Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World

By William A Link

Frank Porter Graham (1886–1972) was one of the most consequential white southerners of the twentieth century. Born in Fayetteville and raised in Charlotte, Graham became an active and popular student leader at the University of North Carolina. After earning a graduate degree from Columbia University and serving as a marine during World War I, he taught history at UNC, and in 1930, he became the university's fifteenth president. Affectionately known as "Dr. Frank," Graham spent two decades overseeing UNC's development into a world-class public institution. But he regularly faced controversy, especially as he was increasingly drawn into national leadership on matters such as intellectual freedom and the rights of workers. As a southern liberal, Graham became a prominent New Dealer and negotiator and briefly a U.S. senator. Graham's reputation for problem solving through compromise led him into service under several presidents as a United Nations mediator, and he was outspoken as a white southerner regarding civil rights.

Brimming with fresh insights, this definitive biography reveals how a personally modest public servant took his place on the national and world stage and, along the way, helped transform North Carolina.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781469664941

William A Link

William A. Link is Richard J. Milbauer Professor of History at the University of Florida.

Book preview

FRANK PORTER GRAHAM

FRANK PORTER GRAHAM

Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World

WILLIAM A. LINK

Published in association with

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL LIBRARY

by

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

© 2021 William A. Link

All rights reserved

Designed by Jamison Cockerham

Set in Arno, Scala Sans, Payson, and Odon

by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover photographs (front and back) courtesy of Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC–Chapel Hill; (spine) courtesy of The Carolina Story: A Virtual Museum of University History.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Link, William A., author.

Title: Frank Porter Graham : southern liberal, citizen of the world / William A. Link.

Description: Chapel Hill : Published in association with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library by the University of North Carolina Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021021844 | ISBN 9781469664934 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469664941 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Graham, Frank Porter, 1886–1972. | University of North Carolina (1793–1962)—History. | Educators—North Carolina—Biography. | Statesmen—North Carolina—Biography.

Classification: LCC F259.G7 L56 2021 | DDC 328.73/092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021021844

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1 BEGINNINGS

2 UNIVERSITY MAN

3 WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

4 THE UNC PRESIDENCY

5 ANGELS OF DARKNESS

6 THE NEW DEAL COMES SOUTH

7 THE LIMITS OF GRADUALISM

8 A PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHER OF COMPROMISE

9 POSTWAR CRISES

10 THE ANTI-COMMUNIST ATTACK

11 A TOCSIN OF DEMOCRATIC DECENCY

12 PEACEMAKER

Epilogue: Champion of Peace and Freedom

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Series Editor’s Note

A section of illustrations follows page 110

Preface

My first exposure to Frank Porter Graham came in February 1972, when, as a high school senior from New Jersey, I visited the campus of the University of North Carolina. Both of my parents were UNC graduates and, though they spent most of their adult lives outside North Carolina, always considered the state their home. My mother grew up across the street from Davidson College, where her father taught physics for nearly half a century; although the campus remained an all-male institution until 1972, she attended Davidson for two years during the 1930s because the college, during the Depression, permitted faculty daughters to attend two years and then transfer to another college. Both of my parents thoroughly internalized regional loyalties and expected their children to abide by them. As a result, among the four children in my family, all of them attended either UNC or Davidson.

I happened to visit UNC just before Frank Graham passed away, and local headlines were filled with the news and tributes to his career. Having been students at UNC during the 1930s and 1940s, my parents were Graham admirers, but I had little idea who he was. I quickly learned, and he has fascinated me ever since. Subsequently, as a faculty member at UNC-Greensboro for twenty-three years, I learned more. So when Bob Anthony suggested the idea of a new Graham biography that would appear in the UNC Library’s Coates Leadership series, I was intrigued. I was also aware of the enormity of the subject. Graham’s papers, at UNC’s Southern Historical Collection, are vast. But also daunting is the intellectual challenge of placing Graham’s life in the history of the university, state, region, and nation.

In 1990, Bill Friday observed that serving as UNC president was a much better position than being Governor of the state anytime because the job had a greater and more sustained impact on North Carolinians than any elective office.¹ But UNC presidents, with this exaggerated public role, also had to maintain the confidence of state leaders and the general public. Far from shunning the spotlight, Graham sought out and cultivated editorial writers in the state in order to further the cause of education. He became a lifelong cheerleader for UNC, but he often tested public patience. Over time, Graham joined liberals who sought to ameliorate the effects of industrialization as well as racial segregation, and these causes expanded his public role beyond higher education. The university occupied a precarious position in the state, and many North Carolinians have long regarded Chapel Hill as a center of political and cultural radicalism. For the most part, Graham succeeded in fending off conservative critics who were aroused by controversial speakers who appeared on campus. He also enjoyed considerable freedom to take controversial positions, especially on labor and labor unions. Yet there were limits to how far Graham could push white North Carolinians on the highly sensitive topics of labor and race.

