American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'Street, Julian
General
American Adventures: A Second Trip 'Abroad at home'
Street, Julian
Southern States -- Description and travel; Southern States -- Social life and customs
In journalism Atlanta is far in advance of many cities of her size,
North or South. The Atlanta "Constitution," founded nearly half a
century ago, is one of the country's most distinguished newspapers. The
"Constitution" came into its greatest fame in the early eighties, when
Captain Evan P. Howell--the same Captain Howell who commanded a battery
at the battle of Peachtree Creek, in the defense of Atlanta, and who
later called, with his son, on General Sherman, as already
recorded--became its editor, and Henry W. Grady its managing editor.
Like William Allen White and Walt Mason of the Emporia (Kansas)
"Gazette," who work side by side, admire each other, but disagree on
every subject save that of the infallibility of the ground hog as a
weather prophet, Howell and Grady worked side by side and were devoted
friends, while disagreeing personally, and in print, on prohibition and
many other subjects. Grady would speak at prohibition rallies and,
sometimes on the same night, Howell would speak at anti-prohibition
rallies. In their speeches they would attack each other. The accounts of
these speeches, as well as conflicting articles written by the two,
would always appear in the "Constitution."
Of the pair of public monuments to individuals which I remember having
seen in Atlanta, one was the pleasing memorial, in Piedmont Park, to
Sidney Lanier (who was peculiarly a Georgia poet, having been born in
Macon, in that State, and having written some of his most beautiful
lines under the spell of Georgia scenes), and the other the statue of
Henry W. Grady, which stands downtown in Marietta Street.
The Grady monument--one regrets to say it--is less fortunate as a work
of art than as a deserved symbol of remembrance. Grady not only ought to
have a monument, but as one whose writings prove him to have been a man
of taste, he ought to have a better one than this poor mid-Victorian
thing, placed in the middle of a wide, busy street, with Fords parked
all day long about its base.
Says the inscription:
HE NEVER SOUGHT A PUBLIC OFFICE.
WHEN HE DIED HE WAS LITERALLY
LOVING A NATION INTO PEACE.
On another side of the base is chiseled a characteristic extract from
one of Grady's speeches. This speech was made in 1899, in Boston, and
one hopes that it may have been heard by the late Charles Francis Adams,
who labored in Massachusetts for the cause of intersectional harmony,
just as Grady worked for it in Georgia.
This hour [said Grady] little needs the loyalty that is loyal to
one section and yet holds the other in enduring suspicion and
estrangement. Give us the broad and perfect loyalty that loves and
trusts Georgia alike with Massachusetts--that knows no South, no
North, no East, no West; but endears with equal and patriotic love
every foot of our soil, every State in our Union.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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