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WORK TITLE: 30 Days a Black Man
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://billsteigerwald.com/
CITY: Pittsburgh
STATE: PA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://truthaboutcharley.com/about-me/ * http://billsteigerwald.com/about/ * http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/books/2017/06/14/30-Days-A-Black-Man-Bill-Steigerwald-Ray-Sprigle/stories/201706140012
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2016163668
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2016163668
HEADING: Steigerwald, Bill
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670 __ |a 30 days a Black man, 2017: |b ECIP title page (Bill Steigerwald) About the Author (Newspaperman; 1969 Villanova University history major; retired in 2009 from newspapers; author of several books)
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Attended Villanova University, 1969.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist for newspapers, including Los Angeles Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review; author, 2009–.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Bill Steigerwald retired from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 2009 and began a new career as the author of nonfiction books that use his reporting skills to tell unremembered stories from twenty-first century America.
Dogging Steinbeck
In Dogging Steinbeck: How I Went Looking for John Steinbeck’s America, Found My Own America, and Exposed the Truth about “Travels with Charley,” he tells the story behind a putative work of nonfiction by a great modern American writer. “In 1960,” explained Lewis Jones in the Spectator, “John Steinbeck set off with his poodle Charley to drive around the United States in a truck equipped with a bed, a desk, a stove and a fridge. To renew his acquaintance with that ‘monster of a land’, he planned to cross the northern states from the east coast to the west, then drive down the Pacific and across the southern states. He was fifty-eight, and recovering from a mild stroke…. Travels with Charley was published in 1962. It was a great success, and his last major work. Four months later he won the Nobel Prize.”
Steigerwald shows that, in fact, Steinbeck fabricated many of the stories he told. “In the book, Steigerwald points out that when Steinbeck was supposed to have been roughing it, camped out on a farm near Lancaster, N.H., he actually booked a room at a luxury hotel,” wrote Bill Lucey in NewspaperAlum. “He also discovered that Steinbeck spent precious little time in campers, and was hardly alone, as he led readers to believe; but traveled with his wife Elaine on more than half of the trip; other times he stayed at the Steinbeck family cottage in Pacific Grove, Calif., and another week at a Texas cattle ranch for millionaires.” “Apart from some surprised indignation at the brazenness of Steinbeck’s fabulism,” said Shawn Macomber in the Weekly Standard, “this friendliness is the primary motif of Dogging Steinbeck, offering a corrective to the original sin by beautifully detailing Steigerwald’s own journey hopscotching across a nation which `despite the Great Recession and national headlines dripping with gloom and doom’ remained `a big, beautiful, empty, healthy, rich, safe, clean, prosperous, and friendly country.’” “Anyone who’s interested in John Steinbeck, the truth about Travels with Charley and how much America has changed in the last half century America,” concluded a Community Voices contributor, “should read it.”
30 Days a Black Man
In 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South Steigerwald “offers a valuable corrective,” reported a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “in resurrecting Ray Sprigle (1886-1957), an old-school white Pittsburgh newspaperman who produced an expose after traveling the South disguised as a black man.” “Sprigle traveled from Pittsburgh to Atlanta to rural Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. He talked to sharecroppers and black doctors and families whose lives were torn apart by lynching. He visited desperately underfunded schools for black children and resort towns where only white people were allowed to bathe in the ocean,” stated Lorraine Boissoneault in Smithsonian.com.
“In one of the most striking moments of his reporting trip, he met the Snipes family—a black family forced to flee their home after their son”—a veteran–was killed voting in a Georgia election.” The book, said Nick Gillespie in Reason, “does a masterful job of recreating an America in which de facto and de jure segregation was the rule not just in the former Confederacy but much of the North as well. It’s a deeply disturbing and profoundly moving account.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2017, review of 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South.
Spectator, January 3, 2015, Lewis Jones, “Three Men, Two Men, One Man and His Dog …,” p. 28.
Weekly Standard, January 21, 2013, Shawn Macomber, “Chicanery Row.”
ONLINE
Community Voices, http://communityvoices.post-gazette.com/ (November 14, 2012), “Travels without Charley.”
NewspaperAlum, http://www.newspaperalum.com/ (April 17, 2013), Bill Lucey, “Bill Steigerwald Refused to Let Sleeping Dogs Lie: John Steinbeck Exposed.”
Reason, http://reason.com/ (May 12, 2017), Nick Gillespie, author interview.
Smithsonian.com, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/ (February 14, 2017), Lorraine Boissoneault, “The Complicated Racial Politics of Going `Undercover’ to Report on the Jim Crow South.”
Print Marked Items
Steigerwald, Bill: 30 DAYS A BLACK
MAN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Steigerwald, Bill 30 DAYS A BLACK MAN Lyons Press (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 4, 1 ISBN: 978-1-
4930-2618-0
Fascinating account of an anti-Jim Crow muckraking adventure.Longtime journalist Steigerwald (Dogging
Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about Travels with Charley, 2012, etc.) offers a
valuable corrective in resurrecting Ray Sprigle (1886-1957), an old-school white Pittsburgh newspaperman
who produced an expose after traveling the South disguised as a black man. As Juan Williams notes in his
foreword, "over thirty days, Sprigle learned of the daily humiliations experienced by blacks in the 1948
Deep South." Before he details Sprigle's tense journey, Steigerwald strongly depicts the pre-civil rights
landscape, arguing that most white Americans could ignore blacks' plight, and some enforced the color line.
He focuses on once-prominent figures, including the NAACP's driven head Walter Francis White (who
actually appeared white), so-called "progressive segregationists" like journalist Hodding Carter, and
determined middle-class blacks like John Wesley Dobbs, a Masonic Grand Master (and passionate Atlanta
booster despite its segregation) recruited by White to guide Sprigle. He portrays Atlanta and Pittsburgh as
cities in their primes, vastly different for black and white citizens, as was the country overall in 1948: "Civil
rights and desegregation were in the headlines every day." Sprigle, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing
the Ku Klux Klan associations of Supreme Court justice Hugo Black, was described by Time as "a harddigging,
hell-for-leather newsman." Passing as a black man with a deep suntan and workman's clothes, after
learning that dyes would be toxic, Sprigle traveled through several states, from Atlanta to the Mississippi
Delta, and avoided danger due to Dobbs' counsel: "to stay out of trouble and avoid harm you had to be
vigilant as well as meek, lowly, and docile. His newspaper stories were carried nationwide and turned into a
book, yet Steigerwald concludes, "by Christmas of 1948, the intense debate over the future of Jim Crow
segregation had burned out in the national media." Sprigle's audacity was forgotten, but Steigerwald turns it
into rollicking, haunting American history.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Steigerwald, Bill: 30 DAYS A BLACK MAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482911713/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=97b858d1.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482911713
Three men, two men, one man and his dog ...
