The Carolinas,
Jews, and China
Sidney
Rittenberg died on August 24 of this year, ten days after his 98th
birthday. He was probably the most
famous American collaborator with the Chinese Communist regime of Mao Zedong
(We are not counting Chinese government official, Israel Epstein, as American,
although he had his book, The Unfinished Revolution in China, published
during the crucial five years in which he lived in the United States). Like Epstein, Rittenberg got long obituaries
in The New York Times and The Washington
Post. They might not have been as glowing as Epstein’s, but they were
far from being as negative as they might have been for this long-term leading
turncoat and propagandist for the murderous Mao regime.
Although the Times seemed to treat
him with some approval by headlining its obituary, Sidney Rittenberg, Idealistic
American Aide to Mao Who Evolved to Counsel Capitalists, Dies at 98, from
the perspective of any right-thinking anti-Communist, The Post’s article
is much the worse of the two. One
sentence in The Post’s obit says it all, “After
Mao’s seizure of power in 1949 over the corrupt U.S.-backed Nationalist Party,
which enjoyed little support among the population, Mr. Rittenberg was rewarded
with appointments at Chinese news and propaganda agencies.”
John
F. Kennedy would certainly have taken issue with The Post’s extremely
simplistic, pro-Mao, if not to say, pro-Communist view of the loss
of China.
Alfred Kohlberg,
an American businessman with many years of experience with China, would no
doubt have said that The Post is just continuing to perpetuate the
pro-Communist propaganda with which the American mainstream press was packed in
the 1940s.
Soul Mate Rittenberg?
As
surprising as it might seem in light of all the anti-Communist writing
that I have done, I can easily identify with Rittenberg, although I make no
excuses for his actions. We are both
Carolinians and we both received some education at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. My time was
spent there getting a Ph.D. in economics after service as an Army lieutenant. Rittenberg entered as a freshman and either
attended only briefly before dropping out to become a labor organizer or
graduated with a degree in philosophy, depending on whether you believe the Post
or the Times obituary. The Times
assertion seems to be more plausible, because Rittenberg got the sort of
U.S. Army assignment, though a private and not a lieutenant, that would more
likely go to a college graduate, as a language specialist, becoming fluent in Chinese
and being sent by the Army to China at the close of World War II.
Oh,
but Rittenberg was Jewish, you say, and a former member of the American
Communist Party. On the latter point, I
have certainly never been a Communist Party member, but I can attest to the
truth of the old saying that if you’re not a socialist when you’re under thirty
you have no heart, and if you are a socialist when you’re over thirty, you have
no brain. Chapel Hill was certainly a
place to feel right at home as a Leftist when I was there, and it was probably
more so when Rittenberg was there at the tail end of the Great Depression. Consider the fact that when I was there the
most powerful voices against the Vietnam War, which most of us despised,
including virtually every fellow veteran that I encountered, were from the Jewish
Left. We looked forward every two weeks
to reading I.F. Stone’s newsletter, and Noam Chomsky’s anti-war treatises in
the New York Review of Books seemed to be the most persuasive. The first verse of my poem, “A
Chomsky Dissenter,” captures my attitude toward the
man at the time, and well into the years that I taught economics in college:
When
I trusted Noam Chomsky,
I
had a cozy home.
With
my academic friends,
I
did not feel alone.
In
1970, the very pro-Mao article, “Maoist Economic Development: The New Man in the New China,” by respected mainstream economist, John W. Gurley,
was all the rage among us graduate students, even though it was weak in
analysis and practically devoid of facts, an ideological screed dressed up in
economic jargon which has aged very poorly.
About the same time, I also read Jack Belden’s China Shakes the World, and was very favorably impressed, as
I see many more recent readers are, too, even years after the horrors inflicted
by Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution—admittedly well after the
period that Belden reported on—have become known. It’s not at all hard for me to put myself in
the young Rittenberg’s shoes and being won over by Mao and his fellow
revolutionaries. It’s not like
Rittenberg deserted from the Army and went over to the enemy like my very
misguided fellow rural Eastern North Carolinian, Charles Robert Jenkins,
did in Korea in 1965. Rittenberg stayed
in China after his Army tour was over, worked for a time in United Nations
famine relief, and then joined up with Mao, becoming a propagandist for
him.
