In Love with Defeat. H. Brandt Ayers
Anniston had come into being at the same time as Birmingham, the state’s industrial capital. Both were post-Civil War towns that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s. But Anniston did not become the state’s major business and manufacturing center—which is too bad, because its founders endowed Anniston with a civic ideal while Birmingham was a runaway frontier town. Anniston had tantalizing mineral deposits, but sixty miles further west lay the major deposits of coal, limestone, and ore needed to make iron and steel. These deposits in Birmingham’s aptly named Red Mountain spawned a helter-skelter city—atop which a statue of Vulcan, god of fire and metalworking, stands today. One industrial titan whose personality dominated the erupting town was Colonel Henry DeBardeleben, described by the writer George Packer as a “coal-maddened Ahab.” DeBardeleben’s civic conscience was expressed in this pretty sentence: “I like to use money as I use a horse—to ride!” His defense against union organizers was a militia whose armaments included machine guns.
Birmingham’s homegrown Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company fell under control of an entrepreneurial Texas stock gambler, John “Bet a Million” Gates. During the Panic of 1907, J. P. Morgan proposed to save the country from a stock market crash by buying TCI stock from the Wall Street brokerage that held a majority of the stock in Gates’s syndicate. President Theodore Roosevelt endorsed the emergency scheme. Morgan bought TCI for roughly a dime on the dollar—thus eliminating U.S. Steel’s major competitor and creating a steel monopoly that became the godfather of Birmingham. From the 1880s until about 1970, the city’s soul was shaped by a succession of managers whose allegiance was to a corporation instead of the community, who helped guarantee that the world was safe for the Big Mules of industry and that the people and the press were orderly and respectful.
If Birmingham’s corporate chieftains saw their community as existing for the company’s benefit, Anniston’s founders wanted their company to uplift the community. Noble moved his family to the nineteenth-century “new town” and General Tyler persuaded his son, Alfred, to take up residence and help run the company. They first chose the name Woodstock, after the ancestral English town of the Noble family near Oxford. When the founders discovered there was another Alabama town named “Woodstock,” they named the new city for General Tyler’s wife, Annie, thus Anniston. The two families were determined to make the place where they lived as attractive as possible. Sam Noble expressed the civic ideal: “Instead of dissipating our earnings in dividends, we have concentrated them here . . . These reinvestments were judiciously made, and every dollar was made to do its best.” One of the earliest investments was a gilt-and-velvet jewel box of an opera house. Another gift was given in 1881, at Sam Noble’s suggestion, when the town council authorized the purchase of 100,000 water oaks to line the orderly grid of broad, north-south avenues named for Episcopal bishops (both families were Episcopalians) and east-west streets. On the east side, Grace Episcopal, a little gem of a parish for the carriage trade, was perched prettily on two landscaped lots which, together with the rectory and a finishing school for young ladies, covered an entire city block. On the west side, St. Michael and All Angels, filled with Italian-crafted marble statuary and set grandly on its own city block, was a cathedral for the working class. The liberal ideal of the founders extended to the workers in other ways, too. General Tyler believed that good workers should be well paid—twice the prevailing wage of fifty cents a day. Instead of paying rent for company-built houses in perpetuity, Woodstock’s workers accumulated equity in their houses, which encouraged upkeep and made the workers stake-holding, home-owning citizens.