Lewis Jones
Spectator.
327.9723 (Jan. 3, 2015): p28+.
COPYRIGHT 2015 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
In America: Travels with John Steinbeck
by Geert Mak
Harvill Seeker, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 498, ISBN 9781846557026
Spectator Bookshop, 20 [pounds sterling]
In 1960 John Steinbeck set off with his poodle Charley to drive around the United States in a truck equipped
with a bed, a desk, a stove and a fridge. To renew his acquaintance with that 'monster of a land', he planned
to cross the northern states from the east coast to the west, then drive down the Pacific and across the
southern states. He was 58, and recovering from a mild stroke. Having recently abandoned his attempt to
write an American Don Quixote, he called his project 'Operation Windmills', cast Charley as his Sancho
Panza, and named his truck Rocinante. Travels with Charley was published in 1962. It was a great success,
and his last major work. Four months later he won the Nobel Prize.
In 2010 Geert Mak, a Dutch journalist and historian, approximated Steinbeck's itinerary in a rented silver
Jeep. Setting off from Sag Harbor, Long Island, which when Steinbeck lived there was 'a blue-collar place'
and is now a rich yachting resort, he was soon dismayed to learn that he was not alone: Bill Steigerwald, a
journalist from Pittsburgh, was taking the same route, as were 'a woman from the Washington Post' and
'someone who runs a website for doglovers'.
The woman from the Washington Post has left no trace that I can find. The doglover turns out to have been
John Woestendiek, who has written Travels with Ace, a blog inaccessible to my computer. And Steigerwald
of Pittsburgh has published Dogging Steinbeck, much of which may be read on the internet. He takes an
'openly libertarian' (i.e. stridently Republican) line against the Democrat Steinbeck, and is dismissive of his
way with facts: according to him, Travels with Charley is 'a very flawed load of fictional crap and
deception'.
Mak acknowledges Steigerwald's detective work, but is less brutal and more literary in his judgment.
Steinbeck claims, for example, to have spent a night in the Badlands of North Dakota camping under the
stars, listening to the barking of coyotes and the screeching of an owl, when he actually drove on to stay at
an hotel. Mak concedes that 'too many of the meetings [described in Travels with Charley] are of dubious
veracity, too many facts are wrong, too many dialogues ... are clearly invented'.
As a liberal European, his opinions on the current state of America are pretty much the opposite to
Steigerwald's. Where Steigerwald finds 'few signs of real poverty', Mak encounters 'islands of prosperity'
amid 'oceans of anguish and poverty'. One surmises that Steigerwald might well subscribe to the Fox News
interpretation of history, while Mak certainly does not. After watching a report about how elderly people in
the Netherlands are subjected to involuntary euthanasia on an industrial scale, he concludes that America's
Enlightenment quest for objectivity has been 'replaced by hypnosis, exhibitionism and collective
entertainment'.
The turning point of Steinbeck's journey occurred at Monterey, California. He had spent much of the 1930s
there, and respectable locals were outraged when he portrayed it in Cannery Row (1945) as populated by
losers, drunks and whores. (Mak writes that, as an 'ode to an aimless existence', it is an 'extraordinarily unAmerican'
novel, though the same could be said of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. ) After its success the
town decided to cash in, and turned itself into a sort of theme park, renaming Ocean View Avenue as
Cannery Row and so on. It was this transformation that so upset Steinbeck when he revisited it, and caused
him more or less to abandon his project. Monterey is the turning point of Mak's journey, too, as he reflects
that Travels with Charley is effectively the opposite of Cannery Row. The latter, based entirely on
Steinbeck's experience, was fact dressed up as fiction, while the former is best seen as a 'road novel'.
The subtitle of Travels with Charley is 'In Search of America'. Mak, though, puts In America ahead of
'Travels with John Steinbeck', indicating that for him Steinbeck is essentially a peg on which to hang a
companion piece to his monumental and much praised In Europe (2007). For long sections of his narrative--
his frequent historical digressions, his blizzards of statistics and his swathes of opinion--the novelist is
accordingly absent. This will disappoint Steinbeck fans, but the result is not without interest or validity.
Both Roosevelt presidents figure largely in Mak's historical analysis. He argues that the Republican 'Teddy'
established the messianic aspect of America's foreign policy--'Shall we go on conferring our civilisation
upon the peoples that sit in darkness,' asked Mark Twain in 1900, 'or shall we give those poor things a rest?'-
-and that the Democrat FDR's New Deal continues to define the key questions of domestic politics, which
concern the roles of big government and big business.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
He notes that despite the extreme differences in education, income and life expectancy between, say, an
American-Asian in New Jersey and a Native American in South Dakota--comparable to those between the
inhabitants of a Paris suburb and rural Poland--nearly everyone hates the federal government in Washington,
just as Europeans do the one in Brussels. A consequence of this is that America seems more or less to have
given up on improving its infrastructure, and the nation that built the Hoover Dam is now incapable of
building a railway tunnel between New York and New Jersey. If things go on this way the federal
government will end up, as the economist Paul Krugman puts it, as little more than 'an insurance company
with an army'.
Steinbeck was himself a bit of a doommonger, but he has nothing on Mak, who finds cause for lamentation
everywhere he looks: the systematic corruption of Congress; the interdependence of Goldman Sachs and the
US Treasury (which he compares to that between the KGB/FSB and the Kremlin); the death of the smalltown
heartland; the grotesque prison system; the hordes of jumbo flabsters waddling to early graves (one in
three Americans weighs as much as the other two); the 'prosperity gospel', which sees congregations of tens
of thousands praying for new cars; the way an egalitarian society is 'turning into the kind of class-based
system the Founding Fathers rebelled against'.
In America reminded me of last year's jeremiad, George Packer's The Unwinding. I dare say their gloom is
fully justified by the facts, but there is more to the truth than facts, and I doubt if either will be read half a
century from now, when Travels with Charley still will be. 'I am happy to report,' wrote the quixotic
Steinbeck, 'that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.'
Answers to 'Spot the Booker Prize Winners' by Simon Drew
1. Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2002)
2. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (1998)
3. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch (1978)
4. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (1992)
5. Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975)
6. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008)
7. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
8. In a Free State by V.S. Naipaul (1971)
9. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009)
10. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle (1993)
Jones, Lewis
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Jones, Lewis. "Three men, two men, one man and his dog ..." Spectator, 3 Jan. 2015, p. 28+. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A396326468/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5f312853. Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A396326468
NewspaperAlum
Bill Steigerwald Refused to Let Sleeping Dogs Lie: John Steinbeck Exposed.