But,
again, there’s the matter of Rittenberg’s Jewishness. Wouldn’t that have set him apart from
me? To the contrary, for a number of
reasons; when I was of the same age as he was when he went over to the Reds, it
would have probably made me identify with him even more closely. In the first place, the stereotype of white
Southerners generally as prejudiced against Jews and non-whites is simply not
true. There are lots of relatively
broad-minded liberals in the South, and my family liked to count themselves
among them. If there is any group of
fellow whites that the average Southerner is likely to have some prejudice
against, it is Roman Catholics, for doctrinal reasons. That’s because most Southerners are
Protestants—Southern Baptists more than any other group, as my family was—and many
of them descend directly from religious sects in Europe who were on the
Protestant side of the Reformation, when people took those religious
differences very seriously. Sunday
school instruction in Southern Baptist churches is steeped in Old Testament
stories. So was the child’s story Bible
from which our second-grade public school teacher read to us regularly, and I
imagine that she was hardly unusual as a small-town Southern elementary school
teacher.
Although
the fundamentalist evangelist Oliver B. Greene was ubiquitous on the radio in
the South when I was growing up, I can’t say that he had any influence on me or
anyone I knew, but his influence in the region had to have been
substantial. Many times, I heard him
offer as a “gift” to anyone sending him money a copy of the Scofield
Bible. I have never seen a Scofield
Bible, and I was well into middle age before I was to learn that it is an
annotated work with a very strong Zionist slant.
Harry Golden’s 1955 book is entitled, Jewish Roots in the Carolinas: A
Pattern of American Philo-Semitism.
I have not read it, but from my own education and experience I can say
that the average rural to small-town Southerner, at least at the time that I
was growing up, was much more likely to have a positive rather than a negative
attitude toward Jews. Most are unlikely
to have known any Jews; I know I didn’t.
When I thought of Jews, I thought mainly of those Old Testament
characters. I didn’t even think of the
numerous comedians I saw on television like Sid Caesar, Jack Benny, or Phil
Silvers as Jews or of my beloved Mad magazine as a Jewish publication or
the popular Tin Pan Alley music composers as Jews. If I had, it would have only made me more philo-Semitic. I
think the only person that I ever laid eyes on in person whom I knew to be a
Jew was that self-same Harry Golden from Charlotte, who wore his Jewishness on
his sleeve. He actually came and gave a
talk at our church one Sunday evening. I
recall that he was an entertaining and likable-seeming fellow, although I don’t
recall what he had to say. Only in researching
this article did I learn that Golden was actually originally a New Yorker who
ended up making his career in Charlotte, settling in the Southeast probably
because he had been sent to the Federal Penitentiary down the road in Atlanta
for five years for mail fraud when he was living in New York City. He was a popular celebrity, though, by the
time that he was invited to speak at our church.
South Carolina Versus North Carolina
As
for the Jewish roots in the Carolinas, my impression is that they are much
deeper and more important in South Carolina than in North Carolina. There is certainly no North Carolina
Wikipedia page to compare to History of the Jews in Charleston, South Carolina. From that page we
learn that in 1800 South Carolina had the largest Jewish population of any
state in the nation. It would not
surprise me if North Carolina had the smallest.
Rittenberg was a fairly representative Charleston Jew. His father was the head of the of Charleston
City Council and his grandfather was a prominent state legislator. Up the road in Dillon County on the border
with North Carolina, Alan Shafer
was the long-term corrupt Jewish political boss. Judah Benjamin was born in Charleston, but he
made his mark politically as a U.S. Senator from Louisiana and later became a
powerful figure in the Confederacy as Secretary of State. I noticed recently from the coverage of
Hurricane Dorian that the current mayor of Charleston is named John Tecklenburg.
I
know of no even near-equivalent person to any of those people in North Carolina. In North Carolina, what few Jews there were
at the time I was growing up followed the pattern described by sociologist John
Dollard in his classic Caste and Class in a Southern Town. They might own clothing stores and other
retail establishments, but they seldom got involved in politics. Their public profile was typically low. It never even occurred to me that Epstein’s
and Rosenbloom-Levy, a couple of the clothing stores in the nearby city of
Rocky Mount, were Jewish-owned. As
Dollard observed, they might have been more liberal in their dealing with
blacks than most, but they never felt that they were in any position to rock
the boat socially. Though generally
accepted on account of their money and skin color as social insiders, they usually
felt a little bit like outsiders on account of their roots in the distinctive Jewish
culture.
