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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview A-0313, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
In this wonderfully candid interview, Jonathan Worth Daniels describes the
political and social changes he witnessed from the early 1900s to the mid-1940s
in North Carolina. Daniels was born into two prominent political North
Carolinian families, the Bagleys and the Daniels, in 1902. Daniels's parents
modeled paternalistic behavior in their dealings with the family's black
servants. He recalls that race relations were pleasant, but notes that blacks
were subservient to whites. Daniels's father, Josephus, actively participated in
the 1898 white supremacy campaign by using his newspaper, the News
and Observer, to disseminate Democratic and anti-black rhetoric.
Josephus's opposition to black political power grew out of Reconstruction-era
politics. Although his father provided significant political help with the white
supremacist campaign in the late 1890s, Daniels remembers his father as helpful
to black workers privately. When his father moved to Washington, D.C., as
Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, Daniels's own relationship with
blacks changed; when he was a young child, blacks were his playmates, but during
his adolescence, his social relationships with blacks came to an end. The
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill profoundly shaped Daniels's personal
and professional life. As editor of college's newspaper, the Daily
Tar Heel, Daniels gained practical experience for his future career as
an editor for the Raleigh News and Observer. His participation
in the Carolina Playmakers theatre group enhanced his creative flair. After
college, Daniels worked at a Louisville, Kentucky, paper under his uncle Judge
Robert Bingham's tutelage. By the early 1930s, Daniels had written his first
novel and moved to New York City to attend Columbia Law School. Harry Luce hired
him to work with Fortune magazine. He later returned to
Raleigh to serve as the editor of the Raleigh News and
Observer. Daniels argues that racial views must be seen in the light of
one's era. He also explains that the characteristics of effective leaders are
largely decisiveness and action.
In this interview, Jonathan Daniels discusses his father's role as a newspaper editor and Secretary of the Navy, as well as his father's racial and religious views. Daniels also describes how race and the University of North Carolina shaped his own life.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Would you tell me your full name and when and where you were born?
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.
You were born in your parents' home, then.
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.
This was Grandfather Bagley.
Yes. He was the clerk of the state supreme court.
What were your parents like? How would you describe them?
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.Merrimack, 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."
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 grandmother 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.)
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.
This is Grandfather Bagley.
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.
What were your parents like individually? Were your mother
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.
Did your father help in that little back porch operation?
Yes.
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
Would he encourage Wesley Hoover to register to vote if Wesley Hoover was literate?
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.
Is that just a sense of trust and loyalty that he had?
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
That's Charles Cleaves.
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."
Let's get back to what it was like when you were a small boy in Raleigh. You had three brothers.
Yes.
What were they like?
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.
This was Josephus Jr.
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 Danielses. They'll serve under any
president."
What about your other brother?
Frank is a solid citizen. He keeps all the rest of us in bread and
butter.
Were you closer to Frank or to Worth?
Oh, yes, to Frank. Frank and I were nearer the same age, and we worked together all our lives.
But when you were a small boy, were you closer then?
Yes, Frank and I. Worth was three years older than myself, and Frank was just two years younger, and we were closer.
What was the Daniels home like? I get the impression that your father read a lot, not just newspapers.
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."
Now when those people came to dinner, were you at the table with them?
No, no, no.
Amy Carter then.
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.
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?
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.
So all you boys went to Sunday school every Sunday?
Yes, and we all went to the Methodist Sunday school. I
How important was going to church, was the church for you when you were small?
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.
You said your father taught a Sunday school class.
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.
Now the church was pretty important to him, wasn't it?
Oh, very important to him. My mother always said that first came the
Democratic Party, then the Methodist Church, and she
Where did the News and Observer come in?
The News and Observer was in there, too.
Was his religion very important to him day-to-day?
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 . . .
Daily devotionals weren't . . .
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.
So you didn't have to come home from Sunday school and sit quietly in a chair for the rest of . . .
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 . . .
. . . which was like Authors.
Why couldn't you play cards? Was that your father or your mother?
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
But your father didn't dance then. Was music important?
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.
He had never ridden a horse?
Never ridden a horse. So he led the parade in a little surrey.
George White?
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."
When you were small, did your father tell you stories of Reconstruction and that period of time?
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.
What kind of stories did you hear about the 1860s and '70s . . .
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
So did you grow up with a pretty standard view of Reconstruction as a pretty horrible experience?
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.
What was the basis of his belief that on one should belong to an organization that everyone couldn't belong to?
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.
How did your father reconcile associating himself with the working class, and in the '20s living in Wakestone, which was a mansion of sorts, wasn't it?
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.
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 . . .
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.
Did the other brothers do the same thing, they went to the newspaper, too?
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.
You mentioned your boyhood home was right across the street from Shaw University and that you grew up in a black neighborhood.
Yes.
A ghetto of sorts. And there were always servants in the home, too.
Oh, as thick as chocolate.
You mean a lot of them.
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
Do you remember any of them in particular?
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?
Yes.
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.
Well, which were Sophie and Harriet?
Harriet was mine.
I mean were they the black angels or the yellow sluts?
They were both pretty damn good women. But Harriet had
This is your brother Josephus?
Yes. And one day Sophie said to him, "Boy, you've got to do better than
that."
How long were Sophie and Harriet around?
Harriet was around until, I would say, very nearly 1930.
Then she went to Washington with the family.
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.
You actually paid her bills while she was in the hospital.
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
Did your father believe that?
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.
Wesley Hoover was an exception to the rule?
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.
Did he think that Wesley Hoover was . . .
Competent to vote? Yes.
He thought Wesley Hoover was a good black man.
Yes.
Did he think that Wesley Hoover was better than many white people who were not good people?
Are you talking about on moral grounds?
Any grounds.
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
Why?
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?
The good Samaritan.
You didn't break bread with a Samaritan. Now why? It's a taboo; that's happening in Africa, in Uganda, today.
Did your father ever wonder where that taboo came from? Did he ever question?
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.
Was it difficult for your generation to grasp it?
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
You said your father identified with working-class people and their
interests. There was a union at the News and Observer,
I assume.
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.
When did blacks start working there? Were there always blacks in a custodial . . .
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
You said octoroons. What color were the black people who worked in your home and lived in the neighborhood?
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.
Did you ever sense any difference in the way they were treated?
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.
What about Shaw University across the street?
A very pleasant place to go.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
. . . that you were telling me about Dr. Meserve.
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.
A black man.
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 '60s 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.
Did you play over there frequently?
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.
Did your father know Mr. Meserve?
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."
Do you think your father ever gave any money to Shaw University?
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.
Getting back to your playing, you played with the black children in the neighborhood, too.
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
Did you ever go to their homes?
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.
Would you go uptown with these little black children in the neighborhood, or did you just play with them when you were . . .