Book Cover Dogging
Travels with charley pic
Journalist and author Bill Steigerwald [See his website ]recently checked in to say he is doing well in another chapter of his life, away from the daily grind of newspaper reporting since retiring in March, 2009.
After 30 years reporting for the Los Angeles Times in the 1980’s, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in the 1990s, and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review at the turn of the 21st century, the veteran journalist used his modest buyout package (including tearing through his 401 (k) ) to embark on what seemed at the time to be a crazy book idea.
Unlike other harebrained book ideas that often go nowhere, Steigerwald’s project actually bore fruit and ended up receiving a fair amount of national attention, including from The New York Times and C-Span.
The Pittsburgh native unraveled how John Steinbeck’s 1962 best-selling travelogue (billed as a work of nonfiction) ``Travels with Charley: In Search of America’’ about his journey through 34 states, covering more than 10,000 miles with his elderly French poodle was nothing more than an colorful exercise in creative writing. Or more to the point, as Steigerwald tells it, ``Travels with Charley was a load of fictional crap. It was not the true nonfiction account of his 1960 road trip we'd been led to believe but a highly fictionalized and dishonest book -- a "literary fraud," as I so indelicately called it.’’ [in Reason Magazine ]
A Pulitzer Prize (1940) winning author, Steinbeck wrote 27 books, 16 of them novels and six other nonfiction works.
In the travelogue, among other topics, Steinbeck chronicles French Canadian potato pickers in Aroostook County, Me., a fire and brimstone sermon in Vermont, the peculiar lifestyle of truck drivers, vivid descriptions of mobile homes, the nature of turkeys, the majesty of the Mojave Desert, and a yarn about how a tire blew out in a rain storm in Oregon.
Exactly 50 years after Steinbeck's journey, with over three decades of shoe-leather reporting behind him, Steigerwald retraced the 10,000-mile route the celebrated American writer took around the country in 1960, carefully checking, double-checking and fact-checking Steinbeck’s journey, meeting hundreds of ordinary Americans, often sleeping in the back of his car in Wal-Mart parking lots as he drove from Maine to California to Texas.
Interestingly, the original game plan of Steigerwald’s project was not to fling darts at Steinbeck’s credibility. Rather, it was intended to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Steinbeck’s U.S. tour and report and update readers how the vast landscape of the United States had changed since 1960. It was only through his scrupulous investigation that Steinbeck’s literary deception was uncovered.
In November 2012, Steigerwald published ``Dogging Steinbeck’’ , an e-book by Amazon.com, which made the book possible after he wasn’t able to secure a New York publisher; meaning, he didn’t have the perks normally extended to other authors. ``I completed the book’’, Steigerwald told me, `` with no editor, no copy editor, no fact-checker, no photographer, no publisher, no designer -- just me in charge of everything.’’ The book is also available in paperback form as a print-on-demand in which the customer orders it through Amazon; the book is then printed in South Carolina and mailed to the customer.
Did he experience any anxious moments flying solo without a publisher? Absolutely. `` All that editorial autonomy was scary for a newspaperman at times, but I didn't do too bad. So far, no lawsuits’’ Steigerwald says.
In the book, Steigerwald points out that when Steinbeck was supposed to have been roughing it, camped out on a farm near Lancaster, N.H., he actually booked a room at a luxury hotel. He also discovered that Steinbeck spent precious little time in campers, and was hardly alone, as he led readers to believe; but traveled with his wife Elaine on more than half of the trip; other times he stayed at the Steinbeck family cottage in Pacific Grove, Calif., and another week at a Texas cattle ranch for millionaires. On other occasion, when Steinbeck was supposed to be camping in Alice, N.D., where he claimed to have met a Shakespearean actor, he was actually staying in a comfortable motel 326 miles farther west in the town of Beach.
In a published interview with The New York Times in 2011 Steigerwald was stunned his findings didn’t have more of an impact within literary circles. As he told the Times: ``Travels With Charley’ for 50 years has been touted, venerated, reviewed, mythologized as a true story, a nonfiction account of John Steinbeck’s journey of discovery, driving slowly across America, camping out under the stars alone. Other than the fact that none of that is true, what can I tell you? If scholars aren’t concerned about this, what are they scholaring about?’’
But in fairness to astute followers of Steinbeck's work, not everyone took ``Travels with Charley'' to be a work of pure nonfiction. In The New York Times book review on July 27, 1962, for example, Times’ reviewer Orville Prescott wrote of `Travels with Charley’: ``Relaxed, informal and chatty, he [Steinbeck] indulges in whopping exaggerations, tells tall stories, sketches odd characters he met and tosses off a series of capsule essays on scores of subjects. Since Mr. Steinbeck is an intelligent man and a facile writer the result is engaging.''
In addition to the national attention Steigerwald’s efforts received, he was thrilled to be interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-Span about his shocking discoveries.
As to a brief summary of his post-newspaper career, Steigerwald would only say ``it’s a long story with some trouble-making, a happy ending and a lot of fun on and off the road for an old newspaper hack.’’
-Bill Lucey
WPLucey@gmail.com
April 17, 2013
Posted at 12:23 AM in Books, Journalism | Permalink
Travels Without Charley'Dogging Steinbeck' -- A True Book
'Dogging Steinbeck' -- A True Book
Tuesday, 14 September 2010 01:00 AM Written by Bill Steigerwald
Nov. 14, 2012
For half a century, we were told John Steinbeck's beloved road book "Travels With Charley in Search of America" was a work of nonfiction. It wasn't.
As former Post-Gazette staffer Bill Steigerwald proved on the road and in libraries during 2010, Steinbeck's iconic bestseller was a literary fraud. It was not a true or honest account of the cross-country trip Steinbeck made in the fall of 1960. It was mostly fiction and lies.
"Dogging Steinbeck" is Steigerwald's new ebook.
Part literary detective story, part American travel book, part history book, part book review, part critique of the mainstream media, part primer in drive-by journalism, mini-Steinbeck bio, it is the true story of his own 11,276-mile road trip across America and how he stumbled upon the truth about Steinbeck's last major work, ruffled the PH.Ds of some top Steinbeck scholars and forced the publisher of "Charley" to tell readers the book was too fictionalized to be taken literally.
"Dogging Steinbeck" is for sale on Amazon.com for $6.99 -- only $2.04 more than what Steinbeck's hardback sold for in 1962 when the U.S. dollar was worth about seven times more than it is today.
Anyone who's interested in John Steinbeck, the truth about "Travels With Charley" and how much America has changed in the last half century America should read it, Steigerwald's mother says, and help him recover the costs of his two year adventure.
2010-10-31_16.07.09_copy
Bill Steigerwald
Posts of interest:
A “Travels With Charley” Timeline.
