[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

CHARLES EAGLES:

Would you tell me your full name and when and where you were born?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

My name is Jonathan Worth Daniels, and I was born April 26, 1902, at the corner of South and Blount Street in Raleigh, North Carolina, right across the street from Shaw University, and in the margin of a black, what you would now in your educated condition call a ghetto, but which was really a nigger-town.

CHARLES EAGLES:

You were born in your parents' home, then.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes. My grandfather had built the house shortly after the Civil War. And a lot of the other whites in that area had moved up to more fashionable Blount Street. But we stayed in my grandfather's house in a deteriorating neighborhood, you'd call it, and we were very happy there. We had the best neighbors in the world, although every one of them was black.

CHARLES EAGLES:

This was Grandfather Bagley.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes. He was the Clerk of the State Supreme Court.

CHARLES EAGLES:

What were your parents like? How would you describe them?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I would describe them as wonderfully gentle, receptive people. My mother and father came from rather diverse groups. My father's father was a ship carpenter in Little Washington, North Carolina. He didn't believe in slavery, and he went to Rhode Island to live and work, but he had fallen in love with my grandmother in North Carolina. So he came back in time to meet the Civil War. My grandmother came, I think, from a rather distinguished family, the Seabrooks, but her parents had been impoverished, and she'd been left as an orphan as a child and raised in very limited circumstances.

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He was, I think, a good ship's carpenter. He helped build the "Merrimac," as I understand it. But I'll give you this as a little piece of background. When my father became Secretary of the Navy, Little Washington wanted to welcome back its distinguished son. And he went down to Goldsboro, where his mother was living with my Uncle Frank at the time, and he was surprised that she wasn't so enthusiastic. She said, "Joe, those people who are putting on this show wouldn't have had your father in their house." [Laughter] And my mother's family had been originally Quakers. My grandfather was Jonathan Worth, who was elected Governor by the whites after the Civil War, because he had been a Quaker and against secession. And then he was removed from office by General Canby, who came as military commander of that district. And Governor Holden was put in in his place. He had five daughters, of whom my grand mother was one. She [my grandmother] was as far from being a Quaker as anybody I've ever seen. She was a very dominant old woman who, when I knew her, walked with a gold-headed cane. And she had two daughters, unmarried, who she attended on all occasions. She was a very great snob, I thought. In a book I wrote I said that, and at my father's request I changed it to "dame." But she had a very strange sense about herself. In a sort of mystic way she thought she was the mother of the reunited Republic, because her son, Worth Bagley, who was a great football player at Annapolis, had been the first officer to fall in the Spanish-American War. He's completely forgotten now, and it was not anything but just a hero of circumstance at the time. But there was this hoopla about the first blood had been shed by a Confederate officer's son. (My grandfather was a major in the Civil War in the Confederate Army.)

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So that was the background I came from, very good people but not one of the racehorse aristocrats among them. And I'm pretty proud of my ancestry. I had some blackguards among them. My grandfather's brother, who did marry a racehorse aristocrat's daughter, stole money out of the till in the Supreme Court office, went to Baltimore and drowned himself, and my grandfather spent a good many years paying back the money he'd stolen. But they were in general good, simple, a kind of Southern people that are lost. In our books we have much about the great plantation people and much about the poor whites, but the great, solid middle class between them has been pretty much neglected, I guess because they are people without creating any sins and scandals, have very little romance to present. My grandfather owned slaves. He had a place named Sharon near Raleigh, which later became the black public school there.

CHARLES EAGLES:

This is Grandfather Bagley.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No, my great-grandfather Worth. And De Roulhac Hamilton did two volumes of his letters. He must have been a pretty good old guy. He said at the beginning of the War, "I think the South is committing suicide, but I'm going to stay with my companions and go down with the ship." I suppose that was the reason that they picked him at the end of the War. He'd been Treasurer during the War. Picked him because he hadn't been a hothead in secession, and they thought that would possibly placate the conquering Yankees, but he wasn't enough to do that.

CHARLES EAGLES:

What were your parents like individually? Were your mother

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and father quite a bit alike?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Very much alike, and yet they were people of very definite personalities. For instance, my mother was a Presbyterian; my father was a Methodist. But neither one ever joined the other's church. And they would alternate on Sundays—he would go with her to the Presbyterian; she would go to the Methodist—but they stayed in their own church. My father didn't believe in baptizing little children. He waited until the youngest was about eight. Then they baptized them, and she took two and he took two. [Laughter] But they were lovely people. In connection with what you're writing, my father was one of the most gentle and determined people on fairness to blacks of anybody I ever knew. Our next-door neighbor was a man named Wesley Hoover, who I think my grandmother taught to read and write. He'd become fairly wealthy operating a saloon, which, of course, was much against my father's principles, but he respected Wesley Hoover. And he would give Wesley Hoover every courtesy in the world, except, of course, he could never call him "Mr. Hoover." There were these little fragile, almost unexplainable taboos that existed. But my mother operated at her back porch—now remember, back porch—what would be the equivalent of the WPA today, or the center of federal charity. And black who came to her back door—and many did—got food and what he needed. But the separation was complete and yet very friendly, so realized that there had become an acceptance of the status quo between the blacks and the whites. And maybe that was a period of subserviency by the blacks and arrogance by the whites. But for a little period there, at least at my childhood—and many, many of my playmates were

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black—there wasn't any feeling of surface antagonism, at least, or hostility.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Did your father help in that little back porch operation?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

[Laughter] He financed it very much, but of course he never served the food or anything of that sort. And shortly before I was born, my father had been the man chosen by the Democratic Party in North Carolina to go all over the South and devise the best, and hopefully the most constitutional, system to disenfranchise the illiterate blacks while not disenfranchising the illiterate whites. He went down to Louisiana. Have you seen his books?

