The Kingdom and the Power (27 page)

Turner Catledge’s grandfather, James Turner, returned after the war to the farm. It was a subsistence farm whose main purpose was to raise enough food to nourish the Turner family, a considerable undertaking since Turner and his wife would have fourteen children. The first-born was a daughter, Willie Anna Turner, Catledge’s mother. Of all the women that Catledge would meet in his lifetime, none could approach the efficiency of his mother—she did everything with precision, remembered everything, reared her brothers and sisters and ran the home as her own mother could not have done had she tried, which she didn’t, being pregnant most of the time, or recovering from pregnancy, or being too conditioned to life’s raw realities in the shambled South to expect any miracle of comfort or order under her own roof. And so the daughter, Willie Anna, a plain Bible-reading young woman, kindly but stern, took over the home and the children. She did not seem to resent this task, recognizing it as a necessity, but as she became older and learned
to master other people’s affairs more and more, she discovered that they had become almost totally reliant on her, a burden she found overwhelming and annoying at times, but mainly she loved it and came to need it.

When her brothers and sisters were old enough to marry and have children of their own, Willie Anna helped in the rearing of
their
children, which they happily let her do. Willie Anna knew best, she did things
right
. Even after she had met and married Lee Catledge, a tall, slim, almost frail man with a long face, dark eyes, a drooping black moustache, a man four years younger than herself, she did not alter her routine very much. She had only two children of her own, her son and an older daughter, and she had time on her hands, energy to burn, and she seemed to enjoy most of all the large family reunions at the main farmhouse of her father, supervising the dinner while the old man sat back encircled by as many as forty grandchildren. He was a commanding figure, proud and vain, and what most impressed young Turner Catledge about his grandfather was how, with a minimum of effort, he got maximum results—with the slightest gesture, a soft word here, there, he could get other people to jump to his needs. He was Big Daddy, the grand progenitor, the boss—one of many bosses that Turner Catledge would observe during his career as a political reporter and editor, but his grandfather was the first and he left a lasting impression.

James Turner had done very well for himself and his family after the war. The immediate postwar years had been bad, with practically no money and a complete barter system, but as the South’s economy revived toward the turn of the century, Turner’s interests began to extend, with the help of his children, beyond the farm to the opening of small stores around Neshoba County. First there was a little hardware store and then a grocery store, both beginning as extensions of the farm; then a drugstore—and finally, a Ford agency. There were the seeds of Snopes in James Turner, and they produced degrees of vengeance and virtue in his offspring, but with his prodding most of them pushed forward, and if his prize daughter Willie Anna had her way, as he suspected she would, the next generation of Turners would do even better. Willie Anna’s greatest hopes, of course, were with her son, Turner Catledge.

From his earliest years, the boy felt the pressure of his mother espousing the dignity of hard work, denouncing laziness and drinking, ballplaying and profanity. When the Sunday newspapers and
comics arrived, Willie Anna would tuck them under her bed and not let the children see them until Monday, and she would not tolerate even the whistling of a secular tune in her home on Sunday. Lee Catledge, her husband, a brooding and sensitive man, never had much to say. He was an educated man, having been taught in a church school, and had been a teacher himself for a while, as well as a dabbler in local politics; but now he was working in one of Turner’s many stores. His forebears had also been farmers, having come to America as Scotch-Irish immigrants and settling first in the Carolinas, later in Alabama, and then, before the war, in Mississippi. Lee Catledge’s father had served in the Confederate Army but had not seen action, although five of his father’s brothers had, and three had been killed. What was left of the family carried on at farming, but Lee Catledge, after his marriage to Willie Anna, became absorbed into the Turner clan, his gentility later providing a welcome and contrasting sense of soft sell behind the counter.