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
Where was Centennial School? Did you have to go a ways?
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
And the black children went to a . . .
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
You were playing with black children all . . .
Oh, afternoons, sure.
. . . while you were in Raleigh. You left Raleigh when you were eleven.
Yes.
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 . . .
In the ball teams, I think we'd have played until . . . that's a hard question.
There's bound to be a time when you went your separate ways.
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
When did that take place for you?
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.
So you almost left Raleigh before you could get to that point, you think.
Yes, I did.
And did you play with little black boys and girls?
Mostly boys, but some girls, yes.
I wondered if there was a . . .
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.
So you think you'd have stopped playing with black girls, and then have played with black boys a little longer.
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.
You don't remember that happening with Josephus Jr., for instance.
No, I don't remember. Josephus, you see, was nearly ten years older than me.
I wondered whether you remembered that stage.
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 black 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.
He was upset about the race riots?
Yes, very much upset.
Because he thought sailors had caused it?
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.
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?
Oh, yes.
He was at the newspaper every day?
Yes, except when he was off campaigning or speaking. You must remember,
my father became very active in politics at birth, 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.
Did that leave your mother in charge of the home, then?
I would say this: my mother was always in charge of the home.
Oh, was she the one that raised you more than your father?
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.
Who do you think had a greater influence on you, then, growing up?
I don't know.
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 . . .
He wasn't the final authority in any sense that we would appeal from Mother. No, sir, we wouldn't appeal from Mother.
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.
And you think your parents were aware of that after a while.
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, "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
Ever scared of him?
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
She kept a closer eye on you than your father.
Oh, yes.
Worried about who you were associating with?
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.
Was he too occupied to talk with you when you were at home? Did you talk politics with him when you were little?
We talked things at the table all the time.
With both parents.
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.
If he didn't run the home, he ran the News and
Observer. How did he run that?
He ran it with a very gentle hand but with a very iron hand.News and Observer was him; he
was it.
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?
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.
Were his attitudes towards sex and toward liquor and toward blacks all part of one way of looking at the world, do you think?
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.
It was related with him, too.
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.
You mean he didn't have a black mistress.
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.
Black or white?
Black or white. He was a good man, in the sense that the preachers would say a good man.
Was that important to him, what the preacher said on Sunday?
No, not particularly. He was not dominated by what the preacher said in any sense.
What the Bible said, then.
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.
A case where a lot of his beliefs coincided.
Yes, and where they were mixed up together. And Prohibition, for instance, was mixed up with the use of money in politics.
Was Prohibition also mixed up with, if black men started drinking, you don't know what they're going to do?
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.
Is that why he could know that you drank and still get along with you?
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.
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 juvenilia—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.
Why was he against the book?
It was a story about Jehovah being . . . Jehovah was
Yes.
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.
Less than . . .
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.
But he didn't smash that bottle before he . . .
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.
We'll get to that maybe in a few minutes. You said a few
Religion.
That's the religion that he'd been brought up on?
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.
Did he see issues then in terms of morality, everything from liquor to his fighting the Dukes to . . .
Fighting Dukes was the little man, the little farmer.
But it was a question of right and wrong.
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."
He had that sense. He was a fair man.
You said a few minutes ago that he had a sense of sin. Did he see things right and wrong sinful?
Now you are trying to get me into a fixed pattern of the rigid religionist.
I'll let you get out of that if you want to.
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.
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.
So when an issue came up, he not only knew which side, but knew quickly which side.
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.
Which side do you come down on?
A little Hamlet in me.
In other words, a little more thinking than feeling?
No, more feeling, I think.
More feeling than thinking?
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.
Where do you get the poetic, then?
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
And boy, you can't meet that, can you?
Did he ever quote scripture to you?
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.
But you think the Bible was . . .
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.
Something you pick up by memorizing those verses in Sunday school.
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
What made you apply that to race where he couldn't, then?
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.
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.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
That's right. I remember going there. The first thing that happened, of course, was the women'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.
But you saw the woman's suffrage . . .
Parade. And we settled down. Mother took a place out on Woodley Lane,
which is across the Rock Creek Bridge. And people said, well, of course
they couldn't live out there in the wintertime. Well, now, it's
practically the center of town. It had a tremendous yard, and we were
much closer to the woods than I'd ever been in Raleigh. There were vast
empty places of wooded places where Theodore Roosevelt had led the
ambassadors hiking in his administration. And there were rabbits. It was
quite a wooded area. And I loved it there, and we had a very happy time.
A place called Single Oak. And I remember my father was given by the
government in those days carriages and two pairs of horses and a footman
and a coachman. And really nothing today is quite as elegant as
carriages and horses. It was a beautiful thing. I remember that in those
days the Russian ambassador had a Cossack riding on the high seat of his
coach. It was quite an ornate time. It was, of course, the last of a
time that had ended with the sinking of the Titanic
and would ultimately end forever with the beginning of World War II.
How did your life change by going to Washington? You told me before you didn't have any black playmates.
No black playmates, but we still had black servants. And my life didn't
change greatly. I went to a public school called the
What kind of students were in the John Eaton School?
Good middle-class children who lived in Cleveland Park, mostly, which was out just beyond . . . Cathedral Avenue led up to Woodley Lane from Connecticut Avenue. And they were children of government officials and merchants and people of that sort.
Did you meet David Mearns there?
No, David Mearns lived right downtown. David was a very interesting boy. His father had been a very rich man, and his mother was the sister of a man named Chambers who ran the Bobbs-Merrill publishing company in Indianapolis. And the Mearnses used to live in one of the best houses in the part of Washington between Massachusetts and Connecticut Avenues. And the bank he was connected with failed. And I don't know whether he ever went to prison or anything, but he always felt somewhat disgraced and never went anywhere. And they lived way off in a rather poor section of Washington. And I didn't meet David until we began to go to St. Albans School, where he went from another section entirely of Washington.
How long did you go to John Eaton, then?
It must have been about two years.
And then you went to St. Albans.
Two or three years, yes, then went to St. Albans, which was a small school then as compared to now. But I had a good time there. I would walk home and walk out there or take the streetcar, which was a long ride around. And it was a nice school.
Was it very upper-class compared to the public school?
You wouldn't notice it, but it was, yes. Although part of the boys . . . the school was established for the choir boys of the National Cathedral School. They might come from homes of very limited resources. But it became, as the time went on, I suppose the upper-class school of Washington. The Friends School was another good private school. All of Theodore Roosevelt's children, after going to the Force School, went there. The Friends, and St. Albans, and there was a third school, something like Landon School.
I'm a little surprised that your father, who was a big supporter of North Carolina State and a big supporter of public schools in North Carolina, would send his son to a private school.
