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Um The 7th of September. It is 19. No, it's the year 2000. This is Harvey Schwartz. I'm in Berkeley, California, and I'm with Dave Selvin. And um Dave, could you say something to see if this is working? And you're at 63 Fairlawn Drive in Berkeley. OK.

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Which has been my home for some 60 odd years. OK. Dave, uh, can you tell me when you were born and where you were born? I was born on the 12th of March in the year 1913. In the town of Tuilla. T. double O E L

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E Utah T 00 E L E. OK, um. What were your parents? That's the question. My parents were Saul J. uh Selvin and my mother Fan Fannie. Her old country name was Fagel. Which she translated to Fannie in this country. And which was then later translated

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by her daughter and her niece. To find you Which is, we, the way we knew her for many years of her life. They um had come to the United States in 1909. Uh, from The town of Grodno. Which is, uh, which was then 2009. A part

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of of Russia. It has since been through the hands of the Poles. The Soviet Union And now is a part of Lithuania. It's near the Polish border and not terribly far as I understand it from Warsaw. They Came to this small town in Utah. Through a

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family relationship. That reached out into a Jewish agricultural community or colony. Which had settled in central Utah. And started the business of uh. First raising chickens and later into turkeys. As a matter of fact, when you buy a Norbes turkey these days, you're buying a product

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of this Jewish. Agricultural community, her colony. My my mother's. Brother had married a woman who was part of that colony. And he had opened a store. In Salt Lake City. And then subsequently had come to Twilla, which is Roughly speaking, um. 35 or 40 miles. West

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and slightly south of Salt Lake City. Just on the edge of the uh the great American desert. And he had started this store in so in Tuilla. And because they uh they anticipated a uh Smelter being established there. As it was subsequently. And it became a

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major economic force in the community, of course. Twiller was largely a Mormon community. Established back in the late 1850s. By the uh Mormons Some of the members of the so-called handcart company who had come across the plains with their Worldly goods in a handcart. I remember

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meeting some of the members of that party when I was a kid. Fabulous old people. My father, who could not speak English. Uh, went to work for my uncle. Um In due course With the help of uh A couple of friends that he had made there

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in Twilla. He bought the store for my uncle. And he managed that store the rest of his. Days When he wasn't being a politician. He served 24 years and uh Legislature of the state of Utah. Uh, short term in the house. Which, which house are you

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talking about? Pardon, which house are you talking about? The lower house, uh, they call it the, must have called it the house or the assembly. OK, this is in Utah. Yeah, OK, not the House of Representatives. No, no, no, no, this is, this is the state,

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the state legislature. Got it. And then he served the balance of his time as a senator. Member of uh Three-man minority in the state senate of Utah. How did he, if he's a Jewish person, how, how does he get himself involved in politics successfully like that

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in Utah of all places? He, uh, he occupied a very unusual position in that community. Because he was a newcomer. An immigrant And because 100s. Perhaps even thousands. Of the Men and their families who came to Twilla to work in the smelter and the nearby mines.

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Uh, he became a kind of uh. Community guide, mentor. Uh, for these newcomers and when they had problems with citizenship. with bringing over their family and relations. And he uh became a um As I say, very, very, uh, friendly and, and close with that, uh, immigrant

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community. Which made up about, as I said, one third of the uh of the town's population, which at that time was somewhere around 5000. At the same time, he of course lived and worked with and had as his chief source of trade. The, the larger element,

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the Mormon community. Most of whom were farmers. Dry farmers And they And some of whom also worked in the smelter. And so over the years he He just developed his friendships among these people. But since we were the only Jewish family in town, And we were

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of the immigrant minority. He became a kind of a bridge between the two communities. Did he, did he have a political stance in some way. Uh When he was in the Senate of the State of Utah. Someone described him as a Democrat and he interrupted him

