Category: Just A Bite

A medieval cure for antebellum nostalgia

“[Some former slaveholders] sought to ‘drown our troubles in a sea of gaiety,’ reviving the aristocratic social life of the antebellum years as if nothing had changed.

“Tournaments straight out of  ‘Ivanhoe,’ complete with knights adorned with lances and plumed helmets and ladies competing to be crowned Queen of Love and Beauty, made an incongruous reappearance  — although in one North Carolina community, the cult of medieval nobility waned after blacks organized a Tournament Association of their own.”

— From “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877” by Eric Foner (1988)

Mountain music man shattered expectations

“[Bascom Lamar Lunsford] turned out to be just the opposite of what I expected. He sings like an old mountain reprobate, full of glee and friendliness. He turned out to be a reactionary aristocrat. The first question he asked us was ‘Are you Communists?’ He claims that hundreds of Communists have been going around the country with tape recorders and collecting songs and using them for progressive causes.

“Telling him we were friends of Pete [Seeger] and Woody [Guthrie] and from New York didn’t help….”

— Folk singer Guy Carawan, recalling a 1953 visit to Asheville (as quoted in “Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970” [2002]  by Ronald D. Cohen).

Wilmington perch too small for ‘Nightingale’

“The railway [from Richmond] to Wilmington bears the reputation of being one of the very worst, if not the worst, in the United States. It had, however, been newly laid, and, save for a short distance on which the old timbers of the road were plainly to be felt, struck me as remarkably easy.

“The cars… were more like remnants from the last century than the cars used in the more northern States.  [In Weldon], however, we had a new car provided, which  approximated more the style of conveyance in vogue among the more civilized.

“The room arranged for [our supper] was not large, and about a hundred travellers entered it. Scarcely were these seated than a horde of strangers — well-dressed ladies, with or without their bonnets, gentlemen in every description of habiliment, and even boys and girls — crowded in.

“One pertinacious and ill-bred, and slightly colored (with a brush be it observed), but remarkably pretty woman, dressed in mourning, raised her eye glass to her brow, and standing at about three feet distance, and exactly opposite where the fair Swede was sitting, contemplated every mouthful eaten by her…. Mademoiselle Lind possessed considerably more modesty, or suffered more from bashfulness, than her admirer, and disappeared in a few minutes, so uncomfortable had she been rendered by this unceasing examination.”

— From “Jenny Lind in America” (1851) by C. G. Rosenberg.

Under the management of P. T. Barnum, “the Swedish Nightingale” gave an enormously successful series of opera concerts in the United States in 1850-1852. En route south to Charleston, the troupe stopped in Wilmington, but Barnum denied fans an impromptu concert because no hall was large enough.

J. P. Morgan, your railroad is a crime

“I wish that someone would lock [J.] Pierpont Morgan up for homicides already committed on his Southern roads…. One of my boys pulled out fourteen spikes with his fingers on a two mile stretch on the Atlantic Coast main line, in North Carolina…. You are going after the New Haven [Railroad] people right.”

–– California Congressman William Kent in a 1913 letter to “People’s Lawyer” Louis Brandeis, who was mounting an epic challenge to Morgan’s railroad monopoly. (Brandeis wrote back to Kent, a fellow reformer: “I note what you say about the condition of the Atlantic Coast main Line. It is, as you say, Morganatic.”)

When nation goes to war, kids go to work

“Booming war industries have already increased child labor….  During 1941 North Carolina issued 10,000 new labor certificates to 17- and 18-year-olds, 1,000 to 12-to-15-year-olds. ‘The situation,’ observed State Labor Commissioner F. H. Shuford, with a dead pan, ‘is as healthy as the war that brought it on.’ ”

— From Time magazine, June 15, 1942

More white solidarity = fewer murders?

“The decline of the homicide rate came later in North Carolina than in New England or the Chesapeake, but by the mid-18th century it… also had a low rate ….