I'm rather surprised at that, too, even now. Worth was the first to go there. Why we moved to that I don't know, really. Frank didn't go there. Josephus didn't go there. Worth and I went there.
Did Frank and Josephus continue in public school?
No, Joe went to a place called the Tome School up in Maryland. Frank is
two years younger than me, but he was about three years behind
Honorary high school diploma.
Yes.
What kind of people did you meet when you were in Washington?
All kinds of people. My great friend was a boy named Tubby Heyl, whose
father was a retired colonel in the Army. And then out on Woodley Lane I
had good friends named Bryant Grove, Paul Heis, Billy Comer, and the
Scotts, Nathan Scott and his sister Agnes. Agnes was my first love. Very
devoted to her. And we used to sit for hours holding hands, and that's
as far as we ever got.
Yes, I knew Agnes when they moved away down on Florida Avenue. Their father built a big place down there. And then she married and went to Atlanta and ended up dying of some kind of a fault in a permanent wave in a beauty parlor.
Strange.
I don't know whether it was electrocution or what.
What kind of important people did you meet? You were moving in a different world now.
Sure. Mr. Bryan, of course, was my father's close friend.
And your idol, I think.
No, not really. He was a little austere, as a matter of fact, with
children. But boy, what he could eat. I remember my brothers and I were
terribly impressed with Mr. Bryan when he'd come to our house. He was on
a diet, and one of the things he could eat was radishes. So he consumed
those radishes like a mowing machine.
Newton Baker?
Yes, I knew him. He had a boy who I knew. What was his name? I don't think it was Newton Jr. But he was a nice boy.
I think he wrote a letter of recommendation for you for something.
I wouldn't be a bit surprised. One thing I remember getting
recommendations for was, when I was at Chapel Hill I wanted to get a
scholarship or something to some French university, which I didn't get.
And I think maybe he was one of the ones. I was not greatly impressed by
the presence of the notables. I saw them. But the Secretary of the Navy
had two Marine orderlies. One of them was named Ober, and the other one
was named Finukin. And I remember Ober taught me how to blow the bugle.
And we got a big Marine tent and erected it on the grounds at
How often did you come back to Raleigh?
I'm sure we came back almost every year, sometime in the summer. Before we went to Washington, one long summer—I think it was the summer of the election of 1912—we were parked in Richmond, Frank and I, with my Uncle Herbert Jackson. He was not my uncle; he was my mother's second cousin, I think, but a great friend of the family, and a banker. Along Franklin Street. And I remember playing in Monroe Park, which is a tremendous park in Richmond. And I had a pretty damn good time in Richmond. And then after Wilson left and was elected, my brothers had a terrible case of typhoid fever. I was afraid Worth was going to die. And they got well, and so, as a sort of a recuperative reward, we all went to New York City for the first time. And I can remember riding up . . . what avenue is it that comes into Broadway at Times Square? Anyhow, all the electric signs. It was the great world for the first time. And we went to the theater. Mr. Morgenthal owned, I think, the Mirror Candy Factory, and we went there and were given boxes. And we went by the making of candy, and we could take any kind of candy we wanted and fill up our boxes. That was a great adventure.
Was that your first introduction to the theater?
No, no. I went to the theater regularly in Raleigh in the old Academy of
Music. There was a pretty good—well, I thought it
Had your father liked the theater?
Very much. He'd liked the theater as a young man, although some of his
religious advisers looked down upon the theater. But he never did; he
loved the theater. He gave some mentions of it in his autobiography.
Washington was about like Raleigh, except . . . and we had the same
servants, brought them from Raleigh, particularly a black man named Bob
Gaines, who had been a waiter at the Yarborough House, which was then
the great hotel in Raleigh.
But you said Harriet and Sophie . . .
Didn't go, no. Harriet wasn't as old as Sophie, but they were both getting along then. And Sophie died while we were in Washington, and Mother came down and stayed in Raleigh during her last days. Willis and Jordan were the footman and coachman. It was a very pleasant place to live. And John Eaton, because of becoming aware of poetry and so forth. I skipped a grade at John Eaton, so, as I said, I felt that the schools that I went to in Raleigh couldn't have been as bad as we now think they were if I could come into the Washington schools and, after a year, skip a grade there.
You met Bernard Baruch in Washington, too.
That was after the war began. See, Baruch came with the war. One thing
that was very remarkable and pleasant about my days in Washington was
that the Secretary of the Navy had a yacht, the Dolphin, and Father wanted to examine naval stations and so forth
in New England. Or maybe, as some people do now, he wanted to go there,
and the naval stations Dolphin in awfully cold water, but we loved it.
And I think it's bigger than the Sequoia that the
President had today. And that was, of course, an aspect of magnificence
in my childhood that of course hadn't attended it in Raleigh. And the
first Mrs. Woodrow Wilson—
So after just spending four years in Washington, you . . .
Eight.
Now you went to UNC.
I went to UNC in the fall of '18. And I tried to get into the service.
You went to a camp, didn't you, a military camp.
I tried to get into the service and even went to see Newton Baker formally, in his office.
I asked him to waive my age and let me in. And he was very nice to me but of course didn't do it. And then I went to a camp at Asheville, at the Horner Military School, run by a Canadian named Captain Allen. I'm ashamed to say I don't remember his first name. He had been invalided out of the war. He'd been in the Princess Pat regiment from Canada, and he came to Chapel Hill, a beautiful man and very popular, and he ran what they called a non-SATC at Chapel Hill. But he was the commander of this camp.
Non-SATC, what does that mean?
SATC was the Student Army Training Corps. And the non-SATC was composed of the boys at Chapel Hill who were too young to get into the Student Army Training Corps. But before I went to Chapel Hill, this summer he ran this camp at Horner's Military School in Asheville. It actually was a part of the University's military operation. And Bill Blount, who was a little older than me, was one of his assistants. He later became president of Liggett and Myers. I don't remember who his other chief instructors were, but I met a lot of the boys I later knew at Chapel Hill at that camp. I came on down to Chapel Hill.
Did you like that camp?
Yes, I had a lovely time. And I also fell in love with a girl in
Asheville.
This was Edward Kidder Graham.
Yes. We had the influenza epidemic at Chapel Hill, and all the fraternity
houses became hospitals, in effect, filled with boys. I was reported to
have died in there. I remember that the only doctors
Worth had preceded you there.
Worth at that time was at Annapolis. He thought that if he was going to have to lose his college career, he'd rather follow a career in the Navy. Later on he got very angry when some cadet there or midshipman intimated that he had gone to Annapolis in order to avoid direct military action. And he got awful damn mad and had a fight. Worth had gone; I was there. I made a lot of friends, particularly some boys from Goldsboro. There was John Norwood and Flip Wooten and Charlie Creech, and Fido Bowen from Greenville. All of them, I think, are dead now, except maybe John Norwood. And when the war ended . . . We had a celebration on the eighth of November with the false armistice. But when the war ended, all the boys in the SATC got a thirty dollar bonus. And we poor boys who'd drilled just as hard in the non-SATC didn't get any, and we felt a great injustice had taken place.
