American Adventures Part 25

THE HEART OF THE SOUTH

CHAPTER XXVI

RALEIGH AND JOSEPHUS DANIELS

Jedge Crutchfield give de No'th Ca'lina n.i.g.g.e.r frown; De mahkets says ouh tehapin am secon'-rate, An' Mistuh Daniels, he call Raleigh his hum town.

--I wondah what kin be de mattuh wid ouh State?

Just as it is the fas.h.i.+on in the Middle West to speak jestingly of Kansas, it is the fas.h.i.+on in the South to treat lightly the State of North Carolina. And just as my companion and I, long ago, on another voyage of discovery, were eager to get into Kansas and find out what that fabulous Commonwealth was really like, so we became anxious, as we heard the gossip about the "Old North State," to enter it and form our own conclusions. The great drawback to an attempt to see North Carolina, however, lies in the fact that North Carolina is, so to speak, spread very thin. It has no great solid central city occupying a place in its thoughts and its affairs corresponding to that occupied by Richmond, in its relation to Virginia. Like Mississippi, it is a State of small towns and small cities. Its metropolis, Charlotte, had, by the 1910 census, less than 35,000 inhabitants; its seaport, Wilmington, a little more than 25,000; its capital, Raleigh, less than 20,000; its beautiful mountain resort, Asheville, fourth city in the State, less than 19,000.

I hasten to add that the next census will undoubtedly show considerable growth in all these cities. In Raleigh I found every one insistent on this point. The town is growing; it is a going place; a great deal of new building is in progress; and when you ask about the population, progressive citizens are prepared to do much better by their city than the census takers did, some years ago. They talk thirty thousand, instead of twenty, and they are ready with astonis.h.i.+ng statistics about the number of students in the schools and colleges as compared with the total population of the city--statistics showing that though Raleigh is not large she is progressive. Which is quite true.

I recollect that Judge Francis D. Winston, former Lieutenant Governor of the State, United States District Attorney, and the most engaging raconteur in the Carolinas, contributed a story to a discussion of Raleigh's population, which occurred, one evening, at a dinner at the Country Club.

"A promoter," he said, "was once trying to borrow money on a boom town.

He went to a banker and showed him a map, not of what the town was, but of what he claimed it was going to be. 'Here,' he said, 'is where the town hall will stand. In this lot will be the opera house. Over here we are going to have a beautiful park. And on this corner we are going to erect a tall granite office building.'

"'But,' said the banker, coldly, 'we lend money only on the basis of population.'

"'That's all right,' returned the promoter. 'Measured by any known standard except an actual _count_, we have a population of two hundred thousand.'"

I shall not attempt to point this tale more than to recommend it to the attention of the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce in every city in the United States.

Raleigh is situated within seven miles of the exact center of North Carolina. The land on which the city stands was purchased by the State, in 1792, from a man named Joel Lane, whose former house still stands.

The town was then laid out in a one mile square, with the site selected for the State Capitol directly at the center of it, and lots were sold off by the State to individuals, the proceeds of these sales being used to build the Capitol. As a result the parks, streets and sidewalks of the original old town still belong to the State of North Carolina, and the city has jurisdiction over them only by courtesy of the State government. Raleigh has, of course, much outgrown its original dimensions, and the government of the town, outside the original square mile at the center, is as in other towns.

While Raleigh has not the look of age which characterizes many old southern cities, causing them to delight the eye and the imagination, its broad streets have here and there a building old enough to remove from the town any air of raw newness, and to make it a homelike looking place. The sidewalks are wide; when we were in Raleigh those of the princ.i.p.al streets were paved largely with soft-colored old red bricks, which, however, were being taken up and replaced with cement. Not being a resident of Raleigh, and consequently not having been obliged to tread the rough brick pavements daily, I was sorry to witness this victory of utility over beauty.

One of the pleasant old buildings is the Yarborough Hotel, at which my companion and I stayed. The Yarborough is an exceedingly good hotel for a city of the size of Raleigh, especially, it may be added, when that city is in the South. The Capitol, standing among trees in a small park, also gathers a fine flavor from age. In one of the many simple dignified apartments of this building my companion and I were introduced to the gentleman who was governor of the State at the time of our visit. It seemed to me that he had a look both worn and apprehensive, and that, while we talked, he was waiting for something. I don't know how I gathered this impression, but it came to me definitely. After we had departed from the executive chamber I asked the gentleman who had taken us there if the governor was ill.

"No," he replied. "All our governors look like that after they have been in office for a while."

"From overwork?"