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to say, I'm not a Democrat, I'm a New Dealer. He was an ardent supporter of uh Of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And later, interestingly enough, uh, Henry Wallace in 1948 was yeah. Why was he, why was he for Wallace at that time? I mean, did he come

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from a left perspective or just from a liberal perspective? I would say more of a liberal perspective. Wallace came to represent at that time. Much more of what he thought of the as the New Deal. With its liberal elements. He, uh Among other things, and I

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haven't followed it uh as closely perhaps as I can, could. Uh, he, uh, introduced, uh, very early on, I think in the early, well, right after the war. In the 40s He introduced a Fair Employment Practices bill and uh. Legislature Uh, which went down to immediate

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and emphatic defeat. But at least it demonstrated where he stood. And affirmed his relationship with the Then very small. Black population. And uh the immigrant community as well. What was your mom doing during all these years? This is a big span of years we're talking about

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that your dad was, you know, politically active. Well, my mother. My mother was a uh school teacher and a principal in uh the old country. My dad had been sent to rabbinical school when he was, I think, 13. But after a year he decided he wanted

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nothing of the Formal Jewish religion. He was content to be and remained a very firmly secular Jew. And when he left for Binnacle school, he went to work, as I understand it, for my mother. In this school in Grodno. And they were married and they had

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2 children in Europe. My older brother, who is now dead. And my sister Older sister Uh We're born in uh in the old country. And we're of course naturalized. When their parents were naturalized in this country. I am the My younger sister, younger by a year.

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were born in Tuilla. Without the benefit of the hospital. And then a private home On the main street I remember a little brick place I used to go by with Kind of mysterious sort of place because that's where I was born. I know nothing about it.

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Later occupied by the deputy sheriff, as I remember. Was this private home um Somebody's private home who was, who was a midwife. I don't know who the midwife was. Probably one of the local doctors, but you were not born at your parents' house. You were born,

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you say, in his private home. No, it was in the parents. It was the house that they had rented. Oh, they rented. Oh, OK, OK, where they were. I see. OK. No, it was a doctor because there was a more a time of considerable confusion. The,

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uh, for years, I figured my birthday was on the 11th of March. And what had happened was that um The doctor had come Late in the evening of the 11th. And the birth apparently uh went on at some length. And well into the next morning. Before

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I arrived on the scene. And so that For some of them, and my parents included. Uh, my birthday was the 11th. But the doctor put the 12th on the birth certificate. It wasn't until many years later that I actually applied for a Uh, birth certificate. That

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I found out that I was actually born on the 12th of March. Interesting after that I, I celebrated that as my birthday. What did your mom work in um my mother uh in Tuila. My mother was with my father in the store almost all of her

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life. But she, being a former teacher, established very close relations with the Schools and and the teachers in Tua there. And I learned many years later at the time of her death, the time of her funeral. The extent To which she has Worked her way into

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the community. Both through the schools and through the store. And had acquaintances throughout the community and friends. And the many uh useful things that she did around there. Interesting. Uh, you may have covered this, but what kinds of things were sold at the store? Uh, my

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father later on adopted the slogan Outfitters for the whole family. was a clothing store. Men, women, and children. Uh, well, covers the whole gamut, of course. Everything from LDS garments to uh. Boots and shoes, I'm sure. And I spent an awful lot of time working in

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the store. I During the summers when I wasn't in school. I used to have to get up and check in at the store at 7:30 in the morning. The store always opened early in the morning because the shift train for the smelter which ran up the

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The street which cut across Main Street there. Uh, always left. Downtown at 7:30. Uh, for the morning or the day shift at uh at the smelter. And I used to get up in time for the opening, and my first job I always remember was washing the

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windows. I washed more damn windows than I can ever want to count. Did they get dirty from the dust from the smelter? It was partly, partly that certainly. And of course this was dusty country. This is desert country, desert country, yeah, it's dry and dusty. Um

