Stone's Return

A patriotic and industrious son of the South is 22-year-old Harry S. Ashmore, reporter for the Greenville (S. C.) Piedmont. Irked by the heart-rending accounts of the South's shortcomings by itinerant northern journalists, Reporter Ashmore decided to spend his two-week vacation in "the deep North to see how they managed to cast the first stone."* New York City, the indignant reporter found, was the "sweatshop capital of America," its slums squalid and crime-breeding. New England's textile cities seemed to him "not far from being industrial ghost cities." In Philadelphia, he found more slums and "the universal fear" that industry would move away. In the shadow of Bethlehem's steel mills he saw "filth and depravity" and the same methods that southern manufacturers use to resist unionization. In Washington, he found statistics to show that "low wages, long hours and primitive working conditions can be found anywhere."

In six snappy articles, the purposeful vacationist concluded that the North was as bad as the South. A dozen southern editors jumped at the chance to cast the stone back. This week, Reporter Ashmore's series begin appearing in papers like the Atlanta Constitution, Birmingham Age-Herald, Charleston News and Courier.

*But no northern journalist ever wrote so pungently of the South's squalor as Southerner Erskine Caldwell (Tobacco Road). This week a southern journalist, Jonathan Daniels, published a more sympathetic account of the South (see p. 48).

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