Category: Just A Bite

“In 1840 U.S. census takers…recorded 9 percent of adult whites as illiterate….

“In New England no state had less than 98 percent literacy, which equaled [world leaders] Scotland and Sweden.

“The state with the highest white illiteracy was North Carolina: 28 percent. The public school system called for in the state constitution of 1776 had never been implemented. However, in 1839 the Whigs gained control of the legislature and put through a long-delayed law authorizing common schools in counties that consented. As a result white illiteracy fell to 11 percent over the next 20 years.”

–From “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848” (2007) by Daniel Walker Howe

“[Three months later] there was a cave-in in a North Carolina mine in which 71 men were caught and 53 actually lost. It attracted no great  notice. It was ‘just a mine disaster.’

“Yet for more than two weeks the plight of a single commonplace prospector for tourists [near Mammoth Cave] had riveted the  attention of the nation on Sand Cave, Kentucky. It was an exciting show to watch, and the dispensers of news were learning to turn their spotlights on one show at a time.”

–“Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s” (1931) by Frederick Lewis Allen

Allen was contrasting the failed cave rescue of Floyd Collins in 1925, perhaps the first news media sensation of the century, with the Coalglen explosion that hastened the decline of North Carolina’s once-thriving coal industry.

Not that North Carolinians didn’t show their own appetite for the morbid. The slow removal of bodies from the Carolina Coal Mine, the News & Observer reported, was dishonored by “an indecent exposition of the picnic spirit by a truckload of heedless students who came over from the University.”

“Instead of an Ivy League university, [Robert Moses’ grandson Christopher Collins] wanted to go to little Chapel Hill College in North Carolina; [his mother] Jane was appalled, but Moses told her, ‘Oh, let the boy go where he wants.'”

–From “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” (1974)

“One day not long after his installation [as assistant secretary of the Navy], he and [Secretary of the Navy Josephus] Daniels posed on an upper-floor porch looking down on the executive mansion. The prints came back, and Daniels showed the best one to Roosevelt.

“‘Franklin,’ he asked, ‘why are you grinning from ear to ear, looking as pleased as if the world were yours, while I, satisfied and happy, have no such smile on my face?'”

“Roosevelt seemed surprised at the question….

“‘I will tell you….’ Daniels continued. ‘You are saying to yourself, being a New Yorker, “Some day I will be living in that house” — while I, being from the South, know I must be satisfied with no such ambition.'”

— From “Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt” (2008) by H. W. Brands

“A bespectacled, priggish-looking former editor of the Biblical Recorder, [Sen. Josiah Bailey of North Carolina] had supported FDR in 1932 and 1936 but had recently soured on the New Deal, mainly because of its trespasses against states’ rights. He had been preparing this speech [against FDR’s plan to “pack” the Supreme Court] for weeks, and as he rose to begin, senators summoned their colleagues from the cloakroom.

“Bailey held forth with his customary melodramatics, shouting his points, banging his desk, shaking a preacher’s finger. The Southerner was offering an argument calculated to appeal to his colleagues from the North  — that ‘the Negroes in the South feel secure tonight because they know there is a Constitution and an independent Court.'”

— From “FDR v. the Constitution” (2009) by Burt Solomon

“We had rights to ‘Ironside’ and ‘Marcus Welby,’ two shows highly regarded on their networks but which turned out to be duds in syndication. We swapped them [to WSOC-TV, another Charlotte station] for ‘The Andy Griffith Show’… a huge hit that really helped turn the station around (and made us a lot of money for years to come).”

— From “Call Me Ted,” Ted Turner’s 2008 autobiography. In 1970 Turner had bought a struggling Charlotte UHF station and renamed it WRET (from his initials). In 1980 he sold the now-lucrative station to Westinghouse and used the proceeds to launch CNN.

“[Secretary of War Edwin M.] Stanton had come armed with a plan, drawn up at the President’s request, for bringing the states that had been ‘abroad’ back into what Lincoln… called ‘their proper practical relation with the Union.’  The War Secretary’s notion was that military occupation should precede readmission, and in this connection he proposed that Virginia and North Carolina be combined in a single district to simplify the army’s task.

“[Secretary of the Navy Gideon] Welles took exception, on grounds that this last would destroy the individuality of both states and thus be ‘in conflict with the principles of self-government which I deem essential.’ So did Lincoln….

“[Lincoln] had reached certain bedrock conclusions: ‘We can’t undertake to run state governments in all these Southern states. Their own people must do that — though I reckon at first some of them may do it badly.'”

— From a recounting of President Lincoln’s last day in “The Civil War: A Narrative” (1958-1974) by Shelby Foote

“The [Office of War Information’s] propaganda operation even used and defanged Lange’s [Farm Security Administration] work. In one case, a 1939 photograph of a typical, run-down North Carolina country store/filling station with a group of young men goofing off on the porch was transformed into a World War II poster by cropping and superimposing a message: ‘This is America….  Where a fellow can start on the home team and wind up in the big league… Where there is always room at the top for the fellow who has it on the ball….This is your America!… Keep it free!’

“Lange had made five photographs of the scene, showing about a dozen figures, several in baseball uniforms, preparing to play with a local league; mugging for the camera, they began picking up and swinging one guy by his arms and legs. In the original context, these images signaled the economic backwardness, inactivity and racism of the rural South. At the far end of the porch, distinctly removed from the others, was a black man who did not participate in the roughhousing, but sat tight with a tense smile. In the poster both sides of the image were cropped, and it showed only young white men standing in manly, confident but relaxed postures, ready to play the quintessentially American game.”

— From “Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits” (2009) by Linda Gordon

The official caption on this Fourth of July image puts it “near Chapel Hill,” where Lange worked closely with Howard Odum’s Institute for Research in Social Science. The “Cedar Grove” modestly marking the players’ uniforms is a community in northwest Orange County.

[NCM note: The image above comes from the Library of Congress’s American Memory website: http://memory.loc.gov/pnp/fsa/8b34000/8b34000/8b34021v.jpg]

“Perhaps none but a gifted novelist can tell what death from the 1918 flu looked like, how the stricken person appeared in those last hours of life when the horrors of the illness are fully unfurled. One of the few who attempted this was Thomas Wolfe. [While] a student at the University of North Carolina he got a telegram summoning him home immediately. His brother, Benjamin Harrison Wolfe, was ill with the flu. He tells the thinly fictionalized story in Chapter 13 of ‘Look Homeward, Angel.’

“Wolfe came home to a deathwatch. He went upstairs to the ‘gray, shaded light’ of the room where Ben lay. And he saw, ‘in that moment of searing recognition,’ that his beloved 26-year-old brother was dying…

“Nothing could be done for Ben. No one knew how to treat the flu. There was no medicine to quell the raging fevers, no way to get oxygen into sodden lungs.”

— Condensed from “Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It” by Gina Kolata (2001).

(Is there an award given for the pairing of shortest title and longest subtitle?)