Oxford, Miss.
Sept. 8, 1950
I notice that your paper has listed me among the proponents of legal beer. I resent that. I am every inch as much an enemy of liberty and enlightenment and progress as any voting or drinking dry either in Oxford.
Our town is already overcrowded. If we had legal beer and liquor here where you could buy it for only half of what we pay bootleggers, not to mention the playgrounds—tennis courts and swimming pools—and the high school gymnasiums and the public libraries which we could have with the proceeds and profits from one four-year term of county-owned and operated beer and liquor stores, we would have such an influx of people, businesses and industries with thirty and forty thousand dollar payrolls, that we old inhabitants could hardly move on the streets; our merchants couldn’t sleep in the afternoon for the clashing and jangling of cash registers, and we older citizens couldn’t even get into the stores to read a free magazine or borrow the telephone.
No; let us stick to the old ways. Our teen-age children have cars or their friends do; they can always drive up to Tennessee or to Quitman County for beer or whiskey, and us graybeards who don’t like travel can telephone for it, as we always have done. Of course, it costs twice as much when it is delivered to your door, and you usually drink too much of it, than if you had to get up and go to town to get it, but better [that] than to break up the long and happy marriage between dry voters and illicit sellers, for which our fair state supplies one of the last sanctuaries and strongholds.
In fact, my effort in the recent election was only secondarily concerned with beer. I was making a protest. I object to anyone making a public statement which any fourth grade child with a pencil and paper, can disprove. I object more to a priest so insulting the intelligence of his hearers as to assume that he can make any statement, regardless of its falsity, and because of respect for his cloth, not one of them will try or dare to check up on it. But most of all,—and those ministers of sects which are not autonomous, who have synods or boards of bishops or other bodies of authority and control over them, might give a thought to this—I object to ministers of God violating the canons and ethics of their sacred and holy avocation by using, either openly or underhand, the weight and power of their office to try to influence a civil election.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Oxford Eagle, September 14, 1950]
TO THE EDITOR OF Time
Re Waugh on Hemingway [Waugh criticized the critics of Hemingway’s new novel, Across the River and into the Trees] in Time, Oct. 30:
Good for Mr. Waugh. I would like to have said this myself, not the Waugh of course but the equivalent Faulkner. One reason I did not is, the man who wrote some of the pieces in Men Without Women and The Sun Also Rises and some of the African stuff (and some—most—of all the rest of it too for that matter) does not need defending, because the ones who throw the spit-balls didn’t write the pieces in Men Without Women and The Sun Also Rises and the African pieces and the rest of it, and the ones who didn’t write Men Without Women and The Sun Also Rises and the African pieces and the rest of it don’t have anything to stand on while they throw the spit-balls.
Neither does Mr. Waugh need this from me. But I hope he will accept me on his side.
Oxford, Miss.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Time, November 13, 1950]
STATEMENT TO THE PRESS ON THE WILLIE MCGEE CASE*
I do not want Willie McGee to be executed, because it will make him a martyr and create a long lasting stink in my native state.
If the crime of which he is accused was not one of force and violence, and I do not think it was proved that, then the penalty in this state or in any other similar case should not be death.
I have nothing in common with the representatives of the Civil Rights Congress except we both say we want Willie McGee to live.
I believe these women who visited in Mississippi recently are being used; that their cause would be best helped with the execution of Willie.
I did tell them if they wanted to save Willie they should talk to the women in the kitchen and make their arguments there rather than to the men and the politicians.
[Memphis Commercial Appeal, March 27, 1951]
* McGee, a Negro convicted of raping a white woman, was executed at Laurel, Mississippi, in May 1951, four months after the United States Supreme Court had refused, for the third time in two years, to review the conviction. Faulkner released this statement to the press on March 26 to correct misquotations which had appeared in newspapers after he had been interviewed the preceding week by women representatives of the Civil Rights Congress.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE New York Times
New York, Dec. 22, 1954.
This is about the Italian airliner which undershot the runway and crashed at Idlewild after failing three times to hold the instrument glide-path which would have brought it down to the runway.
It is written on the idea (postulate, if you like) that the instrument or instruments—altimeter-cum-drift-indicator—failed or had failed, was already out of order or incorrect before the moment when the pilot committed irrevocably the aircraft to it.
It is written in grief. Not just for the sorrow of the bereaved ones of those who died in the crash, and for the airline, the public carrier which, in selling the tickets, promised or anyway implied security for the trip, but for the crew, the pilot himself who will be blamed for the crash and whose record and memory will be tarnished by it; who, along with his unaware passengers, was victim not even of the failed instruments but victim of that mystical, unquestioning, almost religious awe and veneration in which our culture has trained us to hold gadgets—any gadget, if it is only complex enough and cryptic enough and costs enough.
