Poor Uncle Reuben Maury, God rest his soul in peace, was one of those little boys. His body now lies in the earth of his fathers in the County of Albermarle, Virgina, a mile or two from the University.

One time, when I was seven years of age, I broke the blade on his pocketknife. I laid it on his dresser and said not a word. I was very scared. But he told me with an amused smile that he "had taken up his knife, and it fell apart." This polite hint that I should not try to put anything over on him nearly broke my heart; I never admitted this lying-by-omission, and I never tried lying again, either by commission or omission—at least with Uncle Reuben.

After my first year at the Virginia Military Institute, ten years later, I visited him in Charlottesville. At the Institute, one of the most impressive ceremonies is the re-enactment of the Battle of New Market, where the V.M.I. cadets, ranging in ages from twelve to sixteen, charged the Yankee batteries, and though many of them lost their lives, the Yankees were defeated, for the young boys charged to the very cannon mouth and put blade to them, and Virginia was saved.

Uncle Reuben was in the real battle, fought in 1864. If you ever go to Lexington, Virginia, there is his name on a monument at the Institute. To me he was, is, and will ever be, a hero. So on my visit I asked the details of the battle.

It is about the only time I ever saw him lose his temper. "I remember nothing about it," he said, "all I remember is that I was scared to death."

"Where were the Yankees?" I asked.

Uncle Reuben glared, and said, "I don't know, all I remember is that I wanted to run, and I nearly cried—and it was all outrage and foolishness. This damned war business is bad. Maury, you talk like a fool; please shut up and never mention the Battle of New Market to me again."

But to me Uncle Reuben was the symbol of Southern bravery. So was Uncle Lewis Maverick, Major in De Bray's Brigade; and Uncle Sam, private, who died only last year close to the century mark. Uncle Sam served under the famous General Terry, who was killed in a row with Justice Field of the Supreme Court of the United States. Field, like Huey Long, had a bodyguard, and it was the guard who shot General Terry dead. Uncle Sam swam a river with his mouth full of matches; he lit fire to a Yankee gunboat; swam back, stood on the shore, and saw it go up in flames; he captured so many Yankees that it would take Al Smith's Empire State Building to hold them all.

Uncle Willie Maverick, sixteen years of age, was at school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He ran away, joined the Confederate Army, put on his uniform, and started to join Lee. But as he approached Appomatox, he wept, for Lee had surrendered, and he saw the tattered troops leaving for their homes. Back in Texas was my father, eleven years old, and he saw the Yankee troops enter the City of San Antonio, strike down the flag of the Confederacy over the Alamo, and raise the Stars and Stripes once more.

Such then, was the background of my early years. Although the idea of slavery horrifies me, I still have greater horror of abolitionists. I have never read Uncle Tom's Cabin, but I shall some day, to get rid of my last Southern inhibition. I imagine it will be quite a bore.

In the South are my people—neither worse nor better than any other Americans. With all her faults, I love her still. But this will not keep me from telling the truth, and lambasting her when she needs it, and she needs it plenty.

Indeed, I am not irked by what happened before and during the Battle of Appomatox, but what has happened since. Even since then, the story has been one of romance and magnolia blossoms. The reason is, we have been starved and kicked around since that time, and we use all this bravery stuff to cover up our inhibitions.

I am deathly sick of it, and several mission other Southerners are, too.

With our living standards and earning capacity the lowest in America, and with large sections of the people scratching the earth like Chinese coolies, the imaginary singing of old plantation songs on the banks of the Mississippi simply makes any decent Southerner nauseated. These story-book lullabies have put us to sleep, while actually our lands have been washing away, and our condition getting worse.

I have been around the South and in it, plenty. If I know my people, they are now nationally conscious, and they no longer want to sit at the foot of the table, nor on the floor like a contented dog, not even growling. And I believe the rest of the nation, knowing that low wages and miserable conditions simply cause a vicious circle of lower standards everywhere, is willing to help us out of the hole.

In the past we of the South, like the people of most of America, have pulled ourselves out of the hole by the simple expedient of abandoning wasted lands and staking out a claim of fresh acres. With millions of other mavericks, the Mavericks have moved from Massachusetts to New York, into Virginia, to South Carolina, into Tennessee and Mississippi, Alabama, and now Texas. But now our backs are against the wall. Wherever we are, we Americans have no new lands to conquer.

In my own state of Texas we have the benefit of all the prejudices. First, we have those of the old South. Then we have the big hat, boot, and spur idea, which we use to impress Yankees, although as a matter of fact Texas is not any wilder or woolier than an eastern State. And if the intellectual six-shooter doesn't work, we can pull our guitar and go to twanging Spanish airs. But the truth is, we are neglecting the starving sheepmen and small cattlemen, the industrial and agricultural workers, and the starving Mexican-American pecan shellers.

One time on the floor of Congress, Paul Kvale, Farm Laborite of Minnesota, in pure fun, and while we were debating about pedigreed milk cows being bought for the TVA, said the high-priced cattle were justified, since they came from Minnesota, the greatest dairy state in the United States. This put one of my good Southern colleagues in a rage. He rose to defend the fair name of the Cows of the South.

