Southern Enemy Number One
A few weeks before the presidential election last fall, I took a walk through downtown Atlanta because I couldn’t stop thinking about the journalist Ralph Waldo Emerson McGill. I stopped on the corner of Alabama and Forsyth Streets, in front of the old office building that once housed The Atlanta Constitution, the paper at which McGill worked for four decades of his life. Tattooed with graffiti, the curved Art Moderne relic is just a shell now, and its glassless windows were long ago boarded up with planks the color of old blood. The day was clear, the air cold, and something about the October wind whipping against those vacant rooms seemed to sum up the present fate of newspaper journalism a little too well.
But as I squinted in the slant of the afternoon sun, I imagined the heavyset McGill up there hammering away at his typewriter in the 1940s, lost in a jungle of papers and mugs of coffee, phone to his ear, peering down through his horn-rimmed glasses at one of the dozen newspapers he read every day, or—better—reading aloud to his gathered newsroom colleagues from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” or Stephen Vincent Benét’s “John Brown’s Body”:
This was his Georgia, this his share
Of pine and river and sleepy air,
Of summer thunder and winter rain
That spills bright tears on the window-pane…
Some called him “Mac.” Others called him “Pappy.” A friend once likened his voice to that of “an asthmatic bullfrog,” and I half-hoped to hear the gravel of it tumbling from the windows, reminding a cub reporter with all possible patience that “you have to put the fodder down where the mules can get at it.” But this was the fall of 2008, and that voice and the world it inhabited have been gone a long time.
Much of Atlanta brimmed with hope and anticipation in the days before Obama’s election; it was a good time to be young in what felt like a new New South. My friends and I spent a lot of time talking about the man we hoped would be president, and the Civil Rights visionaries who laid the foundations for his moment yet never lived to see it. No one I knew mentioned Ralph McGill, winner of a 1959 Pulitzer Prize and the 1964 Presidential Medal of Freedom for his writings on race.
But there was once a time when nearly every citizen of Atlanta knew who McGill was and what he stood for. As an editor, then publisher of the Constitution from 1938 until his death at age seventy in 1969, McGill spoke out against the injustices of segregation when most of his fellow white Southern journalists did not. For three straight decades he wrote a daily column (over ten thousand in all), each in the tone of easy conversation, inspired by the rhythms of the King James Bible and the works of his favorite poets. At the height of McGill’s career, he was the region’s unofficial spokesman, syndicated in three hundred newspapers nationwide and widely known as “the conscience of the South.” This was the platform he used to expose the demagoguery of race-baiting politicians, the cowardice of the Klan, and the fundamental wrongs of the Southern “way of life.”
“I believe in being strongly partisan on issues which require a choice,” McGill reflected in his 1963 book of personal essa63 book of personal essays, The South and the Southerner. “There are some newspapers which are mute and others which carefully engage only editors with chronic laryngitis. But there comes a time in all controversies when one must hit the issue right on the nose or turn tail and die a little.”
Many of McGill’s white readers, who liked to think of themselves as residents of “the city too busy to hate,” were accustomed to the careful silence that accompanied the topic of race in most major Southern newspapers, and hitting the issue right on the nose was the one thing they did not want him to do. His directness earned him innumerable death threats, obscene phone calls, and the enduring hatred of white supremacists, who dubbed him “Red Ralph” and “Rastus McGill.” They riddled his mailbox with bullets, sprayed the front of his home with buckshot, and dumped garbage on his lawn. This he bore with marked grace and good humor, taking a mischievous joy in noting the spelling errors in his hate mail.
The paper’s reader surveys were, however, much better indicators of his reach: they revealed that he was both the most and least liked of its columnists, but he was also by far the most read. Nan Pendergrast, and Atlanta peace activist and friend of the editor’s, once recalled that she knew a number of people who detested McGill’s liberalism, yet “evidently read him every single day of their lives. It was like brushing your teeth or eating breakfast; you couldn’t start the day without McGill.”