I imagine that even after the first failure to hold the glide-path, certainly after the second one, his instinct—the seat of his pants, call it what you will—after that much experience, that many hours in the air, told him that something was wrong. And his seniority as a four-engine over-water captain probably told him where the trouble was. But he dared not accept that knowledge and (this presumes that even after the second failure he still had enough fuel left to reach a field which he could see) act on it.
Possibly at some time during the four attempts to land, very likely at some one of the final rapid seconds before he had irrevocably committed the aircraft—that compounding of mass and weight by velocity—to the ground, his co-pilot (or flight engineer or whoever else might have been in the cockpit at the time) probably said to him: “Look. We’re wrong. Get the flaps and gear up and let’s get to hell out of here.” But he dared not. He dared not so flout and affront, even with his own life too at stake, our cultural postulate of the infallibility of machines, instruments, gadgets—a Power more ruthless even than the old Hebrew concept of its God, since ours is not even jealous and vengeful, caring nothing about individuals.
He dared not commit that sacrilege. If he had, nothing would have remained to him save to open the cockpit hatch and (a Roman) cast himself onto the turning blades of one of the inboard air-screws. I grieve for him, for that moment’s victims. We all had better grieve for all people beneath a culture which holds any mechanical superior to any man simply because the one, being mechanical, is infallible, while the other, being nothing but man, is not just subject to failure but doomed to it.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[New York Times, December 26, 1954]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS
Commercial Appeal
Oxford, Miss.
10 Feb., 1955
I have just read with interest the ‘Letter to the Editor’ of Mr Wolstenholme, of Hohenwald, Tenn., in your issue of Sunday, the 6th, in which he suggests that the Negro inhabitants of Memphis slums could nail up their rat-holes if they were not too shiftless to do it; and that the white investigating groups would do much better to come to Lewis County, where they could find plenty of white people deserving of their offices.
Does this mean t
hat, for every rat-hole Shelby County Negroes have, Lewis County white folks have two? Which cant be right, since white folks, not being Negroes, are not shiftless; and therefore, for every rat-hole which a Shelby or Lewis County, Tennessee, or a Lafayette County, Mississippi, Negro has, a Shelby or Lewis County, Tennessee, or Lafayette County, Mississippi, white man cant have any. Which wont hold water either, since, for the simple reason that there are more rats than people, there is some inevitable and inescapable point at which the white man, no matter how unshiftless, is going to have one rat-hole. So, at what point on the scale of the Negro’s non-rat-holes does the white man gain one or earn one or anyway have one rat-hole? Is unshiftless twice as unshiftless as shiftless, giving the white man twice as many rat-holes as the Negro man, or does this get us into the old insoluble problem in amateur physics about how much is twice as cold as zero?
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Memphis Commercial Appeal, February 20, 1955; typescript]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS
Commercial Appeal
We Mississippians already know that our present schools are not good enough. Our young men and women themselves prove that to us every year by the fact that, when the best of them want the best of education which they are entitled to and are competent for, not only in the humanities but in the professions and crafts—law and medicine and engineering—too, they have to go out of the State to get it. And quite often, too often, they dont come back.
So our present schools are not even good enough for white people; our present State reservoir of education is not of high enough quality to assuage the thirst of even our white young men and women. In which case, how can it possibly assuage the thirst and need of the Negro, who obviously is thirstier, needs it worse, else the Federal Government would not have had to pass a law compelling Mississippi (among others of course) to make the best of our education available to him.
That is, our present schools are not even good enough for white folks. So what do we do? make them good enough, improve them to the best possible? No. We beat the bushes, rake and scrape to raise additional taxes to establish another system at best only equal to that one which is already not good enough, which therefore wont be good enough for Negroes either; we will have two identical systems neither of which are good enough for anybody. The question is not how foolish can people get because apparently there is no limit to that. The question is, how foolish in simple dollars and cents, let alone in wasted men and women, can we afford to be?
Oxford, Miss.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Memphis Commercial Appeal, March 20, 1955; typescript]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE New York Times
Oxford, Miss., March 18, 1955.
I wonder when we will learn that the day is long since past when even local acts of national policy, let alone ones with foreign implications, can be committed by people with no more equipment than a United States flag and a primer on international law.
I am thinking of the people responsible for and involved in the expulsion from the United States of the Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church, the consequence of which was the expulsion from Russia of Father Bissonnette of the Roman Catholic Church in America. I am thinking of both the people who could have expelled the Russian Metropolitan without it once occurring to them apparently that they might have to explain it to anyone; and the people who could have even dreamed that they could explain it or justify it to Communists, who by their very ideology are compelled to be inflexible enemies of the so-called Christian religion whether they want to be or not.