The destiny of young Turner Catledge, too, was to be fulfilled somehow in Turner trade, although nobody knew precisely where he should begin in 1922 after his graduation from Mississippi State College. There were really no good jobs in the Turner stores close to home, all being held by uncles, cousins, in-laws, and so it was decided that he should begin his business career in a wholesale hardware establishment in which the Turner family had a small interest in Memphis. In a way he was happy to be going to Memphis and to be escaping the claustrophobic feeling of the family. But when he thought more about it, he became angry and resentful. He felt that he was actually being forced outside the family circle because there was no place for him at home, and this shocked and disillusioned him. It was as if he had been deceived all these years by the warm-hearted family, his exemplary mother, and now, suddenly, as in some strange tribal rite, he was being sent away to test his skill at survival. He was frightened by the prospect, disbelieving; Memphis seemed so far away, as remote as Hong Kong—although it was actually a border city between Mississippi and Tennessee; still, Catledge had never contemplated living that far north, and he did not really fancy the hardware business either.

He did not precisely know what he wanted to do for a living. At college he had majored in science, had been bright in botany and zoology classes; he was possibly the only member of his family who knew the meaning of
entomology
. He was good in English, and was an excellent touch-typist, partly as a result of all the practice
he had gotten from his part-time clerical job in the dean’s office. He had held several jobs while attending college, his mother having made sure he would have no idle moments, and one of the summer jobs that he had held, and had most enjoyed, was an all-inclusive yet nondescript position on a little weekly handset newspaper named the
Neshoba Democrat
. He had done a bit of everything on that paper. He had solicited advertising, collected money over the counter for subscriptions, had gathered and written local-news items, helped out in the plant, learned to set type, and learned about the printers themselves, some of whom were Klansmen. It had been a marvelous job because it had never seemed like a job, with new and unexpected happenings every week. It was edited by a persuasive country editor called Peanuts Rand, who had liked Catledge very much, had admired his enthusiasm for hard work, his willingness to do any trivial task without sulking. And so while the Turner family was planning Catledge’s career in hardware, Rand was thinking of keeping him in the newspaper business. Rand had just bought another country weekly in the northwestern corner of the state near the Tennessee and Arkansas borders along the Mississippi River, in a town called Tunica. Rand could use such an energetic handyman as Catledge up in Tunica, and when he proposed the job to the young man, Catledge accepted it immediately. He was now resigned to leaving home, and the last family favor that he would ask would be a ride to the railroad station—and the forlorn feeling of that day remained with him for a lifetime: being driven to the station on a quiet morning over bumpy dusty roads in the Model T Ford of Uncle Joe, his mother’s brother, and then standing along the platform with Uncle Joe waiting for the whistle sound, and then being given a little pocket checkbook, a going-away present. “If you need any money,” Uncle Joe said, “just write a check on me.” It was meant in kindness, but it added to the gloom, the reality of the departure, and during the train ride up to Tunica Catledge felt the emptiness of a life left behind.

In Tunica, Mississippi, 1922, Catledge got along with people, liked what he was doing, liked the characters he met and wrote about. On the
Tunica Times
he did what he had done the year before on the
Neshoba Democrat
and would do a year later on
the
Tupelo Journal
—he did a bit of everything, wrote news and ran errands, solicited advertising and set type, made mistakes and learned, made friends and kept them. To the country people of the town, Catledge seemed to be an engaging young man, earnest and modest. He gave the impression of efficiency without ever seeming to possess great ambition. Ambition, with its repugnant qualities of drive, grim determination, stepping out of line, stepping over older men to get to the top—any hint of this ambition that his mother had nurtured, that his father had lacked, would have been more a hindrance than a help to Catledge, particularly in the rural South. Here there was an observance of order; here one knew one’s place and had respect for elders and preserved the past. A climber like Catledge, wishing to succeed quickly in the South in the early Nineteen-twenties, knew by heritage that it was unwise to seem superior, college-educated, or otherwise different from the plain homogeneous undereducated country people who were the majority. In the North, Catledge’s contemporary opposites, the future tycoons from tenements, did not need such delicacy. In the North the rules were different, directness was appreciated, pushing was permitted, pushing was often
essential
if one were to compete in the overcrowded cities with their towering obstacles and tensions. And it might therefore have been assumed that the young men who had learned to live and survive in urban jungles would be more likely to achieve great power in New York than those quiet ambitious Southerners like Catledge who were moving slowly up through the placid back roads of the Deep South. But this assumption was not necessarily correct. For those who began in the South and got ahead and got along with country people, those who developed the flair for flattery and cajolery, affability and mock innocence that was standard in the South and was seen as “charm” in the North, those who understood the small-town Southerners’ inbred inferiority and prickly pride, his suspicion of strangers and demands of loyalty, his poverty and resultant violence that was almost Sicilian in character—the young climber who took this rustic route northward during the Twenties and Thirties probably traveled a tougher course, faced more subtle challenges, made more personal adjustments, cultivated more disarming devices and weapons for success in New York than did his urban counterpart. If one could get along with country people in the South, one could get along with almost anybody.
And
, having mastered the art of apparent innocence, the Southerner ascended the executive ladders
of New York with relative ease and without arousing great envy in others; on the contrary, his colleagues were disarmed by him, pleased by his triumph, amazed that such an unassuming individual of such “charm” could have gotten so far.