Beyond critiquing local politics, McGill assumed the burden of explaining the South to the rest of the world when the South was hardest for the world to understand. He spent his life trying to reconcile its contradictions, yet the resolutely independent, occasionally stubborn editor also had no shortage of his own. He devoted three decades of columns to dismantling racial bigotry, but in his early years as a commentator he was also slow to support federal intervention in the South, believing that the specter of Reconstruction still enveloped the region and that any federal action regarding civil rights would invite pandemonium and revolt. (He hoped the states would enact and enforce their own such laws. Later, however, he fully agreed that desegregation necessitated federal measures.) And he wrote presciently about domestic Red Scare hysteria in the early 1950s, but he also feared the expansion of Communism abroad and supported the Vietnam War. Far ahead of his generation in so many ways, McGill could never entirely free himself from some of its fears. But the work of certain writers is so intimate and complex, even in its most flawed and searching moments, that it permanently opens a door to the world they walked in. Forty years after his death, McGill is still one of those writers.
In my childhood home, Ralph McGill was a dust-covered spine on the bookshelf, a name that drifted in and out of my parents’ conversations but for which I had no anchoring point of reference. My father had worked at an Atlanta advertising firm during McGill’s tenure at the Constitution and kept a copy of The South and the Southerner alongside the works of W.J. Cash and Shelby Foote.
But I didn’t give McGill or his work much thought until years later, when I found myself in the hills of North Georgia writing about the fate of an Appalachian river. With me was an old copy of The South and the Southerner, which I read in my motel room when I wasn’t down on the riverbanks. The first essay in the book is titled “There Are Many Souths,” and in it McGill sets out into the hill-country near the Chattahoochee River (not unlike the Tennessee mountains of his youth) and finds it a place dramatically changed from the land he remembered. For me, more compellinhia was the way he used his own stories to illuminate the problems of the entire region. Here is how he tried to explain the land of his birth to a Roman bookseller in 1945:
The American South was a regional abstraction with a capital S. It possessed, like his Naples and Sicily, a stubborn, often unjustified, pride; it was easygoing and yet violent when it chose to be; it shared, as did southern Italy, a common mystique in which there is grandeur, and pathos, and a note of falseness too. It was something, I said, that I had been born in and to which I had given all my years, but the complexities of it were often too much for me. Now fluid as quicksilver, now rigid and cruel in its adamant injustice and wrongs, now soft and merry, it was difficult to put in words.
In one short paragraph, McGill, writing in 1963, had managed to summarize all the ambivalence of being a white Southerner—the love and guilt and frustration of it—that still radiates through my generation years later.
From Rome in 1945, he flashed back to rural Georgia, then jumped forward to Brown v. Board of Education and to all the triumphs and losses of the Civil Rights Movement as he had witnessed them. Citing the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, who wrote in 1944’s The American Dilemma that the greatest obstacle our country faced was not the institution of slavery or segregation but “the moral conflict in the heart of white Americans,” McGill set out to unravel that moral conflict as it pertained to Southerners at mid-century, including his own gradual awakening about race. The resulting hybrid of autobiography, history, and sociology, The South and the Southerner, was not so much about how white Southerners would come to live alongside African Americans, but how they would ever come to live with themselves.
“The more sensitive Southerner often is self-embarrassed by a realization that he has accepted unquestioningly some aspect of his community life which he rejects,” he wrote.
The Southerner suffers, too, from having estranged himself from much of the life about him. Segregation is estrangement. It is a withdrawal from humanity that is close at hand, that passes in the streets, that lives just over the way. Life in separate, side-by-side compartments, as events of the last half of the twentieth century already have demonstrated with such devastating emphasis, is productive of results both explosive and tragic. This is a part of the guilt and accusation that make up the mosaic of Southern conscience.
A number of lights clicked on when I read The South and the Southerner in that wood-paneled motel room in North Georgia. The first was that personal journalism of the sort McGill practiced could reach people in ways other types of writing could not, and, like Twain and Orwell, he was doing it years before anyone had ever heard of New Journalism. Here was a man who spoke honestly about his own life and limitations, who struggled with how his world was changing and with what those changes meant, who wrote in the first person with both intimacy and candor. He loved the South “as parents love a crippled child,” but never excused its deficiencies. Evident throughout the book was McGill’s anger at the region’s corrupt segregationist leaders, but rage did not strangle his prose. Like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (in which, coincidentally, King calls McGill a “prophetic” ally), the book’s power came from the author’s clarity and control. Still, as much as he had seen, he didn’t have all the answers, nor did he pretend to.
