Oral History Interview with Arthur Y. Lloyd

Syversten: Dr. Lloyd, I thought we'd start this afternoon talking about your military career and your work in the state Adjutant General's office, and I thought we'd start at the beginning if that's okay with you. As I understand from one of our previous conversations you rose from private to general in the military.

Lloyd: That is correct. I really had not planned to have a military career necessarily. Like a number of older people like me I was too young at the time of World War I to be in the army or navy. Matter of fact, I was only . . . I remember when I was a child--I 1:00was born in 1908--when World War I started, I heard somebody talking about the war had been going on in Europe a full year. I couldn't figure out how on earth people could fight for a full year because I'd been used to seeing boys fighting and I just couldn't see how it could last for a year. But I can remember the armistice night very clearly when they really shot up the little town that I lived in, in western because everybody was so excited about the war being over, and my father took me by the hand and took me uptown. We lived near the side of town, and everybody was up there. 2:00Men were firing pistols and shotguns and stuff. And they really riddled all the telephone lines that you couldn't get anybody on the phone that day. That makes me remember much better that when the boys came back from , we had one neighbor who was a captain over there, Captain [Donab?]. He was much older than I was but he lived two doors from us. And I had one cousin who was in the army during that war. And they was telling me about it and I listened. Naturally, when I went off to college over at Western, what is now , I found they had an ROTC unit so there was nothing to do except I had to join it. I was very proud to be in uniform and drilled efficiently and worked up really from a private to a cadet first lieutenant in the first two years in the ROTC. The uniform . . . we didn't receive no money in those days for being in ROTC, but 3:00I found that having a uniform to wear, a wool uniform at that, was very helpful on your budget. But I finished Western. I got a degree in three years by going to summer school. But without that I could not get a commission for four years of ROTC.

Syversten: Could you tell us what year this was, that you got your commission?

Lloyd: Well, I haven't gotten a commission yet. I couldn't get a commission. You shouldn't. In those days you could get a commission by taking four years of ROTC in some university. I finished in three years, college, so, therefore, I got my degree in 1926. But I couldn't get the commission through ROTC. So to do so I had to join what was known then as the CMTC, 4:00Citizens Military Training Camp, which was held in summers at various military installations over the country. You went in as a private on what you call the basic course for one month. You received no pay for that in those days, but you did get your uniform and bed and board, you might say, while you're in the post, and you had to go thirty days for that. And if you went to that for a full month for four years you'd get a commission.

Syversten: Hmm. That's rather rigorous considering you had had so much previous military training.

Lloyd: Well, but when they found out I was a college graduate, even though I was quite young, and had three years of ROTC, I hadn't been in Fort Knox for more than about a week till they made me a platoon sergeant. 5:00And I was a platoon sergeant till the end of the thirty days which meant that they had two sergeants in each company. All infantry companies had two sergeants. One slept upstairs and one downstairs in the barracks because they needed somebody with these younger boys to keep peace. Lights were out completely in the barracks at nine o'clock at night.

Syversten: Were these mostly western boys in the barracks, or were they from all over?

Lloyd: No, the unit I was in had them from all over. We had some boys but mostly and . . . southern boys. And some of them were right rambunctious. So 6:00the sergeants that were staying in the barracks, from the time the officers left about 4:30 or 5:00 in the afternoon till they came back at 7:00 the next morning, they were responsible for keeping them quiet and not destroying anything and so on. And, believe me, I had some experience that way because the first few nights there, they were very rowdy. I mean they . . . when the lights went out that's when they started making noise.

Syversten: Were they testing you?

Lloyd: Probably. And particularly on weekend nights they . . . one of the boys, I think, got a hold of a little moonshine because they had prohibition in those days.

Syversten: Was it pretty available?

Lloyd: Well, I couldn't say how much, but I'm sure it was available. They found it somewhere. And . . . but the only advantage you had was you had no authority other than that of a sergeant. A first sergeant has some power 7:00because he can put men on KP. Or as a platoon sergeant you could recommend somebody going on KP and get it done, probably. I remember one Saturday night when the lights went out, why, I was always on the bugle to play taps to turn the lights out. I slept upstairs in the barracks because I chose that place because the bed was right at the head of the stairs. If anybody was coming up at night, I'd know somebody was coming up. I knew already by checking the beds who was out. I remember one night, the first week, I offered to whip a fellow bigger than I was and he could have beat me up if he tried. But I think he was a little bit inebriated when he started up the steps and I told him to shut up and be quiet. He said, "I'll do as I damn please." So I knew he was bigger than I was, so 8:00the minute he put his foot on that top step, I hit him. And down the steps he went. And I never had any more trouble with that fellow. But during the second week, one night the barracks got so rowdy that we couldn't keep 'em quiet and they were throwing shoes clear across the barracks. If one had hit somebody it would probably have cut him or hurt him. So I got a hold of the other sergeant that was downstairs. I got dressed first and I went down and got him dressed and I said let's blow our whistle and take them for a march. I didn't know if I had any legal rights to do that or not. But, anyway, we got out in the company street, blew the whistles, had fall out, and we told them to fall out with their belts, rifles, and shoes, but not to put on their uniforms--to come as they were. 9:00Some of them were in shorts, some in pajamas. Anyway, they came down and lined up. I said, "Boys, it's after taps and the barracks are supposed to be quiet and the lights are out and you all are supposed to sleep. Obviously, you all don't want to sleep, you're wanting to have fun, so we're going to do a little military. We're going to go on a march." So we marched them across away from the barracks out in the fields where it had a lot of briars and so on. And we marched them about an hour, hour and a half, till they all got hot and tired, and then we marched them back. Anyway, we were out about three hours. [We] lined [them] up in the company street and had inspection, and some of them were an awful mess. 10:00Their legs were cut by briars and were bleeding. It sounds cruel, but I've often thought about it. I felt sorry for those Marines--you may have read in the paper a number of years ago when a Marine sergeant down at the north [inaudible] there at basic training marched a bunch of guys out and had them cross the creek and lost one or two boys. The creek was swollen with rain or something. But I can understand his problem. But we got them all lined up in front of the barracks and I said, "Well, now, boys I want you to know that if this occurs again we're going to have another march. Every night that you all are not quiet, don’t do what you're told to do and go to sleep, 11:00we're going on a march." I'm sure there was some growling and fussing about it but not before me. And would you believe it, from . . . each week they had inspection. I mean, the officers inspect the places and got the word from some of the regulars. From that time on each week they had a . . . some company got a pennant or something for being the quietest, and kept the barracks better. In other words, the best company for that week. We got it every week in my company 12:00till the end of the month. They were a good, good bunch of kids.

Syversten: Was the fact that you were a college graduate one of the reasons perhaps that they tested you pretty severely?

Lloyd: Yeah, I think so because most of them were . . . some of them were older than high school people but they probably hadn't gone to high school. And we didn't have any . . . I don't think they had but one or two other college students.

Syversten: Hmm. Incidentally, your hometown in western was the town of what?

Lloyd: .

Syversten: . Okay.

Lloyd: I was born in Lisman. Lisman's kind of a wide place in the road. It had a church and a schoolhouse and about a couple . . . two or three houses,I think, and a country store. 13:00But . . .

Syversten: Did you grow up on a farm?

Lloyd: No. My father was from . He was a teacher. My mother was a teacher when they married, and he was school superintendent. In those days you had to run for it in an election. He was elected when I was very small and he served two terms. And like the old days when it was traditional for the president not to serve more than two terms, why, none of the officials in that county got to serve more than two terms. They just didn't run; the people wouldn't vote for them. But my father was county school superintendent and served two terms, and about that time they changed the law and made it elected by the county school board. But he decided to go into another business. He wasn't making much money anyway. 14:00Syversten: But you were introduced to politics on a local level very early. I suspect some of that stuck with you.

Lloyd: When I was five years old I used to hand out cards for my father running to people coming to vote and people over town and the sort.

Syversten: The county there for is what?

Lloyd: .

Syversten: Webster County, okay.

Lloyd: The county seat is . And we lived in while he was county school superintendent. We moved to during the winter of 1917.

Now getting back to the military thing, the army changes its mind quite frequently. It changes the regulations. Every year up to that year, 15:00in 1926 all blue course graduates--blue course graduates were the last year . . . summer--all the blue course graduates had been automatically sworn in as second lieutenants if their duty had been satisfactory for four years. In the middle of our term at the army changed its regulations. So instead of making all blue course graduates second lieutenants at the completion of the course, they decided they should spend at least a year in the enlisted reserves or join the regular army or get in the National Guard and complete one year in one of those sources, and then take an examination to get to be a second lieutenant. So that caught me and I joined and enlisted in the reserves as a private.

Syversten: This is the year of?

