Cold-Drink Philosophy

A SOUTHERNER DISCOVERS THE SOUTH --Jonathan Daniels--Macmillan ($3).

In Chattanooga an average man drinks 70 Coca-Colas a year, in Atlanta he drinks 100, in New Orleans 120. At drugstore counters in a hundred southern towns, at filling stations, country stores, Southerner Jonathan Daniels found his countrymen drinking Coca-Colas, joined them, got them talking about their native land. Last week he published an account of their opinions and his observations, a cool, 346-page book.

Editor of the Raleigh, Va. News and Observer, son of Josephus Daniels, Ambassador to Mexico, 36-year-old Jonathan Daniels began his tour of exploration at Arlington National Cemetery. On through Williamsburg, Author Daniels drove his Plymouth, wondering if he could locate in Warrenton the poker game that is said to have been going on ever since the Civil War, with hands descending from father to son. After he had driven through the textile towns of the Carolinas--Gastonia, Kannapolis, Spartanburg--he began to note the mansions of the Coca-Cola millionaires, and to speculate about their significance. "Wealth in the South," he must reflected, come "for those who sell in the South, must come from a cheap luxury. . . ."

Meanwhile, he was developing such an ear for southern speech that when a hitchhiker said, "I shore do thank ye," Author Daniels thought he must be a novelist in disguise. It sounded more natural when a Cherokee Indian playing a slot machine exclaimed, "Hell, it's a gyp," still more natural when a home-loving Tennessean, standing on a hilltop in his undershirt, told him proudly, "There are not many places like this one. ... I never could figure out what I went for, ex cept maybe I was young and wanted to see the world."

Author Daniels talked philosophy with Tennessee agrarians, interviewed David Lilienthal of TVA, investigated TVA's town of Norris, observed the astonishingly pretty girls of Memphis, and looked over the model plantation set up by the Emergency Relief Administration at Dyess, Ark. He talked to organizers of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union, to planters, to bespectacled, intellectual Oscar Johnston, resident president of Delta and Pine Land Co., operators of the biggest U. S. cotton plantation. He looked in on a historic, 100-year-old brothel in Vicksburg, and talked with an educated Negro who told him that white folks, when they were sitting on the porch, complained that Negroes were lazy. He heard of a white man who had killed 14 Negroes and never been arrested, met one white man who bragged of his cruelty towards them. He also decided that there was justice in the boast of Tupelo, Miss.: "the only place in the South where we have the same beautiful moons we had before the war."

But for all the local color he discovered, Author Daniels finished his trip disturbed, thoughtful, none too optimistic. The Civil War caused suffering in the South, he admits, but its chief injury was that it gave southerners an excuse for doing nothing. Despite lynchings,* he believes that Negroes and whites have lived together in relative quiet, decency and peace, and that if the South is to rise, both races must rise together. He concludes that the tariff hurt the South more than Sherman ever did, that a northern economic occupation is now ending just as its military occupation once ended. From northerners, he asks only forbearance: Cato the Elder destroyed Carthage, he says, and planted it with salt, but he did not afterwards ride through Carthage and blame its poverty on the Carthaginians.

*The first lynching of 1938 took place last week.

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