If The South and the Southerner didn’t offer prescriptive policies for social change, it did provide a sweeping indictment of what had long poisoned the South: a lack of industrial development and high poverty rates; a failed school system; politicians who used race to manipulate their uneducated, unemployed constituents; the sophistry of “professional Southerners” who summoned the ghosts of the Civil War at every opportunity; a clergy who preached the love and tolerance of Jesus Christ, then declared segregation to be the will of God. Until any of those basic maladies was soothed, McGill contended, the cancer of racial hatred would persist. Bringing the hammer down when he had to, his was still a compassionate voice tinged with warm humor. And unlike earlier works by Southern whites—W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South (1941) and Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream (1949) come to mind—The South and the Southerner wasn’t filled with broad-stroke conjectures or bold theories; rather, it was one man’s observations on the land that had shaped him, and the land he hoped in some part to re-shape. True to the book’s provisional title, it was “The Education of Ralph McGill.”
Technically, that education started for McGill on his family’s farm in the hills of Unionist East Tennessee, where he was born in the winter of 1898, and, after a brief turn in the Marines, ended at Vanderbilt in 1922, when he was suspended for criticizing the school administration in the campus paper. He never returned to graduate, and that never seemed to bother him. That’s because what McGill really knew he learned from nearly fifty years on the ground as a newspaperman, first as a sports reporter in Nashville, then as a columnist, editor, and publisher of the Constitution in Atlanta.
On the sports beat, young “Mac” spent the first seven years of his career at The Nashville Banner, putting readers on the field with Babe Ruth or in the ring with Jack Dempsey. He developed a witty, digressive storytelling style that quickly became his signature and earned him a loyal readership, so much of one that the Constitution lured him away to write for its sports pages in the spring of 1929.
For all the intensity and excitement of sports writing in the “Golden Decade,” McGill longed to write about the social and political changes taking place during the Great Depression and he feared he would never be able to produce anything beyond “newspaper drivel.” He wanted to examine real lives and real problems, so he began using the travel he did as a sports reporter to talk on the side with farmers, learn about the plight of working families, and write about Roosevelt’s New Deal. Even so, his bosses didn’t free him from the sports page until 1938, when he returned from a six-month Rosenwald Fellowship to Europe, during which he had reported on everything from farming practices in Demark to the rise of Hitler. When they finally promoted him to editor of the editorial page, McGill was forty years old.
As an editor, McGill relentlessly engaged the world in every way he could. In addition to writing his daily column, “One Word More,” he read over a dozen newspapers a day and two to three books a week, usually works of history or sociology or political science, many of which he reviewed in The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, or The Saturday Evening Post. When he wasn’t reading or writing or collecting and interviewing sources, he traveled abroad (throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle east and Africa). His empathic disposition endeared him both to the tenant farmers and coal miners he met throughout the South and to the Washington insiders to whom he would later give counsel. “The friendly fat man with a camera around his neck” (as another journalist described him) eventually befriended Adlai Stevenson, visited with John F. Kennedy in Palm Beach, regularly dined with Lyndon Johnson, and completed two goodwill missions to West Africa on behalf of the White House. “To be a writer,” McGill used to say, “you’ve got to keep moving around.”
Eugene Patterson, McGill’s good friend, Constitution colleague, and fellow Pulitzer recipient, wrote to me recently that what set McGill apart from other journalists was his inexhaustible enthusiasm; he always jumped at the chance “to learn a new thing or engage a new idea or enjoy a new experience or explore a new mind.”
McGill witnessed firsthand the ineluctable horrors of racial hatred and mob mentality when he reported from Hitler’s Germany in 1938. But in the Depression-era South, he saw similar evils take a different form: not fascism, but provincialism. The only antidote for it, he felt, was rigorous, lifelong self-education. He took notes on everything he saw and heard and remembered—his secretary recalled that these were written on envelopes, napkins, and ticket stubs—and stuffed the notes in his pockets. He never left home without a book, and patient though he usually was, the cardinal sin he could not forgive in his fellow journalists was lack of curiosity. If you weren’t traveling and reading and talking to people, if your mind was not constantly locked in to what was happening around you, then, to McGill, you weren’t much of a writer. The editor set a seemingly inhuman example with his reading, writing, lecturing, and travel schedule, but Patterson said, “It isn’t hard, as he taught me, when you step up to it, and recognize we’ll drift through life using a fraction of our capacity if we don’t demand the impossible of ourselves.”