“America Looks Good From Steinbeck’s Highway” is the last of eight print-side travel stories I wrote in 2010 for the Post-Gazette.
More in this category:
« John Steinbeck Gets Home Again
John Steinbeck Heads for Home »
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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Weekly Standard
http://www.weeklystandard.com/chicanery-row/article/695208
THE MAGAZINE: From the January 21 Issue
Chicanery Row
Even John Steinbeck’s ‘nonfiction’ was fictional.
12:00 AM, Jan 21, 2013 | By Shawn Macomber
In 1956, the celebrated novelist John Steinbeck declared journalism to be “the mother of literature and the perpetrator of crap.” To the non-Nobel ear, this might sound like denigration or enmity. But Bill Steigerwald’s idol-slaying travelogue of truth suggests the bon mot may have been more aspirational than previously believed.
First, a bit of background. After 30 years toiling in journalism, Steigerwald accepted a buyout package from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 2009—or, as he puts it, “I dove from the deck of the Daily Titanic and swam off to look for books to write till I die.” For his first pre-mortem project Steigerwald decided to retrace the route John Steinbeck traveled for his 1962 bestseller Travels with Charley, minus the half-Wellington rubber boots, blue serge British naval hat, and standard French poodle. Though an ardent libertarian such as Steigerwald would typically look askance at the faux proletarian musings of a wealthy, New Deal-worshipping friend of Adlai Stevenson, it is easy to see why Steigerwald presumed an exploration of how the country had changed “since Ike was president, Elvis was king and everything worth buying was still Made in America and sold at Sears” would prove neither “complicated
[n]or controversial.”
Alas, during his newspaper days, Steigerwald developed a nasty research habit, which he continued to indulge after his liberation from the dread deadline. Thus did he visit the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York to compare the original handwritten Travels with Charley manuscript with the edition sold in stores, and discovered that the Charley edit encompassed more than misplaced semicolons and who/whom usage.
“A writer must rearrange reality so it will seem reasonably real to the reader,” Steinbeck writes in the manuscript. Accordingly, it turns out, Steinbeck had not always been where he said he had gone, he likely invented many of Charley’s conveniently archetypal characters, and he serially exaggerated the Spartan nature of the trip—unless one considers Adlai Stevenson’s country estate and the Fatty Arbuckle suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco to be austere lodgings.
Most galling, the foundational conceit of the book—man and dog on a lonely quest “in search of America”—is utter deception: Steinbeck’s wife Elaine rode along for a goodly portion of the trip, costarring in the first draft until a Viking editor chose to play angel Clarence to Elaine’s George Bailey, giving readers the great gift of a chance to see how the book would appear without her—much better, apparently, came the answer from on high—and consequently (and, no doubt, from the dog’s view, belatedly) promoting the frequently kenneled poodle to a perch on the front seat.
Perhaps when Steinbeck got his Nobel Prize his editor got her wings; but out on the cold trail, hardscrabble romantic mythology provided Steigerwald with little warmth:
Apart from some surprised indignation at the brazenness of Steinbeck’s fabulism, this friendliness is the primary motif of Dogging Steinbeck, offering a corrective to the original sin by beautifully detailing Steigerwald’s own journey hopscotching across a nation which “despite the Great Recession and national headlines dripping with gloom and doom” remained “a big, beautiful, empty, healthy, rich, safe, clean, prosperous, and friendly country.”
In the aftermath of his preliminary debunking (first revealed in an excellent 2011 Reason article), Steigerwald finds some unexpected sources and allies: Helter Skelter coauthor Curt Gentry, Paul Theroux, and the New York Times editorial board rallying alongside more predictable supporters. But, overall, the rationalizations of what Steigerwald dubs the “Steinbeck Studies Industrial Complex” are disheartening. Biographer Jay Parini defiantly tells the Times, “I would say hooray for Steinbeck. If you want to get at the spirit of something, sometimes it’s important to use the techniques of a fiction writer.” Of course, one need not possess Steinbeck’s imagination to envision instances where Jay Parini might be less enthusiastic about greater truth through fabrication: For example, if such “techniques” were employed in a book for which Parini had not written the Penguin Classics introduction.
“Scholars who liked Steinbeck apparently were too busy looking for deeper meaning in the conversations with a French poodle or a prescient environmentalist” to wrangle with basic questions of veracity, Steigerwald writes. “If they had been more critical, more skeptical, more scholarly, they might have saved me a lot of work.”
Next Page
REVIEWED IN THIS ARTICLE
Dogging Steinbeck: How I Went in Search of John Steinbeck’s America, Found My Own America, and Exposed the Truth About ‘Travels With Charley’
Dogging Steinbeck: How I Went in Search of John Steinbeck’s America, Found My...
Bill Steigerwald
January 21, 2013
The Complicated Racial Politics of Going “Undercover” to Report on the Jim Crow South
How one journalist became black to investigate segregation and what that means today
By Lorraine Boissoneault
smithsonian.com
February 14, 2017
540425
In May 1948, Ray Sprigle traveled from Pittsburgh to Atlanta to rural Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. He talked to sharecroppers and black doctors and families whose lives were torn apart by lynching. He visited desperately underfunded schools for black children and resort towns where only white people were allowed to bathe in the ocean. He spoke with scores of African-Americans, the introductions made by his travel companion, NAACP activist John Wesley Dobbs.
In one of the most striking moments of his reporting trip, he met the Snipes family—a black family forced to flee their home after their son was killed voting in a Georgia election. “Death missed [Private Macy Yost Snipes] on a dozen bloody battlefields overseas, where he served his country well,” Sprigle later wrote. “He came home to die in the littered door-yard of his boyhood home because he thought that freedom was for all Americans, and tried to prove it.”
But Sprigle—a white, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist—wasn’t traveling as himself. He traveled as James Rayel Crawford, a light-skinned black man with a shaved head who told his sources he was collecting information for the NAACP. More than a decade before John Howard Griffin undertook a similar feat and wrote about it in his memoir Black Like Me, Sprigle disguised himself as black in the Jim Crow South to write a 21-part series for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
“Sprigle was so far ahead of the curve, his exploit was forgotten,” says Bill Steigerwald, himself a journalist who worked for years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the author of a new book called 30 Days a Black Man. Steigerwald discovered the lengths Sprigle had gone to during his tour of the South 50 years after it happened. “I thought, oh my god, this is an unbelievable story, how come I’ve never heard of it? It was a great story about a journalist who had the whole country talking about race in 1948.”