CHARLES EAGLES:

Yes.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

He went down to Louisiana and a number of places and came back with the legislation which was adopted. A strange thing in that fight, though. Now this shows a little about my father. There were a lot of people in North Carolina who wanted to divide the tax rolls and give the blacks for education only the taxes that blacks had paid, and give the whites all the taxes the whites had paid. My father and Governor Aycock were very much opposed to that and defeated it. Now that friendship with Aycock is important in my father's story. I'm not sure if they went to school together, but Aycock was my Uncle Frank's law partner. And they were very close. And they were both tremendously interested in education and education for both races. Of course, by the money we're spending today, that seems ridiculous. But my father's News and Observer in those days of that white supremacy fight, read through the eyes of a 1975 or '6 white man today, seemed just horrendous. They were! Oddly, in that

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campaign, though, a lot of people thought Father's life was endangered by belligerent blacks. He worked, of course, late at night on a morning newspaper, and, unknown to him, this man Wesley Hoover had gone uptown every night and followed him home as an unseen bodyguard. There are so many paradoxes in race relations.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Would he encourage Wesley Hoover to register to vote if Wesley Hoover was literate?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

He wouldn't go out and encourage him, but he would defend his right to vote. There's a difference there. He was a very gentle man, and one thing about this contrast, you see. Very often in my life with my father we disagreed violently, but we never disagreed in blowup between father and son. He didn't approve of many things I said. Like that thing that happened in Florence we were speaking about, could never have occurred with us. And when he did go off in '33 and left me with the paper, I must say he left me practically untutored and undirected.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Is that just a sense of trust and loyalty that he had?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I think so. He believed that I was sensible. Not only in race relations but in Prohibition we differed completely. And it's difficult for you and your generation to realize the sharpness of the quarrel over Prohibition. But he never gave me hell for not agreeing with him. But I didn't do this. When I took the paper which he had edited as a strong Prohibitionist, I didn't write any Prohibition editorials, but neither did I write any which lauded his position. We got along fine, and it never was—even at the end of our lives, when we were disagreeing greatly on the civil rights commissions—anything

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like a personal quarrel over our differences of opinion. He was a very gentle man, and he was also a very violent man, as you know, editorially. What a thing. He had two brothers. His oldest brother Frank, who unknown, was judicial to the point of perfection. Also he was a hypochondriac who took all sorts of patent medicines. And Aycock said, "Well, Frank, you may get after me about drinking, but there's more alcohol in those patent medicines you're taking than the stuff I drink." [Laughter] His other brother, wherever he went, would get into the middle of the worst fight and always come out the losing end.

CHARLES EAGLES:

That's Charles Cleaves.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes. And father must have been a very, very charming young man. I ran across a secondhand book I got which had belonged to a man who wrote the history of the Republican Party; I've forgotten his name. At Princeton. And he'd made a note in it when it came to mention father. He said, "The most attractive damn fool I ever knew." [Laughter]

CHARLES EAGLES:

Let's get back to what it was like when you were a small boy in Raleigh. You had three brothers.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes.

CHARLES EAGLES:

What were they like?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

My oldest brother had a rather tragic life. He was born shortly after my sister who I never knew died as a little child of about three. He was overprotected. And they didn't know anything about psychiatry in those days.

CHARLES EAGLES:

This was Josephus, Jr.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

In the terms of I guess you'd call it stupid views of people in that time, as a little boy who didn't do well in school, and was as an overprotected child not exactly they sent him to a military school. They sent him to Horner's Military School, where I gather, from Thad Stem, that old Colonel Horner was one of the damnedest sadists there ever was. In any of those military schools, people just beat the hell out of their students and so forth. And Josephus never amounted to much. He got in the War and served honorably as a Marine, but he had the name and that was difficult, when he didn't have the stuff. I'd rather you didn't quote me as saying he didn't have the stuff, because he was one of the sweetest people I ever knew. My brother Worth was always a very alert, sharp, smart boy. He was sort of runtish until he had an appendicitis operation. He never was a big man, but he became one of the most distinguished internists in the United States. Two or three years before he retired, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, people are all Fellows of it, but they decided to pick eight Masters, and Worth was one of the eight. He served very well in the Second World War. And he was a respected dean of the Washington, D.C. medical corps, and he had such patients as Chief Justice Stone. To use a vulgar old term, he had the carriage trade. And he was a very distinguished doctor. He helped save the Army Medical Museum and Library. He was reappointed to it by Eisenhower, and said somebody said, "Look at those Daniels's. They'll serve under any president." [Laughter] And of course he was appointed because he unknown. And then he was chief of all the civilian

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consultants in internal medicine for the Army.

CHARLES EAGLES:

What about your other brother?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Frank is a solid citizen. He keeps all the rest of us in bread and butter. [Laughter] He's been a very able newspaper publisher. He served on the Associated Press national board and the National Board of Publishers. Frank is the Establishment. He's a bank director, and I sometimes get him by saying . . . We got a new building, and we had different offices, and I went down and looked at his and I said, "Dammit, it looks like it's decorated for William B. McKinley." [Laughter]

CHARLES EAGLES:

Were you closer to Frank or to Worth?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Oh, yes, to Frank. Frank and I were nearer the same age, and we worked together all our lives.

CHARLES EAGLES:

But when you were a small boy, were you closer then?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes, Frank and I. Worth was three years older than myself, and Frank was just two years younger, and we were closer.

CHARLES EAGLES:

What was the Daniels home like? I get the impression that your father read a lot, not just newspapers.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Oh, yes, he did. He read a lot. My mother's eyesight wasn't very good, and he read aloud to her a lot. And all of my life has been a bookish life. Not just me, but also we were surrounded by it. I remember when I went to first grade and the teacher was reading us the old Greek tales. She said "What am I going to read to Jonathan? He's read all of these stories." [Laughter] It was a very bookish, a very social place. During the legislature

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my mother and father had to dinner every member of the legislature. And in addition to that, if anybody came to town, Ambassador Bryce or some actor of some fame or something, they'd also entertain him. William Jennings Bryan of course was there a lot, and Wilson was there. A very social sort of place.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Now when those people came to dinner, were you at the table with them?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No, no, no.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Amy Carter then.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

But when they came to dinner, after dinner there was always brought in to my bedside a big, nice dish of ice cream that had been served. That sort of thing. Of course we weren't invited to the table as Amy seems to be.

CHARLES EAGLES:

You said earlier that your father was Methodist and your mother was Presbyterian. Where did you go to church? Did you alternate back and forth?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I went to Methodist Sunday school, and I was one of those destined for Methodism. I married an Episcopalian, and, as I say, matrimony is the only missionary branch of the Episcopal Church. [Laughter] I became an Episcopalian. I remember I was very proud to be promoted from the primary to whatever was above that because I'd learned the Ten Commandments, the Twenty-third Psalm, the Beatitudes, and all by heart. I was very proud of that.

CHARLES EAGLES:

So all you boys went to Sunday school every Sunday? Daniels: Yes, and we all went to the Methodist Sunday school. I

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guess that was because Father taught a class, and we all went to the Methodist Sunday school. I had a very pleasant childhood.