“Indian warfare and political strife (including three rebellions against the colonial government) had periodically reduced the colony to lawlessness. But as racial slavery took hold in North Carolina in the 1720s and 1730s, white solidarity increased, and as the colony’s government became more effective, the homicide rate declined….”

— From “American Homicide” (2009) by Randolph Roth

Moving out of Biltmore House? Brits appalled

“The American mogul William A. V. Cecil told a bi-national meeting at Leeds Castle, Kent, in 1980 how he had transformed his North Carolina estate, Biltmore, from debt-laden encumbrance to lucrative honeypot by moving out of the house. This horrified the custodial English, bent on tenanting their stately homes even if bankrupt. Britons cared about living in their homes, Americans about owning them.”

– From “The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History” by David Lowenthal (1996)

A prayer for judgment reversed

“[Rev. J. William Jones, a Virginia Baptist] was the most influential and well-known clergyman in the cult of the Lost Cause.

“When the Charlotte, North Carolina, school board adopted a book by a Northern author, Jones gave speeches and organized protests by veterans’ groups. He called the book ‘utterly untruthful,’ written with ‘all of the prejudices and stupendous ignorance of a conceited Yankee’….

“While Jones was a chaplain at the University of North Carolina [around 1900], he gave the following prayer:

” ‘Lord… We acknowledge Thou had a divine plan when Thou made the rattlesnake, as well as the song bird, and this was without help from Charles Darwin. But we believe Thou will admit the grave mistake in giving the decision to the wrong side in 1865.’ ”

— “From “Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920” by Charles Reagan Wilson (1983)

‘Poster child’ concept originated in Hickory

“In 1944 polio swept through defenseless communities…. The worst epidemic, near Hickory, North Carolina, would provide the first real test for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.

“The foundation agreed to equip and staff a makeshift polio hospital…. Like most polio epidemics, the one in Hickory faded with the cooling winds of fall. The  hospital had treated 454 patients.  All told, the foundation spent about $400,000 during the epidemic…..

“The publicity was priceless. ‘The Miracle of Hickory’ became a staple in future fund-raising efforts. Photographs of smiling victims were distributed nationwide. The caption read: ‘These are some of the Children your Dimes and Dollars Helped.’…Here were the first poster children….

“In 1946 the [National Foundation’s] March of Dimes introduced its first ‘official’ polio poster child. The idea was controversial….How did one portray a polio victim? As cheerful and optimistic or frightened and sad? … Guided by the ‘Miracle of Hickory’ campaign, the foundation chose option No. 1….”

–From “Polio: An American Story” (2005) by David M. Oshinsky

Dad went to jail, but son stayed in school

“Even in maturity, long-legged (6 ft. 6 in.) Clarence E. McVey, 49, a carpenter of Graham, N.C. (pop. 5,000) could not forget the misery of his schooldays. He had grown so fast that he towered above all his classmates, was so gangling and awkward that he became the butt of their jokes. He swore that his five-year-old son David, already over four feet tall, would never have to suffer from the family curse of being ‘too big for his age.’

“He decided last fall to start David in school a year early, even though North Carolina law forbids pupils to enter before they are six. At first, no one was the wiser, and David became one of the best pupils in the first grade. Then one day someone told David’s dreadful secret.

“The teacher asked Clarence McVey to take David out of school. McVey flatly refused. A few weeks later, the county school board made the same request, but McVey still refused. Last week, when he ignored a formal order from North Carolina’s Tenth District Superior Court to keep David at home, he was hauled off to jail. Said McVey: ‘I’ll stay here and rot before I take little David out of school.’ This week, there he stayed — and David stayed in school.”

— From Time magazine, April 9, 1951

Two weeks later Time reported Judge Leo Carr’s decision: Since David had nearly finished the school year, he could stay on and be promoted with his class. But father McVey would have to pay a $150 fine or [serve] another 20 days in jail for contempt of court.

Time dropped the story at that point, but the Burlington Times News reported (hat tip to Lisa Kobrin at May Memorial Library) that McVey chose the 20 days.