Sprigle’s trip to the South wasn’t the first time he donned a disguise for the sake of a story. He’d previously launched undercover investigations of the Byberry mental institution in Philadelphia, a state-operated psychiatric institution called Mayview, and the black market for meat during World War II. Each of the investigations required he masquerade as someone he wasn’t—but none were as dramatic, or controversial, as his attempt to pass as African-American.
The act of “passing” was something Sprigle touched upon early in his series—though he described its prevalence in the African-American community. “The fact remains that there are many thousands of Negroes in the South who could ‘pass’ any day they wish,” Sprigle wrote. “I talked to scores of them. Nearly every one had a sister or brother or some other relative who was living as a white man or woman in the North.” Among the more famous examples of passing among the African-American community are Ellen Craft, who used her fair skin to escape slavery with her husband disguised as her servant in 1848, and Walter White, whose blond hair and blue eyes helped him travel through the Jim Crow South to report on lynchings for the NAACP. Far rarer were instances of white people passing as black, because such a transition meant giving up the benefits of their race. And Sprigle’s act wasn’t universally praised or accepted by other writers of the era.
“Mr. Sprigle is guilty of the common blunder of a great number of other northern whites. A white man who is sincerely interested in promoting the advancement of the Negro in the South need not make any apology for being white,” a reviewer in the Atlanta Daily World, the city’s still-extant black newspaper, wrote. “And never once have we heard of them changing racial identity in order to accomplish their desired ends.” The sentiment was echoed in a review of Sprigle’s book, In the Land of Jim Crow. It was “somewhat doubtful whether a white, pretending to be a Negro” could really understand the experience of that group, the reviewer wrote.
“It’s really easy to think, [Sprigle] is problematic, let’s dismiss everything,” says Alisha Gaines, professor at Florida State University whose forthcoming book Black for a Day: Fantasies of Race and Empathy deals with Sprigle and other cases of white-to-black passing. “I don’t advocate for everyone to go paint themselves and shave their heads, but there’s something about their intentionality that I want to hold on to. About wanting to understand, about caring enough and being compassionate.” But, Gaines adds, it seemed like Sprigle reported the story in disguise in an (unsuccessful) attempt at another Pulitzer rather than for reasons of social justice.
“In 4,000 miles of travel by Jim Crow train and bus and street car and by motor, I encountered not one unpleasant incident,” Sprigle concluded at the end of his series. “I took no chances. I was more than careful to be a ‘good [n****r.]’” What Sprigle clearly missed, however, was that behavior and caution had little to do with how blacks were treated in the South. Griffin, once he began publishing his expose in an African-American owned magazine, was forced to take his family and flee the country after receiving death threats and having an effigy of him hung in Dallas.
Gaines has also found, in studying men like Sprigle and Griffin, that engaging with racism on an interpersonal level is much different than recognizing it as a structural issue. Though Sprigle provided coverage of racism in the South, he failed to cover racism in the North. He mentioned the “injustice” of discrimination in the North in one report, but argued that the focus should be on the “bloodstained tragedy” of the South.
In Sprigle’s Pittsburgh, 40 percent of employers banned black employees outright, Steigerwald writes. There were no black doctors until 1948, only two black teachers in integrated schools, and numerous instances of segregation in public pools, theaters and hotels. But the white media seemed disinterested in covering that discrimination. “If they seriously cared about civil rights, institutionalized racial discrimination, or black workers being automatically shut out of most of the best jobs in their hometown because of their skin color, the white papers didn’t editorialize about it,” Steigerwald writes.
Steigerwald sees Sprigle as an unlikely hero who delivered harsh truths to an audience that wouldn’t have been receptive of those same issues if delivered by an African-American reporter—and might never have seen those stories given the era’s segregated press. “It would’ve been nice if a black man could’ve pulled that off, but given the segregated media of the time, the greatest black writer of all could’ve written exactly what Sprigle wrote and about two white people would’ve seen it.”
But for Gaines, that’s just another effect of racism. “Black people have been writing about what it means to be black since 1763. At the end of the day, as well-meaning as I think some of these projects were, it is a project of white privilege,” Gaines says. “It’s a lack of racial navigation when a white person says, ‘I have to assume this authority in order for other white people to get it.’”
Gaines isn’t alone in the critique. CBS newscaster Don Hollenbeck praised In the Land of Jim Crow, but thought a black journalist “probably would’ve collected many times the material the Post-Gazette reporter did.” And while there were admittedly few African-American journalists working for major daily publications at the time, there was at least one: Ted Poston, who worked for the New York Post and, despite serious concerns for his safety, wrote about a rape trial in Florida in 1949, in which three African-American men were accused of raping a white housewife.
There were also a limited number of white southern journalists talking about issues of racism and injustice at the time. One of them was Hodding Carter Sr., the editor of the Democrat Delta-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, who was considered a liberal despite failing to condemn segregation. Still, Carter spoke out against the violence of lynching and the racial discrimination African-Americans faced. But by focusing on the South, Carter felt Sprigle was singling out the region for a problem that plagued all parts of America.
“[Sprigle] might disguise himself as a Mexican in the Southwest, or a Filipino or Japanese on the west coast, or a Jew in a good many American cities, or a militant, proselytizing Protestant in Boston, or a Negro in Chicago’s South Side, or a truly poor white in Georgia,” Hodding wrote, espousing what was essentially the “All Lives Matter” argument of its time. “He’d discover the really basic and menacing fact that prejudice isn’t directed solely to black skins or limited to the South.”
Sprigle’s work stirred up plenty of controversy and was never reprinted by white southern papers. But it did stimulate a national media debate about Jim Crow and racism. Both Steigerwald and Gaines agree that it’s a story worth discussing today—for different reasons.
“It shows how far we’ve come and maybe how far we haven’t come,” Steigerwald says. “If Ray Sprigle had worked for a New York newspaper and done all the things he did, by 1950 Spencer Tracy would’ve been playing him in a movie.”
For Gaines, the legacy is less about Sprigle’s journalistic prowess and more about how we understand his actions today. “I think it’s even more timely now because of our political climate and how to be a good ally. What does that mean, and what does empathy look like?” It doesn’t mean changing the color of one’s own skin anymore, Gaines says—but questioning the superiority of one’s whiteness is still a valuable lesson.
Lorraine Boissoneault is a contributing writer to SmithsonianMag.com covering history and archaeology. She has previously written for The Atlantic, Salon, Nautilus and others. She is also the author of The Last Voyageurs: Retracing La Salle’s Journey Across America. Website: http://www.lboissoneault.com/
Read more from this author | Follow @boissolm
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HIT & RUN BLOG
30 Days a Black Man: How Ray Sprigle Exposed Jim Crow in 1940s America [Reason Podcast]
"I have such a deeper appreciation for the punishment that black people received from their government for so long and the crass politics that perpetuated it."