In those days, Anniston had the best possible form of government—a visionary and benign dictatorship. As the Georgia-Pacific railroad pushed west toward Anniston, incorporation was required, which introduced democracy, that messy, necessary governing process which in time would clutter the founders’ dream. Among the assets with which this self-governing town began was a newspaper, which the founders established to be an adhesive to community. The first issue hit the streets on Saturday, August 18, 1883, the year the city was incorporated. It is said that Henry Grady and Sam Noble were discussing what to name the paper over a “toddy” on the veranda of Noble’s house when the Woodstock furnace lit the evening sky. “You’ve got to call it the Hot Blast,” Grady is supposed to have said. Grady’s “A Man and a Town,” a reprint of an Atlanta Constitution column, covered four of the seven front-page columns of Volume 1, Number 1 of the Anniston Hot Blast. He detailed the city’s founding and its guiding principles and described what he could see from Noble’s hilltop house. Grady’s excitement at seeing his capital-plus-commitment theory come so vibrantly to life was such that he hoisted the Noble-Tyler partnership to hyperbolic heights: “I thought, as I stood between their two houses, that . . . I had rather have been either of them . . . than to have been the president of these United States.”
Even discounting Grady’s exuberance, the founding vision was liberal to the point of utopian. Democracy’s tendency to choose the means—often the lowest common denominator— couldn’t maintain the brilliance of the dream that inspired the founders. By the time my generation was born, the slogan “Model City of the New South” was more than a little worn. But boys, having no past, are not interested in examining their own roots or that of their city. And having no way of comparing, I thought the place where I was born was pretty much all there was. It was very pleasant for those of us in my part of town, a white universe with black visitors who came on the bus or in old automobiles to cook, clean, garden, and drive for us. We called them “members of the family”; they came to our weddings and funerals, and we went to their funerals, but we all knew where the unspoken line lay between servant and employer. It was a line, not a wall, and thus easily breached by more powerful forces such as grief or affection. Despite that line, genuine bonds of affection and even love developed between individual “coloreds” (the polite term in the ancient regime) and their white employers. Alabama writer and former New York Times editor Howell Raines won the Pulitzer Prize for a magazine piece, “Grady’s Gift,” which poignantly probed such a relationship. It may seem saccharine to Yankees, but Southerners find authentic the line in Driving Miss Daisy when the old lady in the nursing home puts her hand on that of her former chauffeur/handyman and says, “Hoke, you’re my best friend.”
The late Willie Morris, an eloquent spokesman—drunk or sober— for our generation, recalled that his dying grandmother reached not for the hand of her daughter or any blood relative, but for the hand of the black woman who had lovingly looked after her every day for years. Willie and I, and anybody born to the small-town South, know that what passed between those two women was more important than race or station, and we are moved by the authenticity of the scene. Not to a well-known New York writer and his socially conscious wife, however. When Willie told that story at a sophisticated dinner party on the Upper East Side, the writer said, “That is the most racist description I’ve ever heard.” His wife added, “It’s a racist description of a corrupt and racist society.” Poor woman; a head stuffed with stereotypes blinded her to the life-taught knowledge of human interaction. She did not have the key to unlock the attic-consciousness of Southerners: the knowledge of loving and hating, enduring without hope of prevailing through remorse and forgiveness, and caring, eternally caring. At a party once in Willie Morris’s New York apartment, I asked Robert Penn “Red” Warren if he could explain why Southerners are more violent. He thought for a minute and said, “I think it has to do with caring more.” His instincts about us are uncommonly true.
Lila Esau, my first nurse, cared about me, and I loved Lila. She is a fond presence in my memory—slender, small, the color of cured tobacco. After she escaped our narrow universe for the relative freedom of Brooklyn and became a nurse, there would be a birthday note from Lila for me every April 8. The notes stopped years ago, a closure I recall with a stab of regret. A very different personality was Mildred White, the cook, who lived in “the little house” behind our three-story residence. She was no Carson McCullers character, a mass of good will humming gospel hymns and providing a comforting bosom for a boy, sensitive to the sharp edges of childhood. Mildred was a big, strong, ebony woman, a touchy, hard-working loner. She had a talent for frying chicken; she tackled the task with assembly-line energy and efficiency. It was a wonder to watch her machine-like performance, rolling wet pieces in spiced flour, briskly dropping them in the sizzling grease and plucking each golden brown piece at precisely the right moment, as if she were an industrial engineer. I couldn’t imagine Mildred crooning