CHARLES EAGLES:

How important was going to church, was the church for you when you were small?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

It was a social occasion, and also I enjoyed learning the things. Maybe I was a little bit of a show-off; I liked to recite the prayers better than anybody else. [Laughter] But I enjoyed it. So much of my life in that period and even later was taken for granted. For instance, my grandchildren are wondering now about where should they go to college. One of my grandchildren last year got a National Merit scholarship, and he could pick practically any college he wanted in America, but he picked Bowdoin. But from birth it never occurred to me that I could go anywhere but the University of North Carolina. So with my other brothers. So much of our life just fell into the pattern. And it wasn't anything that you wanted to resist; it was comfortable and pleasant, and nobody whipped you into going to Sunday school. Although I imagine that if I had said I wasn't going to Sunday school [laughter], there might have been some goings-on.

CHARLES EAGLES:

You said your father taught a Sunday school class.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

He taught a class of students at State College for many years, before and I think after he went to Washington as Secretary of the Navy.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Now the church was pretty important to him, wasn't it?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Oh, very important to him. My mother always said that first came the Democratic Party, then the Methodist Church, and she

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came third.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Where did the News and Observer come in?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

The News and Observer was in there, too. [Laughter]

CHARLES EAGLES:

Was his religion very important to him day-to-day?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes, but there was no piety flung around our house. I mean we weren't hymn-singing . . . Our household wasn't a place that was . . .

CHARLES EAGLES:

Daily devotionals weren't . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No, we didn't have daily devotions. It was a religious place, but you know in how many novels and stories you've read about the austere . . . There was nothing austere about religion in my childhood.

CHARLES EAGLES:

So you didn't have to come home from Sunday school and sit quietly in a chair for the rest of . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

There was a very funny little thing about that. This was a little later, when we were in Washington. We couldn't play cards on Sunday, but we could play a game called Confederate Heroes . . .

CHARLES EAGLES:

[Laughter]

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

. . . which was like Authors. [Laughter] I don't know how the distinction came in.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Why couldn't you play cards? Was that your father or your mother?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

My father didn't believe in card-playing at all, and he didn't believe in dancing. As a child, he had resisted a feeling among the clergy in Wilson that it was wrong to read novels. That he never paid any attention to. But he didn't believe in card-playing

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or dancing. We never went to a dancing school, although all of us danced. And my grandmother, the lady with the gold-headed cane, was one of the greatest card players I've ever known in my life.

CHARLES EAGLES:

But your father didn't dance then. Was music important?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No, music was not important. He didn't dance. He was once elected Chief Marshal of the state fair. He had never ridden a horse.

CHARLES EAGLES:

He had never ridden a horse?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Never ridden a horse. So he led the parade in a little surrey. [Laughter] Wilson was no horseback riding place much, and they were poor people. His father was killed on a ship full of non-combatants by some irregular Texas troops when he was going back to Washington. And all through my father's life there were certain people who tried to stigmatize him by saying that his father was a buffalo. A buffalo, as you know, was the same as a copperhead in the North. And some years later we had some stories about some people down in eastern North Carolina, which were not very kind stories in the sense that unknown, and the family found a document showing that Josephus Daniels, Sr. had been given a pass to trade within the occupied zone, to try to prove that he unknown. But a great many of his friends and his mother's and father's friends came forward and said he was not an active buffalo. She became postmistress in Wilson, however, because she was the only literate white person they could find who hadn't given aid or comfort to the Confederacy, and served that for many years. In fact, unconsciously,

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I think that may have entered into my father's strong feeling about black domination in the South at one time. He began to edit, as a young man, a very violent Democratic newspaper in Wilson. And at that time there was a black congressman.

CHARLES EAGLES:

George White?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I think so, but you'll have to check that. Who got father's mother removed as postmistress. And he had to go to White to try to get her reinstated; I don't think White ever did. Remember in that period of his boyhood Vance was campaigning against Settle for governor in eastern North Carolina. And he got up to speak, and there was just a vast crowd of blacks. And Vance said, "I feel like a grain of rice in a bushel of rat turds." [Laughter]

CHARLES EAGLES:

When you were small, did your father tell you stories of Reconstruction and that period of time?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

My grandmother did, his mother. She refugeed to Ocracoke, and she used to tell us that they couldn't get any coffee and all this sort of thing, and what they did. And she was informed while there— I think Charles was born there—that her husband was in the hospital or dying in New Bern. He got shot in his arm, and he refused to have his arm amputated because he said, "What the hell good is a carpenter without an arm?" So he died of blood poisoning. And she came back by boat all the way from Ocracoke, and he was dead when she arrived. We don't know where he was buried. He was buried in New Bern. Maybe if I went back and studied lists of those who were buried in the occupation, I could find it, but we never have.

CHARLES EAGLES:

What kind of stories did you hear about the 1860's and '70's . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Mostly about hardships. Father remembered some stories of Yankee artillery against Little Washington. And she got after her boys very strongly, because Frank in particular found out that he could, as a little boy, effectively beg from the Union soldiers [laughter] and ask them for a quarter and things like that. And she tried to put her foot firmly down on any such thing, which I'm sure accompanies occupying armies everywhere, little children. I understand that in parts of Germany where the dental situation of the starving people was pretty good, after our soldiers came in and gave them chewing gum and candy it went the hell to heck.

CHARLES EAGLES:

So did you grow up with a pretty standard view of Reconstruction as a pretty horrible experience?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Not as a horrible experience, a heroic experience. My mother's family belonged to every patriotic organization known in the world, from the Society of Mayflower Descendants, Colonial Dames, this, that, and the other. They were apparently very popular at that period in the South. And she had an aunt named Elvira who, every Christmas, joined her into a different, new patriotic society, and so my mother had to pay dues for the rest of her life. [Laughter] Mother's people were very . . . Some of them had just bosoms full of badges. And my father took no part in that. He didn't believe in any organization that everybody couldn't get into. My Grandfather Bagley had been a very prominent Oddfellow, and they kind of pushed him to join the Oddfellows. And he was going down the initiation line and found out that one of the other fellows being initiated was a man he had publicly

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declared was a blackguard of the worst sort. [Laughter] So he said he didn't want to be a brother of any such as that, and so he never belonged to any organization that wasn't open to everybody. When I went to Chapel Hill, he was violently against my joining a fraternity.

CHARLES EAGLES:

What was the basis of his belief that on one should belong to an organization that everyone couldn't belong to?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

It was a sort of an anti-aristocratic view. He always regarded himself as a member of the working class or the class that worked with their hands. I think his father said that one reason he left the South was that there was no place in it for a white man who worked with his hands. And my father's defense of labor unions all his life was a sense that he came from working people. And he stuck to that pretty closely. My mother was always quite sympathetic, but her people, although Quakers, were pretty damn aristocratic.