Nick Gillespie & Ian Keyser|May. 12, 2017 11:00 am
Lyons Press, AmazonLyons Press, AmazonIn 1948, veteran newsman Ray Sprigle, best-known for having exposed Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black's membership in the Ku Klux Klan, published an explosive series detailing his month-long trip through the Jim Crow South. A white man, Sprigle altered his appearance and passsed as black so that he could experience firsthand a part of the country that most Americans either didn't know much or care much about. Traveling with the well-known NAACP activist John Wesley Dobbs, Sprigle (pronounced sprig-el) published 21 articles and a book that detailed the ways in which segregation was ruthlessly enforced at every level of interaction between the races. Party-line phone operators, for instance, would never address blacks as mister or missus on a call and shop owners would drape napkins or tissues over a black woman's head when she tried on a hat.
Bill Steigerwald's powerful new book, 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South, documents Sprigle's expose and does a masterful job of recreating an America in which de facto and de jure segregation was the rule not just in the former Confederacy but much of the North as well. It's a deeply disturbing and profoundly moving account of what Steigerwald, himself a veteran newsman whose previous book forced the publisher of John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley to reclassify the supposed travelogue as fiction, calls "superstars" fighting for equality under the law (along with Sprigle and Dobbs, Steigerwald points to NAACP head Walter White, who chose to identify as black despite being able to pass as white, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady whose commitment to civil rights bore most of its fruit during the Truman years).
"When anybody goes back in history," Steigerwald tells Nick Gillespie in the latest Reason Podcast, you learn
that nothing is new, everything was worse, and what you thought was simple or true was not. When you look back at '48 and you see this stuff, and Ray Sprigle's reporting, he was a reporter. When he heard guys in Atlanta say, "Oh, Atlanta's a great city for black people. Nothing ever happens here." Well, he went down the courthouse and dug up some records and he came up with three cases in the last two years where young black males, this sounds a little familiar, were shot dead by cops or trolley conductors who were armed at the time and were able to shoot anybody. They were shot dead and the defense was always, "Oh, I thought he was reaching for a gun or something. I shot him dead," and they all got off. I mean, you could take those examples and put them in the paper today and people would say, "Well, yeah."...
I have such a deeper appreciation for the punishment that black people received from their government for so long and the crass politics that perpetuated it.
Read Sprigle's original series here.
Produced by Ian Keyser.
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This is a rush transcript. It has not been checked for spelling or errors—check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Nick Gillespie: Today we're talking with Bill Steigerwald. He's a longtime newspaper man, author of several books, most recently an incredible story called 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South. Bill, thanks for talking to us.
Bill Steigerwald: Hi. How are you doing?
Nick Gillespie: You worked in Pittsburgh newspapers for a long time, and this news story is about a guy named Ray Sprigle who was at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a white reporter, editor, journalist, at that point. In the 1940's, he was most famous for exposing Hugo Black's membership in the Ku Klux Klan, when he was elevated or nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States. What did Ray Sprigle do that moved you to write a book about his 30 days as a black man?
Bill Steigerwald: Well, what he did, and he did it throughout his whole career, was an amazing career in Pittsburgh entirely. I've always said that if he had worked at The New York Times and done everything he did, by 1950 Spencer Tracy would have played him in a movie. Sprigle was what they call an old time newspaper man and he was a tremendous writer. He had literary fiction skills. He was a pulp fiction writer in his youth. He became a journalist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he was an editor for a while, and then he became their start reporter. He was their front page reporter, he did 50 stories a year, he did 21 part series on crime in Pittsburgh, six part series on black market meat during World War 2, sales of black market meat.
He was the greatest journalist in Pittsburgh in the 20th century. I don't think there's any question about that. Even if he hadn't won the Pulitzer for exposing Hugo Black's KKK ties, he did so much and I worked at the Post-Gazette in 1995 and we were doing World War 2 50th anniversary pieces, and I came across Sprigle's 1944 series on black market meat sales in Pittsburgh. He took his false teeth out, got some old clothes, rented an old truck and went out into the marketplace of Pittsburgh and basically bought a ton of meat illegally.
Nick Gillespie: Because everything was rationed at that point, right? In the US.
Bill Steigerwald: Yes, and he didn't use points and everything else. Then he wrote a six-part series about it on the front page and the local Office of Price Administration called him in after his first article he wrote and said, "Hey, tell us what you know." He said, "Don't worry, you'll read about it in the paper." Eventually, the OPA brought the federal guys here to Pittsburgh and held hearings. Anyway, he did that and I said, "Wow." The stories were written like so passionately. It wasn't any of this, "Authorities say this." Sprigle was, as I say, a great fiction writer, a great reporter, and he wrote with enormous authority about anything he wrote about. If he was writing about black market meat sales, he was writing about state mental hospitals, he did like three or four major pieces on state mental hospitals in Pennsylvania.
Nick Gillespie: Let's get to the black market meat and, Jesus, I stepped in it didn't I? But about... That was in '44, he wrote about black markets in meat during wartime, but then in 1947 and I guess the book came out in '48, he actually posed as a black man in the Jim Crow South, right?
Bill Steigerwald: Right.
Nick Gillespie: Talk a little bit about, what was the contours of his trip and why did he do it? Then, we'll talk more about the specifics of your book, of your account, 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South, which is a terrifyingly urgent read I think for all Americans, to be honest. Like, I can't say enough about the book and what it recovers, but talk about Sprigle. He decided to tour the South as a black man. How did that happen?
Bill Steigerwald: He was always looking for a great newspaper story and he found them easily. He came up with the idea, and it's not exactly clear where the idea came from but he came up with the idea based on reports that he had heard of black soldiers coming back from World War 2 and going back to Georgia and wanting to go to vote and having the crap kicked out of them, or killed in a couple cases for merely doing that, or expressing the desire to vote. He came upon the idea of disguising himself as a black man and going into the Jim Crow South for a month so that he could see for himself the conditions under which 10 million black people lived under Jim Crow.
This was 1947 when he came up with the idea. He left in the spring of '48. He tried to dye his skin a couple of times with chemicals and walnut juice, mahogany, and it didn't work or his skin fell off. I guess he could have killed himself if he had really doused himself with a couple ...
Nick Gillespie: You also point out eventually he got a really bad sunburn, cut his hair short, et cetera, and he could pass. This was one of the things, I mean we hear in contemporary America I guess, we're more likely to hear stories, and you talk about this a bit in the book, of people passing as black for various reasons. Whereas back then, obviously blacks tried to pass as white, or as Italians sometimes, or Cubans, and it was actually relatively easy in the South because there was an extremely broad gradient of skin color, and in a way, it exposes the total fiction of the Jim Crow South where you could effectively be white but pass as black because it wasn't about anything real on a certain level.