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And Sometimes they weren't even dirty, you know, but they had they had to be lost. Yeah, yeah. Um, what languages did your parents speak? What was their native language? Was it their native language? Well, I guess you'd say it was Russian. They did speak Russian. They

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both spoke Yiddish. Uh My father served in the czar's army for 4 years, I think. And because he was the only one in the company that had any kind of education at all, they made him a company clerk. And I suspect he picked up a smattering

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of what would be Polish, I guess, at that time. And Yiddish, of course, uh, has an awful lot of German sort of thing. In the home our language basically was English. Uh Except when my father and mother decided they had something to talk about that they

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didn't want us to hear. What did they speak there? And then they went to Russian or to Yiddish and to this day I don't speak either of them. Now, if they came in 1909, um, had they been involved in politics at all, uh, you know, the

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1905 revolution and so forth, was there, in other words, they, was there any political reason for them to come, um. Probably was, uh, Harvey, uh. I'm not sure of the connection at all. Another of my mother's brothers. Was connected with, uh, I think it was called

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the bound. At the time, which was essentially a socialist, politically socialist. Uh, party And responsible for a great deal of uh immigration to the United States. And probably through those connections. They at least were. Aware of and knowledgeable of the political movements of the time. Uh,

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but I don't think they were particularly active, uh, in, in, in that respect. This uncle that I, I refer to uh. Uh, left the, uh, left the country and. Uh, under somewhat pressure, uh, largely because of this political activity. As did many others, of course. OK,

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um. This agricultural community, did it have a political, um, Sort of stance at all? Oh yes, oh definitely, uh, in the first place, the agricultural community, the Mormon part of the community. was basically Conservative. Not in the George Bush sense but conservative in the old Republican

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sense and Utah has long been and now afterwards was a uh. Usually a democratic state except for Short periods in the uh The Roosevelt era Uh When it had that At least one Democratic senator that I remember, uh, Thomas, I think was his name. And there

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was some Major activity by the Democrats, but it's by and large been a Republican state as long as I've known it. I was, and that was true of the uh of Tula as well. It was basically a very conservative. Church going, uh, kind of community, you

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know, the Mormon community, of course, is, is a kind of social phenomenon unto itself. The uh It's a completely lay clergy in the church. There are, there are no ministers, no uh. No paid staff or that sort of thing except in the top hierarchy of the

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church. And they, they have what they call their. I think they were either monthly or quarterly steak meetings. Which uh brought together the uh The lay leadership. Of the various wards into which the church was divided. And That was In one sense, a kind of an

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indirect way. A political organization because there were a great many political decisions that were made there, including, for example, the support for my father. Um And uh my father was always uh concerned to maintain the uh the friendship and the support of uh. The members of

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the uh The stake And succeeded very well, as a matter of fact, when he was about to retire from the Senate. They gave him a uh a present. Uh Copy of the Book of Mormon. Subscribed to him. That's, I mean, that's, that's quite nice. They're really,

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they're saying, hey, you know, you're OK. Well, it was a common theory, you know, among those Mormons, and I mentioned this. One pioneer who was a. Came in with the hand cart companies. There was no mail delivery in Tula in those days, and so it was

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a common custom. For people to come downtown. What there was at the time. To get their mail And this one man, John Bevan was his name. At the time I knew him, he must have been in his 60s or 70s at least. That John used to

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come down every morning, go get his mail, then he'd come into my father's store and then of course in the winter there was a big fat stove in the middle of the store and so he'd pull up a chair around the uh. Around the stove and

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go through his mail and then when he finished with his mail, then it was time for gossip, you know. But he used to voice the theory, and it's not unique with him. That in fact the Mormons and the Jews of course are of the related tribes

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of Judah. And that the Mormons are the I forget the missing tribes, the lost tribes of Judah. And the Jews were the main body of the Accept whenever you want to call it. And John, John Bevin was a great advocate of that theory. In a sense,