CHARLES EAGLES:

How did your father reconcile associating himself with the working class, and in the twenties living in Wakestone, which was a mansion of sorts, wasn't it?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes, it was. He didn't have any sense that a man shouldn't make all he could, but he wanted in that process to be fair to the man who was working with his hands. He didn't have any sense that he ought to take the vow of poverty. And yes, Wakestone was, but he always claimed that he made it by having rocks thrown at him. [Laughter]

CHARLES EAGLES:

To get back to when you were a small boy in Raleigh, did you go to the News and Observer office with your father? Was the paper a very important thing for you even as a . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I guess so, yes. The paper was across the street from where the Sir Walter Hotel is now. It had been built originally—a lot of different papers and so forth and changing—by Milton Littlefield, whom I wrote a book about. It had beautiful ironwork on it. Father always walked back and forth to lunch—it was the only exercise he ever took—and I'd walk with him. And he sometimes irritated me by stopping all the way along and talking to people. [Laughter] I was a little impatient to get going.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Did the other brothers do the same thing, they went to the newspaper, too?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Oh, yes, sure. I thought of the News and Observer as a member of the family, or we were a member of the News and Observer, always. That was my father's whole life.

CHARLES EAGLES:

You mentioned your boyhood home was right across the street from Shaw University and that you grew up in a black neighborhood.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes.

CHARLES EAGLES:

A ghetto of sorts. And there were always servants in the home, too.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Oh, as thick as chocolate.

CHARLES EAGLES:

You mean a lot of them.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes. We had a gardener and a maid and two nurses and a cook. And of course they were paid nothing. I don't mean to say that my mother and father were particular scrooges. They paid at least the going rate. Of course there was a very clear difference between black and white, but there was a very intimate relationship, too. Now that

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may be difficult for your generation to quite understand, the closeness of the ties. It was paternalism complete, but in our time we've become a little too unsympathetic with paternalism, because it did put a heart into a relationship even if it didn't put equality into a relationship. And where somebody was suffering or anything, my mother and father were quick to try to help. And I thought of our servants as just practically members of the family.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Do you remember any of them in particular?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Oh, yes, Sophie and Harriet were the nurses, and I remember them particularly well. Have you read a book called South to a Very Old Place?

CHARLES EAGLES:

Yes.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

He makes a very good point there about how the negro mammy has been . . . He chose me and Faulkner to both be talking too damn much about that. He's right. The notion that the mammy really took the place of the mama didn't really exist. And it came to the point where having a mammy and saying you had a mammy was almost like saying your folks would have had a mansion if Sherman hadn't burned it down. It was a status symbol with many people. And the mammy was as often a yellow slut as a black angel. It's become a romanticized symbol.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Well, which were Sophie and Harriet?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Harriet was mine.

CHARLES EAGLES:

I mean were they the black angels or the yellow sluts? [Laughter]

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

They were both pretty damn good women. But Harriet had

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a great sense of cynicism. And both of them, you know, they were great snobs, particularly about white people. Even today on this island, though you wouldn't get anybody to admit it, the blacks would rather work for the quality, even though they don't make quite as much, than work for somebody that they didn't think was up like that. So at the end of slavery, they didn't adopt the names of Henry Lloyd Garrison and people like that; they adopted the names of their old masters. I remember once my brother, when he was getting older—Sophie was still around—he started going with a girl in Raleigh who was perfectly all right.

CHARLES EAGLES:

This is your brother Josephus?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes. And one day Sophie said to him, "Boy, you've got to do better than that." [Laughter] Yes, they were great snobs. And they were very kind people.

CHARLES EAGLES:

How long were Sophie and Harriet around?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Harriet was around until, I would say, very nearly 1930.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Then she went to Washington with the family.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No, she didn't. My Uncle Henry occupied the house in Raleigh, and she stayed there. But she came back to Wakestone, and then we pensioned her and kept her in the St. Agnes Hospital for a number of years until she died.

CHARLES EAGLES:

You actually paid her bills while she was in the hospital.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Oh, sure. That was standard. And I don't think that was just with us. Almost all decent white people looked out for their blacks. That was part of that paternalism I was talking about. And of course there were some of the meanest in the white family, the white

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community, that ever . . . That's one thing I keep on trying to make people understand, that there are white sons of bitches and black sons of bitches, and good blacks and good whites. Sometimes we just sort of draw the line, as if the whites are all bastards and the blacks are all mistreated angels, or vice versa.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Did your father believe that?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No, he didn't believe it personally, but he believed that politically, the blacks were not able to govern. Now personally, while I said he wouldn't urge Wesley Hoover to vote, he wouldn't want to stop him.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Wesley Hoover was an exception to the rule?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No, any schoolteacher. He was in favor of their voting. Not that he would have tried to and make them vote, but he would resisted preventing them from voting.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Did he think that Wesley Hoover was . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Competent to vote? Yes.

CHARLES EAGLES:

He thought Wesley Hoover was a good black man.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Did he think that Wesley Hoover was better than many white people who were not good people?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Are you talking about on moral grounds?

CHARLES EAGLES:

Any grounds.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Well, now, look. He would have permitted in his house socially a white man about whom he had doubts as to his high standards, and he wouldn't have permitted at his table a black man who he thought

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met the highest standards.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Why?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

That's the taboo. You do not break bread—it goes back a million years—with a . . . What's the Bible term? Who was the man who was kind to the stranger on the road?

CHARLES EAGLES:

The good Samaritan.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

You didn't break bread with a Samaritan. Now why? It's a taboo; that's happening in Africa, in Uganda, today.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Did your father ever wonder where that taboo came from? Did he ever question?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

He was not a poetic man, in the sense that he would go back and philosophize about it. He accepted a situation which existed and in which he became a leader. For instance, I remember my grandmother used to say . . . She had in her girlhood or young womanhood a servant named Zilphie, for whom she had the highest regards. And she would say, "If he's Zilphie's grandson, he's all right," a sense of aristocracy among the blacks in the sense of morals and ability. And they all laughed, I remember. [Laughter] The story came down how Zilphie got two overcoats from the Freedman's Bureau. They thought that was just wonderful, these damn Yankees going unknown. It's difficult for your generation to quite grasp the combination of hostility and friendliness which existed.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Was it difficult for your generation to grasp it?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I'm talking about when I was a child now. And when I was a child, it seemed just as natural to me as the sun rising and

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setting. Of course, I began to ask questions as I grew older. Most of my first break with this tradition was seeing the injustices to some. I didn't become interested in the welfare of the blacks because of any negrophile sense. I felt the same about them that I felt about oppressed and exploited white men. That's the way my interests came into the race situation as a young man. And you accepted it; it was just a situation. You didn't kick against the pricks as a small child in a gentle home, and servants were happy, or seemed to be. This paternalistic system was just the system, and I was in that, really, only until the time I was eleven years old. Then we went to Washington. And in that period I was not an itinerate philosopher. [Laughter] I just had a happy childhood.

