Category: Just A Bite

For Camel shows, ‘Lucky’ was verboten

“Sponsors [of television shows in the 1950s] paid particular attention to anything they thought would boost the competition….

“On the ‘Camel News Caravan,’ in an interview with ‘Lucky’ Luciano, only the mob­ster’s first name, Charles, could be used, so viewers would not confuse it with an ad for Lucky Strikes. The word ‘lucky’ seemed to pose a particular problem for American Tobacco’s competitors. Scriptwriters regularly combed through thesaurus to dredge up synonyms like ‘fortunate’ or ‘providential’ whenever the forbidden ‘L word’ popped up. How bad could it get? This bad: even the word ‘American’ was proscribed on one show….”

— From “The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961” by Jeff Kisseloff (1995)

h/t delanceyplace.com

Making amends in Waynesville, 1870

“Five years after the abolition of slavery… a Methodist minister in the remote mountain town of Waynesville, North Carolina, carried out an act of reparation apparently unprecedented in U.S. history. Asa Fitzgerald signed an extraordinary land deed in August 1870, conveying most of his remaining property to nine ‘colored persons’ he and his wife’s relations had formerly enslaved. He transferred the land explicitly as restitution for the many years of unpaid labor ‘performed by them and their ancestors while in slavery’….

“For eight years Fitzgerald and his family lived with this remarkable arrangement in apparent peace. The Fitzgerald patriarch died in 1878 with little remaining property aside from his house, a small plot of land, and his library. It did not take long for his wife and children to take legal action undoing his novel transaction….”

— From “A Personal Act of Reparation” by Kirk Savage in Lapham’s Quarterly (Dec. 15, 2019)

Josephus schools Eleanor in racism

“[After FDR went to work as undersecretary of the Navy under Josephus Daniels], Eleanor Roosevelt brought from New York four servants, all white….

“When the Danielses had the Roosevelts to dinner … Eleanor appreciated her host asking the traditional blessing but had difficulty reconciling the piety with the harsh reprimand Daniels gave her that night at the table.

“Cloaked in his soft Piedmont voice, the secretary of the navy declared it unnatural for whites to assume a servile position in the house of a white family; only Negroes could wait on their superiors. ‘Whom else,’ he said, ‘could one kick?'”

— From “Eleanor” by David Michaelis (2020)

Blacks’ barriers to independence

“In North Carolina, during slavery and into the era of sharecropping, people in the lowest caste were forbidden to sell or trade goods of any kind or be subject to 39 lashes. This blocked the main route to earning money from their own farm labors and forced them into economic dependence on the dominant caste.”

— From “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson (2020)

Olmsted’s eye roamed after focus on poor

“There was no escaping the irony of his last great endeavor. The young [Frederick Law] Olmsted had ridden this part of North Carolina in 1854 as a decrier of aristocracy and proponent of state-aided uplift of the masses. He’d returned to the region to end his career designing the grounds of a 250-room French-style chateau, the largest private home in the nation.”

— From “Spying on the South: An Odyssey across the American Divide” by Tony Horwitz (2019)

More about Olmsted in North Carolina here. And there’s even a statue at the North Carolina Arboretum. 

Where the famous once fled?

“At some point in the early 1820s, [the pirate Jean] Laffite pulled a disappearing act…. Did he die of a fever in Mexico? Did he die in one of his many raids along the Central American coast? Or did he, to escape his many enemies, make his way to a village called Lincolnton… to live out his days under the nom-de-guerre of Lorenzo Ferrer and be buried in the cemetery of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church?”

— From “Jean Laffite Book Sheds Light On Mysterious Pirate” by Thomas Lark in the Lincoln Herald (Feb. 12)

“Peter Stuart [sometimes Stewart] Ney, a teacher from Rowan County, is said to have made a deathbed confession that he was, in fact, Napoleon Bonaparte’s most trusted commander, Marshal Michel Ney. Marshal Ney was rumored to have escaped execution in 1815 and fled to America….

“However, researcher William Henry Hoyt amassed conclusive evidence that the true Marshal Ney did not escape the firing squad.  He also found an 1820 application for citizenship filed by Peter Stuart Ney in South Carolina and a record of his baptism in Scotland….”

— From “Peter Stuart Ney Confesses to be Napoleon’s Closest Aide” (North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources blog)

“History never repeats itself. But it rhymes.”

— Mark Twain (perhaps)

Charlotte’s ‘salt-and-pepper’ era

“What few people know is that the South wasn’t always so segregated. During a brief window between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century, black and white people lived next to each other in Southern cities, creating what [Charlotte] historian Tom Hanchett describes as a ‘salt-and-pepper’ pattern.

“They were not integrated in a meaningful sense: Divisions existed, but ‘in a lot of Southern cities, segregation hadn’t been fully imposed — there were neighborhoods where blacks and whites were living nearby,’ said Eric Foner, a Columbia historian and expert on Reconstruction. Walk around in the Atlanta or the Charlotte of the late 1800s, and you might see black people in restaurants, hotels, the theater, Foner said. Two decades later, such things were not allowed.”

— From ” ‘Segregation Had to Be Invented’ “ by Alana Semuels in The Atlantic (Feb. 17)

Ideals too big to fit Constitution

“The mystic Herman Husband had perhaps the furthest-reaching vision of American democracy. Having grown up a pampered and willful child on his parents’ Maryland plantation, he [later became] an abolitionist and apostle of nonviolent protest. By the 1760s he was living in the western wilds of North Carolina, a full-time activist against the creditor class and the corruption of government.

“Because Husband was both land-rich and a democratic idealist, he served as a bridge between the truly poor and the landowning class that could vote. His neighbors elected him to the North Carolina assembly in the provincial capital of New Bern, where he spoke so uncompromisingly against the corruption of the assembly that he was repeatedly jailed. Soon he was a leader of the North Carolina Regulation, an uprising that took over court towns, roughed up officials and tore down buildings. Husband tried to moderate the violence, but by the time the royal governor sent in troops, he was a marked man; he fled on horseback right before the Battle of Alamance….  In the grip of biblically inspired visions, Husband began developing and writing down his plans for a unified American nation founded on egalitarian principles.

“The national plan that Herman Husband devised does not resemble the U.S. Constitution written in 1787. It resembles the New Deal of the 1930s, the Great Society of the 1960s, and measures yet to be achieved even now….”

— From “Our Chief Danger: The story of the democratic movements that the framers of the U.S. Constitution feared and sought to suppress” by William Hogeland in Lapham’s Quarterly (Fall 2020)

FDR’s bank holiday passed Engelhard by

“The stock market crash in 1929 was met with a run on banks by depositors who wanted to pull their money out because they didn’t trust that it would be there later. In response, President Franklin Roosevelt, just two days after taking office, ordered all banks across the country to close for three days to allow the public’s mood to calm down. Off the beaten track, East Carolina Bank [also known as the Bank of Engelhard] remained open because bank officials didn’t receive the order until after banks were reopened….”

— From “The bank of Engelhard finally closes its doors” by Sandy Semans Ross in the Outer Banks Voice (May 25)

Details on North Carolina’s banks that did close.

Louis Armstrong + Martha Raye: Uh-oh

“[Louis Armstrong] did get a burst of publicity when Artists and Models was released [in 1937], featuring a blacked-up Martha Raye…. To the surprise of no one, their scene proved to be quite controversial….

“The Theatre Owners of North Carolina and South Carolina Inc. objected to what they described as ‘the appearance of Negroes in movie scenes with white persons on equal social basis….'”

— From “Heart Full of Rhythm: The Big Band Years of Louis Armstrong” by Ricky Riccardi (2020)