Hugh Talmage Lefler

The April 26, 2023, issue of the Wall Street Journal contained a column by Danny Heitman, who regularly writes for the Baton Rouge Advocate. The article, entitled “I’m Revisiting the Books of My Youth”, explains why age and experience made him a better, more appreciative reader than when he was a student.

I have experienced something similar. During my college and graduate school years, I focused on math and science courses. I cared little for the traditional liberal arts courses and avoided all that I could. As a result, when I graduated from my liberal arts college, I did not possess a liberal arts education. For the past 48 years, I have been trying to rectify that defect in my education by reading extensively outside the disciplines of chemistry, physics, and mathematics.

It has not been easy. I am currently struggling with Plutarch’s masterwork, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Some of the chapters are excellent, even gripping, and some are not. It is the sheer length of this work that is killing me: my copy includes 876 pages, two columns per page, of small type. Amazon tells me that a copy printed normally comes in at nearly 1200 pages. By comparison, Amazon tells me that Tolstoy’s War and Peace (another book I’ve never read) clocks in at a bit over 1100 pages. Sheesh!

But some of my reading is really quite pleasurable. Consider, for example, my seventh-grade North Carolina history textbook written by UNC Kenan Professor of History Hugh T. Lefler (1901-1981).

In 1959 Lefler wrote North Carolina: History, Geography, Government, the text that we used during the 1965-1966 school year. I recently purchased a copy online and re-read it cover to cover. It was a joy to see history written plainly, free from the current ideological idiocies afflicting what is supposed to be our intellectual class.

The book was written for school children, but the writing is not boring for an adult. (A book written for seventh-graders in 1959 could pass for a book written for today’s twelfth-graders.) Lefler pulled no punches. He freely discussed the problems that North Carolina faced in its development. An absence of inlets, only one reasonably-navigable river, shallow sounds, and a general dependence on both the Virginia and South Carolina colonies hampered its growth. North Carolina also suffered from periods of poor leadership. The state was slow to adopt a system of public education, and suffered from a lack of decent roads, and later, railroads. All these defects Lefler reported factually.

But Lefler did not fail to mention the positives as well as the negatives. Unit 13 is entitled “How People are North Carolina’s Greatest Riches”. This struck a responsive chord in me. The economist Julian Simon once noted that our system of calculating GDP neglected the positive contributions made by humans: when a calf is born on a farm, the GDP goes up by a very, very small amount, but not so when a human is born.

The photographs in the book are simply great. The Zebulon B. Vance monument in Pack Square, Asheville, was removed before I moved here, as Vance was one of the wartime governors of North Carolina during the late unpleasantness and therefore one to be canceled. The color photo of the monument shows the impressive nature of the memorial, and reminds me of what we have lost to the politically-correct fascists.

This essay is running a bit long, but I must note a couple of items in closing. I turned to the index to look up “Civil War”. This is what I found:

“Civil War. See War for Southern Independence”

Indeed, throughout the book, one never sees the words “Civil War”. When he did not use the term “War for Southern Independence” he used “War Between the States”.

The chapter on the governance of the state beginning with the year 1868 is entitled “A Period of Bad Government”, which is undoubtedly true, and stated quite frankly. In the section entitled “Corruption by Lobbyists” I found the following:

“’General’ Milton S. Littlefield was much to blame for this. He was a carpetbagger from New York who had become a leading citizen of Raleigh. He knew how to get the members of the legislature to vote for the laws that he wanted.”

Note the absence of scare quotes around the word “carpetbagger”. There was no “alleged” about it. Littlefield was a carpetbagger, with all the negative connotations that term carried with it. I suspect that most students today do not know the meaning, much less the origin, of the term.

I believe that my pleasure in reading this book is due to the fact that Lefler really did love the state of North Carolina and the United States of America and that he was not afraid to allow his love to show in his writing.