The Unlikely Origin of Tourism’s Sense of Authenticity

Reaching back to a tent restaurant erected there in 1919, Lexington brands itself, at least in part, the “barbecue capital” of North Carolina, a state with considerable heritage in that regard.

But it was a tragic train accident eight years earlier that occurred between that would-be tent site and what is now High Rock Lake that is more symbolic for tourism historically across the nation.

My Tar Heel Roots go back to 1650 but because I am the last of a line of five generations of Idaho ranchers going back to the 1860s and didn’t make my way to North Carolina until 1989, I’m considered “adopted” by those who could be considered far more relative “newbies.”

But it seems that wherever I’ve lived, including my native Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, I’ve crossed paths with William F. Cody.  It was least expected here in North Carolina as I began what would be the last half of a four decade career in community destination marketing.

When a freight train tragically smashed into one of three trains near Lexington, Cody’s “Buffalo Bill Wild West Show”s (sometimes known by other names) was in the midst of 40 performances throughout North Carolina between 1878 and 1916, including two in Durham where we live.

Over 100 horses were killed in the accident, and the vitality of the show that had also performed hundreds of times throughout the country and throughout Europe would never really recover.

But it is easily arguable that no other person did more to instill a curiosity for transcontinental travel across the United States in both Americans and those overseas.

His attention to detail and authenticity informed expectations. 

Equally significant, Cody redefined and instilled a deep appreciation for history, culture and artifacts among those living in relatively newly settled lands east of the Hundredth Meridian.

He seemed to innately grasp what place branding expert Bill Baker tries to impart wherever he is invited to teach.

The brand of a particular place is, in essence, its innate personality.  It exists at the intersection of what internal audiences and external audiences perceive it to be.

Today, more than ever, it is not something you conjure up or create, it’s simple who and what you genuinely are, something Cody understood was far more appealing than fantasy.

In a moment I will share a story or two about how Cody’s influence has helped shape the negotiation of authenticity over the decades about what it is and isn’t western, a negotiation still underway.

But first, for anyone unfamiliar or in need of a very quick refresher:

Cody was born in Iowa in 1846; the year after my ancestors began fleeing across the southern half of that soon-to-be state toward sanctuary in the Rockies.

Then his family moved to eastern Kansas where he lost his father.

At age 11 he worked as a rider carrying messages between drivers and workers on wagon trains before becoming a bullwhacker, then a trapper, miner and briefly a Pony Express Rider.

He enlisted in the Union Cavalry and after the war worked as a buffalo hunter for the railroad.  Cody then became a Chief of Scouts for the 5th U.S. Cavalry, leading the rescue of Wild Bill Hickok.

Eventually, he earned the Medal of Honor during the Indian Wars.

Cody became a public figure and the subject of dime novels as well as outspoken about the rights of Native Americans.  In addition, he became a performer and show producer.

As a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, Cody was also instrumental in the nation’s first national forest and the national reclamation act.

The best way to get a sense of William F. Cody is to visit his namesake along the Absaroka Mountains in northern Wyoming as they give way to the Bighorn.

Cody, Wyoming is the eastern and to many the most scenic and least touristy gateway to Yellowstone Park.  It is also home to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, which is comprised of four museums including one devoted to Bill Cody’s story as well as a research library.

The little town is also home to the still operating Irma Hotel which Cody co-founded a year after that train wreck back in North Carolina. 

He began by acquiring and then expanding the T E Ranch up the more secluded South Fork from Cody in 1895 and then built a hunting lodge up on the North Fork where the road now leads to Yellowstone since the dam was built.

But Cody first saw the potential of this area in 1870 while leading a scientific expedition up the Bighorn.  It happened to be the same year an expedition was being led to examine the potential of Yellowstone.

Until then, exploration of river valleys along the Rockies such as the Henry’s Fork where my ancestors would settle were dismissive of any settlement potential.  But fresh eyes such as Cody’s changed all of that.

William F. Cody had a sense of authenticity that has inspired 150 years of nomenclature about the old West and is preserved today in details and artifacts such as clothing and dress and speech.

His shows inspired audiences to travel and to know what to expect.  They also helped negotiate what experts call the ongoing interplay and socially-agreed upon construct that we designate as authentic.

Tourism faces much courser fault lines than just authenticity today.  Take for instance, the one that exists between commercial hucksterism and genuine sense of place.

The West does too, and not just recently with standoffs by a few militants in Nevada and Oregon.

In 1939, a movement anchored in the Sheridan Rotary Club began with a threat to secede and break off northern Wyoming including Cody and Yellowstone into the State of Absoroka.

The frustration back then, as it had been during the “range wars” 50 years earlier was more about intrastate politics with the federal policies as a surrogate.

But as it does today, another fault line separated the views of preservationist northwestern and fossil-fuel driven northeastern Wyoming.

I thought of this on a cross country trip through my homeland a few years ago while listening to a story on the radio far more reflective of the West in which I grew up.

A rancher down on the South Fork, near Cody’s T E ranch, was out irrigating his hay fields in June of 2013 when he accidentally came between a Grizzly and her cubs.

Watch this very short video of this remarkable account and listen carefully to Nic Patrick’s remarks at the end.

If you are a regular reader, you may recall that my great-great-great grandfather, Thomas B. Graham, was killed in 1864 by a Grizzly in Cache Valley, Utah under similar circumstances, after having put his rifle down to help my great-great grandfather load some wood.

Like many ranchers, Patrick is a conservationist.  Also like many ranchers, he has another occupation.  For nearly forty years, he and his family have built authentic log homes, often for people who are drawn to live a version of the life Bill Cody depicted.

He understands something that William F. Cody came to understand during his lifetime.

Tourism can help preserve nature and the things it loves.  But unmanaged tourism can also often introduce changes that can kill the very the things it loves.

A lot is written today about gentrification of historic neighborhoods.  If well-managed so that socio-economic diversity is preserved, it isn’t a problem.  If not, the very soul of those neighborhoods and the reasons they became so popular is rapidly hollowed out.

However, gentrification can also occur in areas of the West around public lands.   Studies show that for both kinds of gentrification, tourism popularity can provide warning signals to policy makers that they need to instill protections.

Unfortunately, tourism circles today have far too few Buffalo Bill Cody’s.  Instead of being willing to debate the broader issues society faces, they are prone instead to circle the wagons.

Tracing The Influences of a Strategic Foresight

You wonder what was on the mind of North Carolina’s greatest entrepreneur in the last three decades of his life.

I suspect it was dirt.

By the 1930s, the Piedmont region of North Carolina had lost an average seven inches of soil to erosion, up to 18 inches in some places.

The reddish, sometimes yellowish, clay so prevalent now is actually a subsoil laid bare by this erosion according to historians such as Dr. Paul Sutter.

The effects of that erosion are clearly evident today.  It is why nearly all of our creeks, streams, rivers and lakes are muddy and will be, according to ecologists, for a thousand years.

A hundred years before we had “climate change deniers,” we had “erosion deniers.”  They, too, had policy makers who tried to outlaw science.

Deniers of both are still in office in some states today.

James Buchanan “Buck” Duke, who died in 1925 at age 69, would not have been among the latter nor were he alive today, the former I suspect.

Duke was eight and living with family in Greensboro during the chaotic end of the Civil War, as it was being negotiated near his home in Durham even as his recently released Confederate father, a Unionist, made his way back home.

He was 17 when his father moved their tobacco factory into town and just 21 when “Sons” was added to the name of the enterprise.  His father delegated manufacturing and marketing to Buck.

He is widely regarded today as the first genius in modern marketing.

But before relocating those four miles into Durham, Buck had earlier left the family farm during his teens first to attend what is now Guilford College in Greensboro.

But he soon left there to attend a business college called the Eastman National Business College, a school of business in Poughkeepsie, New York (the image at this link dates to his tenure there.)

He may have been the quintessential Tar Heel at the time, accent, chaw of tobacco and all, but uniquely for his time he also had formal business training including a curriculum that included practical experience to inform his innate entrepreneurial and strategic gifts.

At 24 he was made chief executive of his family’s business and opened a branch in New York.  Before he was 30 he took the company public.  By the time he turned 34, Buck Duke headed a trust that controlled 80% of tobacco production in the world.

In what we call today a SWOTs analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats,) he was well aware that one of the biggest threats to his company came not from federal regulators but the soil depletion associated with growing cotton and tobacco.

At first tobacco had required fertile land.  But the weed-like varieties that yielded a much milder and more popular tobacco not only formed the basis of the Duke corporate empire but they grew on lands depleted by cotton.

