The Charlotte paper has another story about the new book by reporter Rob Christensen:
An N.C. political quiz:
1. What N.C. politician courted multimillionaire George Vanderbilt’s widow but was turned down, the story goes, when he tried to spit tobacco juice out her limousine window that was so clean he thought it was open?
2. What U.S. senator from North Carolina toured Europe in 1938, concluded “Hitler and Mussolini have a date with destiny; it’s foolish to oppose them” and was called the “Tar Heel Fuhrer”?
3. When Frank Porter Graham, a former University of North Carolina president and the South’s leading liberal, was running for U.S. senator in 1950, whom did his campaign try to recruit to be his press secretary?
Answers:
1. Cameron Morrison of Charlotte. As governor (1921-25), he was a crusader for “business progressivism” and led the fight for shockingly huge bond issues of $50 million to create a statewide network of paved roads and $20 million to help the University of North Carolina become the finest in the South.
2. Robert (“Our Bob”) Reynolds. The Asheville lawyer, who was married for a time to a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, was pictured in Life magazine kissing Jean Harlow, and who, when President Franklin Roosevelt rejected his nominee for U.S. attorney because the man “kept a fat whore in Charlotte,” told FDR, “she’s not so fat.”
3. Jesse Helms. Later he would be elected to the U.S. Senate as an arch-conservative.
All that and more is found in Rob Christensen’s fascinating new book, “The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics: The Personalities, Elections, and Events That Shaped Modern North Carolina.”
Christensen, who has covered politics for 35 years for the News & Observer in Raleigh, examines the last century of the state’s politics in an effort to understand its apparent contradictions.
Among them: North Carolina has voted Republican in nine of the last 10 presidential elections (the lone exception: Jimmy Carter in 1976) and in nine of the last dozen U.S. Senate elections, yet the state’s Democratic Party is one of the South’s strongest, winning seven of the last 10 governor’s races and dominating the General Assembly.