The
role performed by Jews in South Carolina and much of the rest of the nation was
performed in North Carolina during my early childhood by…Martins. One of my father’s older brothers was the
chief lobbyist for Wachovia Bank in Raleigh and he was the liberal Democratic
chairman of the state party during most of the 1940s. According to family lore, he was also the
power behind the throne of alcoholic Governor R. Gregg Cherry, who physically
prevented Cherry from taking the delegation out of the 1948 Democratic
Convention and throwing in with Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats. The brother had been a football player at
Wake Forest College.
The
oldest Martin brother was the long-term editor of the liberal Winston-Salem
Journal. At one of our last family
reunions, his son, in an address to the group, told us that Jonathan Daniels,
the editor of the very influential Raleigh News and Observer, told his
father that he often looked west to his newspaper to get an idea what his position
should be on a particular issue. He also
told us that the Jews of Winston-Salem had praised his father for the solid
support of his newspaper for the state of Israel.
Philo-Semitic Experience
By
that time, I had learned enough to be a strong dissenter from such a position,
but in my youth, there was another reason for me to be even more pro-Jewish
than the other Martins. I was in a much
better position to identify with those Jewish-fish-slightly-out-of-water in
Dollard’s book than other family members.
My father became the principal of a school 50 miles east of Raleigh when
I was one year old, in Nash County, and I grew up there. He and my mother were from Yadkin County, the
next county west of Winston-Salem’s Forsyth County.
People
from Yadkin and Nash County have the Baptist Church and the English language in
common, but that’s about the extent of it.
Yadkin was settled largely by Scotch-Irish and Germans who moved down
from Western Pennsylvania. Their
forbears had largely come to the New World for religious reasons. Nash County was settled by English people who
came largely for commercial reasons.
Large tracts of land were devoted to commercial farming, requiring
slaves, in Nash County. In the northern
half of the county where we lived the population was more than half black. The land was largely owned by large
landowners and worked by tenant farmers.
(The “sharecropper” expression was not used where we lived.) The more enlightened and liberal-minded of
the landowners had mainly white tenants who got enough of the share of their
labor to be considered a part of the middle class. But there were plenty of the other type of
landlords who took advantage of the ignorance of their tenants, either black or
downtrodden white, many of whom lived in what one might call “vagabondage,” to
coin a term. In my all-white elementary school,
we had a number of very poor kids, both from an economic and educational
standpoint, come through before moving to another farm out of the school
district. The class size shrank rather
drastically after the mandatory schooling age of 16 was passed.
Support
for secession and the Confederacy had been, of course, total among the whites in
Nash County. Such was not at all the
case in my parents’ native Yadkin County, where land tenure was pretty much on
a one-family-one-farm largely subsistence-farming basis and slaves were
virtually absent. My father’s maternal
grandfather hid out in the mountains during the war to avoid service, and later
served in the carpetbag government in Raleigh as a legislator. His paternal grandfather fought with Lee and
was captured twice, but his son—my father’s father—died before Daddy even knew
him and was therefore unable to be much of an influence on him. His mother, the daughter of the carpetbag
legislator outlived her husband by some forty years and was therefore a much
greater influence on my father’s views.
At
Davidson College, my experience gave me still more of a natural affinity for
Jews. Once again, I was a fish out of
water. Only fifteen percent of the
student body was not in one of the 12 Greek letter social fraternities, and I
was among that former group, which included the one Jew at the college whom I
got to know. He was from Philadelphia,
and I hit it off with him quite well. I
knew of only one other Jewish student.
Wouldn’t you know, he was from South Carolina and he belonged to one of
the more prestigious social fraternities, no doubt befitting the social status
of his family back in the Palmetto State.
I
encountered no Jews at all during two years in the Army. There was a guy named Nussbaum from Miami in
our platoon at ROTC summer camp, between my junior and senior years at
Davidson, who was the most Jewish looking guy you have ever seen, but he took
exception to people who, from off-hand comments, gave the impression that they
thought he was Jewish. I never sat down
and talked to him about that.
Graduate School Reinforcement
In
graduate school, it was not just the Jewish anti-war writers who intensified my
philo-Semitism.