But after a few years, even this tobacco wouldn’t grow without huge amounts of fertilizer, which became prevalent after the Civil War, as well as large quantities of water and eventually pesticides.

Still growing tobacco was leaving swaths of abandoned farm land unproductive because its topsoil had washed away.

Buck Duke did not know of tobacco’s harmfulness to health but he could readily see during his time that it was not good for the environment or future business.

With half of his life still ahead of him including new entrepreneurial pursuits in hydroelectric power and higher education in his home state, Duke bought a farm 45 miles west of New York City and assembled nearly 40 others, for a total of over 2,700 acres in all.

Northern New Jersey had been deforested for agriculture and charcoal by 1850, resulting in heavy erosion into the Raritan River adjacent to his land.

Any forest remnants that remained, here and there, were in poor condition.

Buck Duke foresaw by several years a call in 1896 by the state geologist for reforestation and protection of watersheds.  Primeval forests were extinct and nearly half of the state had been cleared of trees.

Forest fires were ravaging what remained to the south. half of them caused by sparks from locomotives.

Through much of his 40s, Buck Duke worked feverishly to recreate more of a nature area than an estate including excavating and/or rehabilitating, enhancing and connecting a chain of nine lakes and associated waterfalls.

All of this was protected by extensive reforestation of more than 2 million trees.

His vision, in the wake of deforestation, was to create a natural “wonderland,” but he also experimented with sustainable hydroelectric power there and methods to make both land and water more sustainable as well.

Within a few years, his work would be the inspiration for forest parks in New Jersey.

Coincidentally, this was the same period in which his father, Washington Duke, aided by other Durham leaders was busy relocating the 1830’s Trinity College to Durham as the foundation for what would later be renamed Duke University.

But rather than a retirement for Buck Duke, this period of creating what is called Duke Farms in north-central New Jersey was more of an entrepreneurial interlude to be inspired by his intrigue with hydrology and forestation.

It was also about this time that soil research became a national priority, including its indispensable role in life and its birth from forest.

The system Buck created with his natural restoration at the turn of the 19th century was designed to pump a million gallons of water per day from a canal above the Raritan River up to a reservoir.

From there the water was then controllably-released through gravity to flow successively down through nine excavated lakes and related waterfalls as well as restored meadows, lagoons and other wetlands before being reintroduced to the river much cleaner than when it was removed.

Lets just say that before he turned his attention a few years later, when not yet 50, to a startup back in his home state that would become Duke Energy today, Buck Duke knew what he was doing.

That experience through his 40s gave him an understanding of how to later rehabilitate thousands of acres of depleted farm land in his hometown of Durham by laying the groundwork near the end of his life for what would become Duke Forest as part of his transformation of Duke University.

Soil scientists estimate that in North Carolina where under virgin forest exists, it would take approximately 468,000 years to remove a topsoil layer, something that takes only a matter of minutes with today’s method of site preparation in advance of buildings.

Soil science is a discipline fathered as we know it today by another North Carolinian, Hugh Hammond Bennett.

But some who had previously also cut their teeth in North Carolina had been “erosion deniers,” as some policy makers are today.

Back then, evidence was mounting in some studies that would show that an average of 5.3 feet of topsoil sediment had discharged between 1820 and 1830 atop pre-settlement floodplains.

Ironically, many areas we consider treasured wetlands now were really created by these sediment avalanches.

As a ten year old, Bennett has been observing erosion on his family farm near Wadesboro at about the same time Duke was experimenting with how to prevent it as well as restore and protect polluted waterways.

Bennett was graduating from UNC and starting out his career by performing soil surveys in North Carolina counties in the two years before Duke returned to his native Tar Heel state.

One subsequent 1920 survey of Durham soils is filled with descriptions and information about Durham at the time Duke spent much of the last years of his life back here.

Based on a plan hatched in 1919, Buck Duke at the time of the survey was already buying up what would be 5,000 acres (today more than 7,000) of mostly depleted farmland in Durham dotted here and there by remnants of old growth forests.

But this was much more than what was needed for what are now Duke University’s West and Central campuses.

While much of the land he acquired would be reclaimed by forest, telltale gullies are visible today in the undergrowth, tombstones for an era of topsoil erosion.

Only today, the culprits behind that continued destruction are more likely to be mechanized site preparation for buildings which not only scrape off or crush fragile top soils but compact it so as to be impervious.

Most credit those acquisitions from 1919 through the early 1920s stretching across west and southwest Durham as well as west into Orange and eventually Alamance counties to Duke’s strategic sensibilities, a means that guaranteed access roads and water availability.

But his past experience suggests something even more strategic.

The School of Forestry created five years after Duke’s death is credited to William Preston Few, a longtime friend who was the university’s then president, along with a Forest Service veteran turned professor and researcher named Clarence Korstian, with the creation of Duke Forest.

Korstian had served in the United States Forest Service out West including a stint in the Pacific Northwest during the period of The Big Burn in 1910 before an assignment in the North Carolina Mountains.

He followed that with a stint at Yale before returning for a consulting assignment at Duke.

Few had spent a lot of time with Buck Duke, and while intrigued by Harvard Forest, in the mid-1920s he had recruited an ecologist named A.S. Pearse who was even more intrigued with the potential of the lands Duke had purchased.

Pearse connected Few with Korstian in 1927.  Buck Duke had died suddenly in late 1925 leaving behind one last stroke of entrepreneurial genius, a vast endowment so visionary it is as relevant today as it was then.

At his death, he was one of only 23 multimillionaires who had been born in the South, out of 331 nationwide.  But unique to others, he directed his philanthropy back to his roots.

It isn’t a leap to conclude that his influence was very present as Few, Pearse and Korstian envisioned Duke Forest.  Not at all.

If only shorter sighted policy makers in Durham today had the strategic sense of this earlier native son when it comes to the overall urban forest canopy.

North Carolina’s Earliest Post Progressives

Following the American Revolution and creation of a new system of government, North Carolina spent the first four or five decades of the 1800s under the control of regressives.

Before delving into the small but determined resistance to regressives during that period and what they would be able to eventually change, as well as a state icon they couldn’t in time, it may be helpful to explain what regressive means.

Philosophically, regressives differ from other conservatives because rather than just seeking to tap the brakes on what they see as unbridled progressivism, regressives actually seek to reverse progress.

Following the American Revolution, most were not among the third of North Carolinians still loyal to Great Britain or, of course, the 25% in bondage.

But regressives represented a faction that lobbied for a return to those pre-war values and ideals.

In the Tar Heel state, a slightly higher percentage were regressives than than those who were characterized as radicals or rioters because they wanted even more change.

Together, these two group narrowly outnumbered the remaining loyalists, most of whom would emigrate elsewhere.

Throughout the nation, as other states perpetuated the progressivism upon which America was founded, regressives in North Carolina during those early decades earned it a reputation as the “Rip Van Winkle” state.

As a result, land values plummeted as more than a third of North Carolinians moved away.

Between 1830 and 1840 alone, nearly half of the counties lost population according to a superbly documented book entitled, North Carolina Through Four Centuries.

The 1850 census revealed that 31% of all native North Carolinians still living in the United States resided in some other state.  Backwardness had driven away more than 400,000 Tar Heels, two-thirds of whom were white.

This was equivalent to half the state’s population in that census.

For the first half of the 1800s, the legislature was controlled by less than 10% of the population, including slave-holding planters living down east who were adamantly opposed to public education, roads, government in general and taxes.

Fast forward two hundred years.  Sound slightly familiar?

Between 2000 and 2010, half of North Carolina’s counties were again losing population with most relocating to the state’s more progressive cities.

Regressivism is as much a part of America as any other view, if not a bit ironic in a nation forged by progressives.  But it doesn’t take popularity for this view to seize control.

Because very few voters today are able to vote for the handful of legislators who are in control of setting legislative agendas in many states, including North Carolina, those decisions are also essentially controlled by about 10% of the electorate.

In part, it is an inherent flaw in representative democracy vs. more “popular” forms of democracy, but not perhaps, a view currently held by regressives who often seem to rationalize overriding the views of the majority of voters by insisting that the same would be done to them were they not in power.

Fueling this partisan view of “screw them before they screw you back,” is the fact that since 1998 “fewer than 10% of both state senate and state house seats have been competitive,” a factor driven by partisan gerrymandering of districts.

The thing to remember is that during much of that earlier period of regression following the Revolution, a handful of deeply concerned and resilient North Carolinians were persistently advocating progressive ideas, which following the Civil War, would put “the state on a totally new course.”