"No, from an overworked jest--the jest about 'what the Governor of North Carolina said to the Governor of South Carolina.' Every one who meets the governor thinks of that joke and believes confidently that no one has ever before thought of this application of it. So they all pull it on him. For the first few months our governors stand it pretty well, but after that they begin to break down. They feel they ought to smile, but they can't. They begin to dread meeting strangers, and to show it in their bearing. When in private life our governor had a very pleasant expression, but like all the others, he has acquired, in office, the expression of an iron dog."

Raleigh's most widely-known citizen is Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, and publisher of the Raleigh "News and Observer." This paper, published in the morning, and the "Times," a rival paper, published in the afternoon, are, I believe, the only dailies in the city.

Mr. Daniels has been so much discussed that I was greatly interested in hearing what Raleigh had to say of him. Every one knew him personally.

The men on his paper seemed to be very fond of him; others held various opinions.

In 1894 Mr. Daniels came from Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., where he had been chief clerk in the Department of the Interior, when Hoke Smith was Secretary, and acquired the newspaper of which he has since been proprietor. In its first years under Mr. Daniels, the paper is said to have gone through severe financial struggles, and there is an amusing story current, about the way the payroll was met upon one occasion. According to this tale, the business manager of the paper came to Mr. Daniels, one day, and informed him that he needed sixty dollars more to make the payroll, and didn't know where he was going to get it. The only ready a.s.set in sight, it is related, was several cases of a patent medicine known as "Mrs. Joe Persons' Remedy," which had been taken by the "News and Observer" in payment for advertising s.p.a.ce. Mr. Daniels had a few dollars, and his business manager had a railroad pa.s.s. With these resources the latter went out on the road and sold the patent medicine for enough to make up the deficit.

Until Mr. Daniels was appointed Secretary of the Navy he seems to have been regarded by many citizens of Raleigh, as a good, earnest, hard-working man, possessed of considerable personal magnetism and a good political nose--a man who could scent how the pack was running, take a short-cut, and presently appear to be leading. In other words an opportunist. Though he has not much education, and though as a writer he is far from polished, it is said that he has written powerful editorials. "When his editorials have been good," said one gentleman, "it is because he has been stirred up over something, and because he manages sometimes to get into his writing the intensity of his own personality." His office used to be, and still is, when he is in Raleigh, a sort of political headquarters, and he used to be able to write editorials while half a dozen politicians were sitting around his desk, talking.

With his paper he has done much good in the State, notably by fighting consistently for prohibition and for greater public educational advantages. The strong educational movement in North Carolina began with a group of men chief among whom were the late Governor Charles B.

Ayc.o.c.k, called "the educational governor"; Dr. E.A. Alderman, who, though president of the University of Virginia, is a North Carolinian and was formerly president of the University of that State; Dr. Charles D. McKeever who committed the State to the principle of higher education for women, and other men of similar high purpose. A gentleman who was far from an unqualified admirer of Mr. Daniels, told me that without his aid the great educational advance which the state has certainly made of recent years could hardly have been accomplished, and that the same thing applies in the case of prohibition--which has been adopted in North Carolina.

"What sort of man is he?" I asked this gentleman.

"He is the old type of Methodist," he said. "He is the kind of man who believes that the whale swallowed Jonah. He has the same concept of religion that he had as a child. I differ with his policies, his politics, his mental methods, but I don't think anybody here doubts that he is trying, not only to do the moral thing himself, but to force others to adopt, as rules for public conduct, the exact code in which he personally believes, and which he certainly follows. His mental processes are often crude, yet he has much native shrewdness and the ability to grasp situations as they arise.

"He does not come of the aristocratic cla.s.s, which probably accounts for his failure, when he first became secretary, to perceive the necessity for discipline in the navy, and the benefits of naval tradition.

"He was an ardent follower--I might say swallower--of Bryan, gobbling whole all of the "Great Commoner's" vagaries. It has been said, more or less humorously, but doubtless with a foundation of fact, that he was "Secretary of War in all of Bryan's cabinets." That shows where Bryan placed him. Yet when Bryan broke with Wilson and made his exit from the Cabinet, Daniels found it perfectly simple, apparently, to drop the Bryanism which had, hitherto, been the very essence of his life, and become a no less ardent supporter of the President.

"When he was first taken into the cabinet he evidently regarded the finer social amenities as matters of no consequence, or even as effeminacies. He had but little sense of the fitness of things, and was, in consequence, continually making _faux pas_; but he is observant; he has learned a great deal in the course of his life as a cabinet member, both as to his work in the Department, and as to the niceties of formal social life."