That was the first time I worked and interacted with quite a few
Jews. I answered an advertisement and
found myself living in the three-bedroom apartment with two Northern Jews right
off the bat, sociology and political science graduate students. The sociology guy introduced me to the New
York Review of Books and caught me up on a lot of the best pop culture that
I had missed the year before while stationed in Korea. We both detested the political science guy,
because he would do no household chores and because he was basically an
arrogant jerk. The sociology guy told me
that the difference between them was that he himself was a Russian Jew while
the other guy was a German Jew. That
sort of identity politics at that time was completely beyond my ken. To me the political science guy was simply a
garden variety jackass.
In
the first summer school session I took only one course, one on the history of
China to get back into the academic flow and because my just-finished Army tour
in Korea had given me an interest in China.
It had surprised me that the South Koreans had a long-term positive view
of China, in spite of that country having been their enemy in the Korean
War. All of their animus still seemed to
be reserved for their former colonial masters, the Japanese. I liked the young professor of Chinese
history, who came across as about as sympathetic to the Communists as the
author, Belden. Only in retrospect has
it occurred to me that, with his German name, the professor was likely
Jewish. The
same can be said for one of the two guys with whom I shared a calculator the
second summer session in my statistics course.
He was from Alabama or Mississippi, with a matching accent, and though
he had a name that is probably more typical for Jews than for an average
Southerner and perhaps a bit of a Jewish appearance, it never occurred to me
that he was. He only mentioned it much
later when I encountered him working in Washington, DC, for a non-profit
organization.
The
first professor for whom I was a teaching assistant was Jewish. He was a technocratic Keynesian, and I never
got into the subject of politics with him.
Keynesianism is, of course, highly political, but like the typical
technocratic economist, he seemed to be unaware of the fact. My office mate from the second year through
the fourth was also Jewish, and we became good friends, as I was with the one
other Jewish graduate school classmate whom I knew to be Jewish. The only time I recall discussing Israel with
any of them was with the office mate, who brought it up with a question as to
why Americans so heavily favored Israel over the native Palestinians. I responded that I thought it was mainly on
account of the heavy propaganda we get.
I don’t think he disagreed but said that he thought that it was mainly
because we could much more easily identify with the Jews in Israel because they
were Westerners like us. My impression
was that he, by contrast, held Israel’s Jews at arm’s length.
My
professor of comparative economic systems might well have been my favorite, and
I think one of the two known Jewish classmates might have summed him up best as
the “very epitome of the New York Jewish intellectual,” and he meant it in the
best sense of the term.
Not
counting that disagreeable house mate, the one exception to my overall
favorable impression of Jews at Chapel Hill came in the person of the second
professor for whom I was a teaching assistant, and it was a real
eye-opener. The Vietnam War was still
raging, and I gathered that he, like the rest of us, was strongly against
it. Thinking I was talking to an ally, I
made an offhand favorable comment to him about something the influential
anti-war Senator J. William Fulbright, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, had said. His
response really took me aback.
“Fulbright,” he sneered, “is a big enemy of Israel. I never listen to him.”
That
was my first encounter with a died-in-the-wool Zionist. The war at that time could hardly have been a
more immediate concern. To give a
deserved failing grade to a male student could result in his flunking out of
college, losing his draft deferment, and being sent to fight and possibly die
in a war in which we did not believe, but the professor’s first concern, it
would appear, was the well-being of the state of Israel. “This guy is living in the wrong country,” I
thought, although he was a born-and-bred American. I was to learn later, in fact, at a house
party he hosted, that his son, who was approaching college age, was planning to
immigrate to Israel.
The
negative stereotype of Jews as disloyal to the country in which they live could
hardly have been more vividly displayed than it was by this professor, and he
was quite open about it. He clearly
cared more about the people of Israel, that is to say, the Jews who lived
there, than he cared about the students he was teaching, at least if they were not
Jewish. I must stress that he was the
definite exception among the Jews I knew at Chapel Hill, insofar as I perceived
them, but the impression he made was jarring and unsettling.
Rittenberg, the Traitor?