But, though many of my brethren may choke upon it, the truth is we have the lowest dairy and garden production; here are some more lows: we have the lowest fertility of the soil, lowest wages, lowest per capita production of pure bred livestock, and the cheapest and worst type of housing in the whole United States of America. With our temperate or almost tropical climate and the potential fertility of the soil, we might produce from three to five times as much per acre as Sweden, but in fact we produce far less.

King Cotton, Slavery, economic collapse, then sharecropping and the plantation system, coupled with absentee ownership, have been the cause. The South has literally been a colony of New York since the Civil War.

The South, white and black, stands in about the same relation to the rest of the United States as African colonies do to Europe, and you know what that means: the South supplies the manufacturing East with cheap raw materials, produced by sweated labor—cheap cotton, cheap lumber, cheap naval stores. It has to borrow money from Eastern banks to produce them, and then it buys back its own products in manufactured form at high price. Southern workers are little better off than colonial labor.

Texas is a sort of profitable sub-colony of the "Empire State," for, although the South has been completely drained off, Texas still has untold wealth. It has tremendous resources of oil, gas, and sulphur. Mississippi and Alabama and other deep [Whenever I hear somebody say "deep South" I feel like committing violence. But I am a Southerner and it is my right. Will people north of the Mason and Dixon line please refrain from using it in the future?] Southern states have been worked so hard that they are not as profitable as Texas. But all of it, including Texas, is still in a desperate situation.

Strangely enough, this economic exploitation of the South is finally acting to diminish sectional feeling and race prejudice. That is because the white share-cropper now knows he is little better off than the Negro. Those who are a little better off economically know the fortune of the South lies with the nation as a whole.

The Solid South must forever forget its separatist, defeatist, or racial psychology. It must meet the whole nation face to face. It must get solid—in America.

And NRA, merit or no merit, brought the South to new realization of the value of American citizenship. When Southern mill owners began to ask wage differentials from twenty to forty per cent lower, by alleging that their fellow Southerners were inferior to Eastern sweatshop labor, it raised new resentments.

But the South gained new morale, too. And the South is more keenly interested in the national picture than ever before.

For the whole nation, the South has pointed historically, and points today, to the necessity of a unified national economy, with a national government which is representative of and responsive to the people of the whole nation. Before the Civil War the Government was controlled by the slave-owners—the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court. And these Southerners did not even represent their own South!

The economy of the South was then different from the rest of the nation, and a menace to the nation as a whole. Today the low wages, long hours, working conditions, the rotten conditions of the share-croppers, both black and white, are still a menace to the nation. And just as in the Civil War, reactionary forces not representative of the South are holding it down.

The situation in the South indicates the necessity of minimum wages throughout the nation. In that respect, the South should be allowed no minimum wage differential. If the South is permitted constantly to pay lower and lower wages, it is constantly depreciating the whole nation.

But new kinds of carpet-baggers, worse than the ones I learned to hate when I was a kid, are rolling into the South. Into my South they come for one reason—to get cheap labor. They come where labor is not organized, and where agriculture is getting down closer to the bottom.

And what I can't understand is why southern people sometime join in with these new carpet-baggers to exploit their own people. It makes me think of Ed McGrady, Irish and Catholic, Assistant Secretary of Labor, and what happened to him down in Tennessee. It is a spectacular story, and on how such matters are to be handled rests the future of the South. But before we go into his story, we had better understand the situation.

Driving through Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and nearly all the South, I see big signs inviting factories to locate. I stop in a gas station.

"What is all this?" I say to the attendant. "I see all your towns and states are offering advantages to these new factories. What is the story about this?"

The composite answer of the average citizen to my question was this:

"Well, Mister, I don't know. We want new busines of course, but if you ask me, I think it's a dirty deal. These newcomers gets all the gravy, and the home folks ain't no better off.

"The Chamber of Commerce invites these companies to come down here, gives them free electricity, free water, free light, and five or ten years of free taxes. But what do I get? Nobody built me any house, or even helped build one. I don't get cheap rent. I pay high, and my wages in this station are twelve dollars a week.

"I tell you, Mister, this local Chamber of Commerce is a lousy crew. It gives all the breaks to the stranger. It fights labor, holds us down. That's the attraction for the factory. Cheap labor. But that don't do any good for anybody, because the merchants can't make money off'n us if we haven't got money to spend."

This is the place where the South got off on the wrong foot the third time—when they let the industrial carpet-baggers come in, without protecting Southern Labor. The South is still standing on that wrong foot.

And then in nearly every town I visit, I hear a wierd tale like that of Ed McGrady, which involves the attitude of the average Chamber of Commerce. This attitude is puzzling, except that outside capital—chain stores and industries—generally control local Chambers. Along with that, whatever prejudices Southerners have are utilized to keep the people divided and disorganized. This is another case where the carpet-bagger gets the money return, and the Southerner gets his "honor," and his right to enjoy the sweet odor of another magnolia blossom.