Lloyd: '27. 16:00And so then I was serving in the enlisted reserves and we had no National Guard Unit in , so I was serving in enlisted reserves and I had to go to camp with them the following year, the summer of '28. Meantime, I was at first a private and then the . . . whoever was in authority, decided that that's all. That if I was a private and a college graduate and had completed three years in the 17:00ROTC, that I should be higher than a private. So they moved me up quite rapidly from a private to corporal to a sergeant to a first sergeant. So by the time it came my time to go on active duty with some army outfit--regular army--the following year, the summer of '28, I was ordered to extra duty as a first sergeant up at . was, of course, a permanent post right on the river the other side of . . . south of . That was quite an experience because I was assigned to a regular army company, the only enlisted man in the reserves within the company. All the rest were regular army. 18:00The first sergeant, who had a couple of jobs that I was supposed to be training on, was getting ready to retire at the age of sixty. The youngest buck sergeant or platoon sergeant, whatever you want to call him, was forty-five, and I was at that time not quite twenty. So I was sort of a curiosity. There was all these regular army men sitting around the barracks and there I'd walk through. They'd kind of twist their heads around and one of them would say, "Is that a first sergeant?" But it was a good experience, good experience. I learned a lot being an enlisted man doing duty in a regular army company. By the end of that time 19:00I was eligible then to take the examination for the board of regular army officers and, of course, I passed it and then I became a second lieutenant. Well, I was really lucky at that because in those days you had to be twenty-one years of age to be a second lieutenant. But when I filled out my papers for the enlisted reserves, the sergeant that filled out my papers asked me how old I was, and I told him the truth. He said you can't be that young--you've got to be older. So he moved my age up but kept the same birthday, of course. But he moved my age up so I was . . .

Syversten: By one year?

Lloyd: A little more than that, really. I'm talking about way back there when I first joined the ROTC. It says you've got to be eighteen, so we moved my age up to eighteen. I was fifteen at the time I took my first military training. 20:00So I became a second lieutenant illegally, I guess, because my birthday was the same but my birthdate, year date, was not the same. Then I . . . in the meantime, I'd been teaching. I was principal of a consolidated high school down in , down in Webster Co.

Syversten: Where were you teaching, and what had you majored in?

Lloyd: Well, I'd majored in history and political science. Most all college departments in those days were combined--history and political science. And I majored in that and I got a job. The county school superintendent was the fellow that succeeded my father. Of course, I'd known him for a long time. We had just gone into this consolidated thing. It had some good points, 21:00too, but it also had some weaknesses. And was not a large county, but we had six county consolidated schools that were working towards being a high school. We had several independent high schools. But the county school superintendent offered me the job as principal of a newly started county high school which they'd started three years before with a freshman class, and then the next year a sophmore and the next year a junior, and they were going to graduate the first senior class the year he wanted me to take the job. I thought later, I think the reason he wanted me to take the job is that . . . I knew that he had to have a college graduate 22:00principal in order to get it accredited. Of course, the high school diploma wouldn't have been worth anything to the graduates if it was not accredited. So . . .

Syversten: There were many teachers who were not college graduates?

Lloyd: Well, I was the only one in the school sys- . . . well, I mean the only one in that particular school.

Syversten: With the full degree?

Lloyd: Yeah. We had all twelve grades and one teacher in each grade, and we had three high school teachers and myself. I taught two classes myself. But they had . . . it was kind of a tough mining town . . . a typical mining town in west . Most everything was owned by the company store, or a company which had this big store, and so on. Some of the . . . some patrons in school 23:00had their own houses, but most everything was owned by this company, practically. And, unfortunately, they had a reputation--the miners--of running some principals out. Principals hadn't lasted very long. I finally decided that one reason they gave me . . . offered me the job was he needed 24:00to have somebody . . . had to have somebody with a degree, and anybody with a degree with any experience wouldn't have taken the job. But I took it and enjoyed it and wound up with a lot of good friends. Some of the best friends in the world were down there in that little town.

Syversten: Were the . . . was the animosity toward the principals . . . the high school principals in that area largely from the miners individually, or was it from the local miners union, or can you make any kind of differentiation there?

Lloyd: No, it's just that a lot of miners were kind of rough individuals.

Syversten: As individuals?

Lloyd: It's kind of like, I suppose, a western town 25:00way back in the 1890s or something. Nearly every Saturday night somebody got shot. It wasn't a place where they murdered a lot of people. Just somebody got to piddling with a gun and shot somebody. And also, a parent would get mad when one of the children were punished when he didn't think they should be, or they punished him too severely, and that caused them to run the fellow out of town.

Syversten: You did not get run out of town?

Lloyd: No, I did not. That fits into my military career, though. We had a contest in those days so all the county schools--and there were about some sixty or seventy one-room and two-room schools, and then the six county high schools--that 26:00were either two years or four years. I noticed that the school fair they'd have in the fall, or maybe it was the spring, but it had a prize for the school that was what they called the “.” Well, to me that meant military drill. Well, I got some boys . . . good-sized boys, and I drilled them in about face and various army movements of a small unit till they were pretty good. We put that on, I remember, over to the county seat during the school fair and we won a prize on that. But where my military training came in pretty good was because the schoolhouse was on a little hill and I lived up there by the school. Had boarded a room there. 27:00And when I was at home one afternoon, back over in the field in the bottom land where the water backed up from the river, high water, down below the schoolhouse, I heard some firing . . . shooting going on. I thought, “Well, somebody's over there target shooting.” So I got my army pistol and went down there and they said, "Professor, come here. We're shooting at bottles on the top of posts on a fence." I practiced with them a right good while, but I found that despite the fact that it was a rough town and a lot of them carried guns, most of them weren't too good of shots. I had been to CMTC and a year in which I was a lieutenant in the regular army outfit. I had made, 28:00fortunately, already an expert with a pistol, a rifle or a machine gun. And so I went over there and I didn't have any trouble knocking the bottles off. They decided I was knowledgeable with a gun and could hit. About the first week, too, another thing that occurred on the grounds was . . . you know, every school nearly has a bully. Some big boy that beats on little boys. I came around the schoolhouse one day at recess and I heard a lot of noise outside, and I went around the corner of the school building and the school bully had two little boys by the nap of the neck butting their heads together. And there were about forty or fifty kids all around them, some of them cheering them on and some of them horrified. I thought, well . . . he had his back turned to me and I sort of forgot--this happened the second week I was there so I was only out of Fort Knox two weeks--I forgot that I was principal. I grabbed him by the nap of the neck and kicked him, and I mean kicked him hard--sent him spinning. I think I heard later that I sort of cussed him out, too. When I realized I was principal, I looked around at all these little kids eyes 29:00about to pop out. They'd never seen a principal do that.

Syversten: It sounds like the kids largely, and the parents largely, controlled the school rather than vice versa.

Lloyd: Well, anyway, the word got out over town they had a new principal who could cuss and shoot and [to] look out . . . and watch out for him.

Syversten: And who kicked butts.

Lloyd: Oh, I didn't have any trouble at all, though my land lady, the dear soul, was quite worried because later on . . . I had one rule. On the county board we had one board member in that district that was part of the county board . The first time I met him he was up around the grocery. He ran a little grocery and dry goods store downtown there, and he was a board member 30:00elected by the people. The first time I met him he says, "Well, sir, do you believe in lickin'?" And I hadn't ever been. I'd been on to a teacher's college but they hadn't told me anything about that. I'd never had, where I'd had twenty-four hours in education but they never . . .

Syversten: That was never discussed, huh?

Lloyd: That was never discussed. So I guess I gave him a pretty good answer. I says, "Mr. Wallace, I believe in following the wishes of the Board." He said, "Well, we want 'em licked." So I says, "In that case, you'll get 'em licked." So I got together with the faculty and we laid down a list of things for punishment. Sometimes it'd be stay after school, but that wasn't very good if they lived in the country because they had to ride back. They didn't have school buses in those days. They had wagons; two-team wagons and four-team wagons in the winter 31:00with the mud and snow, but wagons with benches on the sides of the wagon and with a tarpaulin over the top, kind of like the ones our ancestors went to in. So, anyway, we had these rules and certain things among which was if you came to school . . . I figured that if they came to school of a morning it was my job to see they stayed there for the full day. Their parents expected them to. So if they left school without permission any part of the day and missed classes, the punishment was a licking.

Syversten: And you administered it?

Lloyd: Well, most of them. But we teachers agreed on that and we adopted them and so on. All the students got a list of them.

Syversten: And the school board approved?

Lloyd: Yep. And among 32:00. . . one of the things I haven't said to you, though, is that one of the things they wanted to do was . . .

