news-record.com

Battling Nell's turnaround

Suppose Rush Limbaugh had a change of heart and renounced mean-spirited conservatism. He had been duped by the evangelical Christian right, he says. He now realizes Sarah Palin doesn’t play with a full deck. He apologizes for what he calls his chauvinism and boorishness. He’s registered as a Democrat and contributes to the ACLU.

Impossible? Consider Cornelia Battle Lewis. She was known to newspaper readers across North Carolina and the South several decades ago as “Battling Nell.” Her change of heart was just as astonishing.

She was the first female newspaper columnist in North Carolina. Her column, “Incidentally,” ran in the News and Observer in Raleigh. It appeared in 1921 as an outspoken voice for progressivism. She attacked the Ku Klux Klan, railed against the long shifts and poor pay of textile workers, supported the rights of strikers in the violence at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, ridiculed religious fundamentalists in their battle against teaching evolution in schools. She was an ardent feminist, linking women’s rights to human rights.

Yet by her death in 1956, Battling Nell had done an about-face. The change was on the imagined Rush Limbaugh scale. She renounced her liberalism. She attacked Frank Porter Graham, the voice of Southern progressivism, a family friend and president of UNC. She said she had been duped into supporting textile strikers. UNC needed to be cleansed of communists, she said. She became an ardent segregationist, calling for massive resistance on the Virginia model to obstruct the integration of North Carolina schools.

What happened?

Alexander Leidholdt, a professor of media arts and design at James Madison University, shares his conclusions in the well researched biography, “Battling Nell: The Life of Southern Journalist Cornelia Battle Lewis, 1893 -- 1956" (LSU Press: Baton Rouge; 331 pages, hardcover $47.50).

Leidholdt’s biography doesn’t confine itself to Battling Nell’s turnaround. It becomes a history of North Carolina in a turbulent period filled with labor strife, the challenge to the Jim Crow South and the erosion of gender barriers. Old Dixie fell for good in this period, and Battling Nell was in the thick of the fight. Yet, strangely, on both sides.

Cornelia Battle Lewis was upper crust North Carolina. Her middle name came from the family of Kemp Battle, the historian who became president of UNC. Her father, Richard Lewis, was among the leading public health experts in the country, and was behind many public health reforms in North Carolina. She was born into a wealthy, well-connected family influential in the state’s public affairs. Her father was a UNC trustee for more than 30 years. Two stepbrothers became trustees, too.

After finishing at St. Mary’s, the Episcopal school for girls in Raleigh, Lewis studied at Groucher in Baltimore for a year, then enrolled at Smith College in Northhampton, Mass. At that time, Smith was the largest college for women in the world, Leidholdt notes. It had a little over 1,700 students. She was the second woman from North Carolina to graduate from there.

She returned to North Carolina filled with liberal ideas, a niece recalled. Her outlook and outspokenness was at odds with her father and stepbrothers. One stepbrother was a biologist at the University of Virginia and defender of segregation. The others were in textiles: One was president of Erwin Mills in Durham, the other owned a mill in Oxford.

On a whim, she hitched her horse on Hay Street in Raleigh one day and asked for a job at the News and Observer. She had worked on the student newspaper at St. Mary’s and Smith. She was hired.

Within a few years, she had attracted the attention of some of the leading newspaper columnists in the country, including H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun. In one column, apparently typical of her tone, she castigated the state’s industrialists for the way the strike at Loray Mill in Gastonia had been handled. The governor had sent in the National Guard. She wrote that the unrest could have been averted had the owners not “given an earnest, if inadequate, imitation of God Almighty,” according to Leidholdt.

She found time to earn a law degree and run for the state legislature. She was admitted to the State Bar but lost the election. Her emotional health took a beating through the 1930s. She suffered bouts of depression, resigned from the paper, and consulted doctor after doctor, including spiritualists. Nobody was much help, Leidholdt says.

Her change of heart happened in this period of stress and poor health. A family land deal soured in the Depression, putting her under financial pressure. Her stepbrothers contributed to her upkeep, including the medical bills.

“As she struggled in the mid-1930s to recover from the most severe episode of depression in her life, many factors unmentioned by Lewis may have combined to erode her liberalism,” Leidholdt writes. “Consumed with health and financial worries, frustrated in her publishing ambitions, and beholden to family members with whom she now resided while deprived of her former network of feminist support, Lewis surely would have been ripe for absorbing her kin’s outspoken conservative ideology.”

She already had rethought her support for labor, apparently after the unrest showed up in mills owned by her relatives. The family felt slighted by UNC and its president, Frank Porter Graham, for what they perceived as a tolerance of communists. “Alcoholism might have affected her thinking, and the difficulty she would have faced in reassuming her controversial liberal persona when rumors of her mental problems had circulated throughout the state possibly reinforced her turnabout,” Leidholdt writes.

After a stint on the conservative Raleigh Times, the News and Observer eventually rehired Battling Nell in 1950, apparently with the thought of balancing its editorial progressivism. She used her column “to stoke the white southern backlash against liberals and racial progressives,” Leidholdt, says. “Lewis’s reputation as a leading voice of the southern way of life peaked in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education as she goaded her state to join Virginia and the Deep South in their massive resistance to public school integration. No Tar Heel journalist lobbied more forcefully toward this end.” With the young Jesse Helms, she spoke out for the election of Willis Smith to the U.S. Senate, who defeated Frank Porter Graham in an ugly, racially charged campaign.

This is a solid, thoroughly researched biography. The focus on a public personality in such a divisive, turbulent period offers insight into our own times where ideologues, defending a mythical past, shrilly skew public debate. The prose can be a bit ponderous at times, slowing the pace of the narrative, which surely is at odds with the way this remarkable woman lived her life.

Accompanying Photos