Did
Sidney Rittenberg display the same sort of disloyalty to the United States when
he threw in with Mao and the Communists in China? We had just finished fighting a major war in
which the Communist Soviet Union had been our ally, and so were Mao’s fighters
as long as they directed their efforts against the Japanese and not the forces
of General Chiang Kai-Shek, the leader of China whom we supported. Perhaps we can cut him some slack for his
decision on that account. It would be an
open-and-shut case against him if Rittenberg had fulfilled his role of China’s
lead propagandist during the Korean War, when Mao’s China came in in force on
the side of North Korea to oppose the U.S.-led United Nations forces on the
side of the South. I would imagine that
we would be thinking of Rittenberg now in the same way in which we think of
Tokyo Rose. But from 1949 to 1955 he was
locked away as a political prisoner, upon suspicions raised by Joseph Stalin
that he was really a U.S. spy.
Before
that time, though, he performed, in his own words, at least one very disloyal
act on behalf of the new objects of his affection. This comes from a very favorable interview
article published in 2013 in The Atlantic, entitled “The American Who Gave His Life to Chairman Mao”:
I was able to give them some important
information about the American decision to allow Chiang Kai-Shek to wipe out
Communist troops in that area. At the time, the local leaders, Li Xiannian and his colleagues, were in dispute about the
intentions of General Marshall and the American role in the Chinese civil war.
Some people, including the then-political commissar, felt that the Nationalists
would not be allowed to attack them and wipe the Communists, who were
outnumbered four or five to one in that area, out. Others believe that Marshall
would let them be killed.
I got a very clear statement from General
Marshall’s attaché, General Henry Byroade, that the
Americans were definitely going to let the Nationalists attack and annihilate
these 60-70,000 Communist troops in that area. I took that information to
the local commanders, Li Xiannian and so on, it
proved to be right, and they totally escaped from encirclement. And when they
came back to Yan’an, they thanked me and told me how
correct my information had been. And in his memoirs, Li recalls this story and
my role, which he exaggerates—my role wasn’t probably the decisive factor, but
it was helpful. And then, these two commanders, who were both Central Committee
members, Li Xiannian and Wang Zhen, became my two
sponsors in joining the Chinese Communist Party.
What he has just told us in, so many words,
is that by one major act of disloyalty to the United States government, he was
instrumental in the Communists coming to power in China. One can’t help but wonder what Alfred
Kohlberg would have said about that had he known it when he testified before
Congress in 1952. Interviewer Matt Schiavenza just let it pass, though, and the obituary
writers for The Post and The Times made no mention of it.
My first thought upon reading the first
sentence of Schiavenza’s piece was that he was in
error: “From 1944, when the 23-year-old
Sidney Rittenberg first arrived in China with the U.S. Army, to his departure
35 years later, no other foreign national played as important a role in the
country.”
Surely
that designation belongs to Israel Epstein, I thought, a man of whom Schiavenza seems to be unaware. Epstein became a high government official, after
all, while Rittenberg was just a propagandist, and he spent 16 of those 35
years as a political prisoner. He would
do another 10-year stint in the clink after having been denounced by Mao’s wife,
Jiang Qing, during the Cultural Revolution.
Epstein, too, spent five years in prison during the Cultural Revolution,
but that early act by the young Rittenberg, if taken at face value, is what probably
tips the balance in favor of Schiavenza’s opening
observation. It makes Rittenberg, in
fact, a very important player not just in Chinese but in world history.
I
doubt very strongly that my professor of Chinese history knew anything about
this episode, or perhaps anything about Rittenberg himself, when I took his
course, or he would have told us about him, what with that Chapel Hill
connection. Someone else who I suspect
did not know about Rittenberg when he published his book, The
Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History back in 2008, is the Roman Catholic
writer, E. Michael Jones. Rittenberg’s
career was the embodiment of the book’s title.
The volume is 1,159 pages long, not counting the index, and neither
Rittenberg nor Israel Epstein make an appearance, although there are two other
Epsteins in the book’s index (neither one of which is Jeffrey, either).
This
revolutionary spirit thing is something of which I was largely unaware at the
time that I was a graduate student and how deeply it runs in Jewish history and
culture, which we learn from Jones’s book.
Although my heritage, experience, and education made me lean to the left
politically at the time, I do not come from a background of people with a
strong tendency toward violent insurrection against the prevailing power. Such knowledge of Jewish heritage, in
retrospect, certainly does make me tend to identify quite a bit less with the
late Rittenberg.