(End of Tape #l, Side #l) (Begin Tape #1, Side #2) Lloyd: They had an outdoor court. That was bad because if there was inclement weather, rain or snow or something, they just couldn't practice. But they did play with some of the schools--had in the past--some of the schools, either eighth grade teams or first year high school teams or something like that. But now that they became a four-year high school, they got them accredited. They wanted to have a basketball team, both girls and boys. I was the only male teacher and the board wanted me to . . . in addition to my other duties, asked me if I'd coach basketball. I said, "Well, 33:00I know a little something about it. I'll help them anyway to get started." So I was a basketball coach, but it had one good effect on me. I had all the largest boys in school going out for basketball, so that helped me keep discipline. My basketball 34:00players would do what you say because they wanted to make the team. And so all the larger boys were on my side. I remember one day I came home from school, and that day, or the day before,rather, some . . . I think it was three girls and three boys left school in the upper classes along about recess time and didn't come back. So I knew who they were. And the next morning all three of them were going to be punished by whipping. Now, I never whipped any of the girls. I had a very good teacher who I judged was--not an old lady, but I judged she was probably forty. A big buxomed widow. She'd paddle the girls. I'd paddle the boys. 35:00And one of the boys who had done this was my center on the basketball team. [He] was taller and heavier than I was. He was 6' 3"; I was only 6' 1". And he was up for punishment. So rather than have an argument about the matter I called him in the office and I said, "Benny, you broke one of my rules and you knew that you broke it, and now that we've found out about it you're going to be punished with a whipping." He said, "Mr. Lloyd, you're not going to whip me, are you?" I said, "Well, let's talk about it a little. You're too big for me to whip, shouldn't have to do that. I shouldn't have to do it. But it's the rule and neither can I let you off without a whipping and have others whipped. 36:00So I have to have a choice of either whipping you or expelling you. If I expel you, the board will back me up. But now you're my best player and the only one tall enough to be my center and I just don't know what my team's going to do if I have to expel you. So I want you to make the choice whether you want to be expelled or whether you want a whipping." He said, "Can I think about it till recess time?" I said, "Yeah." So after recess he came in and said, "I'm here to take my licking."

Syversten: What'd you whip him with?

Lloyd: Paddle. Wooden paddle. . Hard wooden paddle which I'd whittled out myself. And my office was right off the study hall and all the kids heard him being paddled and he came out all red-faced and flustered. 37:00So that helped a little. In disciplinary matters I'd say it helped a great deal. But in the case of one of the girls who was also on the basketball team, one of my best players, when my landlady heard that my girl had been punished she went to wringing her hands when I came in. She said, "Oh, Mr. Lloyd, you whipped Mr. So-and-so's daughter today." I said, "No, I didn't whip her. I had her whipped. I'm responsible for it, but I did not whip her." She said, "Well, did you know that he always . . . every time one of his kids got a lickin' he came up and whipped the professor?" I said, "No, I wasn't aware of that." She said, "He'll be up here tomorrow, and I'm just so worried about you." "Well," I said, "I can't help it." I says, "A rule's a rule and I wasn't 38:00going to break it for anybody." So the next day I kind of expected him up there but for some reason he never came. And I found out later . . . I always let two of my larger boys that . . . if we got any mail at the school, to the teachers and all, we had to send somebody down to the post office. We didn't have mail delivered in our town. And I always let two boys go down there, if they'd been good. So as it turns out, two of my basketball players went down there and the post office was next door to the barbershop. And they, as boys will do, always a bunch of men sitting around a barbershop telling tales, so this old fellow was in there getting drunk, holding his liquor up and talking about how he was getting ready to go up to the schoolhouse and whip the professor. He was going to cut him down to size and whip him. 39:00He had a great big long knife.

Syversten: Oh! Did a lot of the students also carry weapons?

Lloyd: Not much, no.

Syversten: But some did?

Lloyd: We didn't permit that.

Syversten: But before you became principal, was that common?

Lloyd: They may have. A student was more apt to carry a knife or brass knuckles. But they're a very dangerous weapon, I guess, some of them.

Syversten: I mean we think of that today as rather common in many inner-city schools, but we don't often think about it in a country school situation in 1920 in western . I think that's a fascinating point.

Lloyd: Well, don't . . . this really was not in a good agricul-. . . what you might call an agricultural community. Nearly all these people that lived out of town were miners. And I think you'd find in those days it wouldn't have been unusual in the mining towns. 40:00But, now, my boys, instead of bringing the mail back immediately, when they heard that I was going to be whipped, instead of coming to tell me about it, they ran to tell their parents. One funny thing about that town was that most . . . a good many people had phones, but they didn't need phones. Anything of interest was by word-of-mouth. It would run from one end of town to the other in a very few minutes. So they went home--the mines were closed that day--and the individual parents were bully, strong, heavy-set miners. When they found out the principal was going to be whipped, they started up town to the barbershop to stop this fellow. Before they got there, word got to him they were looking for him and he got on his mule and rode back home.

Syversten: So 41:00you didn't have to face the fellow with the knife?

Lloyd: No, I didn't. I didn't see him for about three or four weeks. Then I saw him downtown one Saturday afternoon. He was off across the street, and I thought, “Well, I might as well face this right now.” So I . . . it was a muddy street, but I crossed the street and held my hand out to him. You know it's kind of hard to hit a fellow when he's holding his hand out to shake hands with you. I had my hand out and I called him by name and shook hands with him and I said, "Glad to see you in town. I've been wanting to talk to you about your children." So that kind of flustered him. In the meantime, when he was across the street over there, he'd been talking to another fellow and he'd been whittling. A lot of people just stood around and whittled. He had a great long sharp knife whittling, and I didn't see that till I got on him. But I thought, “Well, that's not even.” So I picked up a piece of wood on the ground and pulled out my knife and I started whittling. We was fooling with each other and chatted about the weather and crops and so on. He finally . . . well, we was still whittling though, and he finally said, "Professor, I was awful mad at you here a while back." And I said, "Well, I heard you were." He said, "I just almost did a foolish thing." I said, "Well I heard that, too." But he said, "I thought it over and I decided that if you thought one of my kids needed a licking, 42:00then you'd give it to them, and if you give it to them in the future, you let me know and I'll give them another one when they get home." So I thanked him. He was as good a friend as I had from that day on. Now whether or not that was a part of my military training, I can't say.

Syversten: Well, it's an interesting relationship there that seems to have a bearing.

Lloyd: Well, I was taught if you had an enemy you ought to face him. But remember, I only stayed in there two years. I liked the place. We did well. It was a small salary for those days but it was pretty good as teacher's salaries go. As principal for the school for nine months, I got $125 a month. Most of the teachers, depending upon their experience, 43:00got anywhere from . . . the minimum was sixty dollars as I recall for a new teacher and, but most of them drew seventy or seventy-five dollars. I don't think any of them drew over eighty dollars, not over eighty-five, I'm sure. So the second year we organized the county basketball association among just the county schools, not the independent schools, and we won both boys and girls basketball. So they raised my salary up to $175.

Syversten: Now, you won for your league?

Lloyd: Yeah, the championship for . . .

Syversten: Not for the Western District?

Lloyd: Oh, no, just within that county. 44:00Syversten: Now how did you get back into the military?

Lloyd: Well, I had . . . summers I went to extra duty camp.

Syversten: And then you . . .

Lloyd: And then I decided to go to Vanderbilt. I was going to work on my masters, and I really intended to take law, but I wanted a masters degree before I took law. Because I think a lawyer needs a good background in history and political science. So I decided to go to Vanderbilt to law school, and they elected me again but I resigned. In the meantime, I was also elected to principal over to my hometown, , which was a much larger school. But I didn't take that either. I went to school at Vanderbilt and then they transferred me into a Tennessee Reserve regiment and I was . . .

Syversten: But this is the Depression 45:00era, right? You were in the Depression period while you were going to Vanderbilt?

Lloyd: Yeah. So I went to military camp each year I was at Vanderbilt. We didn't go to , but we went to one time, and Fort [Screven?] another time, and so on. And so I kept the military on up to the time--I used to do just enough of this correspondence work which the military had in the way of training--lined up to be promoted. Not enough to be eligible to go to camp; you had to be eligible to go to camp. I figured when I was going to graduate school I couldn't afford to spend too much time on correspondence work for the military. So I never did. Moving back from one place to another, too, you lose something in knowing the officers 46:00. . . older officers especially.

Syversten: Sure.

Lloyd: Anyway, I didn't get promoted at all. So even after I left Vanderbilt and took a job up at Morehead, what is now . . .

Syversten: Now the years you were at Vanderbilt were . . .

Lloyd: I was there from '28 . . . the fall of '28 till '31.

Syversten: Then you went to Morehead?

Lloyd: Then I went to Morehead. But I got a . . . you know the Depression hit in 1929. I had gotten a job up at one of those schools at , , just out of . But the year was 47:00. . . I was going to get a masters. But in the meantime, the Depression started so that's why I had to get a job up there. But my, not military, but my major professor--you may have heard of him yourself--Frank Owsley, who was a great writer in southern history and that sort of thing . . .

Syversten: One of the Southern agrarians who was very well known. One of the twelve. The Vanderbilt school of thought, as they might say. So he was your major professor, and you studied your M.A.. under him. Later on I know you went back for your Ph.d. Did you continue under him?

Lloyd: Eventually, but I was there when they wrote that book, I'll Take My Stand. And I knew most 48:00of the agrarians who participated in that, and I had one of the first editions. [It] was autographed by most of them, cause I knew what chapters they wrote. And,unfortunately, sometime before I went away to the army . . . I mean war, I loaned that to somebody and I never did get it back. I'd give anything for that. But I never got it back. I don't remember who I loaned it to. But, anyway, Frank Owsley was more than a major for me, he was a real friend. And before I had got my masters, along about May of that year, he called me in his office one day and says, "Lloyd, I've been talking to the dean of the graduate school--who was Dean Walter L. Fleming--. . .