And so what worked in Mississippi worked as well in Manhattan, although the reverse was not so true. The impersonal pushing of the North was out of step with the South; Southerners could not easily accept it: the South was deep-rooted and fixed in its ways, as Federal lawmakers would later learn. The South set its own pace and style and stamped its people for a lifetime, and when Northerners went South to live, it stamped them, too. Northerners who settled in the South adopted the regional accent; Southerners who settled in the North did not.

So in Tunica, Catledge got along; and the country people that he met, and the small papers for which he worked in Mississippi as well as the larger papers that he later joined in Memphis, provided him with a repertoire of regional stories and oddities that would delight his companions and guests in future decades around Sardi’s bar or “21” or in the backroom of some Southern Senator’s office in Washington. The politicians to whom Catledge was most naturally drawn in Washington were those who shared his familiarity with the country South, who exemplified its style and had learned, as he had, how it could also work wonders far from home. In Washington, Catledge was friendly with, among others, Senators Pat Harrison of Mississippi, Carter Glass of Virginia, Thomas Heflin of Alabama, John Nance Garner of Texas, and James F. Byrnes of South Carolina. They confided in him, tipped him off to stories, drank with him—particularly Garner, who became Vice-President; and when Byrnes became Secretary of State, he offered Catledge an assistant secretaryship. Catledge turned it down, preferring the newspaperman’s existence to the politician’s, although in Catledge’s case the two worlds were almost indistinguishable—Catledge behaved like a politician, talked like one, and no doubt would have made a great one had he ventured into a full-time political career. He remembered names, remembered old obligations, remembered old friends even as he made newer ones in more powerful places. By the time he had joined the Washington bureau of
The New York Times
in 1930, Catledge seemed to know people in every hamlet south of the capital—bootleggers, Baptist preachers, bellhops, usedcar salesmen; country editors and judges; a Mississippi whore about whom Catledge had once written a flattering article for his paper’s society page; a Memphis shoeshine boy named Willie Turner who had descended from slaves on James Turner’s farm. In fact, Willie Turner had been named in honor of Catledge’s mother, and when Catledge moved to Memphis he and Willie Turner would get together two or three times a week, and when Catledge’s by-lines began to appear in the local newspapers—and later in the
Baltimore Sun
and
The New York Times
—his friend would clip them out of the various journals left behind each day by customers and he would paste them into a scrapbook that he kept under the shoe stand.

Catledge had ridden the rails into Memphis from Tupelo in 1923 and, luckily, he walked into the
Memphis Press
offices almost directly behind a newly appointed managing editor from Oklahoma City who was anxious to demonstrate his powers as a decision-maker. He hired Catledge on the spot. Later, when the newspaper had an economic setback, Catledge was laid off, giving him an opportunity to visit the
Memphis Commercial Appeal
and to walk directly into the office of its editor, a red-faced volatile Irishman named C. P. J. Mooney. As Catledge entered the room, Mooney was seated behind his desk rubbing his eyes with a hand that lacked a few fingers. Mooney listened to Catledge’s spiel for a while, expressing particular pleasure at Catledge’s being born in Mississippi, a state in which Mooney hoped to increase circulation. Then Mooney, rubbing his eyes again with the nub of his hand, interrupted Catledge and waved him out of the office, saying in a snappy tone that Catledge can hear even now: “Okay, okay, just walk down the hall, take a left, then take another left, and you’ll see a red-headed Jew and tell him to put you to work.”