to whether
you could imagine risking your life/getting involved in similar circumstances. Finish this ladder,
please, with a two-page double-spaced essay where you discuss how you do/can/would like to
fight apathy in your own life—give specific examples whenever possible. Concentrate on how
you do/might become involved when any sort of wrong is occurring that you could help with.
Volunteering where need exists certainly counts.
“Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts.
Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it…Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand
and watch them do it.”—Addie, Act. III
To Addie, the Hubbards are like an impersonal and inevitable plague, a scourge on humanity,
and whether one fights them or stands by in apathy, permitting them to feed off of others, is a
test of character that most of the others in the play fail. Addie fails too, since, being black, she
lacks the social status to fight them effectively. She nurtures Alexandra in the hope that the
young girl will one day escape the Hubbard sphere of influence. Horace also hopes Alexandra
will leave; he wants her to “learn to hate and fear” the Hubbard’s mean-spirited avarice. Horace
himself gets away for a few peaceful months at a hospital in Baltimore. He returns too weak,
physically and emotionally, to fight the Hubbards, and the shock of hearing that his wife hates
him and wishes him dead kills him. Thus Hellman demonstrates that apathy exacts a price—
those who fail to strive against evil are devoured from inside. Horace’s heart weakens, Birdie
resorts to alcohol, and both of their lives are ruined by the Hubbards. Furthermore, their
weakness perpetuates the evil they cannot stop.
http://www.enotes.com/little-foxes
The Killing of Kitty Genovese
Her public slaying in Queens becomes a symbol of Americans' failure to get
involved
By Michael Dorman
It was just after 3 a.m.
A red Fiat rolled slowly through the darkness into a parking space adjacent to the Long Island
Rail Road station in Kew Gardens. The young woman behind the wheel emerged from the car
and locked it. She began the 100-foot walk toward her apartment house at 82-70 Austin St.
But then she spotted a man standing along her route. Apparently afraid, she changed direction
and headed toward the intersection of Austin and Lefferts Boulevard -- where there was a police
call box.
Suddenly, the man overtook her and grabbed her. She screamed. Residents of nearby apartment
houses turned on their lights and threw open their windows. The woman screamed again: ``Oh,
my God, he stabbed me! Please help me!''
A man in a window shouted: ``Let that girl alone.'' The attacker walked away. Apartment lights
went out and windows slammed shut. The victim staggered toward her apartment. But the
attacker returned and stabbed her again.
``I'm dying!'' she cried.
Windows opened again. The attacker entered a car and drove away. Windows closed, but the
attacker soon came back again. His victim had crawled inside the front door of an apartment
house at 82-62 Austin St. He found her sprawled on the floor and stabbed her still again. This
time he killed her.
It was not until 3:50 that morning -- March 13, 1964 -- that a neighbor of the victim called police.
Officers arrived two minutes later and found the body. They identified the victim as Catherine
Genovese, 28, who had been returning from her job as manager of a bar in Hollis. Neighbors
knew her not as Catherine but as Kitty.
Kitty Genovese: It was a name that would become symbolic in the public mind for a dark side of
the national character. It would stand for Americans who were too indifferent or too frightened or
too alienated or too self-absorbed to ``get involved'' in helping a fellow human being in dire
trouble. A term ``the Genovese syndrome'' would be coined to describe the attitude.
Detectives investigating Genovese's murder discovered that no fewer than 38 of her neighbors
had witnessed at least one of her killer's three attacks but had neither come to her aid nor called
the police. The one call made to the police came after Genovese was already dead.
Assistant Chief Insp. Frederick Lussen, commander of Queens detectives, said that nothing in his
25 years of police work had shocked him so much as the apathy encountered on the Genovese
murder. ``As we have reconstructed the crime, the assailant had three chances to kill this woman
during a 35-minute period,'' Lussen said. ``If we had been called when he first attacked, this
woman might not be dead now.''