What courses did you take there that you remember particularly?
I remember that Dr. Henry was a delightful fellow. He was really in
Latin, but in those days, with the men who had gone off to war, they
were substituting around; he taught me trigonometry. I remember I got a
"One." And I took English. As a matter of fact, in spite of the fact
that I came in with a lot of Confederate money credits, I got all "Ones"
that fall. And I could have been on the way to being
What set were you in?
It's difficult to say.
Because you were kind of between . . .
I was ambivalent, if you want to use a big word. I was a Deke, and we
thought we were, of course, the cream of the earth. But I was not the
elegant gentleman that you're supposed to be to become a Gimghoul or
Gorgon's Head. I'd begun to move with a group that was working with Koch
and the Carolina Playmakers. And I was also a sort of professional
dissident. I didn't believe in God. I remember they had a question as to
whether boys who had played in semi-pro baseball in the summertime
should be regarded as amateurs to play on the team at Chapel Hill. And
they put a thing on Patterson's drugstore window, those that thought
that was right and those that thought it was wrong.
Did fraternities have big parties the way they do now?
No, not in the sense that you do now. Gosh, we'd have a
I'd been interested in dramatics at St. Albans, and I got very much interested in the Carolina Playmakers. And I appeared in the first three sets of plays they put on. And there, of course, I met Paul Green and Tom Wolfe and Elizabeth Lay, who became Mrs. Green, and a boy named Albert Oettinger from Wilson. And a professor named Daggett. And then this old Spanish professor named Levitt, who died just a year or so ago. They were helping Koch as professors. Daggett was an electrical engineer, and he tended to all the lighting and so forth. And the plays were put on in the high school. And we thought we were pretty damn good, and I guess it was the beginning of a fairly significant thing in Chapel Hill.
What attracted you about dramatics?
When I was a little boy, somewhere in the world I had got the phrase that
what I was going to be when I got grown was an "actomanager." I was
going to manage my plays and play the lead in them. Now where does a
child get these big notions about literature and actingTar Heel just before I
was editor, was in there. And George Denny, who became a radio
impresario or whatever you call them. It was the literary sort of group.
Willie Horner, who later ran the papers in Sanford, North Carolina, was
one. An interesting group of people. And we enjoyed it. And I would go
to Raleigh. In those days there was a man named Bull Durham who ran a
touring car; they called it a bus. And we'd ride to Raleigh. And golly,
it was cold some of the nights. And go to dances. Subscription dances
seemed to be quite the thing at that time. And sometimes we'd get a
little tight.
It was a very good time.
What about professors?
Well, I said Old Man Henry was one of the sweetest persons I know. I took
trigonometry under him, but he was a Latin teacher actually. He was a
good teacher. I liked Johnny Booker very much.
Archibald Henderson, did you have him?
No, I didn't ever have Archibald. I knew Archibald somehow; I don't know
exactly how.
This is any time during your time there.
Greenlaw was the greatest professor there then. He was an English professor. I had a couple of courses under him. And he was the head of the English Department and later went on to Hopkins.
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
. . . belts and one of these black bow ties. I've drawn a portrait of
him in the description of Tom Wolfe's funeral in the Tar
Heel. Hibbard was a good man in English. J. Holly Hanford was
another good one in English. But I loved Johnny Booker. He was a very
proper . . . well, I would have described him as a proper Bostonian; he
was a Baltimorean, I think. But he was an awfully nice person under a
certain pomposity.
Were you a pretty serious student?
I was when I was interested. I early developed, which is both a virtue
and a vice, the ability to cram. I could loaf through a course, and then
in the last week before examinations cram like hell and get it pretty
quick. I don't suppose I really savored the mixture
What kind of things were you reading, mainly fiction?
Mainly fiction and poetry. I belonged to the group that read Vanity Fair and The Smart Set, which were
the new sophisticated young man. The F. Scott Fitzgerald generation, the
Mencken period. And it was there, I think, that I fell in love
particularly with a very . . . I don't ever hear him mentioned anymore,
an Englishman named Norman Douglas, who wrote a book called South Wind and a great deal about life in Italy. And I read
pretty widely, Arnold Bennett. If you had named it then, I had read it.
I might as well come to my sins. At Chapel Hill my name was "Dice
Daniels." I was the leading crapshooter on the campus, and I had a
reputation which I do not think was justified as a man who could just
call the numbers and
Make much money that way?
I must have, but I don't remember that I was very far ahead. The only
time I really got far ahead was when I stopped. Oh, it must have been
half a dozen years later. I was in New York, and a friend of my
brother-in-law there, Noble Cathcart and I, met Ogden
Well, nobody among us had a hundred dollars.
You passed up a good career.
Maybe so,
Was your life in Chapel Hill fairly well divided among the people you gambled with and were in the fraternity with, and then the people you were in Playmakers with?
I suppose you might say so, but actually people don't divide their lives.
It's sort of like a fringe; you are this today and with that tomorrow. I
remember once some of the boys stole some cannabis indigo, which I think
is hashish, from the medical school. And a couple of us agreed to take
it and let the others observe us as we went into our drug
whatever-it-was, hallucinations. And nothing
But you did try it?
Yes. I remember I lay on the bed. And I have a hunch that a good part of
my hallucinations were for the benefit of my audience, rather than . . .
Mostly moonshine?
Oh, corn whiskey. I shudder to think of it. I had a friend named Jack
Joyner from down east, who later went to Statesville, a young lawyer,
and killed himself there; I never knew why. And I remember his saying,
"Well, if it's wood alcohol, drain the splinters out and we'll drink
it."
You never got into trouble, though.
Yes, I got put on probation once for drinking.
What did your father say about that?
He never knew,
How did you get caught?
I slipped down on the dance floor. And somebody reported me. And then some of my friends, of course, testified that I had one drink but I wasn't drunk at all, you know; it was just a borderline case. And so they put me on probation.
What did that mean? You couldn't go off campus or something?
If I misbehaved again, I was out. That's what that did.
So you had to toe the line a while.
At that time I was managing editor of the Tar Heel, and
the Student Council came up with a statement that two or three students
had been put on probation for drinking, but didn't name them, thank God.
But I had to print it.
How did you get involved with the Tar Heel?
I was fooling with it. Then it came as a sort of a surprise to me. I think my brother Worth was to some extent responsible. I was at the meeting in Gerrard Hall one day, and Lee Overman Gregory—he was a grandson of Senator Overman, an awful nice boy—and he got up and nominated me for managing editor. Well, I don't suppose I really was entitled to it, but I went out friends and politicked for it and beat Willie Horner, who was my opponent, and became managing editor.