Writing about race in the American South, which McGill began doing soon after he was named the paper’s editor in chief in 1942, would have appeared to many to be just such an impossible demand. The upheaval of the Second World War—a war in which black American soldiers were routinely discriminated against, even as they fought the imperial ambitions and racial politics of the Third Reich—cemented his desire to write about it.
But he also realized that, in order to keep his white readership and make any sort of dent in the old prejudices, he had to balance what he wanted to say with what his audience could hear. He sensed that if he publicly demanded a legal end to segregation at that time it would cost him not only his readers but also his job. Without a forum, he would have no influence.
So McGill started slowly. First he chipped away at the pretense that the South had in any fashion lived up to the “separate but equal” Supreme Court ruling of 1896 (“We…have repeatedly insisted we want to be fair to the Negro. Let us admit that the record shows we have not”), then he pushed for equal voting rights for African Americans and he skewered the “yellow rats” in the Ku Klux Klan. The rampant, unchecked terrorism of hate groups revealed a much more destructive social epidemic, as McGill saw it:
[T]he existence of poor, inarticulate, and uneducated people with legitimate grievances and no agency or person to whom to go.… Until something is done about all of this, there will always be, not merely in Georgia, but the whole country, a field for the hate racketeers to harvest.
The editor’s early columns on race, mild though they read today, proved sharply polarizing for the 1940s. Hate groups picketed outside The Constitution’s offices. Georgia’s then-governor, Eugene Talmadge, made a regular point of denouncing McGill’s credibility from the stump, decrying the trespasses of “them lying Atlanta newspapers.” The Klan declared the editor “southern enemy number one.”
If anything, the persistent opposition made the normally affable editor all the more certain that he was saying what needed to be said. “He put his head through the canvas and invited the baseballs thrown at it,” Patterson recalled. There was still something of the sports reporter in McGill, and something of the old Vanderbilt football player he once was, a part of him that relished the sweat and toil of a good slugfest. Young reporters who tiptoed around controversy received from him one swift admonition: a little sparring is fine, but sometimes “you have to walk out into the center of the ring and bust the other guy right square in the nose.” The race-baiting of Talmadge, and later of Lester Maddox (“a psychotic person”) and Alabama’s George Wallace gave him plenty of opportunities for nose-busting.
Wearied by his detractors’ insistence that, because of his assault on Southern demagogues, he had “betrayed” the South, McGill wrote in 1949: “It seems to me the Southerner who loves his region must love it enough to fight for it.”
The person who really loves the South must love it enough to refuse to see it exploited by those who seek to say that lynchings and mob violence are a part of the South. They must love it enough to say the Negro may have full justice and economic opportunity without any harm to the South’s true traditions.
But “Pappy” McGill, then in his fifties, also knew when to back off. Rather than continually blasting the ignorance of white racists and imperiling his persuasive power with them, he often assumed the role of a patient teacher. His column extended an implicit invitation: “Come sit by me for a minute, and I’ll show you how I see things.” He wanted to establish a lasting bond with his readers—white and black—that traced the curves of a real, neighborly friendship, one full of digressions and debates. Some days he’d write about the lack of educational resources for black children, or the failure of law enforcement to bring lynch mobs to justice; other days, his subject was the importance of getting regular medical checkups or maybe even his own love of poetry, Brunswick stew, hunting dogs, or beekeeping, throwing in a Biblical parable for good measure. “Newspapers have got to come down and be close to the people,” he once wrote. “[N]ot merely interested in informing them and in interpreting for them, but interested in their health, their housing, their living conditions, their children, and their whole panorama of interests.” Then, when he felt the time was right, he’d return to race, and new ways of tearing down the old system.