Syversten: Another major 49:00historian; well-known Reconstructionist.

Lloyd: ". . . and we want you to stay on here at Vanderbilt. You're going to get your degree all right, and we want you to stay on here at Vanderbilt and work on a Ph.d." And I says, "Well, Dr. Owsley, I'd appreciate that, but I really can't afford it." He says, "Well, son, now, wait a minute. You didn't apply for it and didn't say anything about it, but I took the liberty of talking to Dean Clements and we're going to offer you a fellowship to stay and work on a Ph.d." Well, of course, a fellowship meant several different things. So probably I shouldn't have said it but I said, "Well, Dr. Owsley, how much does it pay?" "Well," he said, "it pays five hundred dollars." 50:00I said, "Well, what do I do?" He said, "Well, we'll have you teach at least one class here in this department and you can still take a full graduate load.” I says, "Dr. Owsley, I appreciate your thoughtfulness and your kindness, but I still can't take it. I didn't ask you to give a reference for me, but I've got a job up at . They're paying me. It's a small school but they're paying me to be superintendent there. It's a small independent system, and they're going to pay me eighteen hundred dollars. I have some debts and I feel like I ought to pick them off." He said, "Well, is it mostly money?" I said, "Yeah. I appreciate the opportunity you're offering me, but it's the money." 51:00He said, "Sit here a few minutes and I'll go and talk to the dean again." Well, he came back in about fifteen minutes and said, "We've got it all fixed. Instead of fellowship," he said, "they offered you the same amount the others have been getting, and we're going to make you an assistant instructor. You'll teach two classes instead of one and we're going to pay you fourteen hundred dollars. And you can take a full graduate load." So I couldn't turn that down. So that's the reason I got a Ph.d., I suppose.

Syversten: That was a lot of money in Depression days.

Lloyd: Yes, it was. The tuition wasn't too high even at Vanderbilt in those days, and I stayed at the which 52:00was right across the west-end there from Vanderbilt. [It was] handy and the rooms didn't cost very much. And, as a matter-of-fact, I think you could get most any room in those days for ten dollars or twenty dollars a month. So that's the way it happened.

Syversten: And then you did your . . . you did your dissertation, I presume, under Owsley as well?

Lloyd: Oh, yeah.

Syversten: Can you tell us about it?

Lloyd: Well, my master thesis was in a period that he was very much interested in, pre-Civil War and so on, and he suggested that I do it in that particular area. I wanted him to be my major professor, so I did my master thesis entitled "The Southern Justification of Slavery." And when I finished that--I'll 53:00tell you this funny story about that in a minute--he suggested that I continue in the same general field but expand my . . . I could use part of my master thesis and save a lot of my notes on the dissertation. We decided the name for that would be, "The Slavery Controversy." It covered a period from about 1831 to '61, which was all familiar area to me but just a different viewpoint, slightly. So that's what I did. But the funny thing, I had a professor at Vanderbilt, he was sort of an eccentric type fellow, much the type that was . . . he taught political science and he loved to talk. I only 54:00had him there at graduate school. I thought at the time that he didn't . . . really wasn't quite up to the caliber of Owsley and some of the others. He taught . . . they had a course in constitutional law and I was trying to get in as much background as I could, and there was a seminar that only had one other student and myself in it. I had learned from some of the other graduates that you could get him off on any kind of subject you wanted to. All you had to do was ask questions and he was gone. But he was the kind of professor that if he gave you assignments, he'd expect you to read them. And during the class, why, you could talk about anything: politics, women, anything in the world, just talk. But when it came to examination, he had a tough examination right down the line of those 55:00assignments that you may have missed if you thought you'd get by with it. But I learned a lot of philosophy from him. For inst- . . . for example, he said one day to us, he said, "Now, you fellows go out of Vanderbilt here to teach, I'll tell you something about these girls that go to school." They only allowed fifty girls in the freshmen class in those days. "You'll have some of these pretty little blue-eyed blonds, as cute as they can be. Don't be too hard on them, let them slide by fairly easy. Don't give them an “A” or a “B”, but let them get by with a “C” if you want to. Don't fail them because if they finally graduate they're not going to teach. Now, you take a homely little old skinny girl, 56:00homely as she can be, be tough on her! All her life she's going to be a teacher, and every year or two or three years she's going to be coming back to the university wanting a recommendation for some other school to teach. But those little blue-eyed blonds, they're going to persuade some man to take care of them the rest of their lives and they'll never come back to the university for a recommendation." I thought that was terrible at the time, but when I thought of it later I thought it was pretty good philosophy. But what I was trying to tell you, though, he made me as mad as anybody . . . any professor ever made me in my whole life. I was doing this: he was my second reader. Owsley was my major professor, therefore he was my first reader. And I wrote a dissertation. This time I'm not talking about dissertation, I'll get back to my masters. I was doing my masters and I wrote a dissertation. So I got interested in the subject, there was a lot of material and that sort of thing, 57:00and I wrote it too long. So I turned it in to Owsley and he read it, made some good suggestions, but I passed it without any trouble, so I turned it in to my second reader. I got it back about two weeks later, and I got it in early . . . it was nearly two months before graduation time. He had whole pages marked across with red, making little sly remarks, "Bull," "Cut it out!" He'd write, "Ridiculous," in some places. And I'd worked hard on that and he said, "In the first place, it's too long. I'm not going to sign it. I'm not going to sign any masters thesis over a hundred typewritten pages." Mine was about two hundred and forty, double-spaced. I worked 58:00day and night. As you well know it's harder to cut down than it is to add. I worked day and night, some nights till three or four o'clock in the morning until I'd fall asleep. Get up when I could and start again cutting that thing down. I only had about five or six weeks to do it in. And I took it in there . . . I was mad when I took it in. And he was sitting there in the rocking chair. He had a rocking chair behind his desk. He liked to lean back and rock. He said, "Well did you cut it down, Lloyd?" I said, "Professor, I've cut this damn thing down as much as I'm going to cut it down. I've been sweating blood on it, trying to cut it down to what you wanted, and I haven't got it down that 59:00far and this is all I'm going to do. I don't give a damn if I never get a degree from Vanderbilt. You can have it. If you want to sign it, okay. I'm through with it." And do you know what that bastard did? He rocked back and just laughed and laughed and laughed. And every time he laughed the madder I got. And finally he said, "Well Lloyd, I'll tell you, you got that thing in here early to me. It was too long and I figured you were just figuring on loafing the rest of the term. So I decided that I just wanted to see you sweat awhile." And that made me madder.

Syversten: Yeah, it should. That's not a very good reason.

Lloyd: I think if I'd had a gun I'd have shot him. But he said, "I'll sign it without even looking at it." He said, "I've signed doctor's degrees 60:00that weren't any better." He's been dead a long time now. I've thought many times that I really got more of a variety of things from that man . . . that professor than anybody else I ever had.

Syversten: That's interesting. I've related to this, of course, the issue of the Southern agrarians who were considered, and still, I think, are considered to have been extremely conservative and anti-industrial and in that context anti-progressive. Yet your career in state government and in state politics has largely been with the progressive wing of the Democratic party and with progressive industrial change. Later on you headed the Legislative Research Council which was very 61:00progressive at the time it was put through. Apparently this raw conservatism of the Southern agrarian movement by Owsley and the others you were close to did not make you totally committed to their philosophy. Is that correct?

Lloyd: Oh, bear in mind they were all Democrats. They were conservative Democrats.

Syversten: True. But they were much more conservative, and they were, by and large, anti-industrial and anti-change, and yet you were more associated with the group bringing about change in , as I understand it from our other tapings.

Lloyd: Well, I'm essentially conservative. I'm essentially a conservative person. When I see need for change I'm as enthusiastic about it as anybody.

Syversten: But you were not, for instance, I gather, 62:00anti-industrialization . . .

Lloyd: No, no.

Syversten: . . . which is one of the strong points of a Southern agrarian. I mean, they really did not believe in that.

Lloyd: Well, I'm not quite the agrarian, apparently. I'll have to agree with you on that. But things like . . . you mentioned the Legislative Research Commission. I was in long enough before the war to see the need for a type of agency which would not belong to the governor, but belong to the legislature which could be completely unbiased and furnish the facts. They couldn't get any facts because they didn't have the machinery to do so. And the governor controlled all the head of departments. So they were told, whenever they asked a question about some department, what needed to be done or something, by whatever department they were going to want it done. 63:00Syversten: Well, we want to explore this in detail at another point, but I thought it was interesting that all those that were so strongly influenced by the Southern agrarians, you know, the, "I'll take my stand," that in some ways you were not made a total disciple of this very intimate group. Of course, your career has been outside of agriculture as well as in agriculture, but also outside of agriculture. Well, what about, now, your other involvement with the military through graduate school?