Had you been working on the paper before that?
Slightly, yes. But I think Horner really deserved it, but I had the
political connection with the upper world and the lower world.
Who was editor when you were managing editor?
Dan Grant. Tom Wolfe had been the editor, then Dan Grant, and then me. And a boy named Philip Hettleman, who has later become a very rich man in the stock market in New York, was business manager. As the thing ran in those days, the business manager made all the profit, and the others didn't get anything. And Philip made a pretty good thing out of it, but we worked like dogs. It came out twice a week for the first time. Printed in Burlington.
You had to go up there twice a week then.
Yes.
How did you get back and forth?
In a car. Somebody would bum the car. There weren't many cars on campus. But in some ways we got the transportation up there. I wouldn't remember exactly.
Did that please your father, that you . . .
I suppose it did. I don't remember his writing me anything about it. My father then, he was still in Washington, you see, a pretty busy man. And then I decided to graduate in three years, and I did. Then I came back. I wanted to be editor, so I took an M.A. and was editor while I was getting my M.A.
What were the burning issues on campus then?
I remember we had one real terrible thing, really. The police arrested a
group of whores in the ATO house. It came up into court, and the Tar Heel and got a story about it. And what was his
name, Ervin, he's a brother of Senator Sam Ervin, was the biggestTar Heel. That will do great injury to the University,
which is at this moment trying to get appropriation for more money and
so forth, and it would be a great injury to the University if you
printed it." Of course, he was interested because he was in ATO. "Well,"
I said, "I think we've got to print it." We finally agreed to go to see
President Chase about it. We went to see Chase, and Ervin stated his
case and I stated mine. And Chase said, "It happened, didn't it?" And
Ervin said, "Yes." And he said, "Well, I think Jonathan should print
it." I always had great affection for Chase after that. And so we
printed it. Oh, lots of issues, but I don't remember any of them
particularly. We had a good time.
How did you happen to write the M.A. thesis that you did?
Middle Western Literature in the United States. At that
time, all the literature in the United States was coming out of the
Middle West. It was the period of Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters,
and there was a great outburst around Chicago and all through the Middle
West. And I'd been reading everything, and I'd been reading all of these
people, so I decided to write. And then I wrote it under a professor, a
nice guy, very elevated, esoteric . . . I'll have to remember his name
later. That's one of the things that happens to you when you get a
little old. And I wrote it, and sometimes I've wanted to go back and see
it. I took the orals for my M.A., and it became very clear early that my
knowledge of English and literature was very spotty. I knew everything
about this, and nothing about that.
So I rather flunked the first oral.
You did flunk it.
Yes. But they said, "We want you to come back and take it again." So apparently my thesis had very much impressed them, and I did better on the second and came through and got my M.A. But during that year, at some times I felt like leaving college, because I'd fallen desperately in love. And I wanted to go to work and get married.
Let's don't leave the thesis yet. We'll get to your love in a minute. In your thesis, one of the points you make, I think, is the greater realism in the very recent literature in the Midwest. And you seemed to like that and appreciate it, and criticized the earlier sentimentality.
Oh, yes, all of us in that period in America were rather critical of the
sugar and cinnamon of the earlier American literature. And I was, too. I
still think that Spoon River is one of the real great
American books. And Sandburg's poetry, and I'd have to check all the
rest, but I did do a pretty good thesis, I think. I'd like to look at it
someday and see.
It's in Chapel Hill.
Have you ever looked at it?
I sure have.
Any good?
Yes.
So that was that. I remember writing it sitting at a little house that
Bob Gray, who's now editor or editor emeritus of the FayettevilleObserver, and I
lived out on the edge of town. One of the stories they told about me
is—I've heard a lot of stories—that I bought a bicycle just to go back
and forth. And that it was fine until it got a puncture, and then I just
put the bicycle aside and walked, and never got it fixed.
Who had you fallen in love with?
I fell in love with a girl named Elizabeth Bridgers from Raleigh. One of the few times that sobriety has been a great help to me. I was not drinking at all at the next dances, and I met her. And we sat up down at Mrs. Battle's. I don't know whether you'd know where Mrs. Battle's is. It's down back of the President's house, a big, old house, and it was a boarding house. And we sat and talked all night long. We were the young enchanted, you know. And I fell very much in love with her. She was going to Smith.
You had not known her in Raleigh then.
No, I hadn't. You see, I hadn't lived in Raleigh very much then. And I fell in love with her and stayed in love with her.
What did her parents do? What was her background?
Her grandfather had been president of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad.
They called it in those days the Wilmington and Weldon. Then it was
bought by Harry Walters and other capitalists from New York, but they
kept him on as president. And her father had been a railroad builder. He
built some of that twisting stuff down from Asheville to the foot of the
mountains. And he died when she was just a little child. And her mother
had moved to Boston to become a Christian Science practitioner. You see,
Mary Baker Eddy had a period
How did she get over to Chapel Hill to that dance?
She was there with somebody else; I don't know.
I had a late date with her that lasted very late. She was a lovely girl.
She was at Smith College then.
Yes.
When you finished your graduate work at Carolina, when you got your M.A., what did you do? Did you go straight to law school in New York then?
No, I went to Louisville and worked as a police reporter.
Whose idea was it for you to go to Louisville?
I suppose it was sort of a family idea, because my mother's cousin, Judge
Robert Bingham, owned the Louisville paper, and I went out there as a
sort of an apprentice. I stayed out there during the summer and made
some fascinating contacts, and it was a pretty lively crowd. I graduated
in '21; I was a little over nineteen. And there was a friend of my
father's named Judge Callahan who was a great
How long were you out there?
About three months.
You worked for Arthur Krock out there, didn't you?
Yes, Arthur Krock was the managing editor of the Times.
And he took me, I remember, to a prize fight, and I remember how
impressed I was. I went by his office to see him one day. He was sitting
in there with a perfectly bare desk, reading a book. To me, it was the
picture of the glamorous newspaperman who had attained the position
where he'd just read a book while the world went on.
Somebody else was out doing the legwork.
Yes.
Did you get to know Colonel Bingham, too? The owner of the paper.
Oh, he was my mother's cousin.
Oh, so you'd known him all along.
Yes, and so I would often go out to his place on River Road. I remember him as one of the last people I remember who would pour his coffee into his saucer and let it cool and drink it that way. It was very elegant, the way he did it.
You got to know Barry then, too, I guess.
Barry was a little younger then, but I got to know him then. Knew him better later. It was a very interesting experience. I remember covering a suicide who had lost all his money on the Kentucky Derby, and all sorts of queer little people that came into the basement of the City Hall. It was an impressive apprenticeship.
