George Stoney, Writer:
The Early Years
Leonard Rapport
In September 1916, just before his sixteenth birthday, Thomas Wolfe of Ashe-ville became a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. George Stoney, in Winston-Salem, was three months old. Wolfe was to become North Carolina's first, maybe only, great writer. In his autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel, he described the college and village as "a charming, an unforgettable place." 1 George Stoney was thirteen when his English teacher read in class from Look Homeward, Angel. He says, "I knew I was going to be a novelist ever since I picked up the first writings of Thomas Wolfe." 2 George considered it prophetic that he had a newspaper delivery route in a black section of town, just as Wolfe had, and that their routes included several prostitutes. Inevitably, George would go to Chapel Hill.
George had forty-seven cash dollars with which to pursue his education. If that wasn't enough, he had an alternative plan. On his newspaper route, there was a cotton mill foreman to whom, for several months, George had been deliveringthe paper free. In exchange, the man was to help him get a job in the mill. But at summer's end, another foreman's son got the job. Chagrined and ignoring reality (and possibly missing a chance decades later to offer testimony for somebody else's version of The Uprising of '34), George took himself and his forty-seven dollars to Chapel Hill.
In January 1937, almost seventeen years after his graduation, Thomas Wolfe returned to Chapel Hill. This visit was commemorated in the October 1938 issue of the college's literary journal, The Carolina Magazine. There were a dozen articles about Wolfe by his editors, Maxwell Perkins and Edward Aswell, [End Page 19] by contemporaries at Chapel Hill and Harvard, by faculty members, and by several students. The longest article, and in retrospect probably the most memorable, was George Stoney's reminiscence:
We wrote of "the thousand faces, the ten thousand mouths," in a foolish effort to approximate his style. We tried to taste, smell, see with his catholicity and acuteness.... Then Eugene came back to Pulpit Hill. Tremendous, flabby, stuttering, homesick, still a boy at thirty-six, his warm brown eyes pleaded forgiveness; his stumbling heavy lips blubbered sentimentalities about how good it was to be back... 3
In the spring of 1938, George, who had recently arrived in New York, helped organize and label Wolfe's literary materials. George tells of the friendship thatdeveloped between them during that last summer. He questioned Wolfe about a remark he had made in Chapel Hill indicating that he planned eventually to return to North Carolina. "'Did you really mean that, about going back to live in Yancey County?' I asked Wolfe as we cracked pecans together in his barn-likerooms in the Hotel Chelsea in New York. He smiled a little bitterly. 'I did then. But going back taught me this one thing. A man can't go back home again.'" 4
The Carolina Magazine article represents a sea-change in George's aspirations fora writing career. He now no longer dreamed (if he ever really did) of becoming North Carolina's second great novelist. He realized he wouldn't match Wolfe's "lost child-face below the lumpy ragged cap, drugged in the magic of unheard music, listening for the far-forested horn-note, the speechless almost captured pass-word." 5 George was to make do with his own talent used in his own way.
After a harried four years of working his way through the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a couple of flunked classes, and his well publicized inability to spell correctly, George finally graduated, not with his class in 1937, but in 1938. While an undergraduate, George had begun selling feature stories to the leading state paper, the RaleighNews and Observer. Some of these stories grew out of his reading in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North Carolina newspapers, which he catalogued while earning twenty-five cents an hour on a National Youth Administration job. When that project ended, he submitted a proposal to the News and Observer. A devotee of hitchhiking, he thought such a [End Page 20] trip through the South would produce publishable episodes. The newspaper agreed to let him take a shot. So during 1938, he mailed in stories about the woman who sold sandwiches on the Charleston docks, the people who hung around a park in Jacksonville, the longshoremen who carted coffee in New Orleans and sometimes ate the beans.