Given that McGill was a giant among the journalists of his day—idolized by young Southern newspapermen in the 1940s and ’50s the way today’s generation of reporters venerates the late David Halberstam—I wondered: Why has McGill faded from the popular history? And why has his most expansive and insightful work, The South and the Southerner, been largely forgotten?
One reason may be that the idea of a white Southern liberal writing about racial intolerance during the Civil Rights years seems redundant or even paternalistic to a modern reader. Dr. King brought the world’s much-needed attention to the problems of the South and African-American intellectuals like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin were finally getting the wide readership they deserved. But to minimize McGill’s contribution is to underestimate the crushing tension of the times and to misunderstand his approach. The audience he reached with his varied columns was broad, but the one he targeted—what his colleague and biographer Harold Martin called “the great massed millions of southerners in the middle—those who held allegiance neither to the NAACP nor the Ku Klux Klan”—was quite specific. Those people most needed moral direction, McGill felt, because their long silence about hatred was as corrosive to the region as the hatred itself. More than speaking on behalf of Southern blacks, he worked to highlight the endemic moral failures of his own Southern whites: “Where have the ‘best people,’ the ‘good people’ been?”
Despite his close friendship with Patterson and other brave editors like Harry Ashmore of The Arkansas Gazette and Bill Baggs of The Miami News, the place McGill occupied among the Southern progressives of his day was still a lonely one. As one who had carefully observed Hitler on the right and Stalin on the left, nothing frightened him the way groupthink did. He remained a lifelong Democrat, but before any party or ideology McGill adhered first to his own sense of honor and integrity, of which intellectual honesty was a crucial component. To him none of these values could be found at any ideological extreme, whether it was on the far right or the far left. (He was as critical of black separatism as he was of white supremacy.) “I have always tried to develop a nonconforming mind,” he wrote, “believing such a mind necessary to one whose job it is to comment on events and policies…. If man ever becomes tamed, and if he loses the one paramount freedom from which all others stem—the freedom of his mental processes—then all else is lost.”
Determined to forge his own opinions on social change, McGill appeared dangerous and unforgivably radical to his conservative critics, but for a good number of Civil Rights leaders—like Walter White of the NAACP, who branded him a “weasel” when the editor failed to advocate a federal anti-lynching law—he was an apologist, an accommodator, not nearly radical enough. This is understandable, especially in light of McGill’s initial hope that “the best people, the good people” of the white South would demand justice for African-Americans without federal pressure. But his views on activism grew more passionate and committed as the movement gathered momentum in the 1950s, his voice reaching new levels of outrage whenever white Southerners employed cruel acts of violence to protect their “heritage.” In 1958, white supremacists bombed Atlanta’s Benevolent Congregation Temple, and in his shock and grief McGill wrote “A Church, a School,” the column that would help win him the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.
There will be, to be sure, the customary act of the careful drawing aside of skirts on the part of those in high places. ‘How awful!’ they will exclaim. ‘How terrible. Something must be done.’
But the record stands. The extremists of the citizens’ councils, the political leaders who in terms violent and inflammatory have repudiated their oaths and stood against due process of law have helped unloose this flood of hate and bombing.
You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field….When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.
And after a string of devastating political assassinations in the 1960s—Medgar Evers and John F. Kennedy in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968—McGill let loose with blistering ferocity on:
“the jackals, the cowards, the traitors, the failures, the yapping feist pack that tries to drive out truth; those who dislike Jews, Negroes, Catholics and liberals; the bitter and evil persons who organize themselves and send out hate literature; the Klan types, the States’ Rights diehards, those who dynamite churches, synagogues and homes—they are the abscesses in America’s society.”
Diverging from the course others tend to follow, McGill became bolder and more radical as he aged. The South and the Southerner was published when he was sixty-five. He sliced up “the yapping feist pack” when he was almost seventy. Once, when looking back on his first columns, McGill admitted to Gene Patterson that he was ashamed of them and wished he had spoken out in more emphatic terms. “They’re pretty pale tea,” he said. But Patterson feels the editor was too hard on his early efforts, considering what he was up against: “Mr. McGill’s wide unpopularity proved he hadn’t been brewing pale tea at all.”