Did you do much writing there?
That's one of the things that practically killed me. When I first got there, I was a Master of Arts of the University of North Carolina. And the first story I turned in got cut down to about that size.
About an inch.
Yes.
So what did you do then in the fall of '22?
I remember coming back by Beech, North Carolina, where my girl lived in
the summertime. They had a little cabin way up in the mountains. And my
father was very anxious for me to take law. He had a feeling that every
newspaperman, whether he was going to be a lawyer or not, ought to know
his law and so forth. And Babs, my girl, at that time had dropped out of
Smith and was going to New York to study art. Well, I saw the possible
conjunction of my going to Columbia, while she was studying art, and so
I entered the Columbia School of Law and lived down on Thirtieth Street
with a boy named Bill Lippfert from Winston-Salem. Very smart boy. He
died not long after from peritonitis in an emergency appendix. And Henry
Cole, who was a North Carolinian but was living in New York then. We
lived upstairs in a brownstone over a poet named Charles Hanson Towne, I
remember. And he was really the man of letters. And he looked with some
. . . well, I don't know whether "disdain" is the word
But I still wanted to get married, and it was sort of an implied
condition that when I finished law, okay, I could get married. So I came
back to Chapel Hill, and I went in what they called the review course of
twelve weeks. Well, all the other boys were reviewing, de novo.
First time through.
Yes, and this was when my cramming ability was . . . I worked about sixteen hours a day, and I passed the bar exam in the top of the class.
Back at Columbia, who was in your class?
I always was wondering, because Tom Dewey was supposed to be in my class, so I met Tom Dewey one day at a Gridiron dinner. And I said, "Look here, how does it happen that here you and I were in the same class at Columbia, and I never met you?" It turned out that he took his first year of law in some western university, and only came to Columbia in his second year, and I was there the first year and didn't come back the second year. He's the only very distinguished man I knew was in that class, and I didn't know him there at all.
So you had a good time in New York, whether you . . .
Oh, I had a wonderful time. If I could change it for all A's, I wouldn't have changed it.
Did you see more of the Roosevelts when you were in New York?
I had a very funny experience there. My father would come to New York,
and he always went around to see Franklin. Of course, Roosevelt was then
recovering from polio. And he took me around with him. And Mrs.
Roosevelt was very anxious at that time for the President to see people,
particularly young people. So she asked me to bring my roommates up for
Sunday night supper. Well, I took the message back, and Billy Carmichael
was living there, too. Billy Carmichael was very much in love with a
girl in Philadelphia, and the only time he had a chance to see her was
Sunday night, so he said, "No, I can't go." And I don't know what about
Lippfert, but Henry Cole said, "Look here, Jonathan, I'm on my make here
in New York and trying to get somewhere, and I haven't got any time to
waste with a has-been."
You went to dinner.
I went to dinner, and I've kidded Henry about that ever since.
What about Bernard Baruch?
I don't remember seeing much of Mr. Baruch that year. As a matter of fact, after Washington and the very great kindness he showed me then and all that, I'd never seen much of him until I went to Washington in World War II, although my father saw him pretty regularly, and the family friendship remained.
I ran across a letter from you to your mother, I think, in your
Oh, yes, and they were all perfectly nice boys. But I'm not anti-Semitic . . .
No, I . . .
Now, wait a minute, I want to tell you. There were some of those boys . . . you see, you'd be assigned to go to certain cases, so some of those Jewish boys would get around a table and get all the books out and keep them there until all of them had finished with all the books. And that created some prejudice, I might say. That was my antipathy to the Jews.
Where did the black students come from?
I don't know. I didn't know many of them, and they were perfectly acceptable and pleasant boys, but I didn't know them very well. I was more interested in those days in being a Socialist than in being a savior of the black race. I thought I was going to be a Socialist.
What kept you from being a Socialist?
I became a newspaperman, and so nothing, but . . . then I came back and I was naturally an underdog-supporting man, and I felt the Democratic Party . . . despite the fact I got it largely by tradition, I'm sure, but also I believed in the tradition, and so I became a Democrat from then on, and still am.
You left New York and came back to Chapel Hill, and then you
And got married.
Finally your father consented to marriage.
Yes. A funny thing, my brother Worth and I got married in the same week,
so the family had to go to Baltimore for one wedding, and Raleigh for
the other. And got married and went to work on the News and
Observer as a reporter. And stayed there until 1926, I think it
was, when I went to Washington as the News and
Observer's Washington correspondent.
What did you do for the three years you worked in the News
and Observer in Raleigh? What kind of work—
[END OF TAPE 2, SIDE B]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
—how you weren't treated like the boss's boy when you went back to Raleigh.
Well, I was quite competent. First I went there in the summer to do sports, and I was quite competent. I did my work all right, and I wasn't pushed forward until, I guess, there was a certain partiality in giving me the Washington correspondent's job. That was pushing the boss's son forward, I'm sure, although I was perfectly competent to do that. I was a good newspaperman. I was a presentable young man. There was a woman named Nell Battle Lewis who was quite a character in North Carolina. You ever heard of her?
Yes.
And she wrote in her column about me, "There's a youngFortune magazine and
come back to Raleigh. And as he was leaving, I don't think he wanted to
. . . there was Frank Smethurst, who was a damn good newspaperman and in
the normal course might have been made editor. But, as we had this
family conclave before he left, I said, "I'm going to be editor, or I'm
going back to New York." Now I was qualified for it, but I wasn't going
to be hanging around to be the successor and not be it. So I insisted.
He had some little doubts, I suspect, about my judgment, as to whether I
might go a little wild. But I insisted that I was going to be editor or
else.
When you first came back then, for those first three years, did you just write sports?
Oh, no, I wrote mostly police. I covered some of the important murder
cases. There was the Cole murder case down in Rockingham. This very
Puritanical cotton mill owner had shot a young man who was in love with
his daughter, and it was a very, very sensational murder case. I covered
that and a number of other cases of that sort. I'd done a good deal of
important news coverage, as well as a lot of trivia. On the News and Observer at that time, nobody could just write the
top story; they had to write obituaries and personals and every sort of
thing. No, I never think I got advantages that I wasn't qualified to
take.
Did you ever write any columns or write any editorials?
Well, once, some time later after I came back from Washington, I wrote a
column which was mostly based on odd items in North Carolina news or
history, for several years, while doing other work, too. When I came
back from Washington, here's where my father took advantage of me.
Who else was working on the paper when you were there in '23 and '4 and '5?
Nell Battle Lewis and Smethurst. Smethurst was the man who, more than any
other, brought the News and Observer into what I
described as "modern journalism." It wasn't these long stories. It was
quite a change, and he was a damn excellent newspaperman. I think he's
the best managing newsman I've ever known. Then he had Nell Battle
Lewis, who was a character. And then there were two men on the
paper—there were others, of course, but these two—there was Robert E.