CHARLES EAGLES:

You said your father identified with working-class people and their interests. There was a union at the News and Observer, I assume.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I don't know. He was for a very long time an honorary member of the Typographical Union. Yes, he was pretty strong for the union. I'm pretty sure it was there, but when it started I don't know.

CHARLES EAGLES:

When did blacks start working there? Were there always blacks in a custodial . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes, always janitorial blacks. And as a young man, his pressman was black. Now there's another case where the blacks, at a certain time, occupied skilled jobs, and then gradually they were squeezed out of those skilled jobs. For instance, when I was a child it would never have occured to me to have a white man cut my hair. Otey

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ran a very nice barber shop. It's a very well-known family in Raleigh, and their women really were beautiful octoroons. I mean, people write about them and you think every octoroon was beautiful [laughter], but these were real beautiful girls. And one of them lately was the woman who made, I suppose, most of the dresses for the girls who came out in the Debutante Ball in Raleigh. They were very nice people.

CHARLES EAGLES:

You said octoroons. What color were the black people who worked in your home and lived in the neighborhood?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Harriet was yellow; Sophie was black. Most of them were black. Once I wrote, and I said they went all the colors from chalk to chocolate. But most of them were either mahogany or black.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Did you ever sense any difference in the way they were treated?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Not a bit, and they didn't seem to think any difference, either. These were not octoroons or anything or very nearly white. No, they were all black with some little infusion of white somewhere along the line. Sophie could have been an African.

CHARLES EAGLES:

What about Shaw University across the street?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

A very pleasant place to go.

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

CHARLES EAGLES:

. . . that you were telling me about Dr. Meserve.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Dr. Meserve was the President of Shaw when I was there. He was, I think, a Massachusetts man and a very dignified gentleman, and I saw no hostility towards him anywhere.

CHARLES EAGLES:

A black man.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No, a white man. And we played in the campus there, and there was no hostility towards us at all. And we certainly had no hostility to Shaw. It was said that the man who started it was advised to get on a train and go back north right away, but he didn't. And I don't think Shaw ever had many troubles, unless it came in the sixties of this century. One of Booker T. Washington's children went there. Of course, I wasn't at the age when I knew anything about the standards of the college.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Did you play over there frequently?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

On the grounds, yes. I remember there were some little ground snakes in the fence that we'd capture and scare girls with them, that sort of thing. It was quite a pleasant place across the street.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Did your father know Mr. Meserve?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I'm sure he did. I don't ever recall any meeting between them, but of course he knew him, yes. And I'm sure he would have called him "Mr. Meserve."

CHARLES EAGLES:

Do you think your father ever gave any money to Shaw University?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I doubt that. His principal charity in Raleigh was the Methodist Orphanage. But he didn't have money to throw around as you hear about today. I don't know anything about his gifts, but I would think most of them went to his church and to the Methodist Orphanage.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Getting back to your playing, you played with the black children in the neighborhood, too.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Oh, sure. And they weren't intimidated by me. I remember there was one damn little black bully who tried to take all my candy

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away from me [laughter], and he got away with it, too. At that age, equality was pretty well established, although, if they came to our house, they would come to the back door.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Did you ever go to their homes?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes, I was taken by Harriet to their homes, and I was treated with kindness. You know this thing, "know his place." Well, that is a term that is now anathema. But in those days, you did know your place, and it wasn't regarded as shameful to know your place by the blacks. We had a lot of good friends among the blacks. There was a little boy that played with me; I think that was an arrangement. After you got too old to be tended by a nurse, you had a colored boy who was a year or two older than you as a kind of a playmate who was able to keep you from falling in the creek and such things. We had some great adventures. There was a storm sewer in Raleigh five feet wide and five feet tall that extended from right below our house up to the Sir Walter Hotel. And we would go through that storm sewer with torches. It was like going through a great cave. I don't know what would have happened to us if we'd gotten caught in there when there was a cloudburst, but we didn't have any troubles. We enjoyed it. It was an adventurous thing to do.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Would you go uptown with these little black children in the neighborhood, or did you just play with them when you were . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I didn't much go uptown until I was older, except with my father. Then when I got to ride a bicycle, that was a rather lonely business, riding a bicycle. You went by yourself. I used to get up early in the morning and ride way off with a book and sit under the trees

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and read. I guess I was always a pretty bookish little boy. unknown went uptown I was going with my father or something like that. And of course with the school, we saw no blacks at all. And I don't know about the whole business of education. I think I got an excellent education at the Centennial School. At least, when I went to Washington, D.C., which should have been one of the best, I didn't drop back at all. And we talk about how much better education we've got today. I'm not sure that the fact that the schools were limited in size and all, and that it was the only occupation, really, that was open to a white woman, that we didn't get a better quality person—not necessarily better educated, but a better quality person—as teachers than we do today.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Where was Centennial School? Did you have to go a ways?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

About a block and a half. It had been the Governor's palace. It's the foot of Fayetteville Street, where the auditorium is now. And then they built the new Governor's mansion up on Blount Street. That was when the better-off whites moved up to Blount Street. This was left, and it was transformed into one of the first public schools in North Carolina. A good school, I thought. Of course, I was no judge then, but I'm not so much impressed by the feeling that we have advanced far from unknown, that the past didn't have just as good teachers as we have today, with all their degrees and so forth.

CHARLES EAGLES:

And the black children went to a . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

They went to a black school. Now I didn't know anything about that school. And I doubt that in those days that truancy laws were very much enforced. There were a lot of children in the

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Centennial School that came from a sort of broken-down white cotton mill, back of it, who were definitely poor white and of poor quality. The saddest thing in the world is that the oppressed generally are the inferior. I suppose it's a natural thing, but you like to think that the oppressed would be presidents of the United States if they weren't oppressed, but I'm afraid that inferiority is a basis for inequality. I'm talking about within each race.