Lloyd: Well, each year during the summer I went to summer field camp for two weeks at various regular army posts. We had things within our regiment. 64:00I belonged to the 124th Infantry Regiment down there in . On weekends we had frequently no pay--they pay people for that now, but not then. We had contact camps in which we would go some place and make a study on, well, for instance, the Battle of Shiloh, and just spend one whole weekend going over everything. [End of Tape #l, Side #2] Tape #2, Side #1 6/11/86 Lloyd: All during the time that I was a Vanderbilt professor, I kept in contact with the military through these weekend contact 65:00camps. Then when I moved to Morehead, to teach up there—and, incidentally, you might be interested in that move to Morehead because Dr. Payne, who was president of the university or what had been Morehead State Teacher's College, asked me to come up and talk with him about the possibility of a job, which I did. This was while I was still down at Vanderbilt. And I was finishing up my residential requirements on my Ph.D. But with the two clas-. . . teaching two classes, plus taking a full graduate load, I found I could not finish writing on my . . . I could do a lot of research, but I could not finish writing on my dissertation. So Dr. Payne offered me this job up at Morehead and I talked to Dr. Owsley about it. 66:00And Dr. Owsley, as I told you, was a friend as well as a professor. He gave me, I think, very good advice, because he said . . . we had decided . . . meantime, we had a new dean of the graduate school down there named Dr. [Binkley?]. He said, "Dean Binkley and I've been talking about offering you an instructorship here at Vanderbilt." And that's when I first told him I'd done been offered a job at Morehead. He said, "I'd like to have you stay here, but I think for your own good, it'd be better for you to take it." He said, "That's a relatively young school 67:00and Vanderbilt is an old conservative school. You'll go up there as an instructor and maybe in three or four years you'll be an assistant professor, and then in about the same time you'll be a . . . another length of time like that you'll be an associate professor, and then maybe in ten years you'll probably be a full professor. By the time that time reaches, if you were here at Vanderbilt, being very conservative, it would take you a full five years to become an assistant and maybe another five years to become an associate professor. Fifteen years would be a short time . . . twenty years would be a short time to be a full professor. And if you get to be that in eight or ten years at Morehead, we could bring you back to Vanderbilt and we couldn't offer you any less rank than you had, 68:00so you'd become a full professor and gain time." That sounded fine but it might not have worked out that way. But as it turned out I became an instructor the first year at Morehead. The second year they made me an assistant professor of a small . . . relatively small department. And then I took a leave of absence in the fall of 1933 for one semester. To go back, I found that with committee work and eighteen hours a week classwork at Morehead, the coach of the debating team, faculty sponsor for one or two things, I could not write a dissertation. 69:00So I took a leave for one semester and went back to to finish it and did. So when I came back from that, I was promoted at Morehead to . . . the chairman of the department had decided--he was an older man and he had wanted to retire--and they promoted me to the head of the department.

Syversten: That was quick movement!

Lloyd: So I got . . . Owsley was right in his advice, but [it took] a shorter [amount of] time.

Syversten: Much shorter than he thought. [Chuckle] Lloyd: So I stayed on there till . . . still regularly went to camp for the Reserves army. And the next thing I did was to take a leave from Morehead in 1936 at the governor's request to come and start a new department in state government. You want me to continue there?

Syversten: Yeah, sure. 70:00Lloyd: Well I took a year's leave in 1936, that was Governor [A.B. “Happy”] 's first administration. And there was a period of time when [President Franklin D.] , you may recall, had a whole bunch of professors he got out of Harvard and Yale and various places . . .

Syversten: The “brain trust.” Lloyd: He called them the “brain trust.” Well, "Happy" was the new governor and thought he ought to do the same thing, and he pulled me in from Morehead and Jim Martin and John [Mannick?] from the of and various people to . He wanted me to start the Public Assistance Division, which was our . . . 's first participation in the various parts of the Social Security Act, which passed the Congress in 1935. So I wouldn't . . . he wanted me to take over, and the Act 71:00went into effect on July l, 1935, as far as was concerned. That was 's act. Something like the Social Security Act went into effect July 1, 1936 . . . our Social Security Act 1935. And I couldn't do it because I was teaching summer school, and I didn't think it was fair to drop out of summer school after class had already started. So I came down as soon as summer school closed about August 10th or 12th, somewhere in there, and started there. Of course, that's a different story than the military but it followed through on the military.

Syversten: We'll come back to this a little later. I'll make a note to myself, okay?

Lloyd: You want me to . . .

Syversten: Yeah, yeah. Highlight it and then you can come back to it.

Lloyd: When I arrived I found that 72:00I was Director of Public Assistance, my official title. "Happy" had already gotten two hundred and forty workers . . . field workers for the old age assistance, plus some in the central office, case readers and typist and secretaries and that type thing. But the way we . . . it would be amusing today to most schools . . . social workers, the fact that the way these were selected. The governor or one of his helpers called up his campaign manager in each one of the one hundred and twenty counties in and said, "We're going to start this old age pension," they called it and said, "we're going to need at least two 73:00field workers in each county. So you get somebody who's on our side and helped out well, and they ought to be educated, and let me have their name and we'll appoint 'em." So they were appointed before I arrived. I don't know if I could have done anything about that if I could have gotten there July lst or not, but I don't suppose it matters much. But the funny thing about it is we had two workers in , the smallest county in the state, and two workers in , which has the highest population, and two workers in which has the largest area. So I started off on that. The governor was very anxious, possibly because 74:00following the August primary, the November elections were coming up and well he was very anxious that we start paying people.

Syversten: Before the elections.

Lloyd: Before the elections. Well, obviously we couldn't get them paid before the primary, which came usually the first Saturday in August in those days. We had to have that month. So we got the people together and gave them some instructions on qualifications for old age assistance, what they had to have proof of and so on, and urged them to get somebody over sixty-five in their county so it could be passed sometime in August. The governor wanted to have a big thing and bring at least one or two from each county, if he could, 75:00to deliver them personally their first checks, and have public relations in the house chamber over in . I don't know if you're familiar with the house chamber the way it was at that time or not. The big glass dome ward was still there with no air conditioning, and the August sun pounding down through that . . .

Syversten: Through all that glass.

Lloyd: . . . through all that glass makes it awful. Now, I don't know how hot it got there, but it was unbearable. And I was worried to death because of those old people. We brought some of them in and told them the amount of money we could give them was thirty dollars at the most. They'd be eligible to draw less than that, usually. And to get them to have a stroke in there . . . three or four of them have a stroke and die right there in the house chamber, that would be terrible.

Syversten: Negative public relations.

Lloyd: Yeah. Well, 76:00my workers got some ready and we arranged for the workers to bring whoever from their county in there. We couldn't do anything much about the air conditioning. And we were going to have it about--in order to get in and get back--they were going to have it about the early part of the afternoon, the hottest part of the day. We managed to do some things. We got some big tubs . . . wash tubs. In those days icehouses sold big blocks . . . three hundred pounds of ice. We took . . . put wash tubs all around the speaker's stand up there and put a three hundred pound [block] of ice on each, standing it upright in each tub. Looked like a bunch of statutes. Put big fans . . . about thirty-six-inch wide fans right behind them [that] blew air out across the ice to the old folks standing up and sitting 77:00down out front. Well, nobody died.

Syversten: Your first public act was successful; nobody died. That was a good start.

Lloyd: For a period of time there weren't enough . . . you couldn't get enough trained social workers in any state, I don't think, and have them all trained. We only had about five or six we could find anywhere in . We got those in to help train these others, and they were the ones who would supervise the field workers, we called them. And a good precinct worker . . . every social worker, I suppose . . . professional social worker would deny that forever, but a good precinct worker isn't 78:00a bad social worker. They're used to dealing with people. They're used to dealing with people of small means, people who are in want, people who need something. They are very compassionate. And if you can just keep them from saying, "Well, I'm gonna give it to this one just because he's a Republican,” or, “This is a mean Democrat. I don't like him," [and] make them deal fairly, well, they weren't bad. And the way we got it changed pretty well over a period of time, I talked to these county chairmen. [They'd] been named county chairmen by the governor. If we had one county [that] wasn't doing enough work, wasn't doing very well, wasn't getting enough past the final test whether they got their check or not, I’d go to the county chairman and I'd say, "Look, we've got a little problem. If you want to be able to carry your county in the next election, and while 79:00we've not . . . we don't condone in anyway, and don't let our field workers just put somebody on because they're sixty-five years old. They'd have to be eligible. But if we can get a fellow down here in this county that hustles, you'll get a lot more of them on. And it'll be done fairly where you're not getting embarrassed by somebody suing us or something like that, than by somebody that doesn't want to do the work." And that was during the period of the Depression. And many, many people wanted to do the work at one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. So we were able quietly, over a period of time, to guide the county chairman into getting the kind of people we needed. It helped him out, it helped us out. So it worked pretty good.

Syversten: Fascinating.