Another appeal of writing a Graham biography arises from my experience writing previous biographies, in which I narrate the lives of two important North Carolinians and white southerners, UNC president William C. Friday and five-term US senator Jesse Helms. Adding Graham to that mix creates a trilogy that encompasses modern North Carolina; the impact of these three men extended beyond the borders of the state, and their careers overlapped. In different ways, these three men came to define the rapid economic, cultural, and political history of North Carolina as well as of the modern South.² Graham mentored Friday during the late 1940s, when he worked as UNC assistant dean of students and began to climb the administrative ladder until he was elected university president in 1956. Like most members of the midcentury campus community, Friday absorbed the ethic of service to the state that Graham embodied. Working as Graham’s driver and companion during the 1950 senatorial campaign, Friday remembered watching Dr. Frank embody the qualities of a good teacher. Serving as UNC president for thirty years, Friday attempted to extend Graham’s legacy.³

In North Carolina, as sociologist Paul Luebke reminds us, a struggle raged between traditionalists and modernizers.⁴ By the middle of the twentieth century, the state had become sharply polarized between those pushing for change and those opposing it. Education, especially higher education, played a central role in the modernizers’ agenda. At the same time, the small towns and countryside where most North Carolinians lived rebelled against what accompanied modernization—a widening gulf between urban and rural, between technology and its absence, and, perhaps most important, traditional Protestantism and growing secularization. Today and in its past, North Carolina displayed a stubborn resistance to change and a tension between modernizers and traditionalists that spurred political and cultural polarization. Social change has today widened the separation between modernizers and traditionalists, both powerful political forces in North Carolina. UNC’s twentieth-century rise to global importance has exposed tensions that characterize early twenty-first century America.

While Friday was a modernizer, Helms came to be known as a defender of tradition. He is best known as US senator and one of the founders of the modern conservative movement. During most of his twenties, however, Helms was politically indifferent. Like Friday, he crossed paths with Graham during the 1940s. Jesse attended college for a few years without graduating and then worked during the 1940s as a Raleigh newspaperman and radio announcer. Moving to Raleigh, Helms fell in love with and married Dorothy Dot Coble in October 1942. As a UNC coed, she participated in the Sunday evening get-togethers that Graham held at the president’s house. One of the first women to graduate from the UNC School of Journalism, Dot often brought Jesse with her during return visits to Chapel Hill. Helms considered Graham a charming and dear man. But Helms had a choice to make when Graham sought his help in a special election for a US Senate seat in 1950, which became known as one of the most vitriolic in the state’s history. By then, Helms had become a dedicated conservative and opponent of most of what the UNC president stood for. Instead, Helms worked for Willis Smith, Graham’s opponent.⁵

This book considers the life of this remarkable man, the subject of two previous biographies by Warren Ashby and John Ehle. Both authors lived under the Graham spell, which cast a long shadow. Ashby did not attend UNC, but he taught there during the late 1940s. During the early 1980s, he and I were colleagues at UNC-Greensboro when I was starting my career and he was ending his. When he passed away in 1985, it was a major campus event. Ashby’s Frank Porter Graham: A Southern Liberal (1980) was published more than forty years ago. Representing more than two decades of research, Ashby’s biography is the work of a philosophy professor who knew Graham at UNC. It is a wonderfully rich book, based on firsthand research in Graham’s extensive personal and university papers and on numerous interviews with contemporaries. To some extent, Ashby belongs to the Grahamite tradition at UNC, and his book is unabashedly admiring. Similarly, Ehle was a 1949 UNC graduate, novelist, and public commentator who lived as a Graham follower. Ehle’s Doctor Frank (1993) is rich in memories that are more a personal history than a fully contextualized biography.⁶

My book seeks to fill this void by examining Graham in the context of his time and attempting to understand this man of many faces, many sides. He developed a unique style of leadership that combined his personal qualities with past experiences. He was also an academic who abandoned a quest for the PhD in favor of applying knowledge usefully. Indeed, though Graham had little patience for the remoteness of scholarship, he valued the importance of liberal education. Even the study of history, he believed, had practical implications as a guide to leadership and policy. His thinking was profoundly historical: in his articles and speeches, he typically included lengthy historical analyses that traced context and evolution. How and where societies existed, he told an interviewer, was not one sudden efflorescence that came from nowhere, or came entirely from the recovery of the old classic age. All social, economic, and political phenomena had historical roots, and part of understanding them required historicizing them. Even a subject as esoteric as medieval Europe had a lot to do with our institutions and ideas.⁷

At the same time, Frank could also be a hard-headed realist who, in the rough-and-tumble of politics, often settled for less. He was a Christian idealist but also a pragmatic leader always in search of compromise. This pragmatism, as he saw, only supported and made possible his principles. The main thing, he once told an interviewer, was the basic nature of the principles rather than the popularity of the principles.⁸ As Ashby wrote, Graham operated according to an internal process that tried to reconcile possibilities and realities. While most people adjusted principles according to possibilities and realities, Graham followed a reverse process: possibilities came into focus in light of the principle.⁹