CHARLES EAGLES:

You were playing with black children all . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Oh, afternoons, sure.

CHARLES EAGLES:

. . . while you were in Raleigh. You left Raleigh when you were eleven.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes.

CHARLES EAGLES:

When do you think you would have stopped playing with black children, or would you have played with black children all the way until you . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

In the ball teams, I think we'd have played until . . . That's a hard question.

CHARLES EAGLES:

There's bound to be a time when you went your separate ways.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

There came a time when you were Charlie, and at some point you become "Mr. Charles." Now when that occurred, I don't know, but it did occur. And I imagine one of the reasons why, many of the conflicts—although that system doesn't exist today—racial differences become apparent to both. Before you reach the basis of adolescence, there's no sense of black except as you are it. But when you get to a certain point, one realizes he belongs here and the other realizes

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he belongs there, or did.

CHARLES EAGLES:

When did that take place for you?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I don't know, because I moved to Washington. And in Washington, except for our servants, we were completely removed from the black world. I didn't know any black children; there weren't any within three or four miles of us. And the John Eaton School, the public school which I attended, was absolutely lily-white.

CHARLES EAGLES:

So you almost left Raleigh before you could get to that point, you think.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes, I did.

CHARLES EAGLES:

And did you play with little black boys and girls?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Mostly boys, but some girls, yes.

CHARLES EAGLES:

I wondered if there was a . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No, there wasn't any . . . Now that would have occurred when sex occurred, when puberty. But of course, there was no sexual difference, really, at that point when I was living in Raleigh.

CHARLES EAGLES:

So you think you'd have stopped playing with black girls, and then have played with black boys a little longer.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

My mother would undoubtedly have looked askance at black girls after they got to the point where they had a little protrusion in their breasts.

CHARLES EAGLES:

You don't remember that happening with Josephus, Jr., for instance.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No, I don't remember. Josephus, you see, was nearly ten years older than me.

CHARLES EAGLES:

I wondered whether you remembered that stage.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No, I don't remember that at all. And in Washington, as I say, I was absolutely cut off from any black and white. There, though, of course, there was one thing that I think probably went into my thinking. When I was about fifteen or sixteen, the race riots broke out in Washington, and I remember our great concern for our servants, about their going back to the balck areas in which they lived. And Father taking special precautions for their safety. He'd have them each carried by car to their house. And there my father was terribly disturbed about this thing. A lot of it was caused by some sailors, which helped him be upset.

CHARLES EAGLES:

He was upset about the race riots?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes, very much upset.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Because he thought sailors had caused it?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Well, some of them had caused it. They'd been on leave, and they were active in the fighting. And he had no sympathy whatever with this white attack on the blacks, although the newspapers in Washington even were trying to make it out a black attack on the whites. You know, always that takes place wherever there's any collision. So that's about it.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Let's talk about your father a little while, and the News and Observer. Did that occupy most of his time when you were growing up?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Oh, yes.

CHARLES EAGLES:

He was at the newspaper every day?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes, except when he was off campaigning or speaking. You must remember, my father became very active in politics at birth [laughter], but in 1896 he was elected Democratic national committeeman.

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And he had a friend whom he'd met in the Cleveland administration in Washington named William Jennings Bryan, and he went out to Chicago, and then in the campaign afterwards he was very strong for William Jennings Bryan. William Allen White once described him as the Secretary of War in the first Bryan administration. [Laughter] And they remained great friends all their lives. And so he was away in the campaign years particularly. And then as a newspaperman he travelled all over the area the News and Observer circulated in and went to meetings and saw people, and so it was a sort of a News and Observer operation he was doing there.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Did that leave your mother in charge of the home, then?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I would say this: my mother was always in charge of the home.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Oh, was she the one that raised you more than your father?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Oh, yes. My father was the court of last resort, not that we ever appealed to it, but mother did the whipping and the feeding and the buying and the housekeeping. My father, I'm very much like him. We turn over our personal lives to our wives, really, almost completely, and so did my father. But she, of course, always tried to do what he would like and so forth. But the home was the seat of the matriarch, not the patriarch.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Who do you think had a greater influence on you, then, growing up?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I don't know.

CHARLES EAGLES:

It would almost seem in one sense that she might have, because she was there all the time, but if he was the final authority . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

He wasn't the final authority in any sense that we would appeal from Mother. No, sir, we wouldn't appeal from Mother.

CHARLES EAGLES:

[Laughter]

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

But I was interested in the newspaper business. And I don't know how you can explain this, but somehow at birth I was chosen to succeed him. Worth always wanted to be a doctor, and Josephus was going into business. I don't like to color my statements about Joe too much, but he just didn't have it.

CHARLES EAGLES:

And you think your parents were aware of that after a while.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Oh, they were aware of it, yes. They were aware of it through his whole life. He was a lovely fellow, but given to great rages and outbursts and things like that. And at birth I was sort of chosen to be my father's successor. I don't know why. And he would refer to me, and "We're going to do this and that and the other." I suppose, from the point of view of my newspaper career, I was definitely more influenced by my father than my mother. But my mother was not as literary a person as my father. She was very much concerned about our sex lives, as [laughter] attested to. And she wanted us to be pure boys, and, you know, that sort of thing. And I remember when we were in Washington, once a year Father would take me out to lunch on my birthday. But other than that, he was remote, but he was always very sweet to us.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Ever scared of him?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Never scared of him at all. Never scared of either one of them, except just when I was going out to get whipped, I got scared of

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my mother. [Laughter]

CHARLES EAGLES:

She kept a closer eye on you than your father.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Oh, yes.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Worried about who you were associating with?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Sure, and whether I was well or sick, and all that. Yes, she ran the household as far as the physical, and even the emotional, problems of children were concerned. Father was always too occupied.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Was he too occupied to talk with you when you were at home? Did you talk politics with him when you were little?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

We talked things at the table all the time.

CHARLES EAGLES:

With both parents.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes. Every Sunday when I was a little boy, it was almost like a ritual, Father would take us to walk. And we would go down where the Southern had parked an obsolete old engine down on the tracks and left it there, and we would go through it and go through the boiler and swarm all through it and so forth. And he'd be there, but often he took a political friend with him and they would talk while we were examining the engine. [Laughter] He was not austerely separated from us in any sense, but he just was not particularly interested in these swarming infants. I don't know whether that's a Southern characteristic or not, but the female in my world has always been the master of the house, rather than the man, that is, of the children.