Williams, called "Fleet", and there was Ben Dixon McNeill. And Father
said of them that if he'd send McNeill out, he'd get all the story and
no facts; and if he sent Fleet, he'd get all the facts and no story.
Both of them were good newspapermen, although McNeill was crazy as hell.
He got himself a Dusenberg and rode all over and finally just drove
himself out of his job. He just didn't send his copy in, and all of a
sudden, after two or three weeks, Smethurst just took him off the
payroll. Funny guy.
What did he wind up doing?
He wound up down on the coast of North Carolina, and he wrote a book. He
was always the fellow who had just gotten a hurried request from the Saturday Evening Post to write him to send me some
articles, and always had some big thing that never came off. But finally
he wrote a book called The Hatterasman. It's a pretty
good book.
What kind of person was Nell Battle Lewis?
You've got to say what period you're talking about.
She went through a change, didn't she?
Yes. She was a very good and humorous newspaperwoman. Wrote a column called "Incidentally." Then she went crazy, to be frank about it, and then she recovered. But in her recovery she became the damnedest Joe McCarthy you ever saw in your life. She hated Jews and niggers and you know . . . she became as reactionary as they are allowed to live.
Do you mean that she actually was mentally ill?
She had been committed.
When was this?
I would think that was in the late '20s. She'd been an excellent reporter. She'd done a lot of good stuff on the trial of the communists at Gastonia, and she was a great liberal. My golly, she blew all the horns. And then, in a sort of a sea change, she came back and hated everything that was different from the old patterns. And she was a racist, and not merely directing at blacks; Jews, foreigners. She was sort of entrenched in her column, and you don't fire somebody who's got a following like that. And once or twice I tried to say something. She wrote about the Jews that were ruining Chapel Hill and the University. And I just tried to quiet her down, and I know that in the process she just thought I was pretty much of a dictator. But I'd let her go as far as you could, and then sometime she'd blow the top off the tent.
When did she finally stop writing for the News and
Observer?
I would think about in '36 or '7. As a young woman, she was really a
comer and quite a liberal in letters as well as in politics.
Mencken had an effect on you in the twenties?
I read Smart Set regularly at Chapel Hill. Yes, I was a
part of the generation that was affected by him. I don't know the date
of the Sahara of the Beaux Arts. When was that, do you
know? When he said the South was just the last place in the world . . .
I would say '22 or '24, something like that.
Yes, I sort of applauded that, because I thought he was shooting at the characters on the scene that I didn't care for.
Did you ever meet him?
Yes, I met him at a couple of political conventions, but I never knew Mencken well. I met [Heywood] Broun in 1924 and knew him a little bit better. Mencken I never knew well. I would like to have known him, but I didn't ever have any opportunity to.
In '26, then, you went to Washington.
I went to Washington as Washington correspondent of the News
and Observer.
Did you work for any other papers?
The Winston-Salem Journal I had, too. And I did all
right, and we had some good stories and stuff like that. It was coming
along all right. And then my father got interested in writing his
autobiography. I came back to help him, and I worked to a certain extent
on the paper. And I was working with him until I got my novel
written.
Did he know you were writing that novel all along?
I'm sure he did, yes. But I mean I didn't read the
Was the subject matter a surprise to him ever?
I would suspect that it was, because it was this thing I knew he would be a little touchy about, and I didn't go into it. And I got that book written about '28 and started sending it around. And finally, it was Amy Loveman who liked it and got it placed with the publisher. And then between its acceptance and its publication, my wife died, and that was a terribly traumatic experience for me.
She died about Christmas, I believe.
Just the seventeenth of December.
Was she sick?
Died in childbirth. And so I was all torn up. Her people, her mother and two sisters . . .
Bridgers, this is.
. . . were moving to New York, and I went along.
They were moving anyway.
Yes. And first I got a . . . Fortune. And so I went to work for Fortune in January, I guess.
'30s.
Yes, '30s. And stayed there and did all right.
What kind of things did you write for them? I looked the other day; the articles aren't signed.
No. I wrote one, I remember, on cows.
There was a series of pictures of the great artists and their pictures of
cows and so forth. And I remember going to see an expert cattleman and
showing him the pictures that were drawn by the great artists, and I
remember he said they were "canners." They weren't worth anything but
just to make canned meat out of, he said.
How did you originally meet her?
Through Noble Cathcart, Lucy's brother.
When did you meet these people?
Noble Cathcart was a friend of Virginia Royster, who lived in Raleigh. Her father was a surgeon there, and the Roysters and the Danielses were great friends. And Noble came by there to see her; I met him.
In Raleigh.
In Raleigh. And then I suppose the next thing was that he gave the book
to Amy, and Amy was enthusiastic about it and gave it
Your daughter went with you, I believe.
Yes.
Did any of the Bridgers go?
Oh, yes. Now in the meantime, Ann Bridgers, my sister-in-law, had, in
collaboration with George Abbott, written a play called Coquette, in which Helen Hayes played the lead, which many
thought was based on my reporting of the Cole murder case. I don't know
that it was. She always said it wasn't, but it's almost the identical
story. Which was a great success. And so when I got the Guggenheim,
well, this is not a very gallant thing to say, but the Bridgers women
wanted my child, you see, just a very natural loyalty. And so I moved in
as the male appendage in a group of single women, with my child. And we
all went abroad together. I had a nice time on Fortune. Harry Luce was a good boss.
What kind of guy was he?
He was a very nice guy. He was very brusque, but not bad. After I came
back and had worked there about a year again, I came in and told him
that Lucy and I had gotten married, and I thought the best thing for me
to do was to go back South to the paper. And he said, "Why, don't do
that. Can't you wait till fall, because I'm going abroad and Lila [that
was his wife at the time] is going abroad, and Kennedy [he was another
writer on Fortune] is going off, and So-and-so is
going off.
What kind of magazine did he want Fortune to be
then?
What it was. Any magazine he ran was the magazine he wanted. About once a
year he'd come in and completely take over the editorship of Time and Fortune, and he had a
couple of others, Architectural Forum . . . he would
in fact edit it. And he had ideas. There are certain things about great
editors. You hear a lot about their going out and getting somebody to
make a poll of what people are interested in and so forth. Harry Luce
and Lorimer of the Saturday Evening Post knew what
they were interested in, and it turned out that what they were
interested in, enough other people were interested in.
Who else worked on that, Dwight MacDonald, did you know him?
Dwight MacDonald was there, yes. He was just a nice guy who did pretty good work. I didn't know anything about his Socialistic leanings at that time. A very able fellow named Kennedy; I wonder what ever happened to him. And two or three others of less significance in my memory.
Roy Larsen, did you know?
