By 1958 many American intellectuals were looking at Southern society with harsh disapproval. Not poet E. E. Cummings (or e. e. cummings), whose politics had swung right after a disillusioning visit to the Soviet Union.
After a series of readings at North Carolina colleges, Cummings wrote his sister:
“What a surprise — to enter a peacefully homogenous community where money is never mentioned, where no racial tension exists either on or under the surface; & where instead of colliding with indoctrinated automata, one meets courteous individuals! For the first time I realize what ‘America’ might have been.”