Review - Josephus Daniels career explored

Lee A. Craig. Courtesy photo

Last Modified: Friday, May 24, 2013 at 8:22 a.m.

Before Jim Hunt, Jesse Helms or Pat McCrory, Tar Heel politics was dominated by the towering presence of Josephus Daniels, a name that's almost forgotten today.

For a half-century before his death in 1947, Daniels was the editor and proprietor of the Raleigh News & Observer, back when it was known as "the Nuisance and Disturber" and served as the dominant daily newspaper for most of Eastern North Carolina.

As fervent a Democrat as he was a Methodist, Daniels was a kingmaker who lashed out at political opponents. (A Duke University professor named Bassett, who challenged orothodoxy, was repeatedly referred to as "bASSett" in the N&O's editorials.)

Daniels was known for spotting political talent early. He latched on early to Princeton University President (and former Wilmington resident) Woodrow Wilson, who appointed Daniels his secretary of the Navy.

Today sailors and Marines ruefully recall Daniels – a devout prohibitionist – as the man who banned alcoholic beverages from U.S. Navy vessels. The phrase "cup of Joe" as a synonym for coffee seems to have originated with sailors as a backhanded salute to their secretary.

In the Navy Department, however, Daniels saw something special in the young New Yorker, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who became his chief deputy. Later, in the White House, FDR would name Daniels his ambassador to Mexico, where the Tar Heel farm boy mended fences after decades of tension following the Mexican Revolution.

A good biography of Daniels is long overdue, and North Carolina State University professor Lee A. Craig has filled that need with "Josephus Daniels: His Life and Times."

Craig spends much of his time trying to make sense of the contradictions in Daniels' character. Born in 1862 in the midst of the Civil War, Daniels grew up nourished on legends of the Glorious Lost Cause; Confederate veterans were his substitute father figures. (His own father, a shipwright who spent much of the war working at the Beery shipyard in Wilmington, was killed at the very end of the war under murky circumstances.)

Daniels was a white supremacist. In the viciously racist 1898 election campaign, Daniels had selectively reprinted excerpts from a Wilmington Record editorial by African-American newsman Alexander Manly to inflame bigotry among white voters. Years later, Daniels acknowledged that his role in 1898 had been "cruel, too cruel" and he deserves at least a share of the blame for the riot and coup that followed the balloting in Wilmington.

In other respects, though, Daniels acted as a progressive. He used his newspapers to promote greater funding for public schools and the state's colleges and universities. A canny businessman, he thought businesses needed to be regulated to ensure fairness in the marketplace, and he was more than willing to tax and spend for the public good.

Craig, an economic historian, draws a rather muted portrait of a colorful character, but his background gives his biography hidden strengths. He underlines the economic changes that shaped Daniels' career – for example, the rise of flue-cured tobacco and the Duke and Reynolds tobacco dynasties, which supplanted cotton as North Carolina's cash crop at the turn of the past century.

Craig also underlines Daniels' business acumen as a newspaperman. Before him, local newspapers were seldom money-making propositions on their own, and had to rely on political patronage (and local governments' printing contracts) to survive. Daniels mastered the trick of running a money-making regional paper, away from big urban centers, relying on advertising and subscriptions. (The advent of rural free delivery helped.)

Daniels also believed that the key to a money-making paper was delivering accurate, detailed reporting. His editorial pages might have been yellow-dog Democrat, but his news columns were straight and relatively unbiased. As Craig notes, Daniels and print tycoons of his age helped invent the modern newspaper.

Ben Steelman: 343-2208


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