They were named Yancey, Caldwell, Fisher, Swain, Gaston, Morehead and Graham.

But their architect was Judge Archibald DeBow Murphey who was born in Red House, which is now called Semora, a crossroads just northwest of what is now Hyco Lake, a twin in Person County just west of Mayo Lake where we now split time with our home just south in Durham.

The area of Murphey’s origins is now a part of Caswell County, but when he was born it was a part of Orange County. 

Judge Murphey eventually practiced law down in Hillsborough a few miles west from what is now Durham and established a residence in Hawsfield (southwest of current-day Mebane.)

It was during this period that Murphey crafted his plan for North Carolina’s salvation including “establishment of a public education system, construction of canals and turnpike roads, as well as a general public welfare system,” and eventually railroads.

In fact, regardless of sympathies, North Carolinians weren’t paying much attention to succession leading up to the Civil War.

Instead they were focused on constitutional reform and a struggle over ad valorem taxes as a means for wealthy plantation owners to pay their fair share to fund Murphey’s vision.

Many of Durham’s founding generation were heavily influenced by Murphey’s strategic views including his close friends here, the Camerons.

They encouraged others in what would become Durham to push for statewide progress such as building railroads and a strong banking system.

Keep in mind by 1820, only 7% of Americans lived in cities and progressives such as Murphey saw a scalable role in development and progress for state government. 

There were only 61 settlements with more than 2,500 people in the whole country at the time and only five with more than 25,000 people so progressives such as Murphey were clearly farsighted.

But progressives at the time were not able to save the longleaf pine forests that provided North Carolinians their “tar heel” nickname as well as a species of our state tree.

In pre-settlement times, these savannah-like forests dominated a swath from northeast North Carolina in a strip that straddled the fall line between the Piedmont and Coastal Plain continuing in an arc down through the south all the way to Texas, 90 million acres in all.

These would have been the forests where my 8th great grandmother Mary Jane was born on Salmon Creek, more than three hundred years before I would uncover my North Carolina roots.

But from a time before North Carolina earned its “tar heel” nickname until the mid-1800s, these trees were used for naval stores or in other words tar, pitch, rosin and turpentine.

More than just shipping, it was the “wagon” industry that relied on grease produced from these distinct trees as well as uses for their wood by settlers, such as fencing.

Colonists would gird or strangle the trees to death while replacing the understory savannah grasses with corn and other crops as well as letting livestock such as hogs range wild.

Soon huge numbers of hogs, cattle, horses, mules, sheep and goats eventually trampled through these forests contributing to their demise while depleting the soil across much of North Carolina by 1900.

By 1920, the longleaf pine was virtually extinct. 

Gone were not only trees that take 100 to 150 years to reach full size (between 98 and 115 feet) and may live to be 500 years old, but gone too were seas of understory savannah grasses.

Environmental and science historians have placed nearly as much blame on these practices for the sediments that will muddy North Carolina’s streams, rivers and lakes for a thousand years, as they do on the farming practices used to raise cotton and tobacco.

Another factor is that we know now that our soils in the South are much more fragile than other parts of the country.

Fully two-thirds of the deforestation that has taken place across America over the last 400 years occurred during the sixty years between 1850 and 1910.

When a movement took hold to re-plant pine trees in North Carolina, short-leaf pines such as loblolly were used instead of longleaf pines because they grow faster, much closer together and don’t require ground fire to reproduce.

Since the 1960s when collectively pines were named North Carolina’s state tree, efforts have been underway to re-establish longleaf pines using prescribed fire along their base as well as protecting the tiny old growth stands that have been discovered.

But one thing is for sure, for now this means that North Carolina has a much different natural sense of place than it once had.

It is in the wake of this desecration that culminated in the early 1900s that another strategic wave of progressivism took hold in North Carolina, launching its mainstream status as a tourism destination.

More on that in the next post, including a fourth wave in the early 1970s that voters embedded in the constitution, something that legislators including regressives today choose to ignore.

This Ongoing War 150 Years Later

In North Carolina, it’s no surprise to learn that “since 1960, one third of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion.”  Nor, according to scientists, that “46-58 thousand square miles of forest are lost each year – equivalent to 36 football fields every minute.”

Tar Heels have witnessed the link between depleted soils and deforestation in the decades before the Civil War when more than a third of North Carolinians moved away.

By 1850, 31% of native North Carolinians then living in the United States resided in some other state.

Backwardness regarding slavery and race relations as well as resistance to public education and infrastructure played a big role in the out migration as did poor land use practices by plantations.

It’s well documented by unapologetic historians such as the late Dr. William S. Powell.

I’ve been reading or rereading two others recently, one written the year I was born (1948) entitled From Slavery to Freedom and another just released entitled, The Old North State at War: The North Carolina Civil War Atlas.

Both shed new light.

The latter shows the population breakdown by race and freedom-status broken down by county just prior to the Civil War, as well as the vote by county for or against succession.

You can see a divide back then running down between what is now Durham and Wake/Raleigh with 5 points more slave-holders in Wake.

Wake/Raleigh also had twice the number of slaves as Durham/Orange and nearly three times the number of free Blacks out of 30,463 statewide.

There were a little more than 125,000 households in North Carolina in 1860 and 28.2% owned slaves.

Yet in 1861, Durham/Orange voted by more than 3 to 1 against succession from the Union while Wake/Raleigh voted for it by a few hundred votes.

As the rhetoric heated, the state as a whole was almost evenly split on the issue with a slight nod against.  People’s minds back then were more focused on the wealthy paying more in taxes here.

Within weeks though, secessionists won out both because of a general sentiment of “you can’t tell us what to do” and being surrounded by states that had or were succeeding.

The North won the Civil War that resulted, which effectively ended with a surrender in Durham.  Thanks to resistance by Southern Generals Lee and Johnston there wasn’t the subsequent guerilla war Southern leaders wanted.

But that didn’t mean war was over.

Another war erupted almost immediately between Democrats who were controlled by white supremacists and Republicans.

Just as a small percentage of the population had monopolized power in North Carolina and kept it backward, then pushed it into a war to defend slavery as a way of life for a few, a similarly small percentage held power in this follow up war.

Political rhetoric is powerful as we still see today.  It can close minds more easily than open them, something given comprehensive coverage a few days ago in an On the Media radio show entitled Lies, Lies, Lies.  

Republicans lost this follow up war and soon became all but extinct across the South because the party had became divided into an increasingly conflict-weary faction seeking social justice leading to a takeover by its Wall Street wing.

Just as Democrats had become divided into factions over slavery leading up to the Civil War, resulting in President Lincoln’s election, factionalized Republicans lost the follow up-struggle.

Following the South’s defeat and preservation of the Union in the Civil War, reunited Democrats fell sway to the rhetoric of a small fraction of white supremacists who this time sought not only to reinstate limitations on civil liberties, but to virtually annihilate the Republican Party in the South, which they did.

As a result, civil rights in the reunified country were put on hold for another hundred years and even today, seem lodged between ongoing institutionalized bias on one hand and a futile obsession with effacing racist symbols on the other.

The two political parties have switched roles today.

It began gradually in the decades leading up to the 1930s on issues of social and environmental justice, then became increasingly apparent after WWII and symbolized by the 1960s.

As someone who was raised a staunch Republican which I remained until nearly 25, I have been particularly interested in the history of the Republican and Democratic parties.

My Republican roots go back to the party’s founding.  But many of those ancestors would no longer be welcome there.  People who sense I lean Progressive probably don’t realize that it is the Republican Party that has shifted.

Understanding how the parties have evolved helps me understand how I briefly moved to the left in my mid-20s before finding my comfort zone as an Independent except wherever forced to briefly sign up so I could vote in primaries.

Today it is Republican ideology that seems to view everything as a threat to way of life, dominated by a few who seem to want to annihilate not only Democrats but anyone who dares to be moderate.

We see it in the refusal to negotiate or reach bipartisan agreement, even when Democrats sign on to Republican-generated innovations such as carbon credits or healthcare overhaul using exchanges that emulate the requirement for car insurance.

Further evidence is research showing that the root of Republican opposition to addressing climate change is the knee-jerk stereotyping of anyone concerned about the environment as a “watermelon,” green on the outside, red (as in Commie for you Millennials) on the outside.

The one thing that remains constant is that just as a tiny minority held North Carolina back after the U.S. was founded and the Civil War was fought to preserve the way of life lived by only 28% of Tar Heels, policies here are still driven by a small percentage in power.

The only thing certain is that the pendulum will swing yet again, but not the problem.