At the time of our visit to Raleigh I had not met Mr. Daniels, nor heard him speak. Since that time I have heard him several times and have talked with him. Also I have talked of him with a number of men who have been thrown more or less closely in contact with him. As is well known, naval officers detested him with peculiar unanimity. This was true up to the time of our entering the War. Whether matters have changed greatly since then I am unable to say. One officer, well known in the navy, said to me quite seriously that he believed the navy would be better off without its two best dreadnoughts if in losing them it could also lose Mr. Daniels. Such sentiments were peculiarly unanimous among officers. On the other hand, however, a high officer, who has been quite close to the Secretary, informs me that it is indeed true that he has improved as experience has come to him. This officer stated that when Mr. Daniels first took office he seemed to be definitely antagonistic to officers of the navy. "He appeared to suspect them of pulling political wires and working in their own interests. That was in the days when he seemed almost to encourage insubordination among the enlisted men, by his att.i.tude toward them, in contrast to his att.i.tude towards their superiors. Of course it was demoralizing to the service. But there has been a marked change in the Secretary since Bryan left the Cabinet."

From several sources I have heard the same evidence. I never heard any one say that Mr. Daniels was really an able Secretary of the Navy, but I have heard many say that he improved.

Personally he is a very likable man. His face is kind and gentle; his features are interestingly irregular and there are heavy wrinkles about his mouth and eyes--the former adding something to the already humorous twinkle of the eyes. His voice has a _timbre_ reminding me of George M.

Cohan's voice. He is hardly an orator in the sense that Bryan is, yet he is not without simple oratorical tricks--as for example a tremolo, as of emotion, which I have heard him use in uttering such a phrase as "the grea-_a-a-at_ Daniel _Web_-ster!" Also, he wears a low turnover collar and a black string tie--a fact which would not be worth noting did these not form a part of what amounts almost to a uniform worn by politicians of more or less the Bryan type. Almost invariably there seems to be something of the minister and something of the actor in such men.

Once I asked one of the famous Was.h.i.+ngton correspondents what manner of man Mr. Daniels was.

"He's a man," he said, "that you'd like to go with on a hunting trip in his native North Carolina. He would be a good companion and would have a lot of funny stories. He is full of kind intentions. Had you known him before the War, and had he liked you, and had you wished to take a ride upon a battles.h.i.+p, he would be disposed to order up a battles.h.i.+p and send you for a ride, even if, by doing so, he muddled up the fleet a little. That would be in line with his fixing it for moving picture people to act scenes on a battles.h.i.+p's deck--which he permitted. He saw no reason why that was not proper, and the kind of people who admire him most are those who, likewise, see no reason why it was not proper. The great lack in his nature is that of personal dignity--or even the dignity which should be his because of his position. If you are sitting beside him and he is amiably disposed toward you, he may throw his arm over your shoulder, or ma.s.sage your knee while talking with you.

"But if some friend of his were to go to him and convince him that he lacked dignity, he is the kind of man who, in my judgment, would become so much the worse. That is, if he attempted to attain dignity he would not achieve it, but would merely grow arbitrary. That, to my mind, shows his great ineradicable weakness, for it not only reveals him as a man too little for his job, but prevents his comprehending the basic thing upon which naval discipline is founded. Nevertheless, as a man you like him. It is as Secretary of the Navy, and particularly as a War Secretary, that you very definitely don't."

Some time after our visit to Raleigh my companion and I heard Secretary Daniels speak in Charleston. He told a funny story and talked generalities about the navy. That was before the United States entered the War. I do not know what he meant the speech for, but what it actually was, was a speech against preparedness. So was the speech made on the same occasion by Lemuel P. Padgett, chairman of the House Committee on Naval Affairs. It was a disingenuous speech, a speech to lull the country into confidence, a speech which, alone, should have been sufficient to prove Mr. Padgett's unfitness to serve on that committee. Mr. Daniels argued that "Germany's preparedness had not kept Germany out of war"; that seemed enough, but there was one thing he said which utterly dumbfounded me. It was this:

"_The Southern statesman who serves his section best, serves the country best._"

Let the reader reflect for a moment upon such an utterance. Carried a little farther what would it mean? Would it not be equally logical to say that the man who serves himself best serves the country best? It is the theory of narrow sectionalism, and by implication, at least, the theory of individualism as well. And sectionalism and individualism are two of the great curses of the United States.

Compare with Mr. Daniels' words those of John Hay who, veiling fine patriotism beneath a web of delicate humor, said:

"_In my bewilderment of origin and experience I can only put on an aspect of deep humility in any gathering of favorite sons, and confess that I am nothing but an American._"

Or again, compare with them the famous words of Patrick Henry:

"_I am not a Virginian, but an American._"

Clearly, one point of view or the other is wrong. Perhaps Mr. Daniels has more light on sectional questions than had Patrick Henry or John Hay. At all events, the Charleston audience applauded.

CHAPTER XXVII

ITEMS FROM "THE OLD NORTH STATE"