Be sure to check out the new This Month in North Carolina, in which Harry McKown examines the Colored Industrial Association Fair.  The Colored Industrial Fair occurred occurred on November 18, 1879, in Raleigh and displayed the achievements of the African American population in North Carolina.

… This makes an interesting follow-up to last month’s essay on the history and origins of the NC State Fair, which you can read about here.

“A bespectacled, priggish-looking former editor of the Biblical Recorder, [Sen. Josiah Bailey of North Carolina] had supported FDR in 1932 and 1936 but had recently soured on the New Deal, mainly because of its trespasses against states’ rights. He had been preparing this speech [against FDR's plan to "pack" the Supreme Court] for weeks, and as he rose to begin, senators summoned their colleagues from the cloakroom.

“Bailey held forth with his customary melodramatics, shouting his points, banging his desk, shaking a preacher’s finger. The Southerner was offering an argument calculated to appeal to his colleagues from the North  — that ‘the Negroes in the South feel secure tonight because they know there is a Constitution and an independent Court.’”

– From “FDR v. the Constitution” (2009) by Burt Solomon

As a follow-up to Bridget’s post about the “N.C. I.O.O.F.,” here are several I.O.O.F.-related items from the Lew Powell Memorabilia Collection.

I have to say that I love the somewhat-racy button showing the lady’s leg, garter, and her “Tar Heel.”

Above is a postcard showing an Odd Fellows’ Lodge in Beaufort, NC.  It turns out we’ve got a lot of materials relating to various secret societies and fraternal orders in North Carolina, including the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.  Interestingly, the card mentions that the lodge is over a hundred years old, which places the construction of the lodge to  ca. 1805-1815.

Below is an excerpt from the inside of the front cover of the “Ritual of a Subordinate Lodge under the Jurisdiction of the Sovereign Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows,” published by the I.O.O.F. in 1908 (VC097 O22r).  While it was used in the Centennial Lodge of Elm City, it dates to roughly the same time the postcard was created.

In the financially intemperate 1840s no fewer than eight states, including North Carolina, defaulted on their bond obligations.

“The Constitution forbade the states to tear up their contracts,” Robert Wernick wrote in the December 1964 issue of American Heritage. “But to get their money back, bondholders would have to sue the states, and the Eleventh Amendment says a state may not be sued by a private citizen without its consent. None of the delinquent states has ever given its consent.

“Ingenious lawyers, glimpsing all those millions of dollars in perfectly valid obligations, have tried again and again to figure out a way of getting into that paradise. But the flaming sword of the Eleventh Amendment has always kept them out. Except once. In 1904 the state of South Dakota found itself in possession of North Carolina bonds left by a citizen for the use of the state university…. The Supreme Court held for the plaintiff, and North Carolina had to fork over $27,400. The shock was so great that North Carolina promptly made a deal with private holders in England to buy off their bonds  –  at a low price, but paid in hard cash.

“Other aggrieved parties have had no such luck. Private citizens tried deeding defaulted North Carolina bonds to, say, Massachusetts, since one sovereign state may sue another, but the Supreme Court held that this was only a dodge to get around the Eleventh Amendment and would hear nothing of it.”

I love flipping through old phone books in the NC Collection; I’m always amazed at what I find. While looking at a Red Springs and Maxton, North Carolina, phone book from 1923 (Cp971.78 R31c 1923), I found the following list of instructions.

[Be sure to read the sections on "Always Call By Number--Not By Name," "Unauthorized Use of the Telephone," and "Attachments to Telephone."]

“We had rights to ‘Ironside’ and ‘Marcus Welby,’ two shows highly regarded on their networks but which turned out to be duds in syndication. We swapped them [to WSOC-TV, another Charlotte station] for ‘The Andy Griffith Show’… a huge hit that really helped turn the station around (and made us a lot of money for years to come).”

– From “Call Me Ted,” Ted Turner’s 2008 autobiography. In 1970 Turner had bought a struggling Charlotte UHF station and renamed it WRET (from his initials). In 1980 he sold the now-lucrative station to Westinghouse and used the proceeds to launch CNN.

From the Cape Lookout National Seashore (National Park Service) webpage:

“On the evening of November 1, 1859, Lighthouse Keeper John Royal climbed the 216 steps to the lantern carrying a 5 gallon container of whale oil. Carefully stepping inside the giant glass lens, Keeper Royal filled the lamp with oil and installed and carefully trimmed the wicks. Then exactly at sunset, Keeper Royal lit the lamp and the new Cape Lookout Lighthouse shone its light out to sea for the first time.”

Happy 150th!

Just in time for Halloween! Found in the stacks …

Murgatroyd, Ebenezer, with illustrations by Herb Roth.  Cooking to Kill!  The Poison Cookbook.  Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, ca. 1951.

This book is a great source of “comic recipes for the ghoul, cannibal, witch & murderer.”   It also includes inspired illustrations after each recipe.

Carole Boston Weatherford. The Library Ghost. Fort Atkinson, WI: Upstart Books, 2006.

A librarian discovers a ghost lurking around her library at night trying to solve a riddle.

And last, but not least, a general interest essay titled, “All Halloween” by E.A. Hawes, published in the 1902 University Magazine.  This essay accounts several Halloween practices and superstitions, my favorite being:  “A similar rite is removing the yolk of a boiled egg, filling one half with sale and eating at “bed-time,” without drinking water.  If your dreams are of water, you will marry, if not, death will find you single.”

“[Secretary of War Edwin M.] Stanton had come armed with a plan, drawn up at the President’s request, for bringing the states that had been ‘abroad’ back into what Lincoln… called ‘their proper practical relation with the Union.’  The War Secretary’s notion was that military occupation should precede readmission, and in this connection he proposed that Virginia and North Carolina be combined in a single district to simplify the army’s task.

“[Secretary of the Navy Gideon] Welles took exception, on grounds that this last would destroy the individuality of both states and thus be ‘in conflict with the principles of self-government which I deem essential.’ So did Lincoln….

“[Lincoln] had reached certain bedrock conclusions: ‘We can’t undertake to run state governments in all these Southern states. Their own people must do that — though I reckon at first some of them may do it badly.’”

– From a recounting of President Lincoln’s last day in ”The Civil War: A Narrative” (1958-1974) by Shelby Foote