The
first knowledge I received of the man’s death, in fact, of the man himself,
came to me in the form of an email from a person whom I do not know. He and a correspondent, also unknown to me,
had some rather favorable pungent commentary on a linked article whose title
will tell you that it was designed not just to make you not identify with the
guy, but to hate and despise him, “Old Jew Who Helped Kill Millions of Chinks Dies.” To say that the
article is less nuanced than mine is a considerable understatement. It comes from a supposed white nationalist
site that calls itself The Daily Stormer.
By
coincidence, shortly after getting the Daily Stormer article, I received an
email from a long-time contact that linked to an article entitled, “Why Are Jews Leading the Alt-Right & ‘White’ Nationalist
Movement?”
It is on a web site that I had not heard of called Christians for
Truth. Right off the bat, we find this
statement in the article: “It is no secret that the Daily Stormer is run by Jews
and not-exactly-Whites with a subversive agenda. This has been known for
years.”
It
would appear that what the Daily Stormer is up to with its Rittenberg article is
something that I call “divisive mischief” in “The
Charlottesville Operation,” but
that’s a topic for another article.
David
Martin
September 12, 2019
Addendum
After completing this essay, I established communication
with my old professor of Chinese history at Chapel Hill. He’s still there. He tells me that in 1968 he had heard of
Rittenberg, but only in a “sketchy fashion” from someone at a Vietnam Veterans
against the War rally at Fort Bragg. I
don’t know if that would have been before or after I had his course in that
first summer session, but he would not have known enough to discuss the subject
in class, at any rate. In a short
Rittenberg biography that he has prepared, he also provided a lot of important
information that isn’t in any of the articles to which I have linked.
Both The Times and The Post are wrong about
Rittenberg’s UNC education. He dropped
out after his junior year to do labor organizing work, but shortly afterward
was drafted into the Army. When he first
returned to the United States in 1979 for a four-month visit, at the invitation
of my former professor, he came and gave an address on campus on U.S.-China
relations, a gathering at which there were a number of protestors. During that visit, Rittenberg inquired about
transferring the credits that he had earned at Stanford University while at the
Army’s language school. Dean Frederic
Vogler checked his Stanford transcript and then wrote Rittenberg informing him
that, indeed, he had accumulated enough credits to be deemed a graduate of the
University of North Carolina. Upon
receipt of Vogler’s letter, Rittenberg wrote in reply, "it was
difficult to articulate my pride and joy at your letter, and the feeling it
gave me that my long, deep love for our school has been requited. . . How I wish Dr. Frank could know and see this
all taking place." (more about “Dr. Frank [Graham]” below)
I also learned from the professor’s Rittenberg biography
that the two obituaries omit important academic work by the man upon his
permanent return to his native country.
In 1993 he was appointed the Frey Foundation Distinguished Visiting
Professor at UNC and began teaching in 1994.
From 1995 to 1998 he taught two courses a year at UNC, in Chinese
history and Asian studies, usually in the spring semester, as the Edward M.
Bernstein Professor of History. From
1997 on he was Visiting Professor of Chinese Studies and Senior Adviser at
Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.
Upon graduation from high school, Rittenberg had scholarship
offers not only from Princeton, as the obituaries have it, but also from the
University of Virginia. He specifically
chose UNC because of its president, the illustrious liberal and social
activist, Frank Porter Graham. Ironically, it was Graham who encouraged the
young Rittenberg to drop out after his junior year and pursue his passion as a
labor organizer.
Graham is another point of intersection between Rittenberg
and me. Graham was one of my father’s
liberal political heroes. Another was
Governor W. Kerr Scott, who appointed Graham as U.S. Senator to fill out the
term of J. Melville Broughton, who died in 1949. The next year, at the end of the term, Graham
was challenged in the Democratic primary by the conservative Willis Smith. One of my earliest political recollections
was attending a rally at which Graham spoke in Rocky Mount. It made a big impression on me because they
handed out Graham crackers. The runoff
campaign, which Smith won after Graham narrowly failed to gain a 50% majority
on the first vote, was marked by scurrilous red-baiting and race-baiting
advertisements against Graham. I would
learn many years later that future U.S. Senator Jesse Helms was behind those
advertisements, and that he later became Smith’s top aide in Washington.
David
Martin
September 14, 2019
Addendum 2
A correspondent from South Carolina has informed me that
Mayor Tecklenburg of Charleston actually comes from an old German Catholic
family. For what it is worth,
politically prominent German Catholics, like politically prominent Jews, are
also exceedingly rare in North Carolina.
David
Martin
September 20, 2019
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