FRANK PORTER GRAHAM

Introduction

In 1957, Benjamin Mays, African American civil rights leader and president of Morehouse College, described Frank Porter Graham as representing the best there is in the South and in the Nation, past, present, and future. A heroic soul who would be rewarded by history, Graham was fearless in defending his convictions and drew no distinctions between rich and poor, big and small, or Black and white. All people, according to him, were people of God who possessed intrinsic value. By rising above class, caste, culture, race, religion, and nationality, Graham saw all human beings as children of God, with equal worth. A person of deep convictions and sane convictions, he denied any distinction between what one believes and what he does. Graham, Mays said, was a citizen of the world.¹

Born in the aftermath of the Civil War, Frank Graham’s ancestral roots lay in the Highland Scot migration to North Carolina’s Upper Cape Fear valley. His father briefly experienced the Civil War and, as a veteran, attended the University of North Carolina but, unlike most of his ancestors, spent time outside the South. Frank was born in the Upper Cape Fear’s largest town, Fayetteville, and grew up in Charlotte, the largest town of the Piedmont. After the Civil War, most North Carolinians still lived in rural areas, which, despite the expansion of the railroad network and the spread of commercial agriculture, remained under the yoke of the low-wage plantation system. Though freed from enslavement, African Americans remained impoverished and oppressed by an unjust racial hierarchy.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Chapel Hill remained a sleepy village of slightly more than a thousand inhabitants. The campus, confined to the northern portion of UNC today, enrolled 870 students. At Graham’s death in February 1972, the town claimed nearly 27,000 inhabitants and the university enrolled more than 19,000 students, with buildings that spread in the forests of South Campus. Chapel Hill, by the late twentieth century, had become a bustling center of North Carolina’s knowledge industry in the Triangle megalopolis (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill), an anchor of the state’s modern economy. Part of the urban belt that sprawls across the Piedmont, UNC played a major role in the social and economic changes affecting the state.

Chapel Hill’s most celebrated citizen, Graham lived in this world of great change. His childhood was spent in Charlotte, a town that eventually became the state’s most important urban center and whose growing economic significance relied on the industrialization of the Carolina Piedmont. Between the 1880s and World War I, manufacturers remade the Piedmont’s social landscape with cotton textile factories and mill villages housing workers. Although they created new wealth, mills depended on prevalent poverty. Textiles spread into the Carolinas primarily because of a cheap labor force, whose low wages made possible millowners’ cost advantage. Despite the advent of the Industrial Revolution, however, North Carolina opened the twentieth century with glaring poverty, economic underdevelopment, and extensive illiteracy and ignorance among both Blacks and whites. Frank Graham found his life’s mission at UNC, where he was a student, a member of its faculty, and its president, and in a quest for social justice, which took him well beyond the campus. For most of his life, Chapel Hill was his home and the university his frame of reference. A distinctive ethos, first developed during the early 1900s, saw the university as an engine of social change in which the campus’ boundaries included the entire state. As Graham put it, for early twentieth-century leaders UNC was a university of the people. If we in our time failed to carry this on, he remarked, we’d be traitors to a great tradition.²

By any measure, Graham’s years at UNC were turbulent. During the 1920s, while student enrollment nearly doubled, the university underwent the biggest and most significant physical expansion in its history. Subsequently, the Great Depression resulted in severe financial repercussions and led to a complete restructuring through university consolidation. Graham, as UNC president, insisted on free speech on campus as a prerequisite to the university’s ascent. Although keeping conservative critics at bay, he often tested these critics through controversy.

Leading the University of North Carolina during its rise to national prominence, Graham was no ordinary university president. During the mid-twentieth century, his celebrity went beyond Chapel Hill; and during his life, his interests moved from the locality and state to the nation and world. Indeed, he became one of the most significant white southerners of this era as a liberal reformer and New Dealer, an adviser to presidents, and, later in life, an international peacemaker. Throughout, he developed convictions about human goodness and the ability of people to resolve differences using reasonableness, good faith, and compromise.

An idealist and Christian humanitarian, Graham was often described as Christ-like in his selfless devotion to humanity. People remembered him as someone who was, by nature, truly interested in people as individuals. In October 1946, one observer noted his genuine interest in people—all people without regard to race, creed or color. His love of humanity served as a well from which sprang all the force of his nature, while his mind contained no cynical thoughts. Graham was physically diminutive with ordinary features that made him easy to miss in a crowd; although he was not a striking figure, it was impossible to forget him once you have met him.³ At the same time, Graham remains a subject both difficult to understand and elusive. You will never capture the real Graham, longtime UNC law professor Henry P. Brandis told an early biographer. According to Brandis, his inner citadel formed the most important part of his character, and biographers who failed to comprehend it were certainly doomed to failure.⁴ One of Graham’s closest associates, Robert Burton House, agreed. He characterized Graham as a moral genius and a hero who was one of the greatest men of our time, but he was also a person who inspired a cult following. Everybody supposes they know Frank Graham, House reflected, but he was too deep, too complex for anybody to know.⁵

