January 26, 2006
A Nice Pair of Heels Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:00 PM EST Going through boxes of books from your past is like copying over an old address book: You happily rediscover some old friends and just as happily delete others. I have recently had this experience at home and at work. In both places, the acquisition of bookshelves has permitted me to take hundreds of books out of “storage” (a polite term, in most cases, for “unruly heaps”) and sort through them. The result was two large stacks of books that I want to read again but probably won’t, and two somewhat smaller stacks that either went to a local used-book store or were left on the sidewalk in front of my building (and ended up, within a few days, being sold from card tables on Broadway). One book I was pleased to revisit was Only in America (1958), by Harry Golden. The author was a Jew from New York City who settled in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1941 and began publishing a newspaper called the North Carolina Israelite. It was that era’s equivalent of a blog, filled with Golden’s miscellaneous thoughts on a wide range of matters, from segregation and racism to the oddities of human behavior to reminiscences of his Lower East Side childhood. One item in the book that has particular relevance for us at American Heritage is titled “How to hire a stenographer.” The item tells how Golden advertised for a stenographer and spotted, among the résumés he received, one from a woman named Carrie Ferrara. “Ferrara? In Charlotte there’s a Ferrara?” he writes. “I immediately put all the other letters to one side and decided to hire Miss Ferrara sight unseen.” Her very last name inspires Golden to thoughts of the Duke of Naxos, Princess Leonora, and “that great city of culture, art, good wine, and beautiful women.” And of course she turns out be a first-rate stenographer. Golden goes on to explain how such a fish-out-of-water situation happened: The stenographer’s brother had been stationed at an Army camp in North Carolina during the war. He married a Charlotte girl and stayed in the area, and Carrie followed him down from the North a few years later. Golden proclaims this unusual move as “a good thing for Charlotte and for the State of North Carolina . . . a few more ‘Ferraras’ and eventually Charlotte, too, will be enriched with a substantial community of these people who have given so much to the world . . . If there is any truth to what the philosophers say, that the Jews represent ‘the salt in the stew of civilization,’ it certainly follows that the Italians supply the bits of ‘red pepper’ and the dash of ‘paprika’ which help make the whole concoction more delightful.” The time is long past, of course, when anyone would raise an eyebrow at finding an Italian surname in North Carolina, or anywhere else in the United States. In fact, not long ago American Heritage hired a young Italian-American woman from North Carolina as an editorial assistant. Ms. Armaleo did an excellent job in the too-brief time she worked for us before moving on to better things. Shortly after she left, we hired another editorial assistant from North Carolina, also highly capable. This one would have surprised Harry Golden even more: Her last name is Cheng. Meanwhile, as I sorted through my office books, I came across a copy of Inside U.S.A. (1947), by John Gunther. This book created quite a stir when it came out and was even somehow made into a Broadway musical; my copy is from a 1997 reissue. Gunther, a Chicagoan by birth, was a world-traveling journalist who had spent several years, starting during the war, visiting all 48 states and noting what he heard and saw. He is also remembered for writing Death Be Not Proud (1949), about his young son’s unsuccessful struggle with cancer. When his tour of America reaches the South, Gunther writes: “The foreign-born and sons of foreign-born . . . now leave our story to all practical intent . . . in every [Southern] state except Florida and Louisiana 90 percent or more of the white citizens come of parents who were both American born. The figure reaches 98.7 percent in Arkansas, if Arkansas statistics are to be believed. That Arkansas should also be one of the most unquestionably backward of American states naturally gives the observer slight pause, and makes one wonder what peculiar characteristics the Celts and Gaels, when transported, contribute to a civilization.” Gunther’s sniffiness and Golden’s giddiness aside, it’s clear that the South has benefited enormously from the changes that have taken place in America since these two men published their books. As late as the 1960s, if you weren’t from the South there really wasn’t much reason to go there. Now there is; a good slogan might be “The New South—All the Weather, None of the Faulkner!” In fact, as my fellow blogger Joshua Zeitz wrote in our pages recently, the South not only has flourished at home but has come to dominate large sectors of the entire country’s culture, politics, and religion. You might say it took Martin Luther King to give Jefferson Davis his revenge. There are many reasons behind this change. The civil rights revolution was a big one, of course, and then there’s air conditioning, the mechanization of agriculture, advances in communications and transportation, the relaxation of immigration controls, the establishment of a working two-party system, and many others. Bluenecks may grumble about the red states’ disproportionate influence, but on the whole, there can be no doubt that the entire country is better off since the South made its great change. It’s the same old story of free trade, this time in culture. When the South was insular and hostile to outsiders, its potential was stunted. But when it opened itself up, willingly or not, the region’s natural charms and advantages attracted a whole new crowd of people, including many descendants of those who had fled the South in the old days. Cultural protectionism not only shuts off those on the inside from beneficial influences; it keeps those on the outside from finding out what they’re missing. And in the end, that means everyone loses out.
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