Durham: The New South

WASHINGTON DUKE HOTEL
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA
DEAR ELISAVETA ANDRIEVNA: —
I have now been in Durham for ten days. Here I have found Southerners and the South, although it is no more the South of the legendary past than is the Yankee-preëmpted hunt country of northern Virginia. Durham is, on the contrary, a type-town of the future South. It is filled with boosting, gogetting, up-and-at-’em business-men who haven’t the slightest interest in whether Grandpa Clutcher dispersed a whole regiment of Yankees at Manassas or hid in the woods around Burnt Britches Bridge until the war was over. Ancestors, to Durham folk, are merely biological but not social necessities. They derive more comfort from the ascending curves of business graphs than from the flowering branches of family trees. They don’t ask where you came from, but where you expect to go. If you want the South of moonlight and roses, with crinoline trimmings and faithful colored retainers plunking guitars in the moonlight, you are frankly told to go to Charleston, which specializes in that kind of thing. Durham’s stars twinkle not in Baedeker but in Bradstreet; it is a boom town built on two depressionproof industries — the manufacture of cigarettes and culture; it is still crude and almost unrelievedly ugly; but for all that I hope you will include it in the itinerary of your grand American tour.
Here, first of all, you will see a striking and unique phenomenon: a made-overnight university complete with acres of Gothic buildings, eminent faculty, star football team, cheer leaders, college spirit, sorority mothers, campus statuary, a student body gathered from all over the land, climbing ivy, and a great cathedral. Elsewhere universities have grown accretion by slow accretion. Bologna, the Sorbonne, Oxford, Heidelberg, Harvard, and Yale are the distillations of centuries. But Duke University stands where only ten years ago pines swayed in the vagrant winds. Philosophy Cl is taught in 1940 on the very spot where the rabbits of 1930 indulged their odd, fantastic habits amid tangled honeysuckle. Professorial voices expounding the law of corporations linger on the air that a little while ago was musical with the notes of mockingbirds singing amid sweet gum trees. Only fifty years before this time, moreover, the Dukes who decreed a university as imperiously as Kublai Khan decreed a golden dome had been impoverished peddlers of tobacco going up and down the rutted roads of North Carolina in a swaybacked wagon drawn by two blind mules.
A phenomenon such as this, my dear, is one that you will not encounter elsewhere in the world; nor is it likely to be repeated in the America of our times. It belongs to the past, along with such native ingenuities as the fur derby hat, the solid gold toothpick with ear spoon combined, Turkish leather rockers, and no restrictions — moral or legal — upon a man’s ability to amass wealth. In the high old days, however, before the coming of inheritance and income taxes and anti-monopoly laws, men could (and did) go rapidly from rags to riches, while Horatio Alger, Junior, confidently wrote as follows during the devastations of the panic of 1872-1873: —

Writing this preface abroad, after having visited for a second time, some of the leading countries of Europe, I am able to confirm . . . that nowhere . . . are such opportunities afforded for those who wish to rise as in America. We hear, indeed, occasional instances of prominent men who have risen from the ranks; what is rare and occasional in Europe is the rule with us. — Bound to Rise, or, Up the Ladder

When you approach Durham by road from any direction, you note that the landscape is dominated by the tall steel water tanks (American Byzantine) of its tobacco factories. These lend support to the hotly contested theory of some students that the Civil War conferred benefits upon the South other than those contained in the book and motion picture called Gone with the Wind. For example: the tobacco industry.

On a soft April day about seventy-five years ago, thousands of men wearing uniforms of blue or gray were gathered at a little hamlet in North Carolina called Durham’s Station. They played games, swapped horses and stories, and enjoyed the novelty of fraternizing with the enemy. What if they were soldiers of the opposing armies of Generals Sherman and Johnston who were camped near by awaiting battle? Durham’s Station was a neutral area by mutual consent, where Yank and Rob met to play. Here the men found a house full of smoking tobacco that had been manufactured by John R. Green for Confederate soldiers, but when the house was sacked the tobacco was equitably divided between the Blue and the Gray. (The moral holiday of war is sometimes observed with punctiliousness.) Later the groups separated, fought the battle demanded by the conventions of the military, Johnston surrendered to Sherman, the Civil War receded into history, and the men scattered to their distant homes.