Lloyd: We had the state divided up into districts with a district supervisor, and they were pretty well trained, good people. We usually 80:00sorted them out of the best ones from among the field workers. And so . . . but I thought I'd get . . . you know, being a political scientist, I'd always thought political science was too theoretical and not practical enough. That's the reason I took the job. Because I thought I'd go down there for a year, I'd see a little of politics, and I'd come back and be a better teacher. So . . . but by the end of that year I'd been too theoretical, too. I didn't have the thing down to the fine point I thought I'd have it in a year. So the governor asked me to stay on another year and I did. At the end of that time I was blocking all appointments up at Morehead because I had the chairman of the department on leave. Nobody . . . they couldn't put anybody in my place, except just “acting.” So at the end of two years, I just resigned and stayed with it. 81:00Syversten: I see.

Lloyd: Then came along World War Two. I was still a second lieutenant but I'd gone to camp. I was ineligible from the standpoint of age. I should've been younger to be a second lieutenant. And . . . too old to be a second lieutenant and . . .

Syversten: You always seem to have slipped through the grid on these regs. You . . . you weren't in sequence.

Lloyd: Well, the thing about it, I was in the infantry, and army regulations provided that to be a second lieutenant you had to have a vacancy first for the first lieutenant. There weren't many promotions during the Depression for that whole period of time. And if you got into an infantry company, you had a captain, a first lieutenant, and two second lieutenants. Then that was a big long ladder to climb. 82:00So, in fact, we were required to have a certain amount of correspondence work and things like that. But I told you I just did enough correspondence work to be eligible to go to camp and not enough to be promoted. But I didn't see any great value in being promoted at that time. So, see, I'm sure when Pearl Harbor came along . . . I can remember the day very well because it was on Sunday and I was on my honeymoon, and we'd gone out on the boat out on the Gulf of Mexico. And we came in that night and at the hotel was the first I'd heard anything. We hadn't had the radio on. (We) heard about the Japs bombing . And so I told my wife, I said, "Well, as you know I'm a second lieutenant in the reserves and I don't think I'm eligible to go. 83:00I'm too old, but I think that it's my duty to go." My wife, I think, took a very dim view of it, but she was very supportive. My wife was very supportive though. She understood even if she did take a dim view of the idea. But I wired the War Department. We had the War Department in those days instead of the Defense Department. And the question of my overage and grade and ineligibility would be waived and I'd be ordered to active duty immediately. So we got in the car the next morning and drove back to , and by the time I got there--it took in those days about a day and a half or two days--I had telegraphed orders ordering me back to duty. So I was in the army. And the army 84:00had a lot of mix-ups in those days, and they . . . of all things, I was ordered to Wright Field with the air force. I'd been nothing but an infantry officer all my life. A friend of mine, John Manning--you may have known him--he was a professor at the , and he was already on active duty because he was the captain of the reserves.

Syversten: Also in political science.

Lloyd: Yep. And he called me right after I got home and said, "I know that all the reserves are going to be ordered up. You're going to be ordered up and I'm going to ask for you up here in . I've talked to my colonel about it and we'd like to have you." I said, "John, I'm sorry but I'm ordered to Wright Field with the air force. He said, "What the hell do you know about the air force?" I said, "Nothing." Except it was the air corps in those days.

Syversten: Well, it was the new Army Air Corps.

Lloyd: So, 85:00I . . . he said, "Do you mind . . . your training has been in infantry, do you mind doing something else other than air corps?" I said, "No, I don't mind because I don't know anything about it." He said, "I'll talk to my boss and see what we can do." Ha, ha. So he was in the adjutant general's office, which was an administrative branch of the army. So the next day, why, I told him my wife had already gone up to meet me to find us an apartment in Wright Field. So I got a wire the next day after I talked to John saying my orders were amended. They ordered me to active duty on the same date as the previous orders but they added to them that I was in instead of Wright Field. So I called my wife that night and said . . . well, she called me and said, "I found an apartment." 86:00I said, "Get out of it the best way you can!"

Syversten: Apartments were hard to find in those days.

Lloyd: "We're not going to Wright Field." So she came back and . . . well, they were hard to find. I called John Manning back and told him, I said, "Now, look. You got me into this up there. We've got to have a place to stay." About three days later his wife, Sylvia, called us back and said . . . Sylvia said--it was the daytime shift, I was still at work in --she says, "I'm sitting in an apartment house. We rented an apartment house. We leased it from a blue print two years ago. It's almost complete, and we're going to move into it as soon as it's complete, and they have one apartment left. Do you want it? I'm sitting here at the phone; you're going to have to tell me now." I said, "Take it." That's the way we got our apartment. Now, I'm sure you're wondering about the second lieutenant. I suppose I probably . 87:00. . as far as the adjutant general's department reported it, I don't think they had any second lieutenants except me at the time. On the rules at that time, I believe it was sixty days. After sixty days service as a second lieutenant on a job that called for higher grade, you could be promoted. At the end of that minimum time I was promoted to first lieutenant. And I think, if my memory serves correctly, after about three months you could go from a first lieutenant to a captain. I was promoted. I was moved up every time . . .

Syversten: For the minimum period.

Lloyd: . . . for the minimum period up to major. When I was a major they sent me on a mission out to in the southwest Pacific. And while I was out there I was promoted to a lieutenant colonel, 88:00but I didn't know about that. I guess it was a month before I knew I was a lieutenant colonel. Anyway, I became a lieutenant colonel and I got my nose busted and they brought me back in July 1944. And I was here a few months, then they sent me to . I was a lieutenant colonel. It was awful hard to get promoted from a lieutenant colonel to a colonel. But I could go there, and when I came back from . . . I was over there when the war ended, and they kept me over there in the army of occupation till February of 1946. I was just 89:00about eligible to be a full colonel and they told me if I'd stay over . . . overseas for sixty days for safe . . . safe service on active duty for three more months I could be promoted to a full colonel. And I said, "No, thank you. In the first place you might change the regulations. I've had enough of that happen to me. I'd just rather revert back to a lieutenant colonel in the reserves because then it would be much easier to find an assignment as a lieutenant colonel in the reserves than it would a full colonel." And it turned out that way. I came back as a lieutenant colonel, was discharged, and went right into the reserves again. And in order to be 90:00fully eligible--I was told it would be a good thing to do--I went to out to . . . . And I was . . . while I was taking command at General Staff School, we had a branch that was organizing here in , so I brought part of my work here and I worked here. And we had a whole bunch of lieutenant colonels in the thing. Matter of fact, at least two of them were instructors. And the head of it was a full colonel and he had, of course, a table of organization, just like all army units do. And he . . . they had a vacancy coming up for a colonel and he recommended one of the instructors, which he should have, of course. 91:00And I was about finished but I had not finished my command staff school. And low and behold, who do you think got promoted to lieutenant . . . from lieutenant colonel to a colonel? I never have known who was responsible for it, but I was the one promoted. Shocked the colleagues all terribly.

Syversten: I can imagine.

Lloyd: But I imagine there was some . . .

Syversten: Maybe the governor or . . .

Lloyd: No, the governor didn't know anything about it, or the governor would . . . the governor didn't know anything about it, anyway. But . . . because I didn't take my state job back when I came back.

Syversten: Hmm.

Lloyd: I retired because my farm had been neglected. I'd been gone five years and I just didn't want to go back to the state to work, particularly. 92:00And somebody, [an] adjutant general or regular army adjutant general up there was bound to have been reviewing all these reservists and he ran into my papers and said, "What, Lloyd's still a lieutenant colonel? Why, we haven't promoted him since he was out in ." So they promoted me.

Syversten: Ha, ha. Well, fascinating. Can you tell us more about your . . . going back now, picking up some of these threads, some of your work as adjutant general and about . . .

Lloyd: Well, I wasn't adjutant general.

Syversten: Excuse me, I mean in the adjutant general's office.

Lloyd: Fine, fine.

Syversten: And then also the mission.

Lloyd: Well, my first duty was working under John Manning. 93:00He was the head of the . . . the requisition and records section. And I . . . my first job, I worked with John on the occupational management . . . occupational manual, relating private or professional occupations with military occupations so that we could fit in men who, say . . . of course, it don't tell about doctors and dentists and that sort of thing. They were the medical department. But on things like a . . .

Syversten: Professors of political science. [Laughs] What do you do with them?

