Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Spring/Section33/A.C. Jones

Overview
A. C. Jones was an American motorman who was nearing retirement for much of the period surrounding the Great Depression. He was born in Smith County, Tennessee, and also lived in Nashville, Tennessee, where he worked both as a telephone operator and as a streetcar operator. He was interviewed as part of the Federal Writers Project on January 6, 1939.

Biography
Jones grew up on a farm and started doing work there as soon as he was able. He especially enjoyed plowing, and believed that not enough boys in 1939 were learning the skill. Jones also worked at his uncle's general store in Difficult, Tennessee for a few years after graduating from eighth grade. In 1909, he started working in Carthage, Tennessee as a phone operator, and in 1920, He was convinced by his friend to move to Nashville and become a motorman. He worked on and off for 18 years with the streetcar company, which he said was better than most companies. He planned to retire with his pension and move back to a farm when he was 65 years old.



Personal Life and Family
Jones' fondest memory from childhood was the times when his whole community came together for a feast. On those days, the men worked and the women cooked all day and they ate until they were stuffed. Jones was five feet, seven inches tall and weighed two hundered six pounds. In 1922, he took a break from his job to take care of his sick mother, who died two years later. Jones was often unable to save money because of his high rent and city taxes. He had an even tighter budget when his wife's mother moved in with him for the last few years of her life. Jones had multiple children but nothing about them is mentioned.

Morality
A. C. Jones had generally neutral feelings toward African Americans but preferred fewer of them in the country and he didn’t appreciate it when they failed to pay the toll to his car. They also sometimes tried to sit near the front of the streetcar, which bothered him as well.

Jones was a Baptist for his whole life, but he respected everyone's church and refused to argue with anyone about religion. Jones wanted to raise his children well so that people would respect them and so he made sure that they had a good education and went to church and Sunday School. He thought that many young people weren't being raised properly and that bad things would happen to the upcoming generation. His observation of fewer young people going to church was accurate, because the Great Depression had an impact on churches in the South during the Great Depression. This was partially due to their bankrupcy which kept them from providing for the poor, and this lack was alleviated by the New Deal. Therefore, people put more of their trust in the federal government for a financial backup plan rather than their churches.

One reason he gave for the decline of the youth was the new amusements that they had. Jones disapproved of drinking and dancing, for they lowered the people's morals, and he never did either his whole life. Jones also didn't enjoy movies and believed that the content of the movies were indecent for girls to look at and were made to subvert the morality of society and keep the youth from going to church. He viewed football as a brawl, while baseball was a worthwhile sport.

Politics
Jones expressed concern about the advancing technology of the time and its effects on the job market. He noticed how there were tractors that could do the work of many farmers, and that most streetcars could be run by one man instead of two like when he started the job. He said that if things kept going on that path, many jobs would be eliminated and people would have no work to do. His stance on unions was that they were largely run by Russian Communists. He thought that unions were pointless, and that if the employer and employee came to an agreement, they didn't need a third party between them.

A. C. Jones had only voted for Democrats for his whole life. He said that he based his voting decisions on which candidate was a better man, and it was a Democrat every time. Like religion, he didn't argue about politics with anybody. At this time in history, Franklin D. Roosevelt was the President of the United States, and since he was a Democrat, A. C. Jones probably voted for him. Roosevelt created a massive coalition of voters which Jones was a part of. The President caused a major split in the Democratic Party by purging the non-progressive elements from the party. Despite this, Jones' loyalty to the party remained intact.

In 1939, women had recieved suffrage quite recently and many Americans were still not used to the change. Jones believed that only men should be voting in America, and he gave a few reasons for this belief. The first is that he saw women as pure and noble. He saw that the decline in women's regard for themselves and their sex was partially caused by their suffrage. He said that when women went to the polls and mixed with the men, they lost their womanhood. Tennessee was the critical state that caused the Nineteenth Amendment to pass, and most Southerners were still against giving women the vote at this time.

A. C. Jones said that children should go to church and respect their elders to learn their wisdom. There was a struggle in the South around this time to teach evolution in all schools, which is related to Jones for that reason. The primary disagreement was whether the purpose of education was to recieve elders' wisdom or to revise and surpass it themselves.