Thumbprint of the South

TAR HEEL EDITOR--Josephus Daniels--University of North Carolina ($3.50).

Tar Heel Editor is the first of four volumes in which the 77-year-old Ambassador to Mexico proposes to tell the whole of his long life. Taking him through his 30th year, it concerns itself somewhat with his boyhood (his mother's War memories, camp meetings, small-town life, two decades of Reconstruction), chiefly, and in great factual detail, with his young manhood.

A full-fledged editor at 18, Daniels became, during his twenties, one of the most talented and unpurchasable of Southern journalists, fought for virtually every (safely Democratic) advance in sight in the raw, nascent 80's--from free schools, coeducation, a Railroad Commission, to Prohibition (decades before its time) and "white supremacy."

Copiously illustrated with archaic, mostly unheard-of local faces, published by a home press, dealing minutely with matters which once excited a town or county, at most, a State, these 500 pages might easily have been of an interest equally local. But they are, for those very reasons and some others, an almost incalculably rich and subtle portrait of the late igth Century South: as a State, as a people, as reflected in platoons of politicians, lobbyists, journalists, industrialists, preachers and educators; as pinned down in thousands upon thousands of facts of all sorts and sizes; as embodied in every action, still more in every inflection, of one man, Josephus Daniels.

For Josephus Daniels speaks his long piece honestly and guilelessly in the scrawny indigenous jargon of his trade in his time, and his naivete serves to reveal truths subtler than he suspects. A man who can pay tribute to his wife as "the best helpmeet with which man was ever blessed," who can affectionately reprint his own editorials and funny stories, who can, in the Southern journalist's equivalent of Arthur Kober, refer to a "floundered" submarine, speaks from the photographic heart of what his time and environment have made him, and is incapable of going wrong. Even such a wowser as: "Whatever else North Carolinians stand for or do not stand for, immorality by a man in the highest place in an insane asylum or even the suspicion of it brings indignation," is better than a mere laugh; it is, like the whole of the book, as genuine as a thumbprint.

Tar Heel Editor is not quite the complete Southern landscape its author, in his preface, intends; it is a strictly middle-class picture, gets the rest by implication only. But within these limits it is an extraordinary and valuable record; above all, a readable one. With no pretension to literary talent, it contains almost as fine U. S. writing as Twain, Lardner, The Congressional Record. With no "science" at all, it is a document comparable to the two Middletowns.

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