Each Thursday, your
Crap Archivist brings you the finest in forgotten and bewildering
crap culled from area basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea
markets. I do this for one reason: Knowledge is power.
Weep No More, My Lady
Author:
W.E. Debnam
Publisher:
The Graphic Press, Raleigh, North Carolina
Date:
1950
Discovered at:
Charity Thrift Mart on Noland Road in Independence
The Cover Promises: A chivalrous Southern gentleman considers Eleanor Roosevelt's remarks concerning "poverty and unhappiness" beneath the Mason Dixon Line. ALSO: It is chivalrous and gentlemanly to depict Mrs. Roosevelt as a hideous bucktoothed crone.
Representative
Quotes:
"In
the case of Harlem and those slums in the back yard of the Capitol in
Washington, you can't escape it even if you close your eyes. They
smell to high heaven."
(page 11)
"No
one can visit the south today - that is, no one who keeps his eyes
open - and not be profoundly impressed with the economic and
intellectual renaissance going on." (page 46).
In 1950, noted
firebrand Eleanor Roosevelt penned a newspaper column about a trip
she had recently taken to North Carolina. After musing over the charm
of magnolias and the "lavender-and-old-lace feeling that still
exists there," the Yankee doyenne rained down with pure rhetorical
hell:
Butunderneath it all, I'm not so sure that there are not signs of
poverty and unhappiness that will gradually have to disappear if that
part of the nation is going to prosper and keep pace with the rest of
it.
Deeply shaken, journalist W.E. Debnam knew he must do what any southern gentleman would: take to the
airwaves to denounce a widow woman. The resulting broadcasts proved
so popular that Debnam collected them into this book, Weep
No More, My Lady, a polemic
railing against those who would dare suggest that life down south
circa 1950 was not an
egalitarian paradise.
North vs. South:
Debnam
pulls the talk-radio trick of arguing against everything except what his opponent actually said:
She
joins instead that great claque of holier-than-thou reformers that
persists in painting the South as a backward land peopled in the main
by low-browed hoodlums smelling of lavender and old lace and sniffing
away on magnolia blossoms and shuffling along the street with a mint
julep in one hand and a bull whip in the other going some place to
lynch some Negro who, if he got his just deserts, would be elected
governor.
From there, he
bitches about Reconstruction, complains that "Negros" elect
crooks, points out the poverty in northern slums, and insists that any unbiased visitor to the South "can see instances without
number of Negro men and Negro women living in peace and dignity with
their white neighbors."
He is adamant that
white Southerners aren't racist, yet he can't resist asides like
this:
[President]
Johnson was no match for the diabolical plotting of that evil old man
who was Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania, actual head of the
Republican party, who spent his days plotting new indignities for the
South he hated with a consuming passion and his nights with his
mulatto mistress.
In short, this is Randy Newman's "Rednecks" puffed up to
book length.
Shocking Detail:
By
all evidence, Weep
No More struck
a nerve, especially . Debnam ran through four printings in just months, and this
particular copy contains anecdotal testament to the book's power: an
undated letter from a Joe Pickard to a Mrs. Woodson.
Consider Pickard's touchiness. "Some of us in the south are a
little slow," he writes, demonstrating that same missing-the-point,
anti-elitist bent trucked in by Debnam in the '50s and most talk radio today.
Mrs. Roosevelt never said that Southerners were slow.
Or that they were "low-browed hoodlums." But it was certainly
easier to rail at some phantom snobbery than to consider her point ... that a tradition of injustice might be causing the hold up with
that whole South-will-rise-again thing.