American boys were once taught at home and in school that if you worked hard, served your boss well, and saved your money, you might become rich. Chance, according to these teachers, played no part in the rise of any man worthy of the name; it was even deplored as slightly immoral; it flew in the face of the early-to-rise, early-to-bed doctrine of success. Let’s see the workings of chance at Durham’s Station, as the postmaster received letters from ex-soldiers asking where they could buy tobacco — the same soldiers who had stolen it at Durham’s Station. The letters were turned over to John R. Green — the same Green who had been the victim of the robbery. He now sacked some of his tobacco and mailed it to his erstwhile despoilers whom peace had turned into paying customers. The accident of war had given him at small cost the nucleus of a national distribution of his product, and set him on the road to riches. Mr. Green called his brand Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco. The Bull of Durham was to go everywhere in the world, roll up great wealth for his owners, create an industry, a town, and a giant source of revenue to the Federal Government.

At first Bull Durham went into pipes alone, but later in the nineteenth century, and much of the twentieth, millions of coatless men walked the summer streets of America with a sack of Bull attached to a shirt button, and cigarette papers for making ‘coffin nails’ in their pockets. The ability to roll one’s own deftly, with a minimum of saliva and under any conditions of wind, came to be a badge of manhood which the unskillful envied and to which youth aspired. America had become the greatest tobacco-producing and tobacco-consuming country in the world, and Durham one of its most important provincial capitals.

While Mr. Green was busy at the Sign of the Bull, a forty-five-year-old exConfederate soldier, released from Federal prison at New Bern, North Carolina, trudged penniless and weary one hundred and forty miles to his hill farm. He was a widower, with children, named Washington Duke. The Yankees, in sacking his farm, had overlooked a small amount of tobacco which Duke now packed in bags and labeled ‘Pro Bono Publico.’ Then he hitched his two blind mules to a wagon, loaded it with tobacco, a frying pan, tin plates, a side of bacon, sweet potatoes, a bushel of corn meal, and set out for a week’s trip to the herring fisheries on Albemarle Sound. At mealtimes he prepared his own food; at night he camped by the roadside. Duke bartered his tobacco for salt herring; the herring was traded to farmers for fresh pork; and the pork sold for cash to Raleigh merchants. Out of his profits he bought a dollar’s worth of brown sugar — a rare luxury at the time — for his hungry boys at home. One of them was James B. Duke, who was to become the founder of the American Tobacco Company and of Duke University.

Soon after this journey, Washington Duke and his sons began to manufacture and sell tobacco at home. The business grew so rapidly that within ten years the family factory had been removed to Durham; but, while W. Duke Sons and Company prospered, they were dissatisfied with their progress. The road to greater and greater riches was blocked by the fact that none of the Duke brands could compete satisfactorily with Bull Durham smoking tobacco. It was therefore decided to manufacture cigarettes.

This venture was favored by the circumstances that the Civil War had enormously increased the popularity of smoking, and North Carolina had begun to produce Bright Tobacco, which was especially adapted for cigarettes. But cigarette-making machinery had not yet been invented, and no one in Durham knew how to roll them by hand. The Dukes then did what California fruit growers, Hawaiian pineapple planters, and Southern cotton farmers had done under other circumstances — they imported the needed laborers. In this case they were New York Jews who had learned their trade while in the employ of the Russian tobacco monopoly. (Their descendants still live in Durham.) The Jews, however, soon gave way to Negroes, just as the Negroes have long been giving way to machinery in the tobacco industry. The growing wealth and population of the country, the everincreasing use of the habit-forming weed, and the opening of world markets under the fierce energy of the Dukes, caused expansion after expansion of their firm.

Now, my dear, let us observe a sequence of events that could have happened only in America. So lucrative is the manufacture of tobacco that, as you know, many European governments reserve it to themselves as a monopoly and permit no private competition. And the rise from rags to riches in Europe generally takes several generations. Contrast this with the rise of the Dukes. By 1890 — only twenty-five years after Washington Duke had begun to peddle tobacco from a wagon — four rival concerns joined with W. Duke Sons and Company to form the American Tobacco Company. Its capitalization of $25,000,000 was termed by the United States Commissioner of Corporations ‘an amount vastly in excess of tangible assets,’ or, in the less polite words of the man in the street, ‘watered stock.’ But nineteenth-century America was characterized by a savage laissez faire, and the Dukes, after all, were men of their times. Finally, eighty-six other and competing firms were merged or consolidated with the American Tobacco Company, while its capitalization was run up to $235,000,000. James B. Duke was made president of the company, which at its inception secured control of 90 per cent of the cigarette business of the greatest cigarette-smoking country in the world. That, my dear, is (or was) America.

