Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Commandos of World War II by W. Hodding Carter II Hodding Carter. William Hodding Carter, II (February 3, 1907 – April 4, 1972), was a Southern U.S. progressive journalist and author. Carter was born in Hammond, Louisiana, the largest community in Tangipahoa Parish, in southeastern Louisiana. His parents were William Hodding Carter I, and the former Irma Dutartre. Among other distinctions in his career, Carter was a Nieman Fellow. He died in Greenville, Mississippi, of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five. He is interred in the Greenville Cemetery. [1] Contents. Biography. Education. Carter was valedictorian of the Hammond High School class of 1923. Carter attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine (1927), and the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University (1928). He returned to Louisiana upon graduating. According to Ann Waldron, the young Carter was an outspoken white supremacist, like most Southerners of that time, yet he began to alter his thinking when he returned to the South to live. [2] Career background. After a year as a teaching fellow at Tulane University in New Orleans (1928–1929), Carter worked as reporter for the New Orleans Item-Tribune (1929), United Press in New Orleans (1930), and the Associated Press in Jackson, Mississippi, (1931–32). With his wife, Betty née Werlein (1910–2000) of New Orleans, Carter founded the Hammond Daily Courier, in 1932. The paper was noted for its opposition to popular Louisiana governor Huey Pierce Long Jr., but its support for the national Democratic Party. In 1939 Carter moved to Greenville, a Mississippi Delta city and the seat of Washington County, where he launched his successful Greenville Delta Democrat-Times , a newspaper later published by his oldest son William Hodding Carter III. Still later, his second son, Philip Dutartre Carter (born 1939), took over publication. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his editorials, in particular a series lambasting the ill treatment of Japanese American ( Nisei ) soldiers returning from World War II. He was a professor for a single semester at Tulane. Fighting intolerance. He also wrote editorials in the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times regarding social and economic intolerance in the Deep South that won him widespread acclaim and the moniker "Spokesman of the New South". Carter wrote a caustic article for Look magazine which detailed the menacing spread of a chapter of the White Citizens' Council. The article was attacked on the floor of the Mississippi House of Representatives as a "Willful lie by a nigger-loving editor". Carter responded in a front-page editorial: By vote of 89 to 19, the Mississippi House of Representatives has resolved the editor of this newspaper into a liar because of an article I wrote. If this charge were true, it would make me well qualified to serve in that body. It is not true. So to even things up, I hereby resolve by a vote of one to nothing that there are eighty-nine liars in the state legislature. [3] Personal life. The Carters married on October 14, 1931. In addition to Hodding and Philip, they had a younger son, Thomas Hennen Carter (1945–1964), who killed himself playing a game of Russian roulette. Carter was strongly opposed to the Munich Conference which ceded Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler. Carter rushed into World War II service. While stationed at Camp Blanding in Florida, he lost the sight in his right eye during a training exercise. He thereafter served in the Intelligence Division and continued his journalistic activities by editing the Middle East division of Yank and Stars and Stripes in Cairo, Egypt, and writing three books. [4] Late in life, Carter attended the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in 1965. Politics and the Kennedys. Carter was an unabashed supporter of the Kennedys and their quest for the American Presidency. He had dinner with Bobby Kennedy and his family the night before Kennedy was assassinated. Carter had also been working for him "campaigning, making talks, and writing ghost speeches". [5] On a flight home, Carter learned of Kennedy's death and was devastated. A passenger on the plane said, "Well, we got that son-of-a-bitch, didn't we?" Carter responded, "Who are you talking about?" The passenger said, "You know damn well who I'm talking about", to which Carter responded by saying "You're just a son-of-a-bitch", and then punching the passenger in the mouth. [6] Criticism. Columnist Eric Alterman, in a book review of The Race Beat (2006) for The Nation discusses how Carter and other Southern journalists were "moderate defenders" of the South. That is, they were apologists for the South during the pre-civil rights era. Alterman says, "'Enlightened'" Southern editors, especially. Mississippi's