Expressions of outrage cascaded not only from public officials and private citizens in the New
York area but from across the country. When detectives asked Genovese's neighbors why they
had not taken action, many said they had been afraid or had not wanted to get involved. But Lt.
Bernard Jacobs, in charge of the investigation, asked: ``Where they are in their homes, near
phones, why should they be afraid to call the police?''
Madeline Hartmann, a native of France, was 68 at the time of the murder and lived in the building
where Genovese died. On the 20th anniversary of the murder, she said in an interview she did
not feel bad about failing to call the police. ``So many, many [other] times in the night, I heard
screaming,'' she said. ``I'm not the police and my English speaking is not perfect.''
There was no law, police officials conceded, that required someone witnessing a crime to report it
to police. But they contended that morality should oblige a witness to do so.
Six days after the Genovese murder, police arrested a suspect -- Winston Moseley, 29, a
business-machine operator who lived with his wife and two children in Ozone Park. Moseley had
no criminal record. But detectives said he swiftly confessed to killing not only Genovese but also
two other women.
Moseley said he had ``an uncontrollable urge to kill.'' He told detectives he prowled the streets at
night while his wife, Elizabeth, was at work. ``I chose women to kill because they were easier and
didn't fight back,'' Moseley said.
Three months after Genovese's death, Moseley went on trial for her murder in State Supreme
Court in Queens. He pleaded insanity and testified in painstaking detail about how he had stalked
and stabbed Genovese to satisfy his supposedly uncontrollable urge. On June 11, 1964, a jury
found him guilty. The following month, he was sentenced by Justice J. Irwin Shapiro to die in the
electric chair at Sing Sing prison. ``When I see this monster, I wouldn't hesitate to pull the switch
myself,'' the judge said.
But in 1967 the State Court of Appeals reduced the punishment to life imprisonment on the
ground that Shapiro had erred in refusing to admit evidence on Moseley's mental condition at a
pre-sentence hearing.
A year later, taken from prison to a Buffalo hospital for minor surgery, Moseley struck a prison
guard and escaped. He obtained a gun, held five persons hostage, raped one of them and
squared off for a showdown with FBI agents in an apartment building. Neil Welch, agent in charge
of the Buffalo FBI office, entered the second-floor apartment where Moseley made his stand.
Welch and Moseley pointed guns at each other for half an hour as they negotiated. Finally,
Moseley surrendered.
Moseley's periodic requests for parole have repeatedly been denied. During one parole hearing in
1984, Moseley volunteered that he had written Genovese's relatives a letter ``to apologize for the
inconvenience I caused.''
A parole commissioner responded acidly: ``That's a good way to say it. They were
inconvenienced.''
Moseley also told the board the murder was as difficult for him as his victim. ``For a victim
outside, it's a one-time or one-hour or one-minute affair,'' he said. ``But, for the person who's
caught, it's forever.''
In 1995, seeking a new trial, Moseley obtained a hearing in Brooklyn federal court. Some of
Genovese's relatives, unable to bring themselves to attend the original trial, appeared at the
hearing. Genovese's sister, Susan Wakeman, said outside the courtroom: ``We don't blame the
people who were there that night and might have heard her crying. Only one person killed my
sister, and he should die the way she did.''
The court denied Moseley's petition. He is now convict No. 64A0102 at the Great Meadow state
prison in Comstock, N.Y.
Over the years, there have been various scholarly studies of ``the Genovese syndrome.'' At a
three-day Catherine Genovese Memorial Conference on Bad Samaritanism at Fordham
University in 1984, City University of New York psychology professor Stanley Milgram capsulized
the questions raised by the Genovese murder.
``The case touched on a fundamental issue of the human condition, our primordial nightmare,''
Milgram said. ``If we need help, will those around us stand around and let us be destroyed or will
they come to our aid? Are those other creatures out there to help us sustain our life and values,
or are we individual flecks of dust just floating around in a vacuum?''
Michael Dorman is a freelance writer
Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.
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