Rob Christensen, political reporter for the Raleigh News & Observer, has a boatload of them. He’s got a new book, The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics: The Personalities, Elections, and Events that Shaped Modern North Carolina. He was just at Malaprop’s recently, pimping his book.
Here’s a piece of a column printed in the Charlotte paper.
Cameron Morrison, a tough, folksy, tobacco-chewing politician originally from Richmond County, was a lieutenant in the powerful Democratic machine that ran North Carolina at the beginning of the 20th century.
He had been a leader in the white supremacy campaigns of 1898 and 1900 that had resulted in Democratic control, the disfranchisement of African Americans and the marginalization of Republicans.
For his services to the machine, the party boss tapped him to be his candidate for governor in 1920. The evidence suggests that the machine stole the election for him. The count took 11 days as votes from the machine-controlled mountain counties trickled in. He won the Democratic nomination by a mere 87 votes.
Voice for Charlotte business
Morrison may have been an anti-reform politician, but he was also the voice of Charlotte’s business community. And the watchword across the South in the1920s was to spend money on roads, schools and universities. The eminent historian George B. Tindall called this era “business progressivism.”
Taking office, Morrison promised to “war for righteousness with the reactionary and unprogressive forces of our state.”
North Carolina undertook such a massive road building program that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini sent one of his engineers to the state to study how it was done. It was during this period that the University of North Carolina made its great leap forward to become the leading public university in the South. No state increased its spending by a larger percentage during this time. (The downside: By the end of the 1920s, only New York state had a larger bonded indebtedness than North Carolina.)
Leaving the governor’s office, Morrison, a widower, sought to marry a rich widow. He courted millionaire George Vanderbilt’s widow but was turned down – or so the story goes – when he tried to spit tobacco juice out of her limousine window that was so spotless he thought it was open.
He did marry the heiress of a Durham tobacco fortune and settled into the life of a gentleman farmer on a 160-acre estate he called Morrocroft.