I don’t mean the members of the State Department. That is, the professional ones, the dedicated career ones, the young ones who had that vocation in youth and taught themselves (not the Government they represent taught them; we don’t train our agents and representatives to deal with people, the simple, incorrigible, intractable, invincible human heart, but only with numbers and rates of exchange) enough of the humanity of man to be competent for their dedications. I know enough of them myself to know that they would have had more sense. Only they had no choice, no say, because from the day they drew their first Saturday’s wages they were harassed and harried by their masters—people who had acquired that masterhood simply as an incidental prerequisite to their elections to other offices by popular vote, or as a reward for having employed their powers that still others might be elected or appointed to offices which those others wanted or needed or, anyway, thirsted for. I’m thinking about them.
I wonder, until the moment when the public press brought the word to their attention (and, I hope, alarm and fear too), just how many members of the Government and Congress could have defined the word “Metropolitan” in even a hundred times the standard ten seconds allowed by the giveaway icebox-or-electric washer quiz programs to answer the ones like, for instance, what day of what month is the Fourth of July?
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[New York Times, March 25, 1955]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS
Commercial Appeal
I have just read the letters of Mr Neill, Mr Martin and Mr Womack in your issue of March 27th, in reply to my letter in your issue of March 20th.
To Mr Martin, and Mr Womack’s first question: Whatever the cost of our present statewide school system is, we will have to raise that much again to establish another system equal to it. Let us take some of that new funds and make our present schools, from kindergarden up through the humanities and sciences and professions, not just the best in America but the best that schools can be; then the schools themselves will take care of the candidates, white and Negro both, who had no business in them in the first place.
Then the rest of the new fund could establish or improve trade and craft schools for the ones whom the first system, the academic one, had already eliminated before they had had time to do much harm in the terms of their own wasted days and the overcrowded classrooms and harried underpaid teachers which result in a general leavening and lowering of educational standards; not to mention making the best use of the men and women we produce. What we need is more Americans on our side. If all Americans were on the same side, we wouldn’t need to try to bribe foreign countries which dont always stay bought, to support us.
Though I agree that this only solves integration: not the impasse of the emotional conflict over it. But at least it observes one of the oldest and soundest maxims: If you cant beat ’em, join ’em.
To Mr Womack’s last question: I have no degrees nor diplomas from any school. I am an old veteran sixth-grader. Maybe that’s why I have so much respect for education that I seem unable to sit quiet and watch it held subordinate in importance to an emotional state concerning the color of human skin.
Oxford, Miss.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Memphis Commercial Appeal, April 3, 1955; typescript]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS
Commercial Appeal
I have read Mr. Murphy’s letter in your issue of April 3. I also received one from Dr. Flinsch, Dean, School of Engineering, Mississippi State College, along the same line. If my letter stated or implied any facts which are incorrect, I retract and apologize.
My aim was not to injure our present school system, but to take advantage of whatever changes in it the future holds, to improve our schools from their present condition of being a sort of community or state-supported baby sitters, where the pupil is compelled by law or custom to spend so many hours of the day, with nobody but often-underpaid teachers to be concerned about how much he learns.
Instead of holding the educational standard down to the lowest common denominator of the class or grade group, let us raise it to that of the highest.
Let us give every would-be pupil and student the equality and right to education in the terms in which our forefathers used the words equality and freedom and right: not equal right to charity, but equal right to the opportunity to do what he is capable of doing, freedom to attain the highest of standards—provided he is capa
ble of it; or if he is not competent or will not work, let us learn early, before he has done much harm, that he is in the wrong occupation.
If we are to have two school systems, let the second one be for pupils ineligible not because of color but because they either can’t or won’t do the work of the first one.
Oxford, Miss.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
[Memphis Commercial Appeal, April 10, 1955]
TO THE EDITOR OF THE MEMPHIS
Commercial Appeal
I would like to say ‘Well done’ to the writer of the letter signed ‘Student’ from Dorsey, Miss, in your issue of April 10th. Let us make a canvass of the young people of Mississippi who are attending our present schools and will attend the integrated ones if or when they come, for their opinion of it; they are certainly interested parties.
We in the South are faced by two apparently irreconcilable facts: one, that the National Government has decreed absolute equality in education among all races; the other, the people in the South who say that it shall never happen. These two facts must be reconciled. I believe there are many young people too in Mississippi who believe they can be, who love our State—not love white people specifically nor Negroes specifically, but our land: our climate and geography, the qualities in our people, white and Negro both, for honesty and tolerance and fair play, the splendors in our traditions and the glories in our past—enough to try to reconcile them, even at the risk which the young writer from Dorsey took despite the fact that he didn’t sign his name. And what a commentary that is on us: that in Mississippi communal adult opinion can reach such a general emotional pitch that our young sons and daughters dare not, from probably a very justified physical fear, sign their names to an opinion adverse to it.
Essays, Speeches & Public Letters Page 18