In New Orleans, he got a job on a freighter to Argentina, where he spent two months. On January 6, 1939, the UNC Daily Tar Heel ran a story: "A man who nearly failed to get his degree from the University because of poor spelling has an article in the January 4, 1939 New Republic. The article is about the wooing of Argentina by fascism; the man, George C. Stoney." 6 The article went on to say that George had gotten a job in the Survey Department of the Henry Street Settlement in New York City, and was free-lancing for the New YorkTimes.
Later in 1939, George began writing for Survey Graphic, a journal of social and economic importance at the time. The cover of the January 1940 issue featuredhis lead article, "Suffrage in the South/Part 1: The Poll Tax." The journal said:
We launch this significant election year of 1940 with an analysis of the franchise in the South, by George C. Stoney, a native southerner who has done much firsthand research on the restricted suffrage which characterizes one-sixth of our American democracy. A sequel to the present article will examine some of the social attitudes, economic influences, and political implications of the poll tax and the one-party system.7
In October 1940 the New Republic published "No NLRB for Ben Hill County." In January 1941, "No Room in Green Pastures" appeared in Survey Graphic: "George C. Stoney writes on the pains of progress in the switch from cotton to cattle in the Black Belt. His car, his camera, and his notebook are becoming a familiar institution on the highways and byways of Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina..." 8
In January 1940, George had also been hired by Ralph Bunche, and became one of Bunche's three field assistants on Gunnar Myrdal's classic study, published in 1944 by Harper and Brothers under the title, An American Dilemma: The Negro [End Page 21] Problem and Modern Democracy. The project had its beginning when the president of the Carnegie Corporation decided the time had come for a comprehensive study of the Negro in the United States; and that such a study should be done by somebody other than an American. Chosen to head it was Gunnar Myrdal, a thirty-eight-year-old Swedish scholar who held the chair of social economics at the University of Stockholm, was an elected member of the Swedish Senate, and an economic advisor to the Swedish government. The Corporation supplied Myrdal with the then-unprecedented sum of $300,000, to use as he saw fit.
Among the persons Myrdal selected for the project was Ralph Bunche, a young department head at Howard University. 9 He had Bunche join him on a trip through the South. A Bunche biographer described what happened:
Myrdal's sense of humor, combined with his lack of knowledge of Southern mores, put the duo in real danger several times. Later Bunche wrote that Myrdal "thought he was on a lark," and "I was ]always on the verge of being lynched because of his playful pranks. ]We actually had to run for it a couple of times." Bunche made two ]other trips to the South, without Myrdal, but the bulk of the inter- views were conducted by three field assistants.10
Of the three assistants, George Stoney was the only white. Myrdal had become aware of George through his articles in Survey Graphic. Early in their relationship, Bunche wrote George:
Myrdal has written to tell me that he has had a conference with you. He is much impressed and states, "We agreed that he should start working for you the first of January. I left it open...as to how long he shall work and with what financial arrangements." This was very en- couraging to me....I have read through the manuscript of your article on the South and think it excellent.... Your concern, of course, will be primarily with the status and attitudes of white citizens of the South in both urban and rural areas. Myrdal has perhaps indicated to you that in a general way information on one or two of the other topics would be desirable, but my understanding is that your main emphasis would be placed on the political participation subject.11
On January 24, 1940, from the Chattanooga YMCA, George wrote Bunche: "Have some astounding stuff written up in notes that I am typing out to send. [End Page 22] Please remember to keep these things strictly confidential. Many of the important men in politics have opened their hearts to me here--the local situationwould turn anyone's stomach--and it would be a very real tragedy if they should be spread around." 12 Bunche answered George, in part:
We have thought it all through and have come to the conclusion that you are such an innocent and honest looking young fellow that even the rankest Tories are not likely to consider you a radical menace unless you start raising hell outright. You are disarming, you know, and carry a great deal of true Southern dignity, and it would probably take more than what has yet happened to build you up into the proportion of a radical menace down there. However, your experience at Huntsville should be revealing and if your experience is such as to indicate that perhaps you should go elsewhere first in order to let things simmer down, that can be arranged.13
In 1944, An American Dilemma, a four-pound volume of almost fifteen hundred pages, appeared. In the author's preface, George is listed among persons who undertook various research tasks; and among the "Books, Pamphlets, Periodicals, and Other Material Referred to in This Book," his Survey Graphic article on "Suffrage in the South" is listed. There is also one direct quote in a footnote from something George had written for Bunche. But this hardly suggested George's contribution to the project. Three decades later, the extent of that contribution came to light.