CHARLES EAGLES:

If he didn't run the home, he ran the News and Observer. How did he run that?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

He ran it with a very gentle hand but with a very iron hand.

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It was his life, really, and he loved it, and he it and worked at it, and he meant it to be a great force for good as he saw it in his community. The News and Observer was him; he was it.

CHARLES EAGLES:

When you say he made it a force for good in the community as he saw it, what were his standards? How did he decide what was good? How did he decide where he was going to stand on an issue that arose?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

For instance, somebody said that the reason North Carolina has never had any financial scandals as other southern states have had was because of the News and Observer. He was watching his own party. He was a great Democrat, but when the Democrats got into office he didn't stop looking at them. Also, his standards were those of his church. He believed in Prohibition, was violent on the subject of prostitution. He was against sin, as Calvin Coolidge once said. [Laughter] My father, I've often said, was the father of jazz music in America. You read that, I'm sure. Closed up Storyville in New Orleans. I think he was a little bit too puritanical sometimes in his views about sex, but there was never anything thwarted or puritanical in his relationship with my mother. None of this Grant Wood, "American Gothic." Our house was joyous, and I'm sure he and my mother had a very adequate sex life. But the idea of anybody deviating from that kind of a sex life was to them just the most horrible thing in the world. And divorce; when my Uncle Henry Bagley got a divorce from his wife, Father insisted that he leave the paper. You see, times have changed a little bit, Charles.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Were his attitudes towards sex and toward liquor and toward blacks all part of one way of looking at the world, do you think?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I wouldn't be surprised. He undoubtedly had a very low opinion of the morals of blacks. Whether it was justified or not, I don't know. In the poverty of the blacks at that time there was a lot of loose living and so forth. I'm sure he felt that if the blacks ruled, there'd be . . . Well, he brought the element of sex into his campaign in pictures of a black school board member dictating to a white teacher. Now it didn't go any further than that, but the implication was clear. In all racial relationships, there has always been a fear, and a fear related to sex. I don't know why that's so.

CHARLES EAGLES:

It was related with him, too.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I don't mean that he discussed it any, but there's that cartoon by this man Norman E. Jennett. There was the business of "We've got to protect our women from lusty black men." This didn't come into his personal life in any sense; I know it didn't.

CHARLES EAGLES:

You mean he didn't have a black mistress.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

My father was as pure a man as anybody I know. And in his entire life, I never saw any deviation between his public positions and his private life. He didn't drink; he never touched a drop. And certainly he would not have messed with other women.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Black or white?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Black or white. He was a good man, in the sense that the preachers would say a good man.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Was that important to him, what the preacher said on Sunday?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No, not particularly. He was not dominated by what the preacher said in any sense.

CHARLES EAGLES:

What the Bible said, then.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

By what he'd been taught religiously. Oh, he'd be very critical of the preachers. For instance, one of his greatest fights was with Bishop Kilgo of Duke, and it practically split open the Methodist Church in North Carolina. So he was not clergy-intimidated in any sense. Of course, all those fights also are so difficult to single out as to what was the fight. For instance, when he fought Kilgo over the Bassett case, in which my father was wrong—at least, I think so—also involved was the fact that at the same time he was fighting the Dukes as the tobacco trust. And I don't think even he knew where his, well, call them convictions or prejudices stemmed from. He would distrust Kilgo as an agent of the Dukes, and maybe he even distrusted Bassett as a man in the Duke organization.

CHARLES EAGLES:

A case where a lot of his beliefs coincided.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes, and where they were mixed up together. And Prohibition, for instance, was mixed up with the use of money in politics.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Was Prohibition also mixed up with, if black men started drinking, you don't know what they're going to do?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I'm sure. I think the whole reason for the fact that Prohibition grew first and fastest in the South was the thought of the fear of what liquor would do to the blacks, and thus endanger the whites. That was a very old fear. For instance, a lot of people think that Columbia was burned down by blacks and soldiers who got drunk. Yes, the sense of a danger in your community that had to be curbed, that had something to do with Prohibition.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Is that why he could know that you drank and still get along with you?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

That's a funny thing, Charles. As I grew older and grew up, I very carefully . . . Now I didn't advocate repeal of Prohibition in the newspaper. In A Southerner Discovers the South, while I was Editor, I put in chapters where I said we stopped in the evening and had a drink, and so forth. He read the book, of course. He never protested to me. The only real protest I ever had from him about my writing . . . You see, my first divergence from my father was over religion. At Chapel Hill I must have been sort of a jackass.

CHARLES EAGLES:

[Laughter]

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I was an atheist, you see. And in those days atheism served for what communism serves now. Our parents weren't disturbed about the communists destroying youth; they were disturbed by religious dissenters destroying youth. And I guess I never was much of a believer in absolute authority. For instance, I'm one of the first people, and one of the few, I guess, who recognized Horace Williams as a complete fraud. He wasn't God, as a lot of them thought he was. Anyhow, I wrote this book— and I read it here not long ago; it's a nice little part of your juvenalia—about the fall of the angels. Soon after my first wife died, my father asked me if I'd go to ride with him. We went out, and he urged me not to—he hadn't read it, but he knew what it was about—publish the book. Well, I told him I had to, and did. And I didn't go to church much.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Why was he against the book?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

It was a story about Jehovah being . . . Jeohovah was

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the dupe of the book. Have you ever read it?

CHARLES EAGLES:

Yes.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

It was adopted by the Freethinkers' Society of America as a book of the month. And it treated him and God in a light that he didn't think was proper and so forth.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Less than . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Less than awed, yes. And that's the only time he ever protested against me, except little things. Once he asked me, as I told you, to change the description of my grandmother from snob to dame. [Laughter] But he object to my stating . . . And in his old age, we were both at Chicago at a Democratic national convention, and one day he came to my room with a round package—it was obviously a bottle of liquor—and he said, "Jonathan, this must be for you, but I found it in my box." [Laughter]

CHARLES EAGLES:

But he didn't smash that bottle before he . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No, and he knew I was drinking. As a matter of fact—my brother Frank tells this story—he was visited by a lot of people of prominence and so forth from Mexico and around after he retired as Ambassador to Mexico. And along about five o'clock, Frank said he would say to his guests, "Why don't you go over and see Jonathan for a little while?" meaning, without ever saying it, that he'd get his pre-dinner cocktail over there. And he was very mellow about that as he grew older. Mellow about everything, and yet that civil rights thing really set him off.

CHARLES EAGLES:

We'll get to that maybe in a few minutes. You said a few

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minutes ago that he wasn't poetic, that he didn't philosophize about things. Can you explain how he arrived at his positions, if he wasn't poetic? What was the source of them?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Religion.