McGill’s principles, as finely tuned as they were to issues of human rights, did occasionally lead him astray. Contrary to his usual independence, his loyalty to the Marine Corps (or any troops in battle), to the American government, and to President Johnson shaped his adamantine support of the war in Vietnam, a position that greatly eroded (and in some cases, dissolved) his reputation among liberals. He had sized up Senator Joseph McCarthy as a “sinister psychopath” in 1950, but the editor still lived with his generation’s Cold War fears of Communist expansion abroad . Memories of the not-so-distant past haunted him, one dominated by Hitler on the right and Stalin on the left. Vietnam, like Eastern Europe under the Soviets, looked to him like another case of the Reds marching across the lives of unwilling innocents and he scolded anyone who tried to convince him otherwise. As his biographer Leonard Ray Teel put it, “it was as though, when it came to war, McGill surrendered qualities which were a source of wisdom and strength—his lifelong moderation between extremes and his capability of gleaning truth from even those who disagreed with him.” This was mystifying to other Southern progressives, including Martin Luther King, Jr., who once asked the Constitution’s business manager, “How can McGill be so right on race, and so wrong about Vietnam?”
Simply put, he was right on race and wrong on Vietnam because he didn’t live in Vietnam. Or, rather, he had not dedicated decades of his life to observing it, challenging it, reading about it, and discussing it with people he trusted, as he had done with race in the American South. When he had written so perceptively years before about Hitler’s vice grip on the minds of the German people, he had been right there among them, watching the dictator’s rabid speech at the Reichstag. Without similar immersion on the ground in Vietnam (he traveled there only briefly, in 1966), McGill in this case defaulted to his loyalties and to his idealism, even when the ideal of fighting Communism in Vietnam was neither pragmatically viable nor strategically necessary and it had been perverted by other cynical imperatives.
But, his defiant position on that war notwithstanding, the dominant trend in McGill’s career—one that spanned almost five decades, from reading the play-by-play in the Nashville newsroom to winning the Medal of Freedom in 1964—was one of learning and changing, of moving in the direction of his conscience, even when it put him at significant personal and professional risk to do so. He didn’t always do the right thing, to be sure. Like any journalist fortunate enough to work as long as he did, he suffered his share of bad days, missteps, and lapses in judgment. But moving toward the right thing was always on his mind, even if at times he had to feel his way out of the dark.
While McGill recognized that change might come to the South slowly, he had an abiding faith that, slow or not, it would come. He wrote from that conviction during some of the region’s bleakest years, when it would have been easy to relinquish it and turn cynical. Upon the editor’s death from a heart attack in 1969, Albert M. Davis, the former president of Atlanta’s chapter of the NAACP, said that McGill “interpreted the voice of all people who suffered, not only Negroes, but all people who wanted freedom. He was the only voice we had for 25 years. If anyone brought the South back into the Union it was Mr. McGill.”
So I think of him most as the daily newspapers go under. None seems immune; even The New York Times struggles to stay financially viable. (As it happens, the Constitution, now merged with The Atlanta Journal, gave buyouts to seventy-four newsroom employees in April.) “McGill was the last of a kind of thundering editor, which we really don’t have in this country anymore,” noted the television journalist Sander Vanocur in 1988. “Ol’ Ralph” represents a time in America when the public needed a voice it trusted to make sense of a rapidly changing, often violent and morally incomprehensible world. Not at all unlike the world we live in now, really, except that there were no talking heads from the twenty-four-hour news cycle, no tabloid blogs to distract from the severity of current events; there was just hard news and the dedication of those who delivered it. As arbiter of nearly all the public’s information, the newspaper editor shouldered an enormous civic responsibility, and no one took that responsibility more seriously than McGill did. He ran a paper, not a product.
Without question the same digital technology that has rendered papers obsolete has also made reporting possible in ways McGill never could have imagined—just look at the recent “Twitter revolution” in Iran—but when the papers go, much of the dedication and leadership that he exemplified will go with them. His rare style of leadership was not about convenience or advertising revenue, not about the popularity or financial solvency of the publication. It was about being “strongly partisan on issues which require a choice,” and understanding the primary tenet of good journalism: you have to speak to the people you want to reach in a language and framework they can understand, no matter how stifled their lives or how unjust their opinions. Often it is precisely those people who most need to be reached in the first place.
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Photos from the Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center.