As part of this inner citadel, Graham was at once an open book and inscrutable, transparent but also opaque. His life was primarily public; a workaholic with no hobbies, his personal life, day and night, was secondary. Early on, a variety of factors defined Graham. Emphasizing education, especially for those preparing for the ministry, Carolina Presbyterians encouraged mission and service. He remained an active churchman, but he saw the practice of Christianity through a different lens. To Graham, the importance of belief lay not so much in the fallible world of organized religion as in the wider social obligation of Christians. As a young man, Frank’s religious beliefs grew beyond individual piety and expressed a sense of mission, imbued in Protestant Presbyterianism and the Social Gospel, that Christians should dedicate themselves to improving society and creating a Kingdom of God.⁶ By the end of his life, he saw issues of education and justice internationally. A year of graduate work in New York City, nearly two years’ participation in World War I, and subsequent study in Chicago; Washington, DC; and London expanded his vistas and crystallized for Graham the global nature of social problems.

Although he successfully navigated the intense politics of higher education, Graham frequently advocated for social justice. During the 1920s, before he became UNC president, he spoke out for workers and unions, a touchy subject for the state’s fiercely antiunion millowners. As UNC president, he was most constrained. Responsible to the state, he could do little about the most important social justice issue of the day, the state-enforced exclusion of African Americans from becoming UNC students. He thus accepted the apartheid system because, in his view, he was abiding by the law. Although his attempts to ameliorate racial injustice were limited, favoring a gradual end to Jim Crow and improvements within the segregated system, he became one of the South’s leading racial liberals. The great challenge of racial justice was no longer a regional issue; it was national and international. His lifelong concern was with humanity, and he increasingly understood it in global terms. Over time, human freedom, democracy, and adjusting modern life to economic change all depended on helping to connect the local with the metropole. Going beyond the activities of most university presidents, Graham emerged as the mid-twentieth-century South’s best-known and most consistent voice for social justice. Drawn to causes, he assumed a national role in the mobilization of human and economic resources during the New Deal and World War II. But his national stature also made him an increasingly absentee university president.

The Great Depression and world wars solidified Graham’s belief that racial justice and peace depended on global human freedom. He saw the post–World War II expansion of American power as part of a reconstructed global system that incorporated racial and social democracy. War brought widespread death and devastation, and the postwar peace established a new American-guaranteed democratic international system. In UN missions to India and Pakistan, he led unsuccessful efforts to negotiate a settlement of the conflict in the border region of Kashmir. In his UN work, Graham became a spokesman for internationalism, delivering numerous speeches in support of international peace and human rights. He worked for nearly twenty years as an international mediator and became an observer of the civil rights struggle. Only in retirement did he return to his beloved Chapel Hill.

Much of the mystery of Graham also involves the puzzle of how a conservative state could rally behind a university that became known as a center of southern liberalism. As an intellectual influence and operating philosophy, liberalism originated in the late eighteenth century as part of the Enlightenment’s humanitarianism and belief in human-directed social policies. For much of the nineteenth century, this meant liberating people from the shackles of excessive control, in the form of free markets and equal rights. Eventually, the Industrial Revolution brought sweeping changes in life, and liberalism underwent a transformation. In the twentieth century, it sought reform through social interventions, most commonly through interventions by local, state, and eventually federal governments. An essential social intervention was education, and liberals developed a faith that schooling would bring social change.

Out of the Progressive Era, mid-twentieth-century reformers became known nationally as liberal. In general, modern liberalism coalesced during World War I, when the wartime state brought unprecedented federal intervention in all aspects of life. During the crisis of the Great Depression, modern liberalism reached a full flowering with the advent of the New Deal, which sought to address the national economic collapse by injecting federal direction of state and local affairs. Liberals thereafter became known as New Deal liberals. Although favoring an ameliorative government, southern liberals were conditioned to operating cautiously. The main reason for their caution was race. At the end of the nineteenth century, southern whites solidified a codified system of white supremacy that deprived most African Americans of the right to vote, imposed state-required racial segregation, and deprived Black people of a host of public services. On racial segregation, white southerners were expected to toe the line; any questioning of the efficacy of racial segregation exposed them to charges of disloyalty. Southern liberals might question the justice of apartheid, but they believed it was the short-term future.

The issue of race became Graham’s most difficult inconsistency. Although by the 1920s he was exposed to the diversity of world cultures, in order to function effectively, especially as a university president, he compromised principle for effectiveness. Southern liberals feared especially the specter of racial violence that appeared across the country after World War I. Liberals believed in racial progress but feared racial backlash—that whites would resist, even violently, any attempts to force race equality. Graham believed in a gradual bridge toward a more racially just social system in the South. During an unspecified period of time, gradualists believed, the beneficial influences of religion and education would change attitudes that sustained white supremacy. Accepting the common belief, even among historians, that Reconstruction failed because it forced people to accept racial equality, Graham and other southern liberals believed governmental compulsion would be counterproductive.