The parties may reverse roles yet again one day and apologists, as always, will try to smooth everything over like propagandists did between 1866 and 1966 by transforming the issue of slavery into “states’ rights.”

Democracy truly exists only when a majority of people vote, not just when the vote is a majority of those showing up.   Maybe similar to governing boards, popular elections should be valid only when there is a quorum?

As a moderate Independent who more and more has a little “time on him” as they say in my native Idaho, I am more and more aware of the dangers of failing to admit to myths when in pursuit of greatness as a nation or perpetuating a way of life.

I know far too many reasonable Republicans and far too many crazy Democrats to believe the rhetoric when one or the other party gives in to zero sum thinking.

But as President George Washington lamented in 1795, the problem may be in the nature of political parties, meant as a means to help people make decisions but then used as a reason not to think:

“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Lament indeed!

The True Bellwethers of Revitalization

At the conclusion of my last post, I promised to delve further into the DNA of my adopted home town Durham, NC’s emergence as a foodie powerhouse and the bellwether revitalization role of locally-owned chef driven restaurants.

It is a movement rooted here in the 1970s and 1980s, that along with a sense of place revolt, deserves primary credit for Durham’s resurgence, including downtown’s, and helping make it one of the most acclaimed communities anywhere.

But the fingerprints of this movement stretch back nearly 70 years or more.

First, as an aside, it is too bad that communities don’t follow the lead of tiny rural towns such as Ashton, Idaho (pop. 1,000) - the closest place to the ancestral ranch of my birth and early years.

There, the local chamber of commerce is different from others across the nation which have long since deserted sense of place or wisely surrendered it when destination marketing organizations are established for that purpose.

Small rural towns without the resources for specialization are often sources of best practice nuggets.

An example is that Ashton’s volunteer business organization makes an effort to include in the profiles of each member, where possible, the DNA of each location often going back to when the community was established.

One example from my youth traces the heritage of a row of 1920s log cabins as part of a motel that I fondly recall behind the grade school I attended.

I wish I had thought to build this capacity into the DMO inventories and databases for the three communities I represented over the years.

Durham is so extremely fortunate to have Open Durham, a local website created and populated by a friend and physician-turned-developer.

It drills down location by location into the heritage of Durham’s built environment including occupants.

It was interesting to note recently in a Durham News Service post that a local native-returned-home chef plans to open a diner in the storefronts below a mid-century motel under renovation in Downtown Durham.

It happens that when when I was being recruited to come here in the spring of 1989, I ate at another diner in that very location, kitty-corner from the newly opened hotel where I was put up, called the Plaza.

But Open Durham reminds us that it was also the 1910 location of the Plaza Café at the base of the Hackney Building that preceded the classic 1960s motel now under restoration.

I’ve written previously that today’s colony of Durham chef-owner-driven restaurants dates to at least the first half of the 1980’s well before I was I was recruited here to start up and lead the community's official destination marketing organization.

That’s when these locally owned restaurants also became a force for revitalization of districts such as Ninth Street and Downtown.

But their finger prints extend even further back.

Nearly a decade before he opened Café Parizade in the Ninth Street District and Taverna Nikos Downtown, in 1981 Georgios Bakatsias (Bok-i-shaw) who has now concepted and opened restaurants in many cities, opened his first restaurant in Durham.

He was 19 years old when his persistence persuaded a local banker to place trust in him.  One day Durham will recognize that no one has done more than the unpretentious Georgios over so many decades to inspire its culinary prowess.

The former Bakatsias Cuisine was where the restaurant Blue Olive thrives today but while it wasn’t the first of its caliber in Durham including Downtown or the Ninth Street districts, Bakatsias quickly drew attention to Durham’s culinary potential.

Nineteen eighty one (1981) is also the year that Mary Bacon opened the former and soon-to-be-acclaimed Anotherthyme in downtown just as two dilapidated tobacco warehouses nearby were adaptively renovated as Brightleaf Square.

Both were a nod to the awakening brought about by the mid-1970s sense of place revolt that first ignited Downtown Durham’s turnaround.

As I noted in my last essay, it is chef-driven and -owned restaurants that first inhabit areas where the bones of sense of place remain well after their decline, inspiring adaptive reuse developers behind them.

All of what I have outlined so far predated the opening of arguably Durham’s most nationally famous restaurant, the former Magnolia Grill in the Ninth Street District, which chefs Ben and Karen Barker opened in November 1986.

In the early 1980s, it was the Barkers who were one of the very earliest pioneers of what is now known as farm-to-table by sourcing ingredients from local farms.

But the contributions of locally-owned, chef-driven restaurants to Downtown Durham’s revitalization was also nearly a decade before Nana’s and Foster’s Market, both in the Rockwood District, would add to Durham’s acclaim in 1990, while reinvigorating that area.

This was also the year Durham native and Magnolia Grill-alumnus chef Walter Royal, along with partner Don Wexell, opened the former Delta cuisine-themed Crescent Café in the fall of 1990 deep into in the very heart of Downtown.

Royal wasn’t alone.  Chef Mark Day had left Fowler’s Gourmet in 1987 to open a highly acclaimed Bistro a few doors away called Mark’s at Five Points, next to the former Ghirardelli Ravioli Factory (wholesale/retail) which had opened two years earlier.

Both were located where Bull McCabe’s is today and where the former Joe & Jo’s and the indomitable but unpretentious JoAnne Worthington made such an impact on the continued resurgence of downtown between 2002 and 2006 by being, well, Durham.

The Crescent Café opened just as lofts were being created above it in historic buildings along Main Street and just over a year after DCVB had been founded, in part to capitalize on national acclaim such as the Crescent would bring to Durham and downtown by mid-1991.

This was years before Downtown Durham Inc. came to life as an advocate for that area of Durham, fostering economic development from the supply-side as a complement to DCVB’s demand-side approach community wide.

This was also decades before building owners and developers would come to understand how important having truly locally-owned chef-driven restaurants is to not only property values but authenticity and identity.

But the DNA of Durham’s emergence as a foodie town also stretches back long before 1973 when Mary had opened an earlier restaurant in the Ninth Street District called Somethyme.

In many ways, it traces back at least to 1949 which is the first year that Mayola’s Grill opened in what is now the Brightleaf District of Downtown Durham.

It was through the block from what would open as the former Ivy Room later known for “chicken in the rough,” similar to a favorite place on Spokane’s South Hill while I was in law school.

Beverly Osborne who devised “chicken in the rough” in the late 1930s is famous for stating that;

“in business, the product is the vehicle that is used to implement a strategy for creating a good idea.”

No one grasps that genius more than locally-owned, chef-driven restaurants.

I miss Mary Bacon’s “AT chicken” at Anotherthyme and the stories she would regale me with about Mayola’s.  In part, it was the sparkle with which she articulated that heritage before her restaurant came about that helped make the DNA connection.

Mayola Nance’s restaurant morphed over the years from grill to grill and fountain to grill, fountain and pool parlor, to chili house, but Mayola’s was always a mainstay of Durham hospitality for breakfast, lunch and dinner from 6 a.m. to midnight.

The clientele, too, was like Durham, a blend of blue collar factory workers and university students, researchers and professors as well as bankers and lawyers.

The fun thing about scouring old phone directories such as the one linked from 1949 is that you not only get a sense of businesses at the time such as Mayola’s but you can actually see noted next to various names in the listings exactly who worked there back then.

Playing under Mayola’s feet in the 1940s was a young boy better known today for his weightlifting prowess even at age 76, something he has studied and perfected over more than 60 years now into what is known as Maitland’s Method.

Maitland Nance and personal trainers groomed in his controlled-movement method use it to strengthen clients of all ages in his small boutique studio where we go in the Ninth Street District twice each week across from Duke East Campus.

But in his twenties, Maitland took was he had learned from his Mom growing up in Mayola’s and soon developed or acquired dozens of restaurants in Durham and beyond including some still famous with Duke alumni who often regale them on basketball listservs.

It is a tough business.  Thirty percent of all restaurants fail in their first year and another 30% fail within two years of opening.  The local chefs and restaurants I acknowledge in this post are not only pioneers in sense of place, they were courageous.

Maitland’s included perpetuating the former Turnage’s out on Morreene Road as well as the former A.B. Morris Café across from American Tobacco.  Renamed Nance’s, it was still there when I arrived, although the Lucky Strike factory had abandoned it two years before.

It was virtually all that remained of what has now been resurrected as the American Tobacco District.