Yes, I knew Roy, but Roy was not in Editorial; he was in Circulation. And
Roy was a good friend. He'd been a good friend of Noble Cathcart's. It's
funny. Time magazine kind of halfway grew up in Lucy's
house, in that Roy had gone to college with Noble, and these boys
wouldn't have a dime, and Roy would stay out there at the Cathcart
house. And they had their offices in the same offices as the Saturday Review of Literature, of which Noble was
publisher. That's where Amy had known Harry so well. They kind of grew
up together. And we were in a little place where they didn't have much
editorial space over on East Forty-Second Street. When I came back from
Europe and went to work for them, they'd moved to the Chrysler Building,
then on to a building of their own.
Your novel came out in the spring of '30.
The spring of '30, and I went to Europe that same spring.
Was there ever much reaction to that novel? Not critical reaction, but reaction to what you were doing in the novel, from your father?
As a matter of fact, when he finally read the book, he wired me that it was full of action and fire. That was the sort of thing my father would do. No, he didn't ever condemn it after it appeared.
Did anybody else criticize it in that way?
It sort of plagued me a little bit in North Carolina politics. Some years
later they brought it up that I had written this atheistical novel about
things, and tried to bring it against me when I was running for national
committeeman. No, not much. No great pointing to danger.
Your views have changed from then?
Oh, very definitely. Yes, I would say I was pretty much a conformist Christian now. I don't mean to say that I believe in all the folderol, and I think that some of the attitude toward God is that which would have been given to an oriental potentate and stuff like that. But I'm a pretty religious man.
When did you change? Did you go to church when you were . . .
When I was a little boy, I remember when Billy Sunday came to Washington. I got converted every time they'd open the door of the tent.
Oh, yes, my father was a great Billy Sunday supporter in Washington. He had prayer services at our house.
Billy Sunday did.
Yes.
Did you go to revivals when you were little in Raleigh?
Not in Raleigh, but in Washington. They had a big tabernacle down by the
Union Terminal, and yes, I went, and got converted. You see, interest in
religion, even when you call yourself an atheist,
Do you see the South as a fallen angel?
You could make out a case for that, but there again you would be building up that image of the South as the image of Tara and the wonders of Virginia. Well, of course, the South never was an aristocratic Athens, and most of the people have been just plain folks like they are now. They had to suffer with it, but they weren't . . . I guess Charleston regarded itself as the land of the fallen angels. Yes, you can make a case for the South as a fallen angel.
The same kind of underdog, whether fallen angel or not.
It's the sense of the improperly defeated, the hero that's been cast
down. Well, you can cast the South in that model if you want to. And you
could certainly make out the abolitionist as the strict fundamentalist
striking at the illuminating God. You could do that all right. Funny
thing, the South hated the religious carpetbaggers more than they did
the looting carpetbaggers. The people who came
Where were you in 1929 when the stock market crashed? Were you in Raleigh then?
Yes, I must have been.
Did the Depression itself have a big impact on you?
The paper was just struggling along, of course. No, the Depression really
didn't, because I went to New York and got a job on Fortune in late '29 or early '30. And I think I got a hundred
dollars a week. Well, a hundred dollars a week in the early days of the
Depression was damn good money, so I wasn't hurt. And then when I went
abroad, all of my Guggenheim . . . I noticed the other day that they're
now paying $13,000 to a Guggenheim scholar. We got $2,500. But I had all
the money I wanted in Paris, because everything over there was cheaper
than over here. And then I came back to Fortune, and
then when I came back to Raleigh, we were in a mood of euphoria with the
election of Roosevelt. And after that, financially the paper had a
struggle. There wasn't any sense of our being down on our backs. I'm
sure my father had a tough time in the first days of the . . . but you
must remember that the Depression in the South began almost in 1921 with
the prices of agricultural products and so forth. Fortune.
You said in Europe the money you had was quite sufficient. What did you do with it? What did you do with yourself in Europe for a year?
I had a big time, a lovely time. My former roommate at college, who should have been a great artist, was over there studying art.
Who is that?
Clem Strudwick from Hillsborough. And he was over there studying art, and
I spent a lot of time at the Coupole and the Dome, and the Dingback,
which was a dive behind them. And I drank a good deal and, being a
bachelor, I naggled and philandered as much as I wanted to.
Did you spend all your time in Paris?
No, I spent about a third in Paris and a third in Switzerland and a third
in Italy. I lived in a place right next to Montreux called Vevey in
Switzerland. And then we went to Florence. There was a funny thing
happened. I wasn't doing very well with the book I was trying to write,
although it's still got ideas in it. But a cartoon came out in The New Yorker while I was over there of this American
and a drinking companion at a table in a sidewalk cafe. And one of them
was saying to the other, "Mr. Guggenheim's going to be awful mad with
me."
What was the book you were writing?
I was writing a book about, the idea was a sort of a satiric effort to reestablish the Confederacy. A new secession on an artistic and intellectual basis. It had some virtues, but it didn't come off.
If it had come off, what would it have told us?
Well, it would have been a sort of a satiric play against so much of this southern business of "we're going to rise again" and so forth, which I didn't believe and I didn't want. A satire of southern pretensions more than anything else.
Something Mencken would have liked?
I think so, yes.
Would your father have liked that?
I doubt it. But I don't know; my father was very funny. If it had been a good book, he'd have liked it. If his boy had written a good book . . . it's a funny thing. Even though he might not approve of all it said, if it was a success and a good book, he would be glad his son had written it.
Did he share your view of the old South, of Civil War Reconstruction?
As a southern editor, oh, he was always ready to pay his deference to the thinning line of gray and all that sort of thing, and my mother's family with all their badges and so forth. But he had no sense of being a part of that glamour heritage of the South. The mansions and the slaves and so forth. There hadn't been any of that in his background.
But did he go so far as I think you would have then, to say that it really hadn't existed on the scale that everybody thought it had?
He would have avoided it, rather than take one side or another. In other words, my father sometimes recognized the wisdom of not throwing meat to the lions, you see. And he probably would just have passed it by. But he—
[END OF TAPE 3, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 3, SIDE B]
And he told some funny stories about that. I remember Albert Sydney
Burleson was Postmaster General. And he was telling about an old
Confederate veteran from Texas who'd come into his office and said,
"Albert, I've been here, and they told us we were going to be all
brothers and all, but you know, Albert, I ain't seen one of the sons of
bitches yet." The Birth of a
Nation.
Did you go to the White House?
No, it was shown in Burleson's office down at the Post Office Department with all the dignitaries present.
Was that when Wilson saw it?
I'm not sure the President was there that night.
Was Thomas Dixon there?
Oh, yes, he was there, of course. He was a funny character. I was an impertinent little boy. I remember Tom Dixon coming—
END OF INTERVIEW