Graham used gradualism as a practical way to become politically effective, which was essential if UNC were to survive the vicissitudes of political support. He became a master of cultivating political support, with the resulting infusion of public resources in support of the university’s mission. But gradualism also required his support for the existing system of segregation in exchange for vague promises to ameliorate the worst features of segregation, improve systems of dual education, and condemn lawlessness and racial violence. Gradualism meshed with southern liberals’ concept of interracialism, that white and Black people could coexist separately but with communication across racial lines. Like much of the system of racial segregation and the concept of separate but equal outlined in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896, much of gradualism was fictitious. Separate was not equal, and racial inferiority became baked into government and the social system during the twentieth century.

Even so, in the political environment of the Jim Crow South, most Black leaders considered Graham an ally. Mainly by conveying signals of sympathy and support, he enjoyed the confidence of civil rights leaders, who recognized his support for human rights, even while he defended, for his entire career as a university president, the exclusion of Black applicants to UNC. Graham lived with this contradiction by believing in a future of racial justice against a present of racial injustice. Black leaders saw matters more pragmatically. Accepting gradualism became a temporary strategy until a more direct confrontation could defeat racial apartheid.

Graham combined personal charm, apparent selflessness, kindness, and honesty with an ability to embrace controversial and often unpopular causes. Many of these causes involved defending UNC against political interference by providing an environment of free discourse. His political abilities reflected his personality, his ability to connect with people, important and unimportant, and the residue of goodwill that sustained him for most of his career. The most meaningful parts of Graham’s academic life, according to a contemporary, were those that involved people. He enjoyed teaching, because it meant talking to people. There was never a time in his life, the account continued, that he preferred a book to a person, reading to listening, writing to talking. For Frank, life always involved people, and any kind of learning external to a context of people had no meaning for him. Noting Graham’s indifference to a doctorate—he attended graduate school in history but never wrote a dissertation—one friend declared that he never cared.⁷

Graham’s appealing personality could often disarm critics. No one could know him without becoming affectionate with him, declared Asheville newspaper editor Hiden Ramsey, and even those who disagreed with him would admit that he was a great spirit.⁸ For many, though not all, Graham was difficult to attack or dislike, even if there were political disagreements. Greensboro Daily News editorialist William D. Snider remembered that his father, a UNC classmate of Graham’s who disagreed with him politically, often recounted that Frank possessed such great integrity and great persuasiveness that he felt that he was a friend for life. What made Graham so effective, recalled Snider, was that he was utterly disarming and so simple and so direct and persuasive in the way he dealt with people.⁹ Like the eighteenth-century English politician Charles James Fox, according to another contemporary, Graham was made to be loved,¹⁰ and, according to another observer, had to be loved.¹¹

Billy Carmichael, who ran UNC’s finances in the 1940s, was skeptical about Graham’s commitment to causes. Carmichael believed that Graham embraced too many controversies, with something of a martyr complex. There goes Frank, he was reported to have said once, climbing up on his little, portable cross!¹² Graham’s proclivity for causes and controversy antagonized conservatives and spurred his enemies. Journalist Gerald Johnson concluded that he was both the best-loved and best-hated man in the state; and both emotions he has richly earned.¹³ Graham’s external involvement with social justice causes set him apart from other twentieth-century university presidents, especially ones in the South. He associated with numerous groups in labor reform, peace, and racial justice, but this involvement frequently landed him in trouble with North Carolina’s power structure. On and off the UNC campus, Graham became a person much loved but also much hated, an insider who promoted popular causes.

1

Beginnings

One of Frank Porter Graham’s earliest memories, as a five-year-old, was when his father, Alexander, visited with Edwin A. Alderman and Charles D. McIver. Sitting in the Graham household, McIver remembered how, on the night of their graduation from UNC in 1881, he and Alderman were swept up into a new gospel of education. In 1889, Alderman and McIver persuaded the North Carolina legislature to finance three years of teachers’ institutes in order to evangelize the gospel of modern education. Alexander became among the most enthusiastic conductors of the teacher institutes.¹ The institutes’ conductors, among them Graham, Alderman, and McIver, urged teachers to complete an examination leading to certification as a way of improving the quality of public education. In addition, they became educational evangelists, eventually traveling 3,100 miles to speak before 3,600 teachers and 35,000 people.² Listening to the men express their bond in education, Frank was entranced. He recalled the conversation as like the milk from my mother’s breast to me.³

A decade older than these men, Alexander Graham shared their enthusiasm for public education and common experiences as school superintendents in late nineteenth-century North Carolina towns. McIver, like Alexander, descended from Highland Scots in the Upper Cape Fear region. He also attended UNC, taught school, and led schools in Durham and Winston. In 1891, McIver successfully opened a new publicly supported women’s college in Greensboro, the State Normal and Industrial School. Alderman, originally from Wilmington, studied at UNC and then worked in Goldsboro under the tutelage of reforming school superintendent Edward Pearson Moses and eventually became superintendent of that town’s schools. In 1891, McIver recruited Alderman to join the State Normal faculty. Alderman subsequently became president of UNC in 1895, Tulane University in 1900, and the University of Virginia in 1905.⁴