It was located near where friends whose DNA traces back decades in Durham’s foodie heritage will open NanaSteak next year at a corner of the just-opened ALoft Durham Downtown hotel, one of four to recently open in downtown alone.

Restaurants lead the way to revitalization while hotels mostly follow it.

Locally-owned, chef-driven restaurants were among the first to grasp that economic development, in the words of Ed McMahon, is “about what you have, not what you don’t have.”

Maitland’s first restaurant was the former Top Hat Bar Grill in the Ninth Street District across from where the acclaimed Watts Grocery is today, near where the famous Green Room is, having been renamed to reflect its role in the movie Bull Durham.

Still in his twenties, that was eight years before Mary Bacon opened Somethyme there.

Sometime in the mid to late 1970s, Maitland opened Maitland’s, a fine dining restaurant in Downtown Durham in Mayola’s location.

It was just after a sense of place revolt had halted the wanton destruction of Urban Renewal eventually drawing the attention of adaptive reuse developers instead.

It is from trolling Maitland’s that Georgios found some of his kitchen staff for Bakatsias Cuisine, some of whom joined him a decade later at Parizade and Taverna Nikos in downtown.

Robert Adams, another Durham native and the longtime executive chef of Parizade, had joined Maitland out of chef school.

It is from kitchens such as Parizade, Anotherthyme, Magnolia Grill, Fosters and Nana’s that a host of new Durham restaurants found their beginnings, including many being spawned today.

In 1981, Maitland, who was more comfortable with basic southern food, sold the site of Maitland’s to Mary Bacon for Anotherthyme, the year Brightleaf Square opened in two wonderfully restored historic tobacco warehouses nearby forging the template other developers have followed for decades now.

Little did he know that a few years later, Magnolia Grill and the Barkers would take basic southern flavors and recipes to the height of acclaim in the food world.

Restaurants are the bellwethers for resurrecting downtowns and forging other even more organic districts in a community, such as Durham’s Ninth Street.

Chef-driven and owned restaurants are at the epicenter for bringing settings back to life while preserving sense of place.

This is not meant to take anything away from economic developers, such as I was, or development advocacy associations or financial backers, including governments granting incentives, or the development community.

But all of these and more are merely cogs when viewed strategically.

Today as noted in the SlideShare document linked to the image above, huge national developers, such as North American Properties, have identified locally-owned chef driven and owned restaurants as “the secret sauce,” to “establishing an identity.”

Nearly 40 years ago, Durham became a pioneer not only in North Carolina but nationwide in the realization that locally-owned chef-driven restaurants are one of the first and most important ingredients to revitalization. 

Any recognition of the revitalization we see here today is grossly remiss if that heritage is not prominently recognized.

Racism Metrics Among Americans

Once you read up on research by those who study racism, it is a little annoying when the term is applied too broadly especially as has been common over the past year both to individuals and institutions.

I always felt my father was racist but having come in contact with true racists while turning Durham, North Carolina’s image around in my past professional life, I now realize he wasn’t.

He was born in 1923 just as the first studies were launched to determine attitudes toward various groups among Americans.   Back then Americans readily expressed their racial prejudice.

But before I get into how prevalent racism was back then, let me touch on what was happening in America during my father’s formative years.

In fact, in the review of this research in the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, the authors note that in the 1930s it “may have been as politically incorrect to express tolerance as it is to express intolerance” today.

Keep into mind that even into the 1930s Black Americans were being lynched at an average of fifty to one hundred per year.

Those occurred primarily in the South, but even in my father’s native Pacific Northwest, this was also the heyday of nativism which included a resurgence of groups such as the KKK.

Nativism was an anti-immigrant movement spearheaded by politicians such as Congressman and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, newspaper editor and Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington state as well as Presidents Coolidge and Hoover.

As an aside, Johnson coined the phrase “Keep America American” which was picked up by the Klan.  Coolidge rephrased it as “America must be kept American.”

In fact, a 1930s survey of lodging establishments across the country just as travel and tourism became mainstream found that 90% would not accept Chinese as guests.

Germans and Eastern Europeans were the primary targets of nativism back then but it appears to be essentially the same play book that Republican hopeful Donald Trump’s campaign strategy has resurrected today only targeting Latino immigrants this time.

Today, surveys show that only 10 to 15 percent of Americans harbor explicit prejudice against Black Americans compared to about 60% from the 1930s up through the 1950s.

I suspect there may be the same percentage of blacks who are openly prejudiced toward whites.

But racism or prejudice or should I say acceptance of other groups occurs on a spectrum and there is evidence that 7% of Americans are truly virulent racists.

During the 1990s, the organization I led mounted a grassroots effort that reversed the negativity toward Durham manifest by a majority of those living in nearby communities.

But researchers who were helping us told us not to bother when those who continued to be very negative was reduced to single digits.

From reading verbatims, reports from mystery shops and especially online comments to news stories, it was abundantly clear they fell among those remaining were hard core, virulent racists.

Having always been more diverse, Durham was merely a surrogate for their animosity.

We succeeded in the image turn around by inoculating those who were uncertain and reinforcing those who were positive about Durham while appealing to those who were “milder” negatives with better information.

This is why we were wise not to launch a big ad campaign.  Far too blunt as a marketing tactic, traditional ads merely reinforce existing opinions (positive and negative.)

In the wake of Supreme Court rulings on the unconstitutionality of segregation, by the dawn of the 1960s Americans were gradually becoming much more egalitarian and self-conscious about intolerance.

So by the 1970s scientific surveys to determine prejudice had to become more covert as attitudes toward explicit prejudice changed.

By then my dad was turning 50 was apparently too ingrained to make the shift or maybe he just liked pushing my buttons during during lively debates on visits home.

However, I had noticed growing up that while he seemed explicitly prejudiced toward some groups, at least in rhetoric, he wasn’t at all when it came to individuals.

You often hear something similar voiced by regressive politicians and some celebrities who when caught making insensitive or racist remarks are quick to rationalize that Black people are some of their best friends.

Studies show that 75% of Americans - including some who are Black -have an implicit preference for white vs. black racial groups.  It often results in institutional bias where studies show that even a percentage point or two of discrimination on an individual level can add up to a disadvantage for Black Americans overall.

It is reflected in the analysis of tipping practices where patrons, on average, including those who are Black are found to give higher tips to Caucasian servers.

It is why studies also find that many Americans are favorable to leveling the playing field based on gender but not ethnicity, betraying an implicit bias.

But about 40% of Americans have what researchers call aversive racism, a term coined in the 1980s, which means they avoid interaction with other racial and ethnic groups.

Americans who fall into these groups today probably don’t self-identify as racists.

Nor are police officers using stereotypes to make lightning quick life or death decisions protecting neighborhood where less than 25% of the residents, according to Harvard Sociologist Orlando Patterson are structurally disconnected and/or mimicking a street culture that is often itself racist and misogynist as well as defiant of authority and laws.

This all crossed my mind recently while driving home from a lakeside retreat in the county north of Durham.

I was mulling over how a heavy-set white woman had been loudly pontificating up and down the isles of a Walmart to anyone who would listen characterizing Durham as a cesspool, albeit one which provided her with job when a pickup flew past in the opposite direction.

Speeding north along Dirgie Mine Road through Allensville it was streaming two huge, 4’ x 6’ Confederate flags on each side of the truck’s bed.

Doing a little stereotyping of my own, I wondered if the occupants were just trying to intimidate the fourth of the residents there who are black.

Or maybe they were returning from one of the demonstrations of support for that bygone symbol or maybe they just proud albeit insensitive and shallow good ole Southern boys.

Researchers use the term disassociation to describe how our minds operate at two levels, one automatic and the other reflective.

This is how so many Americans can profess to be egalitarian but their automatic responses are clearly biased.

My dad was very egalitarian but reflecting the norms of his youth also very biased when it came to blacks as a group.  Pushing back against his attitudes while growing up I’m sure played a role in propelling me to be much more tolerant and accepting of other groups.

But wondering if I also absorbed an implicit bias when it comes to race, during my summer hiatus from these posts I took the test related to race at Project Implicit.

It was devised in the late 1990s by researchers at the University of Washington, Harvard and the University of Virginia including the two authors of Blindspot, which I also highly recommend.

The test is ingenious for many reasons including that test-takers can’t “game it.”  I suspect that may be because it also measures hesitation.

There are also tests to measure implicit biases based on age, gender, sexuality, weight and religion to name a few.

I turned out to be neutral when it comes to race.  In other words, I am not biased toward or against others on the basis of race.  I have yet to take the other tests but I suspect I may be implicitly biased on the issue of weight.

