Exploring the History, Literature, and Culture of the Tar Heel State
“[In the late 1800s] fan systems — steam-driven, then electric — became the norm for the well-dressed department store. But they offered little in the way of cooling…. Belk Brothers of Charlotte, North Carolina, maintained a barrel filled with ice water at their store’s front entrance; five tin cups were tethered to the barrel for customer convenience.”
— From “Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything” by Salvatore Basile (2014)
On this day in 1930: By a 41-39 vote, the U.S. Senate rejects Supreme Court nominee John J. Parker. Born in Union County and living in Charlotte, Parker would have been the first North Carolinian on the court in 120 years.
Parker, a Republican who had run unsuccessfully for governor, was serving on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals when nominated by President Herbert Hoover. Senate debate centered on a 1920s case in which the judge had ruled with management about a “yellow dog” contract. The Supreme Court later upheld Parker’s decision, but the anti-union label proves fatal to his nomination.
Parker will remain on the bench and in 1945 sits as an alternate judge at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. He dies in 1958, at age 72, after suffering a heart attack shortly after dining at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. His dinner companion: Clement Haynsworth, the Greenville, S.C., judge whose own Supreme Court nomination the Senate would reject in 1969.
“In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while his article is still on the presses.”
— The “(Harry) Golden Rule,” as posited by New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin
On this day in 1947: Before 1,500 fans at Charlotte’s Griffith Park, Buck Leonard has three hits to lead the Homestead Grays to a 17-0 exhibition victory over the hometown Charlotte Black Hornets.
First baseman Leonard began his career in 1925 with his hometown Rocky Mount Black Swans. He becomes best known for his 17 seasons with the Homestead (Pa.) Grays. The Grays are the New York Yankees of the Negro National League, and Leonard and teammate Josh Gibson are the league’s Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
In 1972, Leonard, despite having being barred from the major leagues by segregation, will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
“The particular goal of [two large dances in 1943 sponsored by American Legion and VFW posts] was to raise enough money to send a million cigarettes to soldiers overseas…. Both groups almost made it. Each sent more than 900,000 cigarettes, and on the back of each pack was the message, ‘The Citizens of Charlotte, N.C., Send Christmas Smokes for Our Overseas Fighting Folks’….
“[But] during 1944, with vast numbers of cigarettes earmarked for the military, cigarette rationing began…. Home-front smokers were more concerned with getting their own cigarettes, and no one sponsored programs that would send more cigarettes overseas.”
— From “The Queen City at War” by Stephen Herman Dew (2001)
“[Carson] McCullers’ first novel was written thanks to a pact with her husband, Reeves, whom she married in 1937. The newlyweds — she was 20, he 24 — both aspired to be writers, so they struck a deal: One of them would work full-time and earn a living for the couple while the other wrote; after a year, they would switch roles. Since Carson already had a manuscript in progress, and Reeves had lined up a salaried position in Charlotte, North Carolina, she began her literary endeavors first.
“She wrote every day, sometimes escaping their drafty apartment to work in the local library, taking sips from the Thermos full of sherry that she would sneak inside…..
“After a year, Carson had landed a contract for her novel, so Reeves continued to put his own literary aspirations on hold…. Despite the pact, he would never get to try his luck as the full-time writer in their marriage. When Carson’s first novel,’The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,’ was published in 1940, it vaulted her into the literary limelight; after that, there was never any question of her sacrificing her writing for a day job….”
–– From “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work,” edited by Mason Currey (2013)
“In the important town of Charlotte, North Carolina, I found a white man who owned the comfortable house in which he lived, who had a wife and three half-grown children, and yet had never taken a newspaper in his life. He thought they were handy for wrapping purposes, but he couldn’t see why anybody wanted to bother with the reading of them. He knew some folks spent money for them, but he also knew a-many houses where none had ever been seen….
“I found several persons — whites, and not of the ‘clay-eater’ class, either — who never had been inside a school-house, and who didn’t mean to ‘low their children to go inside one.”
— From “Three Months Among the Reconstructionists” by correspondent Sidney Andrews in The Atlantic (February 1866)
About that “clay-eater” reference: In 1866, a dispatch in The New York Times described “the notorious clay-eaters [as] the lowest representatives of the United States … little more than mere animals … strange, undeveloped [and] repulsive…. For the most part, however, they are long-lived and rarely ill, realizing the old notion that dirt is extremely healthy.”
By 1984 the Times was regarding the practice less with disgust than with clinical curiosity.
“Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore [in “Gender and Jim Crow”] recounts a debate on a summer night in 1901 in Charlotte, North Carolina, between two well-educated young women, Addie Sagers and Laura Arnold, on the topic ‘Is the South the Best Home for the Negro?’
“Sagers argued against going North, where, she said, the only jobs open to blacks were ‘bell boy, waiter, cook or house maid,’ and where Northern unions excluded blacks from their ranks. Arnold, her debate opponent, railed against the violence, segregation and disenfranchisement of blacks in the South. She agreed that ‘the unknown was frightening,’ but added, ‘if the Puritans could cross the oceans in small boats, surely North Carolina’s African-Americans could board northbound trains.’
“Gilmore notes that Arnold’s ‘received more points than any other speech that night.’ Two weeks later, Arnold ‘took her own advice and moved to Washington, D.C.’ ”
— From “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson (2010)
On this day in 1888: The long-delayed Washington Monument opens to the public. Among the 193 carved memorial stones lining its inner walls is a block of leopardite — a rare, black-spotted granite — representing North Carolina.
The stone is the second submitted from the Charlotte quarry; the first was rejected by the monument committee.
The rejected stone will be brought back to Charlotte and used as an “upping block” to help passengers into their carriages. It remains on the downtown Square until street improvements in the 1940s require its removal to the grounds of the Mint Museum.
On this day in 1869: Harriet Morrison Irwin, a frail and bookish Charlotte homemaker, becomes the first woman granted a patent for an architectural design — a hexagonal house.
One advertisement touts Mrs. Irwin’s hexagon as applying “the principle of bee-building to human architecture,” but it wins few converts.
Her model home in Charlotte’s Fourth Ward — two stories with central tower, mansard roof and arched porch — will be torn down without fanfare in the 1960s.