Establishing modern public schools was no easy task. In 1880, nearly half of North Carolinians were illiterate, that is, unable to write their names, including two-thirds of African Americans and nearly 29 percent of whites.⁵ These grim statistics resembled the rest of the South; illiteracy offered visible evidence of backwardness. Other late nineteenth-century North Carolinians believed that the state’s social problems were urgent. Another of Alderman and McIver’s generation, Walter Hines Page, a journalist who fled the state in the late 1880s for the North, became a leading publisher and, after 1900, an advocate of change. While in North Carolina in early 1886, Page concluded that its leaders ill served the state. Enterprising young people left the state in droves, he claimed. The state’s rulers were nothing more than mummies, dead in mind and spirit, and living in the past. They feared intellectual inquiry or honest investigation, and those with initiative and who told the plain truth were accused of treason, or having become Yankeeized. North Carolinians, Page maintained, should rise up and say plainly . . . that the controlling forces, the spokesmen and the mummies of North Carolina to-day must be rid of power. In order to achieve real change, the state awaited a few first-class funerals.⁶ With many white and Black illiterates and extensive poverty, there was a consensus that education could serve as a basis for North Carolina’s awakening.

Alexander Graham and many of his contemporaries served in the Confederate military. The Civil War, only two decades past, cast a long shadow over late nineteenth-century North Carolina. The war’s aftermath became a dead weight, with Page’s mummies remaining in control. The war had radically changed the region’s social system, freeing millions of enslaved men and women while reconstructing slavery’s racial hierarchy into a different form. Railroads expanded to such an extent that the new transportation network reached most of North Carolina’s hinterlands, fueling growing towns and an emerging cotton textile industry. Alexander realized the new opportunities during the postwar era, but he also could not ignore the persistent poverty and underdevelopment that characterized what was called the Rip Van Winkle state.

Alexander grew up in the Upper Cape Fear valley, an enclave of Scottish culture even in the mid-nineteenth century. Nearly 20,000 Highland Scots arrived in the mid-eighteenth century as part of the rush of immigrants peopling the frontier of the Carolina backcountry. These Scottish Presbyterians, devoted to church, reading and literacy, and community-building, subscribed to a Calvinist conception of Christian calling, the belief that Presbyterians had an obligation to service in professions like the ministry, the law, and teaching. Alexander, who was born on September 12, 1844, to tailor and farmer Archibald Graham and his wife Anne McLean, grew up in rural Cumberland County, about four miles northwest of Fayetteville. His parents were by no means poor; in 1810, Archibald owned eight slaves. Fifty years later, in 1860, he reported to the census taker $6,800 in real estate and $18,870 in personal property, wealth that placed the family in a higher social status. Much of that wealth came from Alexander’s mother, Anne, whose great-grandfather, Alexander McAlister, was a Whig leader during the Revolution. McAlister served as a member of the Wilmington Committee of Safety and the 1775–76 North Carolina provincial congresses. He signed the Halifax Resolves, an early demand for independence from Britain, and served as a colonel in the local militia.

Members of Alexander’s family, like other North Carolinians, were swept up into the Civil War. In July 1862, his older brother Archie enlisted as a private in the Fifth Regiment, North Carolina cavalry. During 1863–64, Archie served as courier for Confederate generals Joseph Gordon, Fitzhugh Lee, Wade Hampton, and J. E. B. Stuart. On April 26, 1865, Archie was at Greensboro when Gen. Joseph Johnston’s 90,000-strong Army of Tennessee surrendered to Union commander William T. Sherman near Durham at Bennett Place.⁷ Alexander, an adolescent, missed most of the war, and his military career was briefer than Archie’s and most likely did not involve major combat. Privately educated, Alexander began teaching at age sixteen, working two years at the Richmond Academy, near Spring Hill, North Carolina. At twenty years old, only months before the Civil War ended, Alexander joined the Third North Carolina Home Guard, which Confederates raised in Cumberland County. One account reported Alexander’s capture at Bentonville, fought on March 19–21, 1865, between Sherman’s invading armies and Confederate defenders under Joseph Johnston. But the evidence remains slender. Alexander subsequently applied for a Confederate pension in 1926; after his death, his wife continued to receive the pension provided by the North Carolina state government, but there is no other record clearly documenting his service.⁸

When the war ended, Graham taught school in Bladen County, but, on his own and impoverished, he also ran a peddler’s wagon in South Carolina. In September 1866, Alexander managed to save enough money to enroll at the University of North Carolina, where he joined the Philanthropic Literary Society and in 1867 served as captain of the university’s first baseball team. During Reconstruction, UNC was in a perilous condition after Republicans took control of the university in 1868 and enemies of Reconstruction, opposing Republican influence in state institutions, refused to accept their leadership. In 1871, only two years after Graham and seventeen other students graduated in 1869, an anti-Republican boycott closed UNC for five years.