Hodding Carter, Jr., sold [Northerners] a Chalabi-like dream of steady, nonviolent progress that belied the violent savagery that lay in wait for those who stepped out of line". [7] One of the reasons segregation had been a success, Alterman explains, is "the way newspapers had neglected it". In Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist , author Ann Waldron makes the case that although Carter crusaded for racial equality, he hedged on condemning segregation, and that after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, he attacked the intransigent White Citizens' Council, but only supported gradual integration. [8] In defense of Carter, Claude Sitton, in a review of Waldron's book in the New York Times says, "[R]eaders of today will ask how an editor who opposed enactment of a federal antilynching law as unnecessary and public school desegregation in Mississippi as unwise can be called a champion of racial justice. The answer, which she gives in the book's introduction, lies in the context of the times. Absent his efforts and those of other Southern editors of courage and like mind, change would have come far more slowly and at far greater cost." [9] Quotations. "Television news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone." "There are two things we should give our children: one is roots and the other is wings." (Borrowed from the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher- not confirmed].) Research. For additional materials by and about Hodding Carter, Jr., the researcher is referred to Mitchell Library at Mississippi State University in Starkville, where Carter's personal papers are housed. Hodding Carter. William Hodding Carter, II (February 3, 1907 – April 4, 1972), was a Southern U.S. progressive journalist and author. Carter was born in Hammond, Louisiana, the largest community in Tangipahoa Parish, in southeastern Louisiana. His parents were William Hodding Carter I, and the former Irma Dutartre. Among other distinctions in his career, Carter was a Nieman Fellow. He died in Greenville, Mississippi, of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five. He is interred in the Greenville Cemetery. [1] Contents. Biography [ edit | edit source ] Education [ edit | edit source ] Carter was valedictorian of the Hammond High School class of 1923. Carter attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine (1927), and the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University (1928). He returned to Louisiana upon graduating. According to Ann Waldron, the young Carter was an outspoken white supremacist, like most Southerners of that time, yet he began to alter his thinking when he returned to the South to live. [2] Career background [ edit | edit source ] After a year as a teaching fellow at Tulane University in New Orleans (1928–1929), Carter worked as reporter for the New Orleans Item-Tribune (1929), United Press in New Orleans (1930), and the Associated Press in Jackson, Mississippi, (1931–32). With his wife, Betty née Werlein (1910–2000) of New Orleans, Carter founded the Hammond Daily Courier, in 1932. The paper was noted for its opposition to popular Louisiana governor Huey Pierce Long Jr., but its support for the national Democratic Party. In 1939 Carter moved to Greenville, a Mississippi Delta city and the seat of Washington County, where he launched his successful Greenville Delta Democrat-Times , a newspaper later published by his oldest son William Hodding Carter III. Still later, his second son, Philip Dutartre Carter (born 1939), took over publication. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his editorials, in particular a series lambasting the ill treatment of Japanese American ( Nisei ) soldiers returning from World War II. He was a professor for a single semester at Tulane. Fighting intolerance [ edit | edit source ] He also wrote editorials in the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times regarding social and economic intolerance in the Deep South that won him widespread acclaim and the moniker "Spokesman of the New South". Carter wrote a caustic article for Look magazine which detailed the menacing spread of a chapter of the White Citizens' Council. The article was attacked on the floor of the Mississippi House of Representatives as a "Willful lie by a n*****-loving editor". Carter responded in a front-page editorial: By vote of 89 to 19, the Mississippi House of Representatives has resolved the editor of this newspaper into a liar because of an article I wrote. If this charge were true, it would make me well qualified to serve in that body. It is not true. So to even things up, I hereby resolve by a vote of one to nothing that there are eighty-nine liars in the state legislature. [3] Personal life [ edit | edit source ] The Carters married on October 14, 1931. In addition to Hodding and Philip, they had a younger son, Thomas