Lew Powell

How the need for ‘debuncombizing’ was averted

The origin of “bunkum” — N.C. Congressman Felix Walker’s explanation of his longwinded, irrelevant speech on the Missouri Compromise as “talking for Buncombe” — approaches common knowledge, but the late columnist William Safire traced some notable details in “Safire’s Political Dictionary”:

“By 1828…talking to (or for) Buncombe was well known. The Wilmington (N.C.) Commercial referred in 1849 to ‘the Buncombe politicians — those who go for re-election merely,’ and British author Thomas Carlyle showed that the expression traveled the Atlantic with its meaning intact: ‘A parliament speaking through reporters to Buncombe and the 27 millions, mostly fools’…

“In 1923 William E. Woodward wrote a book titled Bunk and introduced the verb ‘debunk.’ A school of historians were named debunkers for the way they tore down the myths other historians had built up. Hokum, according to the OED, is a blend of hocus-pocus and bunkum.”

Location, location… location?

— “Dempster traveled… to perform at the Piccolo Spoleto International Festival in Charlotte, S.C.” (July 9, New Orleans Times-Picayune)

— “Conroy’s first novel since ‘Beach Music’… looks at a group of long-time friends who first meet as teens in 1969 Charlotte, S.C.” (May 31, New York Post)

— “Tiger Woods seemed to have a pained look on his face during the final round of the Quail Hollow Invitational…in Charlotte, S.C.” (May 5, Woodstock Sentinel-Review, Ontario, Canada)

— “Wells Fargo & Co. bought St. Louis-based Wachovia Securities…as part of its acquisition of Wachovia Corp. of Charlotte, S.C.” (May 1, The Business Review, Albany, N.Y.)

— “Second-seeded Venus Williams struggled to advance at the Family Circle Cup…in Charlotte, S.C.” (April 16, Florida Times-Union, Jacksonville)

Welcome to Wilmington, Mr. Miller

“In 1941 Arthur Miller, penniless, got a job with the Library of Congress. [The 26-year-old playwright] was sent South to record accents. Miller arrived in Wilmington, North Carolina, a few weeks before Pearl Harbor….. A huge new facility had just been built to provide ships for the Navy and Atlantic convoys. But the black people who had built the yards could not get work making the ships. There was also strife in textile manufacturing.

“Miller was more interested in what the people had to say rather than in the way they said it. Most striking to Miller… were the people making music out of their experience and struggle — a railwayman singing raw blues and striking women shirt-makers…. He found a hall and recorded several songs and interviews.

“Miller’s recording trip lasted only a few weeks, but it had a profound effect on him. He had never been to the South before and was shocked by the racism and anti-semitism. He was held at gunpoint for being Jewish. Once he made his host, a health care organizer, incandescent with rage by addressing a black man as ‘sir’ rather than ‘boy’ (the man was in his 50s, Miller in his early 20s).”

— Adapted from “Arthur Miller: The Accidental Music Collector” (bbc.co.uk)

According to “Arthur Miller,” a 2009 biography by Christopher Bigsby, Miller also was taken aback by the dietary habits of the health official [who was apparently Dr. T. F. Vestal, state director of industrial hygiene]: “For breakfast he had four small bags of peanuts and two Coca-Colas. In the corner of his office were cases of Coca-Cola. He was the head [sic] of the health service of the state of North Carolina!”

James, Carly, and friends say no thanks to nukes

Musicians United for Safe Energy, or MUSE, was founded shortly after the Three Mile Island accident to oppose nuclear energy. MUSE organized a series of “No Nukes” concerts in New York in September 1979.

Rolling Stone devoted a cover to the headliners (including James Taylor depicted with his hand atop the head of wife Carly Simon) and later called the concerts “a high-water mark of inspiration and optimism… a stunning testimony to the depth of the shared beliefs of the generation which came of age in the sixties.”

Hat tip from editorial cartoonists everywhere

Death noted: David Henderson, 94, in Charlotte. In 1936 Henderson drew what was likely the first of innumerable published caricatures of Richard Nixon. It appeared on a banquet program recognizing classmate Nixon as president of the Duke University student bar association.

Caption: “Our New Prexy ‘Nose’ All.”

Ney-sayers keep their theory alive

What was it about Peter Stewart Ney, believed by some to be a fugitive Napoleonic marshal passing as a Rowan County schoolmaster, that inspired such fascination? Has any other North Carolinian ever been the subject of so many biographies, however questionable? They just keep coming, from “Historic Doubts as to the Execution of Marshal Ney” (1895) to “Marshal Ney Before and After Execution” (1929) to “Marshal Ney: A Double Life” (1937) to “Napoleon’s Traitor: The Masons and Marshal Ney’s Mysterious Escape” (1989) to “Execution Denied: The Story of Marshal Ney, Napoleon’s ‘Bravest of the Brave’ ” (2004).

The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography avoids using the word “hoax” but concludes bluntly “He was not… the marshal.”

TR had conservation ally in N.C. governor

“On the same afternoon [in 1908 that President Theodore Roosevelt] declared the Grand Canyon a national monument, he began threatening to do the same with large parts of the Appalachian and White Mountains, an action certain to cause tremendous resistance by congressmen from Maine to Georgia. One notable exception was Gov. Robert Glenn of North Carolina, who committed himself politically to Roosevelt’s conservationist crusade, hoping that the Great Smoky Mountains would emerge as a national monument.”

— from “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America” by Douglas Brinkley.

A few months later Glenn would tell the National Governors Conference, “Our forests are being denuded…. Our people… have been living only for the present, thinking of themselves and not of their children and their children’s children.”

Bickett decries ‘wicked appeal to race prejudice’

“The scheme is so transparently impossible, so plainly a gold-brick proposition, that ordinarily the inmates of a school for the feebleminded could not be induced to part with their coin for a certificate of membership…

“But running through the whole scheme is a wicked appeal to race prejudice. There is a hark back to the lawless time that followed the Civil War…There is no need for any secret order to enforce the law of this land…Just now all of us need to be considerate and kind and trustful in our dealings with the Negro.”

— Gov. Thomas Bickett, circa 1921, responding to the revival of the KKK inspired by The Birth of a Nation. Bickett was quoted in an NAACP handbill calling on citizens not to “allow Ku Klux Klan propaganda to be displayed in the movies in New York City.”

The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography describes Bickett as “a traditionalist in his attitude toward race relations [who] nonetheless manifested a sympathy for the lot of the blacks uncommon among Southern politicians of his time.”

The buck started here

“Game was abundant on the upper Yadkin [in North Carolina]…. According to one local story, Bear Creek, near the Yadkin forks, took its name when [Daniel] Boone killed 99 bear on the creek in a single season.

“Deer were even more numerous. Boone and another hunter reportedly killed 30 deer in a single day…. Deerskin was a major part of the local economy. In 1753 over 30,000 deerskins were exported from North Carolina. As early as 1700, an average of 54,000 deerskins were being exported each year to England from southern Carolina. There was so much trade in deerskin that a ‘buck’ — a dressed skin weighing about two and a half pounds, worth about 40 cents a pound — became the synonym for a dollar in the American colonies.”

— From “Frontiersman” (2008) by Meredith Mason Brown. (Hat tip to delanceyplace.com)