Bill Steigerwald: Exactly. He was told after he was experimenting a while, when he finally connected with the NAACP and Walter White and they found a guide, and he was talking to people in Atlanta about what he should do to color his skin and the one guy who was an executive at an insurance company said, "Hey, just go down and get a really heavy tan." He said, "If you're in the South and you say you're black, nobody's going to argue with you" and as you say, the gradient of colors in the South went from Walter White who was whiter looking than Harry Truman, I guess. He was the head of the NAACP and he considered himself a negro, and that's the kind of color was almost insignificant, except for the crazy people in the South who thought that if you had two drops of black blood, you sit in the back of the bus.
Nick Gillespie: So he, his series and his adventure I guess, for lack of a better term, this was before "Black Like Me" which came out later in the '50s, but it was after the movie or around the time of the movie "Gentleman's Agreement" which talked about antisemitism. Talk about his traveling buddy, John Wesley Dobbs, and then just give a very brief sketch of where they started from and where they ended up. Then, let's talk about some of the specifics because I think, and this is obviously part of what Sprigle was doing, and again, your book is an incredibly painful and powerful recreation of the time, and part of that was that Americans outside of the South didn't know or didn't care about the every day indignities that were being heaped on blacks. That was part of what he was trying to expose, right?
Bill Steigerwald: Absolutely, and Sprigle was not naive. He was a seasoned journalist as there ever was, and he was very smart, but he had no idea what was in store for him when he went into the South. The NAACP eventually found him a guide named John Wesley Dobbs, D-o-b-b-s. This guy, one of the superstars of history. I'm afraid we've forgotten many of them. He was a prominent black man, social and political leader from Atlanta. He quoted Shakespeare plays as a drop of a hat. He had memorized 500 poems. He was a tremendous orator. He had made himself into a leader and he would say that he was fighting for the black race all the time.
He was considered a race man, was what they called him, and he wheeled and dealed in Atlanta and got black voters to sign up and to register, and then he would trade those votes with the white city hall mayor and everybody, so that they would get streetlights for the black sections of playgrounds, for the black parts of town. He was an unbelievable superstar. He was basically Sprigle's guide, host, and mentor, and protector for 30 days. He drove Sprigle around, the two of them, in a 1947 Mercury with suicide doors, and looked like a tank. They went from Savannah to the Delta. They were based in Atlanta where Dobbs lived, and they would go on these sort of excursions over a month.
Dobbs passed Sprigle off as a light skinned negro from the South who worked for the NAACP as a field investigator, so Sprigle could interview everyone he talked to, whether it was a sharecropper in a shack or whether it was a professor at Atlanta University. Sprigle saw all those people. He saw the top middle class layer of black society in the South. It was thin, but it existed. Every town had a black doctor, a black dentist, a black whatever, and Dobbs knew many of those people. He took Sprigle around to ...
Nick Gillespie: And you talk about it in the book when they would show up in towns throughout the South, and it's not like the North was any kind of utopia for blacks, but a lot of times there were either no hotels at all or certainly no hotels that would house blacks ...
Bill Steigerwald: Absolutely.
Nick Gillespie: ... So there was a whole informal, almost like Airbnb or home sharing economy.
Bill Steigerwald: You know, as we know markets are pretty amazing at solving problems and creating things when either they're illegal or they're not provided by government. In this case, because blacks had virtually nowhere to stay except in the big cities, in hotels that were really rough. I mean, you wouldn't take your family to one of these hotels. The black middle class had created this network, as you say, it was like Airbnb only all the black people in the South and the small towns would host fellow travelers and they would not charge for them this. But there was a reciprocal kind of arrangement and it was all through the South. That's how black middle class people and businessmen, salesmen or whatever, that's how they traveled, that's where they stayed. That's where Dobbs and Sprigle stayed at probably 15 or 20 of these homes throughout the South.
Nick Gillespie: Talk about the way in which, on their first train, the leg of I guess they started out in Washington D.C. At the end of the first train leg, Sprigle and Dobbs get out and they go to hail a cab and Sprigle has forgotten that he's now a black man in the South, and the South pretty much started in Washington D.C. at the time, and he went out to hail a cab and Dobbs was like, "No, what are you doing?" They have to go around to the back of the train station and wait for the negro cab.
Bill Steigerwald: That was actually in Atlanta. They met in Washington at Union Station, which Washington D.C. was not an official Jim Crow town, but it might as well have been. It was eventually a Southern town and that was thanks to starting with Wilson, but then thanks to all of the Southern segregation senators and congressman who basically ran D.C. in those days. Remember, it didn't have that autonomy that it has now, and they tried to set it up like a Southern segregated town. Washington was a bad town, but they hopped on a segregated train, a Jim Crow train from Union Station and went overnight to Atlanta.
When they got to Atlanta, Sprigle walking ahead of his friend Dobbs who looked I think like the ambassador from Ethiopia, he had about three bags, and he was a dude this guy. Dobbs was a superstar. Sprigle ran ahead to get the cab and he went out the white exit, and he was approaching the white cabs when his friend Dobbs yelled at him and said, "Oh, oh, come back." Then he had to come back and go out the black exit to where the Jim Crow black colored cabs were, but there weren't any there and they had to wait for a while.
That was Sprigle's immediate introduction to that whole society where Washington wasn't quite that bad, but Atlanta was ... Man, you didn't ride in an elevator. Everybody knows about the water fountains and everything, but they had a separate black bible and a separate white bible in courtrooms.
Nick Gillespie: Tell the listeners about what it was like shopping for shoes and hats in the segregated South. Because these are the small details which ... Obviously the stories of lynchings and beatings and physical intimidating and assaults are horrifying, but it becomes unbearable when you telescope it down or microscope it down to these really petty interactions. But how did black people shop for shoes and hats in the South?
Bill Steigerwald: Well, somebody called Jim Crow "legalized humiliation" and that's pretty much what it was. Women would have to sit in the back of shoe stores, for instance, on a bench. That's where they would try on the shoes. If they went into department stores, they would often put Kleenex or a cloth on the black woman's head when she tried on a hat. In other places, if you tried on something, you bought it, so you often had to buy the dress or the blouse or shirt or whatever without ever trying it on. In Pittsburgh, that was true as well, well into the '40s, the same thing. Blacks could not try on clothes in Downtown Pittsburgh as.
Nick Gillespie: Well you know, in the book you mention that New York City was generally considered the best city for black people in terms of they head the most room to live and to be and all of that. Why was New York different than other Northern cities? What sparked that?