Take it for yourself, regardless of your ethnicity and especially if you feel or get the impression from others that you may be racist, even somewhat.

It should be require of elected officials seeking to undermine voter rights.  

Catastrophizing Ultimately is Really About Expectations

If my parents ever disagreed, it was often about politics, religion or money.

In fact, as life-long Republicans, if they couldn’t come to agreement on who they would vote for, my dad would famously say that they just as well not vote then because they would just cancel each other out.

Their marriage lasted 36 years, but during that span, mom usually prevailed when it came to money and religion, but it is the latter that ultimately brought their union to an end.

They are both gone now but a survey of Americans last year found that about 35% of Americans today also find it difficult to discuss politics, and even then I suspect what they hear is influenced by adversarial listening.

Religion falls close behind at 32% but taxes and personal health fall to 21% and 20% respectively.

According to a 2013 poll by Market Pulse on behalf of Wells Fargo, it is finances that Americans find most difficult to discuss (44%) even more than death (38%.)

Ironically, although 71% today learned the importance of saving from their parents, only slightly more than a third (36%) of parents report discussing the importance of saving money with their children on a frequent basis and a large percentage not at all.

American couples find it as hard to discuss money as they do discussing sex.

More than religion, it may have been my father’s struggle with deep episodes of depression as well as my mom’s emotional relationship with money -- spending it that is -- that ultimately pulled them apart.

My dad suddenly showed up to visit me in Alaska after the breakup.  He was deeply depressed but it wouldn’t be for another twenty years before I could talk with him about his depression.

He never let it affect his work but during these episodes he would often sit for hours in the dark without talking.  When I was little, it would scare me.

I know now that he was struggling with deep bouts of feeling inadequate, just as he probably was during his visit to Anchorage after his break up.  I could have said so much that would have been helpful but back then I was more prone to change the subject.

In his extraordinary book entitled, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, Dr. David Burns, a Stanford researcher who helped develop Cognitive Therapy, notes that we really don’t know yet how the brain creates emotions.

Reflection on our own thoughts can either be a powerful stimulant to insight or a spiraling cycle of negative thoughts.  Learning to foster the former and intervene to break the latter is a challenge everyone faces I suppose.

My mom’s emotional relationships with money and food fed into a set of expectations that were very different than my dad’s.  That’s what they really needed to discuss.

I’ve always envied, in a way, the people whom I have come across in life whose “my way or the highway” way of thinking and rationalizing seems so effortless.

Most often though, whenever I was obligated to stand up to someone like this I failed to discuss expectations and instead sailed into analysis.

Occasionally, before catching myself through reflection, I would fall into the all or nothing or black and white thinking trap as well.

A foundation built on clearly understanding expectations is the most essential element for fruitful strategic partnerships.

It is no different with another couple in dispute, Germany and Greece.

French economist Thomas Piketty who wrote, Capital in the Twenty-First Century a book that deals with the evolution of inequality and wealth concentration, reminds us that Germany is being more than a bit hypocritical when it comes to Greece.

Greece was among a number of countries in 1953 that stepped forward to forgive 50% of the massive bailout given to Germany following WWII.

He makes a good point.  Of course, what led to Germany’s indebtedness in 1953 and to Greece’s problems today are very different but no less “moral in stance.”

“Until 2009”, according to Piketty as reported by Chris Harlan on Wonkblog, “Greece forged its books.”  But he notes that austerity measures are forcing the burden on subsequent generations who were not part of that.

Similarly, the post-WWII government in Germany was trying to dig out from under a mess left by the Nazis.  Greece and other countries could have insisted on repayment, creating the same austerity forced on them after WWI which led to WWII.

The struggle regarding Greece’s bailout today is really about expectations more than it is money.

The “catastrophizing,” as cognitive behavior therapists call it, on both sides is just another form of all or nothing thinking.

Best Advice

By the time I arrived in Durham, North Carolina to lead my fifth startup, the first that would be totally from scratch, I relied on some advice I was given when I first became a chief executive.

“Don’t meet with the first 100 people who seek you out.”

This, it was explained, is because for the most part they will have an agenda.  The advice was also to wait to have introductions with the usual suspects until after I had time to seek out individuals whose roots or connections here preceded the community’s.

In Durham, that fortuitously turned out to be George Watts Hill, a banker whose grandfather and great grandfather were close associates with the city’s founders.

Another was Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans, a philanthropist and civil rights activist who was the great granddaughter of Washington Duke whose roots in what came to be called Durham stretched back to before the Revolutionary War.

The third was John Hope Franklin with whom I learned I had become familiar during a college course at BYU entitled The History of the South.  Its syllabus included Franklin’s book entitled, From Slavery to Freedom.

I didn’t make the connection until I saw a copy in a small stack of books on the corner of his desk as I entered Dr. Franklin's office at Duke.

He chuckled as I silently mouthed, “You’re that John Hope Franklin.”

“That had to be the third edition that you studied,” he explained, after asking about my background.  He noted that the one on the corner of his desk was a sixth edition.

But he was more interested in making sure I knew how important from the outset it was to correct the way airlines and other tenants truncated the name of the airport Durham jointly owned.

All three are gone now.  Mr. Hill died a little more than 36 months after we met.  Mary, now also gone, became a friend whom I would run into in restaurants we both favored long after I retired.

But it is John Hope who stayed in contact the most, calling or stopping me at events to fill in details that were relevant to my job of marketing Durham right up to his passing a few months before I retired.

I miss him and I still regularly reread or consult From Slavery to Freedom, which reads as fresh, objective and insightful today as when it was written nearly seven decades ago.

Of course, it has been updated with each new edition, now in its eighth.

I recommend it far more than any book written since then, including those that scholars have recommended in the wake of nine African Americans including a pastor and state legislature gunned down last week by a white supremacist in South Carolina.

Although he had been the target of discrimination, a form of racism, and the Supreme Court had relied, in part, on his research to strike down segregation, Dr. Franklin always made it extremely easy to ask questions and talk about race.

The importance of seeking out individuals such as these this when starting or assuming direction of a community’s destination marketing organization is that they can give you insight into a community’s most temporal values and traits including insights into its sense of place.

They also guided me to useful studies and reports conducted over time in addition to pointing out the flaws or oversights common in politicized histories of various developments.

These insights prepared me to better decipher the agendas of those who would be lining up at my door.

John Hope Franklin, shown in his 20s in the image with this essay, had first come here in 1943 when he was 28.

In 1947, he had been granted time to research and write From Slavery to Freedom by Dr. James E. Shepard, the founder in 1910 of what is now North Carolina Central University.

Shepard had migrated to Durham first as a pharmacist and was prominent in establishing Hayti, an African-American commercial area here during a period when segregation had been legalized by the Supreme Court.

To grasp the values that truly began to differentiate Durham is to understand the period from the end of the Civil War through this period in particular.

In From Slavery to Freedom, Franklin traces the earliest roots of slavery.  It wasn’t racists, per se, who imported the practice to America.  The earliest Americans sort of backed into it, first as indentured servitude.

This was a way people of all backgrounds with little means could secure transit to America in return for working out the terms of a contract while earning a stake of their own.

Some slaves were dropped off in Virginia who had been on a ship that had been intercepted and it was greed that first motivated those who seized on this as way to make land productive and profitable.

By the eve of the Civil War in 1860, there were 31.4 million Americans including 8 million white Southerners.

By then, 1% of the population still owned slaves.  Telling is that slave holding states were growing at a fraction of the pace in states and territories where it was banned.

About 200,000 slave owners in 1860 were small farmers with five or less slaves each and 88% of slave owners had fewer than 20.  Economic historians estimate that it took around 40-60 slaves for it to be profitable.

So the practice was in steep decline by 1860 but the South and the U.S. Congress had been held hostage for decades by what was less than 9,700 slave owners whose hubris then propelled the nation into a war that cost the lives of 620,000 Americans.

At the Battle of Gettysburg alone, five times the number of Americans were killed compared to the slave holders perpetuating the war.

When I read or hear someone today claim the issue was States’ Rights, I agree.  But make no mistake: in the words of Southern officials at the time, it was a State’s right to condone slavery.

Was everyone who fought for the South a racist?  No.  Duped?  Probably many or who were at the very least conflicted.  Just as many who fought for the North were probably somewhat conflicted when it came to race.

It had been the source of a moral struggle about what it meant to be American since before Independence.

In fact, according to experts, it was the proponents of slavery who transformed the Constitutional “right to bear arms” from what was intended as a collective right, to an individual one in order to defend against slave revolts.

