for the planning and coordination of the system to a single entity, the Board of Higher Education.
The Daniels family, which owned the Raleigh Times and the famous News and Observer—Frank Sr., Frank Jr., and most assuredly, Jonathan, a former press secretary to President Truman—were Carolina natives, steeped in its culture and politics. They knew what was going on. They had been cussed and discussed by Tarheels since the time of Josephus Daniels, the founder of the old “News and Disturber,” a lifelong progressive Democrat who had been Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy and later ambassador to Mexico for Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who had been Daniels’s assistant secretary at the Navy Department). Mr. Josephus and my grandfather were contemporaries as Bryan Democrats in the late nineteenth century and the Danielses have been friends of our family for three generations, prominent in the network of a dozen or so moderate-to-liberal Southern papers.
As a pea-green reporter for the Times, I could see clearly about six feet in front of me. Unaware of the labors of gubernatorial and legislative commissions, and what in time their labor would bring forth, I had only a vague sense that North Carolina and Alabama were not the same. They were, in fact, remarkably different. Geology and history combined in North Carolina to create a culture defined by a business-political oligarchy so unashamed of its more humble past as to be, in Jonathan Daniels’s phrase, a militant mediocrity, yet one that was a model of progressivism in the South. Alabama’s more numerous land barons continually fought to control affairs of the state, subduing the white yeomanry and working class by scaring them with the threat of taxes and black domination. The result was an almost anti-progress electorate, a plurality which was willing to accept things as they are, whose buried resentments flare only when breached by meddlesome government, do-gooders, and liberals. Alabama‘s culture is one of fighting-mad resignation.
North Carolina did not regard itself as a kind of agricultural Versailles, the self-image held by the haughty “plantaristocracy” of South Carolina and Virginia. Neither did it have the nouveaux land-riche pretensions of Alabama’s Black Belt plantation society and the Delta planter culture of Mississippi. It had no reason for such pomposity, because its “black belt”—soil suitable for large-scale cultivation by slave labor—was a comparatively little patch in the northeast corner of the state. In 1860, North Carolina had 744 plantations (fifty slaves or more) while Alabama had 1,687 and Mississippi had 1,516. If you think of slave labor as the human equivalent of thousands of six-figure modern combines, imagine the capital investment that vanished with the end of the Civil War. North Carolina didn’t lose so much in the Lost Cause and so the state was not quite as enthralled by the dry bones of past graces and glories. It might have taken some pleasure from its snobbish neighbors being brought low. The lofty disdain of its two adjoining states, however, wasn’t lost on my wife’s family, which came from the plantation patch.
The Ehringhaus clan took pride in having an ancestor who served on George Washington’s staff during the Revolution. In 1932, it gave the state another in a line of “education governors,” J. C. B. Ehringhaus, my wife’s grandfather. If not unique, Ehringhaus was an unusual candidate who promised during the campaign that if it took raising taxes to keep North Carolina schools open during the Depression, he would raise taxes. From a tax-toxic Alabama perspective that was a damn fool thing to promise and Alabama would have set him down. Tarheels elected him anyway. The new governor found keeping that promise hard going. Discovering that increases in corporate franchise and income taxes wouldn’t cover school expenses, he turned to a sales tax. In a 1934 address to the Medical Society, he fixed on the results of the battle: “After trying to find any form of tax that would eliminate the danger . . . we went to the much ‘cussed’ and discussed sales tax, and whatever may be said in criticism . . . , we have saved the schools of North Carolina for the little children.” Another address piped into schoolrooms statewide would be remembered for its surprise ending, a notorious example of the misplaced pause. Emphasizing the use of every resource in a time of scarcity, he concluded, “Now children, remember, every night when your momma puts that supper plate in front of you, I want you to eat every bean (pause) and pea on your plate.” Necessity being the mother of invention, a more lasting and significant claim to the title “education governor” rests on his consolidation of the state’s universities as a Depression inspired, cost-cutting measure. Later governors would thank him.
One of the state’s historical treasures is the family’s plantation, Greenfield, near Edenton. I visited that fine old house when Josephine toured me through what seemed the entire eastern third of the state to stand inspection by her relatives—the equivalent of sniffing a strange dog. Of course, I was shown the famous Edenton Tea Table, an unpretentious piece of furniture that still resides at Greenfield. It was upon that table in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the first church built in the state, that fifty-one Edenton ladies on October 25, 1774, held the famous Edenton Tea Party—following the more-publicized December 1773 Boston Tea Party. The spunky group resolved: “We, the Ladys of Edenton, do hereby solemnly engage not to conform to the Pernicious Custom of Drinking Tea,” or that “We, the aforesaid Ladys will not promote ye wear of any manufacturer from England until such time that all acts which tend to enslave our Native country shall be repealed.” Despite the family’s distinguished past, I kept hearing from them during our “inspection tour” a self-conscious phrase: “North Carolina is a vale of humility between two mounds of conceit.” It finally dawned on me that Tarheels are mighty cocky about their humility. North Carolina, as Jonathan Daniels and others have suggested, is Mediocrity, Militant.
Having lost relatively little in the war, North Carolina went briskly about the business of building a better state for all its people. Alabama—Ashley Wilkes with an attitude—moped about, plotting revenge. Leaders in both states recognized that newly enfranchised, illiterate former slaves were being manipulated at the polls. Both set about constitutional reforms—reforming black citizens out of the political life of the South in 1900. North Carolina sent its black citizens to wander in the political wilderness with kind words. Alabama banished them with a vengeance, and tried to get rid of poor whites, too. Alabama’s aristocracy reserved noblesse for itself and gave the burden of oblige to lesser sorts.
Unlike Alabama, illiterate whites were exempted from Carolina’s 1900 literacy law, but it wasn’t deaf to the siren call of racial prejudice. Even one of North Carolina’s icons, its first “education governor,” Charles Brantley Aycock, was swept into office as leader of a White Supremacy movement. White Democrats with ferocious determination set out to recapture state government from “Fusionists” (Republicans and Populists), which included a number of black office-holders. The Fusion ticket won a majority in the legislature in 1894 and elected a governor in 1896 with a significant black vote in both elections. During the legislative races of 1898, Aycock winked at the activities of the hundreds of mounted and armed Red Shirts who intimidated black voters in the heavily black counties along the South Carolina border. Democrats won two-thirds of the General Assembly and promptly passed a constitutional amendment disenfranchising blacks. In the governor’s race of 1900, the Red Shirts were out again. A Colonel Waddell in black-dominated Wilmington illustrated the temper of the times in an election-eve speech. The Colonel advised white men to go to the polls armed “and if you find the Negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks. We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with guns.”
Once in office, Aycock governed with exceptional vision and liberality for the time. In and out of office, he was a passionate advocate of public education. As governor, he persuaded the voters to pay the taxes to create universal education and prevailed in getting increased appropriations for the state university over the opposition of denominational colleges. He planted the seed from which grew a first-class state university system. And, though elected in a great racial upheaval, Governor Aycock proved to be a defender of the black man. He was a vigorous opponent and prosecutor of lynch mobs. In a speech opposing a plan to limit support for Negro schools to taxes collected from black property owners, the governor said: “The proposal is unjust, unwise and unconstitutional. It would wrong both races, would bring our state into condemnation of a just opinion elsewhere and would mark us as a people who turned backward. Let us not seek