Lloyd: Ha, ha. Well, they put me to studying what to do with these men. I was in personnel. I guess that was a pretty good assignment. But, for example, a jackhammer operator--he can be easily trained 94:00to be a machine gun operator. You have a large number of occupations close enough related--this may be a little break in there, I don't know. We were talking about this when I worked in the adjutant general's office. The first . . . I said the first assignment we had, John Manning and myself put part of the work on coming up with the . . . taking the civilian manual of occupations and transferring and comparing ones with the most easily picked instead of being specific military skills. And that was published 95:00back in early . . . early fall of 1942, as I recall, which simplified the work of the army a great deal not only in the reception centers, but particularly in the replacement training centers. Now, our office primarily worked with replacement training centers and reception centers because our job was to get troops ready as quickly as possible. And various corps would leave and we had requisitions. We received requisitions from every unit in the to get men from the replacement training centers. And according to . . . we call them occupational lists, 96:00especially in numbers. So we had a number which described a type of work or meant the type of work for each individual military position. We went on with that until we were getting in a great many men from the draft board all over the country who were not trained in anything, sometimes. That's about the time they started the Army Specialized Training Program, you may recall. It helped to fill up some of the universities in . . . I mean, not , but . . . [End of Tape #2, Side #1] [Begin Tape #2, Side #2] Lloyd: . . . picked a skill that would be needed. 97:00Most of them were taking things that were . . . mechanics, or physics, or chemistry, and things like that. And they had a quick effect on it because I think that brought a lot of . . . not only saved some universities at that time, but it brought a lot of them back after the war was over to go back and finish their college studies that they started during the war. They moved me a little later to a position where we dealt purely with troop movements and movement to troops. We'd get a wire saying . . . all the time we'd get wires asking for people with certain occupational specialties. They were coming out of these replacement training centers at this time to fill in units that had lost men overseas somehow or didn't 98:00have their full compliment of men to begin with. Do you want me to go into that question about the . . . how we got the data for where to send them?

Syversten: Yeah, fine.

Lloyd: We were . . . I found we were losing literally millions of dollars of rail time and, of course, diesel oil and every other thing the railroad used for electricity and what not. Why, a unit would need men for a certain occupation within a unit [and] they'd send in a requisition to our office and we'd fill it. But in the meantime, a unit may move from the East Coast to the West Coast or vice versa, or some other part of the country. And I know of several instances where 99:00they moved to places and it'd take weeks to get them back. So we finally got permission from a General Marshall, chief of staff, and our group there in the Pentagon, to send us troop movements on every unit that moved, every day it moved. And every unit that was on, at least, received notice that it would be moved and where. And that way we checked every requisition, even though we might have the requisition for a year but couldn't pull it against what we had and where they were going to be, and shipped them properly. It saved a lot of time and money over a period of years. It was during that time 100:00that they first sent me overseas to check all the training replacement centers out in the southwest Pacific area and see whether or not they were getting the kind of troops they wanted and needed, and how much delay and that sort of thing was taking place, and whether anything could be done out there to be speeded up.

Syversten: Before you get into that, could you give us a ballpark figure of roughly how much money was being saved by this new system? Did you ever figure that out or have any idea about that?

Lloyd: Well, we figured it on the first month or so we started. We saved over a million dollars that first month.

Syversten: Hmm. Well, I think that's worth recording.

Lloyd: But I might say that about this time they changed 101:00the system over the protest of several chief clerks who had been in the War Department since back in World War One. And we had some difficulty in doing so because their viewpoint was that the system they had been using had done all right; therefore, they wanted to continue. But that doesn't work. A peacetime system doesn't work very well during war. It necessitated our using only people who had been cleared for top secret material. They put us down in the basement of the Pentagon where we couldn't see any daylight. There were literally weeks when we didn't see any daylight ever. We'd go to work while it was still dark in the morning and go down in the bottom of the Pentagon, and leave after the sun was down. And doing that seven days a week, you don't see much daylight. 102:00Syversten: Very few people had access to this new information on troop unit movements and so forth at this level?

Lloyd: No. We only used it on a level that had to be. And all our talks with units in overseas positions, even and places like that, we had to talk over a scrambled phone. And sometimes . . . one interesting thing about that adjutant general's office was that everybody in there was a general. Not the adjutant general, but they were an adjutant general. So these units didn't know the rank of the person they were talking to unless they asked and they told them.

Syversten: I see.

Lloyd: I remember one night about three o'clock in the morning 103:00we were asked to get the number of troops available in every unit in the whole United States Army outside of the United States. And we got them in pretty much. Though I had fellows that were colonels, full colonels, [who] fussed about it and [did] not want to give it and so on, and I . . . he'd say, "Who am I talking to?" I'd say, "I'm an adjutant general, in the adjutant general's office." He'd say, "Well, I can't give you that one." I'd say, "Well, I'm sorry. General Marshall wants it at ten o'clock in the morning, and if I don't get it there I'll have to tell him you're the one that refused to do it.” I never had any more trouble with them.

Syversten: Did you have many discussions directly with General Marshall, either during the war or after?

Lloyd: Oh, well, no. Not me, no. 104:00Syversten: But did you have any?

Lloyd: Yeah. But not me, from the standpoint that that was done through people who had a higher degree than I did.

Syversten: But at some point, maybe, you could include some of your conversations with General Marshall.

Lloyd: Well, . . .

Syversten: I know you're on another topic now, and you're beginning . . .

Lloyd: No. If I went up with my colonel or somebody, or a brigadier general or somebody from the adjutant general's office to ’s office, I was just there to answer questions that they asked me or something. Usually they didn't ask those questions. The fellows that were up there knew the answers, too. Let's see . . . well, anyway, in the southwest Pacific, first, we almost . . . we lost an engine going from to Kanton. 105:00We thought we were going to ditch there, which wasn't very good . . . wouldn't have been very good because they was on the . . . right over the equator, practically, in very highly shark infested waters. If we'd lost the second engine, we'd have had to have been in the water.

Syversten: Well, who . . . who flew on this plane with you?

Lloyd: On that one?

Syversten: Umhmm.

Lloyd: No one from our office. I was the only one . . .

Syversten: You were the only one?

Lloyd: . . . out of the adjutant general's office.

Syversten: This was a solo mission for you?

Lloyd: Well, I . . . the plane we were on was really carrying mostly freight. [It was] carrying a lot of machine guns and stuff like that. And they only had about . . . outside of the crew, I think there mostly was baggage, a lot of mail, and stuff like that. I think there were only four other officers beside myself.

Syversten: What is the date on this mission 106:00 now?

Lloyd: That was in '44 . . . early '44.

Syversten: '44.

Lloyd: We landed in there at Kanton which was really a tiny little island out in the mid-Pacific Ocean, where we could refuel. First we had to go back to so they could put in a new engine. I thought they were going to put in a new engine, and I tell you, that was one of the hardest things I did having to get back on that same plane that I'd seen burning.

Syversten: After seeing that engine flame out, huh?

Lloyd: So the pilot 107:00. . . well, I happened to be the highest ranking officer on there, though I was only a major, and they put me up in a bucket seat in the thing. They didn't have any reclining seats or anything, just bucket seats, and not many of those. So they put me up next to the cockpit where the door opens to the cockpit. And when I saw this engine smoking I called this person over and told him to tell them up there. And they dived! And the bomber . . . it was a bomber, a B-24 converted bomber. They dived, and I knew they weren't supposed to be diving. It wasn't a dive-bomber. But they dived to snuff out the flames, so then it just smoked. And then we limped on in to , where if we'd lost another engine we couldn't have made it. But we were slightly closer to go back to than on to Kanton. But 108:00I thought they surely would put in a new engine, but I found out they repaired that one and we had to go back and do the same trip on the same old plane. But I made it. We stopped at Kanton. As I recall, the next stop was Guadalcanal, and the next stop from that was near .

Syversten: You went straight to from ?

Lloyd: Well, we were briefed in General [Douglas] MacArthur's headquarters for several days about the G-1, and then I went up to . I traveled every place we had a replacement depot. Also worked 109:00in, not New Zealand but New Caledonia, and I had to make a report, which when I moved from one place to another, had to be sealed into a-- photographs and whatnot--had to be sealed in this dispatch case labeled "Top Secret". I did fine on that till I got back to . The customs people in , apparently they got my orders wrong. All baggage had to be landed there. Of course, it's a main air-. . . one of the military main airfields there. A civilian field. And they had a customs [officer] there, 110:00they made me mad. They said to open my brief case, and I said, "I'm not going to open it." I was very fortunate that they had one old lady admiral on the customs board. And they said, "Well, you can't take it. We have to see what's in it." I said, "You're not going to see what's in it." And, of course, I was coming directly from and I still had my .45 on. And they said, "We can take it away from you." I said, "You can't take it away from me while I'm alive." They said, "You mean you'd shoot us?" I said, "I'd try." And I said, "I think I can." The old admiral said "Gentleman, I think if I were you all I'd . . . I know the young man has his orders. I mean he has orders to take this to the Pentagon without opening 111:00it. I would advise you to let him do it." That was the end of it. So sometimes the Navy cooperates.

Syversten: Sometimes Navy saves Army. [Chuckle] Okay. What else can you tell us about the adjutant general's office and your assignments there?

Lloyd: Well, another assignment was I was loaned to G-1, which was the personnel branch of the army, to work with this army Specialized Training Program to put all these GI's into various universities. They had a bunch of . . . they commissioned a bunch of deans, mostly with higher rank than I had. The dean, 112:00the college president, and so on did the thing up and they loaned me to them mainly because of my . . . what knowledge I had of the military which I had learned in the adjutant general's office. And sometimes I had a terrible time of it. Some of these . . . I started to say, some of these deans and university professors were really trying to pick out the best people for their own university, and they went by test scores and things like that. Not what the army wanted but what they wanted to get sent there. I remember they had a civilian whom I won't name 113:00because he was a very prominent professor, one of our best teachers in the universities. He'd been a specialist in the War Department for a long time. And the job I had at the time was . . . we had some civilians like this professor on it, and some . . . well, really we didn't have any career army people on it, but their jobs was to help select civilians for being given direct commissions during the early part of the war. And I think the reason the adjutant general assigned me to that, 114:00something like a board, was because I'd had some experience in the university teaching.