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that feeling of of relationship of of of brotherhood, so to speak. Um was true in my father's relations with the uh With the Church, uh, leadership in the, in the county. It was an interesting relationship, as I say, he, he functioned so much of his life

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as a kind of a bridge between this immigrant community on the one hand, this very new inexperienced. Uh And the old community, which of course were Traced back to the pioneers who came to the The area in the middle of the 19th century. And such, uh,

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and it was uh it was not an easy mixture. But uh It somehow it worked out. Yeah. It worked out. Yeah. Real, real interesting. Um, was there any Um, any political side to the Jewish agricultural group that you made reference to, to the small, I know

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very little about them, you know, as I say, one thinks of the chicken, one thinks of the, of the left wing chicken. Um, group over in, over in Petaluma, yeah, right, yeah, of course, I suspect it was very similar to that except probably earlier, uh, uh,

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I think the Petaluma group didn't get here until. Just a few decades ago, I guess. Yeah, later than I think uh you're describing I think. But uh the period I'm talking about is probably the first decade of the century or 20th century. Right. And uh I

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know absolutely nothing about them except that they were uh turned out to be a very successful operation and uh. The last I heard I had a cousin Who, uh, became a uh a representative of that outfit, Norbeth. Both, uh, he lived in New York, but he

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frequently come out to the coast here. Uh And they were still operating and very effectively at that point, and that was only 12 years ago perhaps. Hm. OK, I was gonna ask you about the smelter. Who owned the smelter that finally got settled in town? It

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was a Guggenheim operation. Uh, with its roots basically in Butte, Montana. And it processed a great deal of the metal from Montana, I don't, yeah, Montana, that's right, good. Um I guess the question comes up, um, was there any union activity or, or, um, any union

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activity tried there. During the early years of the uh New Deal During the early years there was a, uh, at least one, maybe two locals of the mine, mill and smelter workers. Yeah, that's what I thought in the smelter and in the mines. See, Twiller is

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located on the, Westward side of the Wasatch Mountains, the Wasatch, probably I think so. On the eastern side. On those same mountains, you just crossed over the ridge. You come to the big open pit copper mine in uh in Bingham. Now oddly enough, that copper was

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not processed at Twilla. That copper went to a plant in Magna, which lies in between Twilla and Salt Lake City. But uh it got most of its uh auras from uh. The Guggenheim operation in in in Montana. I, I guess the, the, the reason I'm asking

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this is, um, did you have any connection at all as a young person before you left town for college? With the, with unionism. Absolutely not. Didn't even probably didn't even know of their existence. I, I really don't know. OK, OK, and there weren't at that point,

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see, I left. I left Twella the first time in what, 29. And uh there was no sign of unit activity at that point and there hadn't been any up to that point, right? What's it like growing up in Tuilla as a kid? You've sort of outlined

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it too great. I mean, what was your interaction with the other people and how did you come to become a good student and so on, because you must have been a pretty good student to go to Cal. Uh Not really. OK, I just realized in my

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own head I made an assumption you're not supposed to make. You don't know those things. Well, in the first place, Cal at uh in 1929 or 1930. Uh, was not nearly as rigorous and not as much in demand, of course, as it is now or has

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been for some time. My Growing up in the community was a was a strange mixture. There were among the The immigrant population. Some remnants of anti-Semitism, and that's really where I first ran into the whole thing. Uh, where I came out of, uh, out of that

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community, uh. Schoolyard, uh. Fracuses, you know, um. You get in a quarrel with a with another kid and he starts uh throwing names at you. And uh a couple of wrestling matches. On the other hand, um. There was perhaps Something of that sort among the Mormon

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community, but nothing nearly as What should I say, uh, Aggressive, uh. Not That the anti-Semitism that I'm thinking of is. Was aggressive, but uh. Not as pushy. I mean, it, it just wasn't the same sort of thing and it was much more subtle and, and much

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more controlled so that you, I don't remember uh meeting it nearly as frequently as.