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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' 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'
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' 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 Woodrow Wilson's
Secretary of the Navy, Daniels' 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' 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 Colonel Stover'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. [Laughter]
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. [Laughter]
Did your father help in that little back porch operation?
[Laughter]
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 [Laughter]
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." [Laughter]
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 Daniels's.
They'll serve under any president." [Laughter]
What about your other brother?
Frank is a solid citizen. He keeps all the rest of us in bread and
butter. [Laughter] [Laughter]
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." [Laughter]
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. [Laughter]
So all you boys went to Sunday school every Sunday? Daniels: 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. [Laughter] [laughter]
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 [Laughter]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 . . .
[Laughter]
. . . which was like Authors. [Laughter]
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. [Laughter]
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." [Laughter]
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 1860's and '70's . . .
Mostly about hardships. Father remembered some stories of Yankee
artillery against Little Washington. And she got after her boys very
strongly, because Frank in particular found out that he could, as a
little boy, effectively beg from the Union soldiers [laughter]
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. [Laughter] [Laughter]
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 twenties 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. [Laughter]
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. [Laughter]
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? [Laughter]
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." [Laughter]
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. [Laughter]
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 [Laughter]
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 [laughter]
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 sixties of this century. One of Booker T. Washington's children went there. Of course, I wasn't at the age when I knew anything about the standards of the college.
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 [laughter]
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 balck areas in which they lived. And Father taking special precautions for their safety. He'd have them each carried by car to their house. And there my father was terribly disturbed about this thing. A lot of it was caused by some sailors, which helped him be upset.
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 [laughter] [Laughter]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.
[Laughter]
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, and
"We're going to do this and that and the other." I
suppose, from the point of view of my newspaper career, I was definitely
more influenced by my father than my mother. But my mother was not as
literary a person as my father. She was very much concerned about our
sex lives, as [laughter]
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 [Laughter]
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. [Laughter]
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 [Laughter]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.
[Laughter]
I was an atheist, you see. And in those days atheism s