When Walter Hines Page, in his mummy letters, reported the exodus of enterprising North Carolinians, he listed Franklin Porter, Tarboro native, Alexander’s UNC classmate and Frank Porter Graham’s namesake. Frank later called Porter one of the best friends my father ever had. After spending two years at UNC with Alexander, Porter finished his undergraduate degree at Yale and then studied law at Columbia University. After practicing in Fayetteville, Porter eventually moved to St. Joseph, Missouri, where he established a prosperous law practice.⁹ A UNC classmate of Porter’s and Alexander’s, R. H. Lewis, later a Raleigh physician, recalled how as children Porter had rescued him when he went swimming in the Tar River and almost drowned. Lewis was disabled in one of his legs, and the river current was too strong, forcing him under. Porter dove in and pulled him back to shore. When Frank Graham, as an adult, went to Lewis for medical treatment, he refused to charge a fee. I will not accept payment for this service, Lewis said, to a boy who was named for the boy who saved my life.¹⁰

Perhaps encouraged by Porter, who studied law at Columbia University, Alexander secured a job at the Columbia Grammar School in 1871. Teaching during the day, Alexander also completed a law degree in 1873 at Columbia by finishing many of his classes at night. He returned to Fayetteville in 1875, where he obtained a law license and was for three years a practicing attorney. Soon after his move to Fayetteville, on January 28, 1875, Alexander married nineteen-year-old Katherine Kate Sloan. Kate’s ancestors were mostly English, propertied, and established members of the planter class. Henry Sloan lived in southeastern Virginia and served in the House of Burgesses from 1657 to 1661. About a century later, his great-great-grandson, David Sloan, migrated to the Cape Fear region, then a North Carolina frontier. Kate was David’s great-granddaughter, the fifth of seven children. Her father, David Dickson Sloan, was a physician who lived in the Ingold neighborhood of southern Sampson County, east of the Cape Fear River.¹¹

Frank’s familial influences were powerful, shaping his worldview. His parents, according to one account, were strikingly different in bearing and temperament.¹² He resembled his mother, who was born on March 5, 1855, in Garland, Sampson County. She was five feet tall; Frank was five foot four. Compared to the more reserved Alexander, Kate was warm and outgoing. Nonetheless, the example of his father profoundly influenced the views of his son. Frank internalized his father’s faith in the importance of education, traveling with him and observing his missionary zeal. As a stout Presbyterian, Alexander ensured that all of his children attended college, a rare feat among nineteenth-century southerners.

Alexander’s time in Fayetteville proved formative.¹³ Created in 1783 by the merger of the smaller towns of Cross Creek and Campbellton, Fayetteville was named in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette, the Revolutionary War hero. Located at the fall line of the Cape Fear River, beyond which rapids became less navigable, Fayetteville during the antebellum era became a transfer point for cargoes arriving from the North Carolina Piedmont on three plank roads terminating in the town. Paddlewheel, flat-bottom steamboats transported people and goods such as tobacco, cotton, turpentine, wheat, and lumber from Fayetteville to Wilmington. By the Civil War, the town, with a population of more than 4,000, had become the largest community in the Upper Cape Fear region and the third largest in the state.

Although Fayetteville served as a transportation and weapons manufacturing hub for the eastern Confederate armies, its postwar recovery was slow, and the town did not regain its antebellum population until the twentieth century. Concerned about the town’s future, Fayetteville leaders turned to schooling, and during the summer of 1878 town leaders organized a new, modern graded school. Graded-school education had become a marker of town development. These modern school systems, popular in urban settings during the Gilded Age, offered professionalized teaching, upgraded and permanent facilities, and improved pedagogy, while they also provided a new approach to socialization and training for citizenship. Schools, according to graded-school advocates, could trigger a social transformation.¹⁴ In contrast to rural schools, in which all ages were amalgamated, urban graded schools organized grades and constructed permanent wood or brick facilities. With money from the George Peabody Fund, plus $3,000 raised by public subscription, Fayetteville leaders during the summer of 1878 turned to Alexander Graham to lead the new all-white school.¹⁵ Town leaders wanted what other growing late nineteenth-century urban communities already possessed—modern schools. Graham now saw his Christian calling not in the law but in teaching.¹⁶

In charge of Fayetteville schools for a decade, Graham constructed a model town school system.¹⁷ He participated in the Summer School for Teachers at UNC, an early effort at teacher training, where he met aspiring schoolmen such as Alderman and McIver. Using Peabody support, the state school superintendent also operated summer teacher training, or normals; Alexander taught summer normals in Washington, Wilson, Elizabeth City, Newton, and Franklin.¹⁸ The early historian of southern education Edgar Wallace Knight described Alexander’s simplicity, sincerity, unaffected dignity, engaging humor, fidelity to duty, devotion to the public weal, and a clear conscience in the hour of death. He had, according to Knight, qualities of gentleness, sweet reasonableness, potent personal charm, a sensitive intellectuality, and the calm rationality of philosopher and sage. A person of extraordinary stamina, he was a hard fighter, but always in the open. Alexander had linguistic ability, according to Knight, who described how he gained a fair mastery of Spanish at the age of seventy-five.¹⁹