Monopoly, real or alleged, has now become a wearisomely familiar issue to the American people, but there was a time — particularly in the days of Theodore Roosevelt — when it provoked avid interest and intense indignation among the public. When, therefore, in 1911, the Commissioner of Corporations issued a report on American Tobacco in which he spoke of its alleged corporate sins, of the bare living earned by tobacco farmers, and of the starvation prices paid them for tobacco, it was agreed something must be done. And something was done. The United States Supreme Court, which has often been given to a rather charming metaphysical unawareness of the brawling world, ordered the dissolution of the Tobacco Trust. Whereupon its component parts rearranged their positions; the country’s population increased; millions of women joined the ranks of smokers; tobacco farmers remained poor; and the Dukes grew richer.

In the meanwhile, James B. Duke had moved in 1905 from Durham to Somerville, New Jersey, where he constructed a palace on an estate of twenty-five hundred acres, and lived in that magnificence to which self-made American millionaires seem to feel they are called. The years went by pleasantly enough for Mr. Duke in New Jersey, while down in North Carolina tobacco farmers continued to sow their seeds in hotheds, transplant the slips to warm spring earth, cultivate the growing crop in hot summer, sit up autumn nights to keep wood fires blazing in curing barns, haul their tobacco to market, take the prices they were offered for it, and endure their poverty with becoming humility. When the times pressed too hard upon them they clamored for William Jennings Bryan for President, and shouted for the coming of the Lord in revival meetings. When times were relatively good they bought a secondhand Ford, loaded the family into it, and went off to visit relatives and hunt ‘coons up at Spruce Pine. All in all, it was not a bad world, but it was a world from which James B. Duke was soon to depart.

In 1924, with but one more year to live, his thoughts reverted to Durham, where his youth had been spent and his fortune founded. In that town there was a small school —Trinity College. He now descended upon its trustees with a startling proposal. If they would change the name of Trinity to Duke University, said Mr. Duke, he would grant it an endowment of $40,000,000. This condition, reports the late Professor Boyd of Duke University with admirable understatement, ‘was readily fulfilled by the Trinity trustees.’ A year later James B. Duke was dead. He has, however, achieved at least earthly immortality. A university bears his name; he stands frock-coated with cigar in hand in enduring bronze on the Duke campus; he lies in marble effigy with his brothers in the chapel of Duke cathedral; beneath its stones rest his remains.

The Duke millions began to be converted into Duke University just about the time when economic depression moved in on us for a long visit, and they resulted in a boom for the small but already depression-proof town of Durham. Its principal activity — cigarette making — had increased for years through good times and bad. Now the town was to experience a first-class building boom as the pines went down and the University went up. When the tents had been finally erected, the star performers arrived — men learned in the professions and esoteric lore; doctors of this and doctors of that; men with bizarre names in a community accustomed to simple Anglo-Saxon nomenclature; but all of them, of whatever kind or degree, with the golden aura of Consumers about their heads. Close upon their heels came the girl-and-boy student body: potential purchasers of lipsticks, tennis rackets, shoes, clothing, and ice cream sodas. Culture, it appeared to the towm’s astonished citizens, was not a total loss; it could pay dividends as well as tobacco. Durham’s business and population grew; rows of new homes pirouetted on the flanks of the town’s mastodontic tobacco warehouses; steel tanks and Gothic towers looked down upon a world freshly born; the ugly duckling of North Carolina had become a fairy princess overnight.

Once the University had a roof over its head, it began to erupt fountains of culture in the form of lectures and recitals by famous speakers and musicians, accessible to townsfolk as well as students. But in Durham, as nearly everywhere else in the United States, the propagation of the arts, like the duties of spring cleaning and putting up pickles, is left to the ladies. Occasionally a determined Durham woman succeeds in dragging her husband away from a poker game to hear Rachmaninoff instead of ‘What ya got?’ but in general Durham’s men let their ladies absorb Duke’s ‘advantages’ while they root for its football teams. For this group, education justified itself when the Duke Blue Devils played Southern California in the Rose Bowl, and while its members await the coming of another Great Team they are content for their women to listen to discourses on the bird life of the Bahamas or Edna St. Vincent Millay.

In short, Durham’s men — conscious of the fact that the South, with 50 per cent of the nation’s resources within its borders and a rapidly growing population, is nonetheless the most povertystricken area of America — are out to get the business, and let him who will have the ‘culture’ and Southern ‘romance.’ Northerners deplore this attitude because they feel the South ought to stick to the business of being picturesque. The fact that it is highly unprofitable is all the more reason — in Northern eyes — why the South should stick to it. Old-time Southerners are likely to resent the Durham attitude because to them it means that the South is committing its greatest crime: aping the North. Durham, however, was settled not by aristocrats but by hardworking plain folk like the Dukes; it is not obsessed with the historical past; and, consciously or unconsciously, it feels that the time has come to stop playing the rôle of jolly peasants singing on the village green for the delectation of rich and patronizing Northerners.