CHARLES EAGLES:

That's the religion that he'd been brought up on?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

He'd been raised by a very strong woman, Mary Cleaves Daniels. And he believed in morality, and morality seemed to fit all his policies. He was never hypocritical about it. He could exaggerate against his enemies, but he never opened himself to their saying, "Well, look, old Daniels goes home and nips it," because he never took a drink in his life.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Did he see issues then in terms of morality, everything from liquor to his fighting the Dukes to . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

fighting Dukes was the little man, the little farmer.

CHARLES EAGLES:

But it was a question of right and wrong.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes, he thought that here were the powerful destroying the weak. And he always liked the statement by Tom Johnson that was Mayor of Cleveland, that the free silver issue was not a matter of free silver but of free men. Now he was on the left on everything except the race issue, and I suppose you might say the Prohibition issue. But he was all his life . . . I remember once after I got up on the paper, and we were having a negotiation with the union. Father and I drove home afterwards, and I said, "Gosh, Father, this is a tough business, being an employer." He said, "Yes, son, there's not anything worse than that except being an employee."

CHARLES EAGLES:

[Laughter]

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

He had that sense. He was a fair man.

CHARLES EAGLES:

You said a few minutes ago that he had a sense of sin. Did he see things right and wrong sinful?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Now you are trying to get me into a fixed pattern of the rigid religionist.

CHARLES EAGLES:

I'll let you get out of that if you want to.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

He wasn't any hardhat missionary, in the sense that, well, that old business about nothing on Sunday, you know. No, he wasn't a hard Puritan, but he did think that what he fought for was right, and what he opposed was wrong. And there were not many nuances in that. Comes to a very interesting thing I've noticed in my life. I didn't at first think much of Harry Truman. And Harry Truman was not a man of great learning in history, though he was much interested in history. Harry Truman always saw the cowboys and the Indians.

CHARLES EAGLES:

[Laughter] Black hat and the white hat.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes. And then I was a strong supporter of Adlai Stevenson. But I don't think Adlai Stevenson would have made a great president, because Adlai Stevenson was a Hamlet. In other words, he couldn't quickly see the cowboys and the Indians. There was something to be said for the Indians as well as the cowboys. And that Hamlet business is a wonderful thing in an intellectual; it may be a very bad thing in a man of action. Because you've got to believe in your cause. For instance, Robert E. Lee really never believed in the Southern cause, in my opinion; that's one of the reasons he lost. The man with a militant heart for what he believes is right is a better leader than your intellectual who sees all the sides.

CHARLES EAGLES:

So when an issue came up, he not only knew which side, but knew quickly which side.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

He knew it innately; he just knew it. And I must say I find this is true today. I see all these editors reading the Congressional Quarterly and this and that and that, and finally they come out with an editorial which has Hamlet in it. I think an editor should hit the floor with both feet and say what he thinks and not let the bushes on the side of the road entangle him. And I think many times we are today caught by this too damn much knowledge, rather than feeling. And Father was a man of feeling. Now he never thought anything without feeling it, and he never felt anything without thinking it.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Which side do you come down on?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

A little Hamlet in me.

CHARLES EAGLES:

In other words, a little more thinking than feeling?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No, more feeling, I think.

CHARLES EAGLES:

More feeling than thinking?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

This is a very wrong thing for me to say, maybe. My father never was a very graceful writer. I can write much better than my father. But my father had more personal force in him, maybe, than I have. And the poetry which I am interested in sometimes is not as vigorous as the hammer-strike of my father. And I don't know where I get that ability to write better than he did, but I think I have it.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Where do you get the poetic, then?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I don't know, and you see, I have strange people in my family. O. Henry was my mother's second cousin. And the Worths and

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Bagleys were less caught in the fundamentalist religion than my father's family was. My father was a very strange man religiously. One day I was saying to him that I just couldn't quite see how he could believe in immortality of the soul. And he said, "Well, son, that's not half as inconceivable as the fact that we are here now."

CHARLES EAGLES:

[Laughter]

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

And boy, you can't meet that, can you? [Laughter] He was really a great man, Charles.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Did he ever quote scripture to you?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

No more than he would in his editorials. No more than you and I sometimes, unconsciously. He didn't ever say, "The Bible says this . . . " No.

CHARLES EAGLES:

But you think the Bible was . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

The Bible meant a great deal to him. But I don't know whether it's the Bible, or the Biblical tradition which comes down in families beside the Bible, that was the most important. He wouldn't go and say, "Well, we can't do this, because if you'll look in Luke So-and-so and so-and-so, you'll find that we should do that." None of that sort of thing. It was a Biblical tradition, rather than the words of the Bible.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Something you pick up by memorizing those verses in Sunday school.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Yes, or they just linger in your mind from what your mother told you. So it's hard to draw the blacks and whites of a thing like this. For instance, as I told somebody about this thing you're dealing with, that whatever my differences may be with my father

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about race and other things, he taught me everything I know about good will and fairness to other people. He was a great man, my father.

CHARLES EAGLES:

What made you apply that to race where he couldn't, then?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I must say, Charlie, we're living in different times. I hadn't ever seen the sort of uprising of the blacks and the pressing down of the whites that occurred in the black belt of North Carolina in his youth, when the congressman from his district was a black and the whites were disenfranchised. The only person who could get a federal job was his mother, who hadn't done anything to aid the Confederacy. There's an environmental difference there. But I think that my interest in the blacks grew to a large extent from his feeling for the underprivileged. While he was editor, they had a lottery in Ahoskie. The American Legion put on a lottery. A black man won it; it was an automobile.

CHARLES EAGLES:

[Laughter]

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

And there were some people down there said, "Well, he can't have it." Well, the News and Observer and my father just raised holy hell. He'd won the damn lottery, and it would be robbery to take it away from him. And that sort of thing, there weren't any questions in his mind. And he was always violently opposed to lynching, and I think quite honestly. A very gentle man, very gentle man who could fight like hell. So many of these characters in history and in life are so complicated, Charlie, and it's hard to look from where you sit to where he stood. [Interruption]

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

That's right. I remember going there. The first thing that happened, of course, was the woman's suffrage parade, which preceded the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson. And there was quite a parade. I saw it from a suite up in the Willard Hotel. And I went home, and I went down—I think it was measles—so I didn't see the inauguration of Wilson.

CHARLES EAGLES:

But you saw the woman's suffrage . . .

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Parade. And we s