Syversten: Umhmm. Umhmm. Seems natural.

Lloyd: And these fellows would get into arguments over things and so on, and, unfortunately, it was kind of bad on me because that was way back there when I was a . . . still a . . . I was a captain. And all these other military men on there were at least lieutenant colonels or above, and therefore that threw me to be--by army traditions--to be the recorder or secretary of the board. And I was supposed to keep track of where all these applications were, direct commissions were being looked at and read over and that sort of thing. And some of them would 115:00get somebody they knew who they wanted to get a place for, and they'd hold it, wouldn't let the others see it, and all that kind of thing. I had a terrible time like that.

Syversten: The "buddy" system.

Lloyd: Yeah.

Syversten: But these are very prominent people who got direct commissions that you were associated with?

Lloyd: Sure.

Syversten: Then can you discuss any of that?

Lloyd: Well, I . . . not . . . not . . . well, it'd be better to not give names or anything. One of them was, they say, a very famous psychologist. We had another right famous psychiatrist. We had . . . some of the people we were giving commissions to, technically, we couldn't draft them. Well, you 116:00may remember the president of General Motors they made a lieutenant general. A three-star general, directly from civilian life. He probably didn't know it was a lowly captain or major that selected him.

Syversten: So he went from nothing to a three-star general overnight, huh?

Lloyd: Well, that's a lot of it. Well, I knew a lot of . . . I knew some of them myself. One of them . . . I'd been . . . I say I'd started in ROTC in 1923, and I started the military training outfit in time for me to get commissioned in 1926, and I'd been in the reserves from that time on. 117:00And I helped get people commissioned from civilian life, while I was a captain, who got majors and lieutenant colonels with the same background I did. Matter of fact, I got mad one night. My main boss in there, one night we were all . . . periodically, everybody had to serve some on night duty, a night duty officer. And my boss, who was a full colonel, liked to serve with new officers on the first time so he could kind of be sure he knew they were going to do all right and that kind of thing. So I was serving with my boss, who was a full colonel; not much to do on night duty, really, but you have to be there in emergency and telephone situations and so on. He got to talking to me about my background and I almost got mad at him. 118:00And finally he said, "Lloyd, with your background and experience, I would have commissioned you as a full colonel, and here you are a captain.” Syversten: Telling remark.

Lloyd: Well, anyway. Army's funny how they acted. When I came back from , they . . . I came back, stayed in an extra week or so, and came back to brief the southwest Pacific personnel people, G-1 and so on. And I knew the G-1 there pretty well, and he was in . . . a full colonel, 119:00but he made general shortly thereafter. And he wanted to know if I wouldn't come back and serve there. So I got back and I said, "I don't know where I'm going to go. I think I'm fairly typical of most army, in you don't ever jump in and try to get some job and you don't ever turn one down." So when I got back to the States, he, in turn, asked me if I would return for the next overseas duty to the southwest Pacific. And I expected to go. And then I ran into . . . when I served under him he was Colonel Lovett, Ralph Lovett, and he was then a brigadier general and was adjutant general 120:00for Eisenhower's headquarters in . So I ran into him in the Pentagon one day and he seemed glad to see me and I was glad to see him, and he asked me if I'd been overseas. And I told him I'd been in the Pacific and so on, and he said, "Well, I'd like to have you over in ." So I said, "I'm sorry. They've asked for me in the southwest Pacific and I suppose I'm going to be ordered back there within the next month or so." He said, "Well, would you prefer not to go to , or would you prefer going to the southwest Pacific?" And I said, "I just go wherever they tell me." I said, "I think there's a better war in than there is in the southwest Pacific." He says, "Well, you can't do anything about it," but says, "I'll go up and talk to Jordan [] about it."

Syversten: Oh.

Lloyd: So he had my orders changed and I went next time to .

Syversten: Before you get into Europe, 121:00could you tell us what was the essence of your report? You know, basically what did it say and how was that report utilized?

Lloyd: Well, it was utilized in the studies on the replacement camps training, because I made reports on . . . that's why they were all top secret.

Syversten: I mean they actually used it rather than take a report and shelve it like often happens?

Lloyd: Oh, yeah, yeah. But, what I did, I talked to the commanders and unit commanders on, “What kind of men are you getting? When you ask for a fellow trained on a machine gun, are you getting a pistol expert or something else, or are you instead of a tank mechanic are you getting an airplane mechanic?” or whatnot.

Syversten: What was the result? What did they say?

Lloyd: Well, we straightened the thing out from the standpoint of procedures and so on. For the most part they were doing pretty well, but there were some kinks in the thing. And there are some who never have all the unit doing 122:00as well as we like, so we straightened out some things and so we had a right good one in . But then in other places they weren't getting food or anything. I mean it was screwed up. I was on one little island [where] I hadn't had anything except some oatmeal . . . I mean cereal brought in there by the Navy for a couple of weeks. Those birds were going batty. Of course, I had to take the jungle course. I took that in , and that was a good course. They taught you to live in the jungle. And I really believe they could dump me down in most any jungle in the world if I had a long knife 123:00[and] maybe a few pins I could make fish hooks out of.

Syversten: Hmm.

Lloyd: I could live. The only thing I disliked about it, they told us to watch a monkey in the jungle. If you're hungry and you watch a monkey, you can eat anything he can eat. But I didn't like the idea of these monkeys scamping around these old trees and rotten logs getting these big . . . great big grubworms. Big, fat, white grubworms with yellow heads. I didn't care for that. [Chuckle] Fried grasshoppers were not too bad, or locust. But my report, you asked about was it ever used? My report essentially was to see whether the system was working out the way it should, and that you had a proper flow through channels of the kind of men that was needed. And for the most part 124:00it did pretty well. And the reason I know it was used, since I was retired from the army and so on, I ran into a fellow out of . . . one year the Retired Officers Association met down in San Antoine, and I ran into a fellow I'd never seen before. He said, "Are you Lloyd? Were you the adjutant attorney general?" I said, "Yeah". He said, "I used your report." That's the only time I ever heard of it being used, but I was amazed because I'd never been to his unit at all.

Syversten: Did you get any feedback on who read your report . . .

Lloyd: No, no.

Syversten: . . . when it came back from the . . .

Lloyd: Oh! Oh! Up in the pentagon? I don't know. I'm sure it was read up in the G-l office, and the adjutant general's office, of course, before it went there because they wouldn't have sent something to G-l without 125:00checking to see what it had in it.

Syversten: Fascinating. I know you want to talk about now but I might interject, did you ever talk with [George] Patton . . .

Lloyd: Yes, I . . .

Syversten: . . . in the Pentagon?

Lloyd: Yeah, yeah. Not in the Pentagon. Over in .

Syversten: In . Okay. Well, maybe you can carry us through the European part.

Lloyd: Well, Patton was what I call a soldier's soldier. I didn't . . . I saw Patton come through the Pentagon a time or two, but I didn't know him. Never met him until I was over in Europe . . . at the headquarters over in . And I was in the adjutant general's office over there when General Lovett was adjutant general for Eisenhower. 126:00And they sent me pretty soon after I was over there on a trip over into . And, of course, one of the places I went was the Third Army, which was Patton's army, and the Ninth Army and the Seventh Army, but dealt only . . . primarily with the G-l. But, fortunately, I was in Patton's headquarters the day when he had to call in all of his officers for a big meeting in . And I heard him make a speech almost exactly like Georg-what's his name . . .

Syversten: George C. Scott?

Lloyd: . . . George Scott made . . .

Syversten: In the movie version?

Lloyd: . . . in the movie on Patton. Almost exactly, except a little more cuss words, maybe. 127:00Very practical. Now, at this time I heard this speech was after the war was officially over and he had all his . . . not all his officers, but all his unit commanders at this meeting. And, of course, I was there with a full colonel and I was a lieutenant colonel at that time and we were . . . being representatives from the higher headquarters, we were invited to this meeting with him. And he was talking with his unit commanders [about] what they should do. He said, "Now . . .” and he made his starting off speech almost exactly like the movie. But among other things he said was, "Now, you've got to keep these men busy. The war's over. I want no fraternization of these German 128:00women or any Germans. But you've got to keep them busy or they'll get in trouble. Now, it's going to be a cold winter." [He] said, "Winter is very cold over here. I want you to go out there [and] you're going to put these men to work in these woods. The Germans love these woods. They're the finest people on the conservation of timber I reckon I ever saw. They love the woods. Put them out there cutting wood. We're going to need a lot of wood to heat this winter. If the Germans object to it, shoot them!" He said, "We won the war [so] shoot them!"

Syversten: Interesting statement. [End of Interview]