Even more tragic than the Civil War was the 90 year struggle after the war to perpetuate white supremacy in the South.

Triangulating responses to various Gallup surveys, I estimated yesterday that the number of overt racists now is probably around 7% of the population.

But judging by the actions of several state legislatures, there may be several times that proportion of enablers. 

The percentage of racists and enablers in America was probably around 50% by the time segregation was banned, down from as many as 6-in-10 Americans in the 1930s.

Racism is a learned behavior.  Some of us are obviously still unlearning it.

Living On The Cusp of Climate Change

Another summer job I had in high school was shoveling grass seed.  I even got to take turns driving the truck once it had been filled alongside the combine, over to where it was emptied and back again.

It was in the Northern Rockies of Idaho near where a lakeside rendezvous with family now takes place most summers. Yup, Idaho is a lot more than potatoes or even mountains.

Nearly half of the Kentucky Bluegrass seed in the nation is grown there as well as about 84 tons of fescue, a grass seed that is also used to create turf in North Carolina where I live.

Kentucky may have bragging rights for Bluegrass sod but the majority of it is seeded with grass seed grown in the mountains of Idaho.

By comparison, Idaho only grows 29% of the nation’s potatoes but more than 70% of its food-sized trout.  State slogans can be very misleading.

With 26,000 overall, the state of Idaho has only 1% of the nation’s 2.1 million farms and ranches, but still ranks in the top 10 for production of 26 different types of livestock and crops.

But these pale in comparison to the dominance of its mountains, forests, lakes and streams.

Northern Idaho is nicknamed the Idaho Panhandle.

It is 21,000+ square miles of spectacular, forested mountains, about a quarter of the land area of Idaho.  It includes 324 square miles covered by water, including many of America’s most scenic rivers and lakes.

Stretching between eight or nine of those lakes is the Rathdrum Prairie, part of a 370 square mile trench gouged out between the Selkirk and Bitterroot ranges and planed flat by a glacier.

About a dozen miles long and a dozen wide, it then elbows west across the border to Spokane, Washington.

But this Prairie, which discovered in the 1950s as the perfect place to grow grass seed, had been created 15,000 years ago by a series of floods after the 3,000 sq. mile Lake Missoula broke through an ice sheet dam sending a wall of water 2,000 feet high gushing down its length and beyond, clear to California.

The Cordilleran Ice Sheet, which held one and a half times what Antarctica does today or did until recently, also melted very fast leaving Northern Idaho’s spectacular, natural mountain lakes as remnants, 75 overall within 50 miles of Spokane.

I was reminded of that sweaty, dusty, round-the-clock work harvesting grass seed when I recently learned by trial and error that the ridgeline where I live a mile and a fourth from Downtown Durham, NC is apparently on the cusp of climate change.

Kentucky Bluegrass seed such I harvested is used to grow turf up in the mountains here.  But until recently, it has been fescue that ruled around Durham, including 10% of my city lot covered by four strips of lawn to slow runoff from my house and natural areas.

The battle lines for climate change apparently run between Durham and Raleigh, where the Piedmont falls away to the Coastal Plain, which has also been, until recently, a sort of demarcation line as well between “cool” and “warm” season grasses.

The year before last when heat and fungus overwhelmed my turf, I tried to jump ahead of the curve by replacing the fescue with what was touted as a cold tolerant Zoysia turf, as a few institutions and homeowners did.

Of course, grass is not always grown from seed even in North Carolina.  Tall fescue and Kentucky Bluegrass began and still are pasture grasses.

Back when I was a teenager, as the tall grass ripened,  big swathers, (aka windrowers) were used to cut the grass where it lay drying in the field for about a week or more.

Then several staggered combines ran down the rows without stopping while processing the seed into trucks.  Outgrowing teenagers, all of the equipment used today seems two or three times larger than back then.

Zoysia, which is primarily grown from plugs, is purely ornamental.

And as it seems the case with everything, there are now heritage or heirloom varieties of seed being grown.

But sod growers have a varied clientele.  In North Carolina, tall fescue sod is grown by 40% of sod growers compared to 25% who grow Kentucky Bluegrass.  Warm season grasses such as Bermuda and Zoysia are grown by 75% and 80% respectively.

Only 12.3% overall goes to homeowners while 63% goes to landscape contractors, 9% to golf courses, 7.6% to athletic fields and 4% to retail garden centers.

Lawns didn’t begin with the invention of the lawn mower.  They moved from pasture to homes in the 1500s during the Renaissance in France and England.

Both U.S. Presidents Washington and Jefferson had lawns.  They became fixtures around ranches and later farms for the same reason they had in Europe.

But it was the leisure activity of lawn bowling that had brought lawns to America by 1650.  By the 1850s, lawns were used to create meadows in urban parks, followed by golf courses by the 1870s.

The first lawnmower was invented in 1830 in England.  A reel mower was patented in the U.S. in 1868.  By 1890, they were a fixture of landscapes and by 1914 gasoline-powered mowers were available.

Even riding lawn mowers date to 1922.

But the lawn mower became truly mainstream in 1946 when soldiers returned from WWII and bought homes created for them in the suburbs.

That year, two years before I was born, 140,000 mowers were sold.  By the time I was three years old, 1.2 million mowers a year were sold in the U.S and lawns had become a fixture around farm and ranch houses as well.

By the time I turned ten in 1958, 4.2 million were sold annually, and using ours to cut neighbors lawns became one of my first part time jobs away from home.

Still, the majority of grass seed is for non-residential use.  There are nearly 50,000 square miles of lawn across America, about the equivalent of the entire state of North Carolina and more than irrigated crops such as corn and wheat.

When I worked part time to combine it in Idaho during the mid-1960s, grass seed was dry farmed.  Back then, as it had been since the 1950s, the stubble was burned after harvesting.

There are other ways to manage stubble including baling and selling it for feed but since 2007 but due, in part, to burning the number of Kentucky Bluegrass farms in Idaho has fallen by 55% and fescue growers by 40% as they have nationwide.

That practice came under increased scrutiny for air pollution until 2007 when as a result of a court case, the state of Idaho began to regulate burning of harvested grass fields except on tribal lands.

This involved permitting, burn management training and a $2 per acre fee to burn, as well as identification of no-burn days calibrated to atmospheric conditions especially near population centers such as Spokane.

Apparently Americans now spend $40 billion a year on lawn care.  However, NASA scientists believe that under conditions such as recycling grass clippings, lawns are a carbon sink, meaning they sequester harmful gases causing climate change.

But the real issue is water.  Over half (56) of North Carolina’s 100 counties are at risk for water shortages which nation-wide studies show will be aggravated by climate change.

Unlike Durham which began to invest heavily to build its own reservoirs in the late 1920s when the population was fewer than 50,000 people, less than 20% the size it is today, many counties waited for state and federal assistance, which dried up long ago.

In Idaho, which relies on melting snow, the percentage of counties at risk for water shortages is 64%, in part, due to overuse of the Snake River aquifer.  In other mountain states such as Utah it is 72%.

In Texas, it is 98%.  A quick calculation suggests there is a correlation between red states and water shortages.

But climate change, as it already has in North Carolina, is shifting growing zones north and west while creating drier, less arable micro-climates in some parts of the country.

This will also increase pest and noxious weed populations, all of which will create more pressure for burning as a crop management tool.  It will also lead to a return to dry farming rather than irrigation, resulting in more burning.

Dry farming is natural to one-third of the earth’s land surface.  Mormons heading west in 1847 learned it from Native Americans who had been practicing it in that region for hundreds of years.

At Fort Laramie, a stop on the trail, they also saw it being experimented with to grow wheat for provisioning along the Oregon-Mormon trail.  It is how we grew feed crops on our ancestral cattle and horse ranch west of the Henry’s Fork in the Yellowstone nook of Idaho.

Following a fifty year period when irrigation technology has depleted aquifers across the nation, 12 million acres of cultivation in the West has reverted to dry farming.

It was the technique that was used where I was harvesting grass seed forty-eight years ago even though Northern Idaho sits atop an aquifer, it has twice as much rainfall as Southern Idaho.

Look for dry farming to continue its comeback. 

Restoring “Collective Efficacy” within Poor Neighborhoods

The extraordinary violence or at least the constant threat of it that plagues impoverished neighborhoods is perpetuated by a tiny minority .

It is nothing new.

It was first documented by Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois in the mid-1890s while doing a survey of poor neighborhoods in Philadelphia as a post doctorate fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

This was more than a decade before he would help found the NAACP and in 1899, his findings were published as a book by Penn entitled, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study.