Hennen Carter (1945–1964), who killed himself playing a game of Russian roulette. Carter was strongly opposed to the Munich Conference, which ceded Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler. Carter rushed into World War II service. While stationed at Camp Blanding in Florida, he lost the sight in his right eye during a training exercise. He thereafter served in the Intelligence Division and continued his journalistic activities by editing the Middle East division of Yank and Stars and Stripes in Cairo, Egypt, and writing three books. [4] Late in life, Carter attended the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in 1965. Politics and the Kennedys [ edit | edit source ] Carter was an unabashed supporter of the Kennedys and their quest for the American Presidency. He had dinner with Bobby Kennedy and his family the night before Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. Carter had also been working for him "campaigning, making talks, and writing ghost speeches". [5] On a flight home, Carter learned of Kennedy's death and was devastated. A passenger on the plane said, "Well, we got that son-of-a-bitch, didn't we?" Carter responded, "Who are you talking about?" The passenger said, "You know damn well who I'm talking about", to which Carter responded by saying "You're just a son-of-a-bitch", and then punching the passenger in the mouth. [6] Criticism [ edit | edit source ] Columnist Eric Alterman, in a book review of The Race Beat (2006) for The Nation discusses how Carter and other Southern journalists were "moderate defenders" of the South. That is, they were apologists for the South during the pre-civil rights era. Alterman says, "'Enlightened'" Southern editors, especially. Mississippi's Hodding Carter, Jr., sold [Northerners] a Chalabi-like dream of steady, nonviolent progress that belied the violent savagery that lay in wait for those who stepped out of line". [7] One of the reasons segregation had been a success, Alterman explains, is "the way newspapers had neglected it". In Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist , author Ann Waldron makes the case that although Carter crusaded for racial equality, he hedged on condemning segregation, and that after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, he attacked the intransigent White Citizens' Council, but only supported gradual integration. [8] In defense of Carter, Claude Sitton, in a review of Waldron's book in the New York Times says, "[R]eaders of today will ask how an editor who opposed enactment of a federal antilynching law as unnecessary and public school desegregation in Mississippi as unwise can be called a champion of racial justice. The answer, which she gives in the book's introduction, lies in the context of the times. Absent his efforts and those of other Southern editors of courage and like mind, change would have come far more slowly and at far greater cost." [9] Quotations [ edit | edit source ] "Television news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone." "There are two things we should give our children: one is roots and the other is wings." (Borrowed from the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher- not confirmed].) Research [ edit | edit source ] For additional materials by and about Hodding Carter, Jr., the researcher is referred to Mitchell Library at Mississippi State University in Starkville, where Carter's personal papers are housed. Hodding Carter Jr. Dies at 65; Outspoken Mississippi Editor. GREENVILLE, Miss., April — Hodding Carter, Jr., the outspoken publisher and editor who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his editorials against racial segregation in the South, died tonight at his some here. He was 65 years old. Mr. Carter had served The Delta Democrat‐Times as publisher and editor until the last few years, when he turned over the post of editor to his son, Hodding Carter 3d. He also leaves his wife, the former Betty Werlein; another son, Philip, a freelance writer, and four grandchildren. Fought Against Racism. When Hodding. Carter was small boy in Louisiana, two incidents left an indelible impression on the growing mind. When he was 6 he saw a gang of white youths chasing a Negro boy. Several years later he came upon the hanging body of a lynching victim. As he grew older his life's work took shape—the task of attacking and destroying racism wherever he found it. In 1946 his struggle was recognized when he won journalism's premier award, the Pulitzer Prize, for editorial writing. Specifically, the award noted an editorial asking for fairness for returning Nisei soldiers. The editorial, printed on Aug. 27, 1945, said in part: “The loyal Nisei have shot the works. From the beginning of the war they have been on trial, in and out of uniform, in army camps and relocation centers, as combat troops in Europe and as front‐line interrogators. “A lot of people