Bunche had in mind publishing in a separate volume much of what his small team had collected that didn't make its way in An American Dilemma. But his increasingly busy career never permitted him to do what he hoped to do with this mass of material. What George and his colleagues had produced remained in manuscript form for three decades. Then, in 1973, the University of Chicago Press published Ralph Bunche's The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, edited and with an introduction by Dewey W. Grantham. In an "Author's Preface," Bunche described the mass of collected field material:
Mr. Stoney did especially fine work under difficult circumstances, because of the extreme press of time and the wide scope in both subject matter and territory....Stoney's interviews with Southern ]county officials have been invaluable; without these frank [End Page 23] expressions by one Southerner to another, the picture we attempt to portray here would be woefully incomplete. 14
In "A note on the editing," Grantham wrote:
Stoney, the only white member of the group, made a special point of talking with local officials. He conducted about half of all of the interviews.... As an interviewer for Bunche, his technique was to visit the office of the local newspaper when he first arrived in a com- munity, to acquaint himself with recent elections by reading exten- sively in the back files of the paper, and then to search out the public officials, including the members of the election commission. As a result of his research, he frequently found that he had more "facts" about the local situation than the people he interviewed.Stoney in particular had a remarkable talent for reproducing the language he heard, for spotting the revealing comment and the vivid expression. An open, friendly, and engaging young man, he seemed to know how to approach all manner of people, to make them feel comfortable in his presence, and to get them to talk freely. 15
That more than sixty years later George Stoney would be actively teaching in a great university and involved with filmmaking (of which, in the pre-World War II years, there was no suggestion) is remarkable. The journey could conceivably have had its beginning in the pre-dawn hours of his delivery route for the Winston-Salem newspaper, through the streets and the common-law rights- of-way through yards and vacant lots--common-law only to newspaper boys and companionable early-rising dogs.
Leonard Rapport is an archivist and historian.
Notes
1. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929), 396.
2. George Stoney, interview by Barbara Abrash and Daniel J. Walkowitz, Center for Media, Culture, and History, New York University, 1996.
3. George Stoney, "Eugene Returns to Pulpit Hill: Reminiscences of a 'Wolverine,'" The Carolina Magazine (Chapel Hill, October 1938), 11-14.
4. Ibid., 12.
5. Wolfe, 622.
6. January 6, 1939, the UNC Daily Tar Heel, 1.
7. George Stoney, "Suffrage in the South/Part 1: The Poll Tax," Survey Graphic 29, no. 1 (January 1940), 3.
8. Survey Graphic 30, no.1 (January 1941), 3.
9. Bunche was the first black American to earn a doctorate in political science. Both Bunche and Myrdal were, in the years to come, awarded Nobel Peace Prizes.
10. Charles B. Henry, Ralph Bunche: Model Negro or American Other? (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 94-5.
11. Ralph Bunche, letter to George Stoney, 30 November 1939. Schomburg Collection, New York Public Library.
12. George Stoney, letter to Ralph Bunche, 24 January 1940. Schomburg Collection, New York Public Library.
13. Ralph Bunche, letter to George Stoney, 1940. Schomburg Collection, New York Public Library.
14. Ralph Bunche, The political status of the Negro in the age of FDR. Edited and with an introd. by Dewey W. Grantham. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), ix.
15. Ibid., xiii, xiv.