Born at the end of the Civil War, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was perplexed by the enduring aftereffects of slavery which were deepened by the defacto racial segregation that replaced the “Black Codes” put in place as he was born.

Known as Jim Crow laws, they had even been declared constitutional by the Supreme Court during the time of his observations of black on black violence in neighborhoods that were segregated by both race and poverty.

In part, for contrast, Du Bois also went on to analyze enclaves of middle class and affluent blacks as he did in 1912 in Durham, North Carolina where I live, pointing to the influence of a more “tolerant and helpful community” even then one of the Bull City’s overarching traits.

It was the 50th anniversary of emancipation but Durham then, as it is now in so many other ways, was an outlier. Within months, the Ku Klux Klan was resurrected in Georgia and rapidly spread across the nation.

It has now been six decades since segregation was declared unconstitutional and nearly that long since he passed away at age 95 but the problems Du Bois first traced to slavery and then racial segregation still inhabit areas of deep poverty.

A new book I mentioned last week entitled, Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, is a series of sociological overviews longitudinally weaving together hundreds of studies such as Du Bois’s.

It is edited, as well as mostly written by Dr. Orlando Patterson, another black sociologist with roots at Harvard.

Patterson notes that the black homicide rate documented by Du Bois in the mid-1890s was “more than five times that of the white population.”

In the late 1980s, social historian, researcher and Haverford College professor Dr. Roger Lane took these metrics back to 1860 and then forward to the 1980s making the connection to what he referenced as a “cultural of violence long nurtured by exclusion and denial.”

By the 1960s, according to Patterson, the black homicide rate had grown to be “11.46 times that of the white rate.”  This discrepancy “peaked at 39.4 times in 1991 and has stabilized today at still about “seven times that of whites.”

Today the discrepancy among teens is more “eight times.”

The homicide offending rate today is also higher among black teenagers, “eight times the white teen rate of murders,” giving rise to awareness of black on black crimes.

While significant, Patterson does not see poverty alone as the cause although it is poor neighborhoods where both victimization and offending is highest, perpetrated by a razor thin proportion of people there.

While racism and stereotyping among police may play a role, the findings in Cultural Matrix suggest to me that a far greater possibility is that both the officers involved and the victims in these neighborhoods may have been experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD.)

Patterson explains that “By a socially and culturally toxic environment we mean three things: the pervasive culture of violence and threat of physical danger already existing in a community of upbringing; weak neighborhood efficacy; and institutional neglect and incarceration.”

He explains neighborhood efficacy by citing studies defining “collective efficacy” such as “social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good.”

It can be more effective at instilling social controls than formal mechanisms such as police and courts, something the late Dr. John Hope Franklin, another social historian often pointed out.

According to Patterson, “Growing up in the presence of pervasive violence tends to make one violent…Black children in the inner cities perceive their world as a violent, threatening place….”

Studies show that “environmental trauma” leads to “fear conditioning” which leads to “anxiety disorders,” and “chronic anxiety” that can disrupt “the developing architecture of the brain.”

Our brains are wired to profile but if profiling is useful at all as a tool to solve this conundrum, it would not involve race or socio-economics at all.  It would go something like this:

Look for animal abuse to find abusers of children and domestic partners.  That will also be a predictor of violent offenders in the neighborhood.

For anyone truly concerned about social justice, this would also be a far more effective way to get involved.

Other “eyes and ears” should include solid waste collectors, water meter readers, cable and utility installers as well as animal control officers and of course, neighbors.

Earlier this month, Brookings published “10 facts about child well-being and health in America.”

One is that “In 2013, nearly 680,000 children were reported to states to be the victims of abuse or neglect” and “1,520 died from maltreatment…80% at the hands of their own parents.

Another is that “An estimated 13 percent of all U.S. children and 21 percent of black children will experience confirmed maltreatment at some time between birth and adulthood.”

Police need to be accountable but it is clear, according to Patterson’s book of studies, that so do parents and neighborhoods.

Poor neighborhoods must seem capable of being a war zone at time but it is crucial to remember that the vast majority living there are “friendlies.”

This even includes the vast majority of the between one and two-in-10 who are totally disconnected from society.

Repeat after me:

Look for animal abuse to find abusers of children and domestic partners.  That will also be a predictor of violent offenders in the neighborhood.

When Organizations Are Not Given A Proper Burial

One of the uniquely American traits observed at the founding of our country was the propensity for creating associations.

We’ve just never been very good at shuttering them.

Instead of celebrating a mission well accomplished and retiring them, we tend to keep them hanging around on life support while desperately scrounging to find another “parade” hoping it can leap in front and lead the band.

But this never works.

Instead, as we foster new, more relevant organizations, we weigh them down with those that have outlived their relevance rather than giving them a proper burial.

I am not referring to a failure to evolve or repurpose.  I’m referring to organizations made obsolete either by the successful completion of their mission or eclipsed by paradigm shifts.

In a twist of irony, the failure to let go of outdated organizations is often due to the fact that those involved with these transitions fail to understand patterns or distinctions.

Take cable television for example.  Now caught on the obsolete side of a paradigm shift, it hastened its demise during the paradigm shift it created decades ago by then dragging along the baggage from outdated broadcast notions of advertising.

I first became aware of this phenomena in the early 1970s as I began what would be a four-decade career in community destination marketing and found a layer of tourism-related organizations across the country back then that seemed superfluous.

They had words such as “association” or “council in the name.  A few had “travel industry” even though it was already clear there is no such thing.

Travel is a sector of at least six distinct industries (plural) that have only one thing in common.  They share the traveling public or visitors as customers.

Some of these organizations were statewide and a handful were regional, as in “Pacific Northwest.”  While nearly all had only formed in the 1950s, they were all struggling for membership.

That meant pleading to community destination marketing organizations to keep them alive.

It caused me to examine and wonder how they all came to be obsolete in less than two decades, meaning they had lost appeal and relevance to their original constituency, a condition I found repeated in each of the three states in which I worked before retiring.

In fact, in retirement I still run across states that are trying to keep these organizations on life support nearly 50 years now after they should have been phased out.

Communities first formed Destination Marketing Organizations way back in 1896 along the routes of various railroads, inspired and adapted, in fact, from the destination marketing railroads had done for National Parks.

It was during the Progressive Era when cities and towns began to realize the importance of being culturally and scenically attractive.  This was also when the notion of leisure became more acceptable.

Yes, it may come as a surprise to many in tourism today but it owes its widespread emergence to liberals (OMG!)

These earliest destination marketing pioneers also understood from observing railroad marketing that the true future of travel was point to point, not serially from one community to the next.

From 1897-1915, most tourism was in the form of attending conventions and expositions, that is until an avid Pierce Arrow enthusiast, President Woodrow Wilson, changed things in 1916 by incentivizing the states to begin building or cobbling together roadways.

That’s when the paradigm shift to community destination marketing organizations took off as automobiles made tourism mainstream in the late 1920s and early 1930s, opening the way for many more towns and cities to benefit.

There was just one problem, though, well actually two.

As public roads were built or cobbled together into highways back then they were immediately blighted by billboards, often with one coming into view every 4 to 5 seconds even at the relatively slow 35-45 mile per hour speed limits back then.

Many governors such as O. Max Gardner in North Carolina commissioned surveys of roadsides, such as the 1930 report for his state at this link.

These scenic, or lack thereof, surveys led to billboard restrictions inspired by those that had been pioneered in Massachusetts under conservative Republican Governor Calvin Coolidge.

Coolidge’s restrictions had withstood numerous challenges in the courts during the 1920s resulting in a declaration that aesthetics alone are in the public interest and prohibiting billboards on highways in “The Bay State” of “unusual scenic beauty.”

All of this concern about scenic preservations along roadways brought tourism front and center because citizens and businesses speaking out against billboards across the country were often led by those owning tourism-related businesses such as in the 1930s editorial at this link.

But communities in North Carolina and many other states still lacked the capacity or interest to form tourism promotion organizations so states began to fill the void.

To provide an umbrella until their respective communities were ready to go after tourism, states such as North Carolina after 1935 added visitor attractions to their highway maps and formed what were called advertising divisions.

These state efforts would serve as a sort of filter until specific areas for visitation were identified.  They still basically serve that function today.

But this early tourism marketing was premature and doomed to backfire, unless states could become visitor-ready by first restoring the scenic character of roadsides and conducting in-depth inventories of things for visitors to see and do.

Fortunately, between 1937 and 1941, the federal government stepped in again, just as as World War II was set to unfold.

To be continued tomorrow.