Highlight:
Any spin through the AM dial will reveal
that the argumentative techniques pioneered by Debnam are still angering up our Woodsons and Pickards. Besides "Attacking
Your Opponent's Social Milieu Instead of Your Opponent's Argument,"
"Pretending Your Opponent Called You Names Your Opponent Never
Did," and "Never Under Any Circumstances Recognizing Your Own
Contradictions," Debnam led the way in:
Pretending Your Opponent is to Blame
for the Problem:
Debnam
blames "poverty
and unhappiness" squarely on the North: "Southern economy had
been wrecked along with Southern hopes by General Grant and a lot of
other men in Federal blue. They ganged up on us and beat us by weight
of numbers. The South hasn't always been poor, Mrs. Roosevelt."
Then Pumping the
Problem Up With Biblical Overstatement:
Debnam claims the South has been ravaged by five horsemen of the
Apocalypse. ("You smile, perhaps, when we say 'five' and mark us
down as just another illiterate Southerner who doesn't have sense
enough to know the Prophet John only mentioned four in his Book of
Revelation.") Besides War, Famine, Death, and the Conquerer, Debnam
adds Fear:
It's
a fear that you and your forebears north of the Mason-Dixon line have
never experienced. It's the Fear of defenseless men facing a foe who
strikes by stealth, not against one's own person, but against the
person of his loved ones and the sanctity of his home.
Then Pretending There Isn't a
Problem At All:
"Did
you realize, Mrs. Roosevelt, that since 1939 this South you weep for
-- this South that makes you sad because it's so poor and unhappy --
has increased its per capita income by 236 per cent as compared to an
increase of only 183 per cent by the rest of the country?"
And All the While Ignoring the Real
Point In Favor of Pointing Out "Hypocrisy":
Also known as the Al Gore's Jet
Defense. Debnam attacks Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr.:
Junior, so we understand, didn't go
to the public schools in New York State along with the other little
white and Negro children. Junior went to swanky private schools where
no little Negro boys or girls were admitted.
More interesting is his discussion of
Mrs. Roosevelt's all-black White House staff of almost 20 years
earlier. Debnam quotes the Roosevelts' housekeeper: "Mrs. Roosevelt
and I agreed that a staff solid in one color works better in
understanding and maintains a smoother-running establishment."
Clearly, this disqualifies the former first lady from criticizing
southern poverty.
And Finally,
When There's Nothing Left to Say, Calling Your Opponent a Socialist:
To pad things out, Debnam throws in a poem.
We
can only surmise that Debnam eventually found his way to the
Republicans. Perhaps we'll find out when your Crap Archivist
gets around to his thrift-store copy of Then
My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night!,
Debnam's 1955 attack on Brown vs. Board of Education. (The curious might find the answer in
East Carolina University's Debnam Manuscript Collection.)
Until then,
all you real
Democrats keep on plowing! And don't take no guff from uppity widows!
Showing 1-8 of 8
bob dole was a noble knight compared to the reoublicans of the bush years. he did crazy things like talk to the other partys lawmakers and reach compromises...... but trevro what about the viagra commercials? holy shitballs!!
Cracking Bob Dole because of age would have been funny if only Bob was a Gore, Kerry, or talk radio. But Bob actually left once he realized no one wanted him�if only the others would follow suit.
Eleanor had sooo much fun leading the writing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a few years earlier with the Soviets and others bringing up the embarrassment of U.S. racial inequality, especially in the South.
I'll bet W.E. Debnam turned out to be a civil rights champion later on in the '50s and '60s. Or, more likely, he was still a dick just like those the bag that Bob Dole munches from.
when i lived in the south, guys like this were always telling me how racist the north was. I agreed, but I also knew what bullshit it was to pretend that somebody else's racism excuses yours
Figures. The elite liberal alternative media would, of course, call this tome "crap". But the Democrats have been in charge of Congress for 2 years--where's the outrage there?
Awwww, Dr. Crap, how cute. Debnam�s rant against Eleanor is exactly like your rant against talk radio. You guys are the same. Well played!
And, guz, I actually almost got killed in a bar in Goose Creek, SC when some asshole said, �The South will rise again� and I replied, �That�s ok, we�ll just march down here and whip its ass again.�
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