If the white men of Durham have abandoned the Southern-charm rôle, so have the Negroes. Here one finds perhaps the most imposing and substantial business structure that Negroes have ever erected in America — the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. Founded over forty years ago by the Negro barber, John Merrick, it is today still conducted entirely by Negroes, operates in six states, has assets of $6,000,000 and nearly $50,000,000 of life insurance in force. Durham Negroes also own and run a successful bank, and an equally successful fire insurance company. This concern — Bankers Fire Insurance Company — is unique in that it constitutes the only group of Negroes in America engaged in the field of fire insurance underwriting, and caters to Negroes who, in many cases, could not get insurance elsewhere. It follows that Durham is not a happy hunting ground for writers in search of ‘ that’s-why-darkies-are-born’ material, because here they seem born to conduct business rather than ‘hoe the cawn.’

The success of the North Carolina Mutual is opposed to at least four American legends. (1) Negroes are incapable of managing large-scale enterprise. (2) Even if they were capable of managing large-scale enterprise, they would have to operate in the North because the Negro-biased South would not give them a chance. (3) The best Negro brains go North for lack of opportunity in the South, leaving the dregs of the race to drag out a miserable existence. (This company was founded by and is conducted entirely by Southern Negroes.) (4) Negroes are faced with extermination because of the ravages of tuberculosis and venereal diseases. This legend was once given solemn documentary sanction by one of the great insurance companies in 1890.

At that time — twenty-five years after the Civil War — the Prudential Life Insurance Company assigned one of its best actuaries, Hoffman, to the task of ascertaining whether it would be profitable to insure the lives of Negroes. Hoffman, after a long investigation, issued a thick, statistics-bristling report concluding that there was no sense in insuring Negroes for the simple reason that within two or three generations there would be no Negroes left to insure. They would long ago have perished of pulmonary and venereal diseases! This point of view, strangely enough, was held both by laymen and by actuaries long after the Civil War, and it continued to be held despite the fact that each census showed an increase in the Negro population. I wonder what the ghostly Mr. Hoffman thinks now as he sees 13,000,000 Negroes in the United States (there were about 4,000,000 in 1865), and a large Negro life insurance company prosperously insuring the lives of Negroes.

Now all this is obviously not the Old but the New South. Deplore it if you will; call it sterile; call it whatever you like; and resent the spread of the acquisitive instinct at the expense of many other values. All this, in fact, is resented by Durham’s neighbor, the ancient town of Raleigh, many of whose citizens look down their patrician noses at the upstart town of Durham, because its sky is filled with the smoke of chimneys rather than the lambent Carolina light, its streets paved less with tradition than with brick, and its leaders more intent upon piling up cash than culture. These folk see culture — by which they mean mellowed homes, old silver, impeccable manners, and a gracious way of living — as an abstraction come out of the nowhere into the now. It could not possibly be associated with anything so gross as trade; its silver surface would be tarnished by the breath of business.

They forget, of course, that wherever on this continent or elsewhere an intellectual or sensory culture has prevailed, it sprang from trade and flourished in trading centres. Boston, New York, Richmond, and New Orleans were business cities, and it mattered little whether they exchanged hardware for tea, as Boston did with China, or slaves for money, as Virginia did with the lower South; culture followed in the wake of business. Southerners are prone to forget — or do not want to remember — that some of the shrewdest, toughestminded financiers who ever drove a hard bargain on this continent were the Huguenot bankers of old Charleston. And long before western Europe had awakened from forest barbarism, culture and business had gone hand in hand in Babylon, Athens, and Alexandria. I do not despair, therefore, of Durham, nor deplore its existence. Give it time.

Two or three miles west of Durham I stopped to read the inscription on a simple bronze plaque. It commemorates not a Confederate victory but a Confederate defeat which was the death of the Confederacy. Its noble language breathes the spirit not of defiance but of reconciliation and serene pride. Note these words:

THIS MONUMENT MARKS THE SPOT WHERE THE MILITARY FORCE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FINALLY TRIUMPHED AND ESTABLISHED AS INVIOLATE THE PRINCIPLE OF AN INDISSOLUBLE UNION; IT MARKS ALSO THE SPOT OF THE LAST STAND OF THE CONFEDERACY IN MAINTAINING ITS IDEAL OF INDESTRUCTIBLE STATES — AN IDEAL WHICH PRESERVED TO THE AMERICAN UNION BY VIRTUE OF THE HEROIC FIGHT GROWS IN STRENGTH FROM YEAR TO YEAR.

It seems not unreasonable to me that a community capable of uttering these sentiments is worthy of the luxury of wearing shoes weekdays as well as Sundays.
Affectionately,
DAVID