will begin saying, as soon as these boys taks off their uniforms, that ‘a Jap is a Jap, and that the Nisei deserve no consideration. A majority won't say or believe this, but an active minority can have its way against an apathetic majority. “It seems to us that the Nisei slogan of ‘Go for Broke’ could be adopted by all Americans of goodwill in the days ahead. We've got to shoot the works in a fight for tolerance.” Over the years his name be came a synonym for the battle to improve race relations in state often torn by racial strife and in the fight to improve justice for all minority groups. Mr. Carter and his wife struck out in newspaper work for themselves in 1932. They had but little choice, for the Depression was on in earnest and Mr. Carter, a newlywed, had just been discharged from his $50‐a‐week post with The Associated Press. The reason was “insubordination.” Their pooled resources came to $367, barely enough to start a daily newspaper. Their paper was The Daily Courier in Hammond, La., where Mr. Carter was born on Feb. 3, 1907, and they lived over their tiny shop, sometimes exchanging advertising space for food. The editorial page attacked Huey Long, then the Democratic Senator from Louisiana and a political power in the state and the nation. Mr. Carter's district was the only district in the entire state that never sent a Long supporter to Congress. Mr. Long was assassinated in September of 1935, and early the following year the Carters sold their holdings in Hammond and moved to Greenville, community of 50,000 in the flat and fertile Yazoo‐Mississippi delta. At the time the racial makeup of the population was about evenly divided. Mr. Carter's fledgling paper was The Delta Star. Two years later he bought The Delta Democrat‐Times and merged the two under the name of The Democrat‐Times. During World War II Mrs. Carter took a post with the Office of War Information and Mr. Carter joined the Army. He was assigned to Yank and to Stars and Stripes in the Middle East. At his discharge he was major in intelligence. In an article in The Saturday Evening Post in June of 1960, Mr. Carter remarked that many “friends and well ‐wishing strangers” could not understand why he stayed in Greenville as he approached 25 years there. “They are especially commiserative,” he wrote, “when Mississippi legislature resolves that I am anti‐Southern and liar, when a state legislative investigating committee proclaims that I am Red‐tainted, or when our most powerful figure in state politics, the elderly speaker of the House of Representatives, intones publicly that I am unfit to mingle in decent Southern society.” “My reassuring answers vary. Sometimes I point out that politicians and newspaper men are not natural allies. But mostly I tell them that whatever the spiritual, mental or democratic climate elsewhere in my state or the South of the nation, it is my happy lot to live in an oasis. “Greenville was already an oasis when I came here from my native Louisiana. It is even more an oasis now.” Mr. Carter, who rarely used his first name of William, was a prolific writer, although his vision was seriously impaired. He lost the use of his right eye in World War H. A cataract was removed from his left eye in 1963. An operation to repair a detached retina was performed the following year, but it failed, and, following a second operation, he was told he had lost useful vision in the left eye. Nevertheless, he turned out a dozen books in all and many magazine articles and book reviews. Mr. Carter was a graduate of Bowdoin College and of the Columbia University Graduate. Hodding Carter. William Hodding Carter, II (February 3, 1907 – April 4, 1972), was a Southern U.S. progressive journalist and author. Carter was born in Hammond, Louisiana, the largest community in Tangipahoa Parish, in southeastern Louisiana. His parents were William Hodding Carter I, and the former Irma Dutartre. Among other distinctions in his career, Carter was a Nieman Fellow. He died in Greenville, Mississippi, of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five. He is interred in the Greenville Cemetery. [1] Contents. Biography 1 Education 1.1 Career background 1.2 Fighting intolerance 1.3 Personal life 1.4 Politics and the Kennedys 1.5. Biography. Education. Carter was valedictorian of the Hammond High School class of 1923. Carter attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine (1927), and the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University (1928). He returned to Louisiana upon graduating. According to Ann Waldron, the young Carter was an outspoken white supremacist, like most Southerners of that time, yet he began to alter his thinking when he returned to the South to live. [2] Career background. After a year as a teaching fellow at Tulane University in New Orleans (1928–1929), Carter worked as reporter for the New Orleans Item-Tribune (1929), United Press in New Orleans (1930), and the Associated Press in Jackson, Mississippi, (1931–32). With his wife, Betty née Werlein (1910–2000) of New Orleans, Carter founded the Hammond Daily Courier, in 1932. The paper was noted for its opposition to popular Louisiana governor Huey Pierce Long Jr., but its support for the national Democratic Party. In 1939 Carter moved to Greenville, a Mississippi Delta city and the seat of Washington County, where he launched his successful Greenville Delta Democrat-Times , a newspaper later published by his oldest son William Hodding Carter III. Still later, his second son, Philip Dutartre Carter (born 1939), took over publication. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his editorials, in particular a series lambasting the ill treatment of Japanese American ( Nisei ) soldiers returning from World War II. He was a professor for a single semester at Tulane. Fighting intolerance. He also wrote editorials in the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times regarding social and economic intolerance in the Deep South that won him widespread acclaim and the moniker "Spokesman of the New South". Carter wrote a caustic article for Look magazine which detailed the menacing spread of a chapter of the White Citizens' Council. The article was attacked on the floor of the Mississippi House of Representatives as a "Willful lie by a nigger-loving editor". Carter responded in a front-page editorial: Personal life. The Carters married on October 14, 1931. In addition to Hodding and Philip, they had a younger son, Thomas Hennen Carter (1945–1964), who killed himself playing a game of Russian roulette. Carter was strongly opposed to the Munich Conference which ceded Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler. Carter rushed into World War II service. While stationed at Camp Blanding in Florida, he lost the sight in his right eye during a training exercise. He thereafter served in the Intelligence Division and continued his journalistic activities by editing the Middle East division of Yank and Stars and Stripes in Cairo, Egypt, and writing three books. [4] Late in life, Carter attended the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in 1965. Politics and the Kennedys. Carter was an unabashed supporter of the Kennedys and their quest for the American Presidency. He had dinner with Bobby Kennedy and his family the night before Kennedy was assassinated. Carter had also been working for him "campaigning, making talks, and writing ghost speeches". [5] On a flight home, Carter learned of Kennedy's death and was devastated. A passenger on the plane said, "Well, we got that son-of-a-bitch, didn't we?" Carter responded, "Who are you talking about?" The passenger said, "You know damn well who I'm talking about", to which Carter responded by saying "You're just a son-of-a-bitch", and then punching the passenger in the mouth. [6] Criticism. Columnist Eric Alterman, in a book review of The Race Beat (2006) for The Nation discusses how Carter and other Southern journalists were "moderate defenders" of the South. That is, they were apologists for the South during the pre-civil rights era. Alterman says, "'Enlightened'" Southern editors, especially. Mississippi's Hodding Carter, Jr., sold [Northerners] a Chalabi-like dream of steady, nonviolent progress that belied the violent savagery that lay in wait for those who stepped out of line". [7] One of the reasons segregation had been a success, Alterman explains, is "the way newspapers had neglected it". In Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist , author Ann Waldron makes the case that although Carter crusaded for racial equality, he hedged on condemning segregation, and that after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, he attacked the intransigent White Citizens' Council, but only supported gradual integration. [8] In defense of Carter, Claude Sitton, in a review of Waldron's book in the New York Times says, "[R]eaders of today will ask how an editor who opposed enactment of a federal antilynching law as unnecessary and public school desegregation in Mississippi as unwise can be called a champion of racial justice. The answer, which she gives in the book's introduction, lies in the context of the times. Absent his efforts and those of other Southern editors of courage and like mind, change would have come far more slowly and at far greater cost." [9] Quotations. "Television news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone." "There are two things we should give our children: one is roots and the other is wings." (Borrowed from the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher- not confirmed].) Research. For additional materials by and about Hodding Carter, Jr., the researcher is referred to Mitchell Library at Mississippi State University in Starkville, where Carter's personal papers are housed.