In Search of Covington Hall

OUT in the hilly country of western Louisiana, near the Texas border, there must be a town called Newllano. It was certainly there forty years ago, and some of it must be there still--big barracks-like buildings, perhaps, huge rotting printing presses, a dining hall, land where you can still see the marks of a plow. Newllano used to be the home of a commune called the Llano Cooperative Colony, where former Wobblies and the like from all over the country gathered in some numbers. They lived, farmed, published books and a weekly newspaper, and for a number of years staved of off foreclosure. I don't know what became of the colony; I only know that for a time Covington Hall lived and worked there, and I don't know what became of him either.

Llano must have been near Grabow, though, and I know that 20 years earlier Covington Hall had lived there too. Perhaps he had stayed somewhere in the huge lumber camps, for he had been organizing the workers there, goading them into rebellion, publishing a paper called The Voice of the People. The workers had strck: the Galloway Lumber Company, which owned the town, had posted armed guards; and on a hot summer day in 1912 the strikers and guards had gotten into a shooting match that left three dead and 48 wounded. Perhaps the Galloway lumber camps are, there now, perhaps not; in any event, Covington Hall moved on, probably to Oregon to join the Wobblies there.

Hall had always called himself a son of Dixie, and by 1914, sure enough, he was in New Orleans, publishing a little magazine called Rebellion. It must have been something of a fond return for him, since New Orleans was the city where Hall had settled at the turn of the century, and where he had gone through a sea change that leaves me almost completely baffled, even more than do the other bits and pieces of his life I've found.

HALL was born in 1871 to a Presbyterian minister who seems also to have been an ardent member of the Ku Klux Klan, and when he arrived in New Orleans, a friend of his later remembered, he was "the handsomest young man in all New Orleans...the best dressed man, who set the fashion for the male population...the perfect Southern gentleman." At around that time, he worked full-time in an administrative post called adjutant general for the United Confederate Veterans, an organization that had a hard time extracting from the Civil War anything worthy of nostagia. It groped toward finding a usable past by erecting monuments to dead Confederate Army generals.

Covington Hall's name was on the marching orders of the United Confederate Veterans as late as 1904; but by the next year he was an organizer and propagandist for the United Brewery Workers Union. He wrote for the Labor World and promoted strikes and cooperation between black and white brewery workers, who like most southern workers had separate labor unions at the time. He began to write poetry glorifying the struggles of the working man. Clearly something had happened to him.

Perhaps he had just rejected his past. Oscar Ameringer, editor of the Labor World, later wrote that Hall got "tired of advertising the fact that his father had made an ass of himself fighting for slaves he might have sold to the Yanks and still kept as sharecroppers." Ira Finley, another friend, wrote of Hall that "trained and educated to be a respectable citizen, "he "rather chose to be a companion of the Toilers." Perhaps, but I think not, for Covington Hall was neither a cynic about nor a rejecter of the Old South.

He was fascinated by the Ku Klux Klan, an odd fascination because the Klan's political philosophy was based on the crudest sort of racial hatred and Hall himself was for his day an extreme integrationist. He read other things into the Klan, though, none of them things the Klan particularly had--rebellion, pride, struggle against oppression. In a poem in Rebellion, he wrote of the Klansmen,

Then, blow for blow and woe for woe,

They brooked no insults from the foe;

And side by side, and man to man,

They rode together in the Clan.

The pages of Rebellion are full of similar exhortations of comtemporary Southerners, urging them to adopt the Klan's noble, fighting spirit in the war against capitalism, with never a mention of the Klan's primary driving purpose.

Hall's remaking of the Klan reached its peak in 1915 when he founded a secret left-terrorist organization called the Clan of Toil, clearly modeled in its air of mystery and vigilante spirit on the Klan but dedicated to "bettering immediately the economic condition of the Southern Worker" and "making USE and OCCUPANCY the only title to land." Hall saw in the ills of the South in 1915--tenant farming, poverty, exploitative land and factory owners--a great many similarities to Reconstruction, when his father's generation had complained of the same things, but Hall blamed them on the North. The feeling of being exploited ran deep through the South from the Civil War on; Populists, exhorting farmers, drew on it, and Hall in turn drew much of his rhetoric from the Populists and their uses of the Reconstruction sentiment.

REBELLION, in any event, folded, and Hall moved on, virtually disappearing from 1915 to 1931, when he turned up at Llano. He published books of poetry, returned to New Orleans in the 40s to write a book called Early Labor Struggles in the Deep South, and disappeared again. The New Orleans City Directory lists him sporadically during those years, when he was in his seventies. In 1942 he was listed as assistant librarian at a place called The Nursing Home; in 1949 he was listed as a writer, at a different address. Someone interviewed him in 1950 for a scholarly article. The Orleans Parish Bureau of Vital Statistics has no record of his death. His last listed address, a boarding house, has been renovated and a doctor lives there now, and when I called to ask about Hall the doctor said he was very busy and hung up on me. There is still a tiny band of Socialists in New Orleans, but the unions, which Hall helped get on their feet, will have nothing to do with them.

So there it is--dead ends, 20-year disappearances, lost records and bad memories, west Louisiana buildings rotting back into the ground. It leaves me with very little, not so much about Hall but about where to place him, how to get a grip on his ideas. That he was a revolutionary seems clear, but it is far from clear why he felt the need to put the Southern past through impossible contortions to fit his own ideology. He must have been Southern enough, I guess, to be unable to disassociate himself from history. He must have been troubled about that enough, though, to look for something usable in a past that contained little for him to sympathize with.