In early 1888, the Charlotte school board was looking for a new graded-school superintendent, and, after a search in which twenty-five people applied—including Alderman—Alexander was elected to the position on February 16, 1888, taking charge two days later.²⁰ His reputation, one newspaper put it in 1891, grew into one of the best known, brightest and most energetic educators in all North Carolina.²¹ In 1895, Alexander took an exhibit of a model graded school to the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta.²² A year later, the Charlotte Democrat praised his progressive methods, executive capacity and eminent fitness as well as the high state of efficiency of the Charlotte schools.²³ A well-respected community leader, Alexander led local efforts to refashion Charlotte’s history by promoting the subsequently debunked idea that the first Declaration of Independence was signed in Charlotte on May 31, 1775, a year before Thomas Jefferson penned his more famous document.²⁴ On November 2, 1934, Alexander died in his ninetieth year, according to a contemporary, the most honored and beloved school man in the state.²⁵

Alexander’s growing family included Frank Porter Graham, the sixth of nine children and the fourth son, who was born in Fayetteville on October 14, 1886, and named for Alexander’s good friend Franklin Porter. When Frank was a child, the Grahams lived in a two-story, four-bedroom house at 1001 South Brevard Street, at the intersection with Liberty Street, near the center of Charlotte’s downtown. During the 1890s, the home lacked electricity or telephone, conveniences that arrived in the early twentieth century. In this close family, the older brothers set the example for their younger siblings. The eldest, David Sloan Graham, attended UNC, eventually joining the marines. The second eldest brother, Archie Graham, was a star baseball player in Charlotte. Frank, smaller in stature than Archie, loved athletic competition, which in the 1890s was mainly baseball and football. But he could never equal Archie’s athletic skills.²⁶

When Frank was two months old, Atlanta journalist Henry W. Grady announced to a New York City audience that a new South arrived, with the breath of a new life. This New South, Grady declared, rejected the Old South’s adherence to slavery and followed a new spirit of progress and intersectional cooperation.²⁷ Charlotte fully accepted Grady’s vision of a New South, and, during Frank’s childhood, it was one of several towns competing to become dominant in central North Carolina. During the early nineteenth century, Charlotte benefited from the country’s first gold rush, and in 1837 a US mint was established to coin the metal. Eventually the largest town in the Carolinas, during the 1880s Charlotte was not much larger than Fayetteville, with a population of slightly more than 7,000 people. Superior transportation proved a key factor in subsequent growth. The North Carolina Railroad, which traversed Piedmont North Carolina from Charlotte to Raleigh, first reached the town in 1852. Other railroads from the south solidified trade in South Carolina. By the 1880s, local merchants constructed cotton mills; as a transportation hub, Charlotte captured much of the trade in unfinished and finished goods across the Carolinas. By the late 1880s, Charlotte could claim to have become a classic New South town.²⁸

Charlotte, along with the rest of Grady’s New South, witnessed a new racial, social, and political hierarchy that coalesced in industrializing North Carolina. In the aftermath of the Civil War and the destruction of slavery, a refashioned Democratic Party drew the support of white men largely because of their determination to reestablish white supremacy. Meanwhile, new cotton mills in Charlotte and the surrounding area attracted rural workers who became a new industrial proletariat. They experienced a new, more regimented work regime. Like most children of his generation, Frank likely took for granted the existence of these racial and class hierarchies.

The New South town Graham grew up in emphasized public schools as a mark of progress, a confidence reflected in the town fathers’ recruitment of Alexander Graham. Frank profited from the Charlotte Graded School, where, as a child and adolescent, he excelled under the influence of some of the school’s best teachers. He later remembered William Gilmer Perry, a Davidson College graduate, who taught seventh-grade science, history, and poetry. Perry made his students read what Graham recalled as real literature and poetry and memorize long passages. J. Addison Bivens, who taught Frank tenth-grade math, geology, and English literature, never graduated from college; his brother, J. F. Bivens, was headmaster at the school attached to Trinity College (later Duke University), Trinity Park School.²⁹

During adolescence Frank developed health problems that affected him the rest of his life. In his last year of high school, at age sixteen, Frank contracted a bad case of measles that worsened his eyesight and forced him to drop out of school, though he still received his degree. For much of the fall of 1902, his mother devoted her energies to nursing her son. The experience made him more attached than ever to her. He derived his sensitive moral quality from her, according to one account, and Katherine’s quiet ways and inclusive love shaped his outlook. She was often an outspoken Democrat, and she expressed her views on politics; although she and her husband were both loyal partisans, they sometimes disagreed.³⁰ While determination, courage, and conviction came from his father, according to contemporaries, his tenderness, compassion, and concern for others came from his mother. From his mother, a subsequent historian commented, Frank absorbed a sense of concern for people who were less fortunate and a sense of compassion.³¹

During his last year in the graded school, in 1903, Frank was elected class president.³² The following year, 1903–4, Frank stayed at home, working as a bookkeeper for a cotton broker and running a newsstand and cigar shop at Charlotte’s Central Hotel, the city’s oldest hotel and reputedly the largest between Washington and Atlanta.³³ Health problems kept him at home still longer. Sometime during his adolescence, Frank suffered a hernia in a sandlot baseball game, and during the fall of 1904 he underwent surgery