Bill Steigerwald: You know, that's a good question. I would say that in part it was because of the numbers. I think there were somewhere around 7 or 800,000 black people in New York which when you get that many numbers, things start to happen, and you're treated a little better. Of course, they could vote, so they had political power to some degree, that they didn't have at all in the Jim Crow South. Poor Tom Dewey, the big loser of '48, he was an ... I mean, you look at now, he was as liberal as you could get, and New York State and the City of New York were the most liberal states in the union in terms of race.
Now, Pennsylvania and New York had equally strong laws against discrimination, but they weren't enforced in Pennsylvania. I mean, you had the big unions and big companies in Pittsburgh. I'm more familiar with Pittsburgh obviously, because that's what I was focusing on, but the unions, my favorite was the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and they had 1400 members in Pittsburgh, and it had one black. That's the kind of segregation exited in Pittsburgh, seriously in every way. In education, in jobs, and in housing, and any kind of opportunity. But New York was ahead of the curve on all of that, and Dewey was generally considered and loved by the black press for being ahead of the curve on immigration.
Nick Gillespie: You mention Harry Truman who one reelection in 1948 and defeating Dewey. Truman came from Missouri which was a union state in the Civil War but a slave state, and he himself was pretty racist for a while, but then he flipped because I mean, he did integrate the armed forces during the Korean War, and did a couple of other ... All of these people have very mixed records on race, but what was driving ... Eleanor Roosevelt is, I mean she's in the background of the book, but she's one of the heroes on race in American history and I think Libertarians don't have a lot good to say about Eleanor Roosevelt, but she was ...
Bill Steigerwald: No. I grew up with my dad making fun of Eleanor Roosevelt for every reason, but he was a Republican and a conservative. I've basically come 180 degrees on Eleanor Roosevelt. She was truly a liberal and cared about black people and tried to get first her husband and then Harry Truman, and Harry Truman was pissed sometimes. I guess in his diary he would say, he'd basically say that, "Eleanor was torturing me again over this stupid subject" but she really had Truman's ear and Eleanor Roosevelt was also big buddies with Walter White, another superstar of my book, and there are about half a dozen of them.
Walter White lost the history, ran the NAACP from the early '30s 'til 1955, and he was a dynamo, a lobbyist for his race. He was busting the chops of the FDR people, he got close with Eleanor, and then he was busting Truman's chops too, and he pretty much pushed Truman into making a speech in 1947 which was the first presidential announcement that the federal government was going to start leaning on states who were discriminating basically. I mean, it was all about the South, Jim Crow, he didn't even actually say the word negro or black or anything in the speech, but everybody knew what he was talking about when he said that from now on, the federal government was going to make sure that everyone had their rights regardless of their race.
Nick Gillespie: Take us through one more anecdote about Sprigle and Dobbs in the South that you think is particularly illustrative of the experience and the temperament of Ray Sprigle.
Bill Steigerwald: Well Sprigle, again, he was no naive guy, he was no liberal crusader. He was a conservative Republican, a constitutionalist, and one of the few lengthy notes in his notebooks that I found, he was talking about the importance of property rights and without property, you were just part of the swarm and stuff like that. He was very much a constitutionalist, and when he saw what he saw, and he lived like a black man. He wasn't a reporter, a white guy tagging along with a black guy, looking into the black world. He was pretending to be a black. He had to watch his step, he had to learn very quickly what blacks had to learn over a lifetime, and certainly in their childhood, that they could not speak first to a white man, they could not call him anything but Mr They would never use his first name. They had to sit in the back seat if a white person was driving a car. I mean, on and on, and on.
Nick Gillespie: Well, you talk again, to bring it down to these minute details on party lines and most people in the '30s certainly, and even into the '40s had party lines for phones, and if you were a black person you wouldn't be called Mr or Mrs.
Bill Steigerwald: Oh yeah. No, that's right.
Nick Gillespie: It really is a ...
Bill Steigerwald: The operators would refuse to say that, "Mrs Jackson is on the line." They would demand her first name and they.
Nick Gillespie: I mean, it is, I mean it's a systematic and ritualized humiliation of yeah ... Give an example of one choice anecdote where Sprigle loses his shit or is just like totally floored by what he's experiencing.
Bill Steigerwald: Well, I'm trying to think of a specific thing. It happened over a month, but he very quickly felt like he was a second class citizen. He understood that, and I'm trying to think if there was a specific event. I mean, part of the thing was that he watched his step very carefully. He was 61 years old. He was not interested in getting hit over the head or thrown in jail for protesting Jim Crow customs. He was as servile and as sheepish as any 61 year old black man might want to be, when he was in public. I'm trying to think. There wasn't any major events. We're going to have to leave it to Hollywood to come up with some dramatic event.
I mean, Sprigle and Dobbs slept in the same double bed on a prosperous farm in Northwest Georgia, the night of a picnic that was happening up there where Sprigle found himself to be the only white man at this picnic of about 150 people South of Chattanooga, but it was actually in Georgia. They asked Sprigle to stand up at one point, the host, the man who owned the farm asked Mr. Sprigle to stand up. His name was Crawford, that was the name he was going by. They said, "Mr. Crawford, tell us what the state of the negro is in Pittsburgh, where you're from."
Sprigle stood up and he said he was willing to carryout a lot of deception but he wasn't going to go that far, and he just begged off and he said, he told the truth, "I am not in a position to really say that" and he sat down. He was nervous about that. He wasn't really found out by anybody of any importance to be a white man. One or two people suspected him but it was no big deal. They traveled 3000 miles by car, they pissed in the bushes together, they slept in a double bed together, they ate in crummy, at the backdoor of a couple of places. They did not get into any trouble with the law or white people or the sheriffs or anything.
There wasn't any major thing. What's interesting about it is he was able to move around for 30 days as a black person and observe from the inside without getting his head busted. But he was passionate about what he saw and when he wrote his series, he came back from his trip and he wrote a 21 part series for the Post Gazette and that was syndicated in other papers around the country, and he let it rip. It was like a page one op-ed piece.
Nick Gillespie: What was the impact? what was the reaction to Sprigle's 21 part series?
Bill Steigerwald: Well, it was pretty amazing. He had the whole country talking about the subject of segregation, legal segregation from coast to coast literally. Newspapers were the big media of the day. Newspapers, news magazines, and network radio. Every paper, every town had a daily paper, and even a small town. Pick a small town in Ohio, you have Springfield, Ohio. They had a newspaper, and if you wanted to find out what was going on in the Arab/Israeli war which had just broken out during their trip, you read your daily Connellsville, PA paper. They would have the maps and all the latest dispatches from Tel Aviv and all that stuff.
Newspapers were extremely powerful. Every family had one basically, basically about 1.3 newspapers per household apparently. His series was a newspaper series, it was page one in about 15 papers, major papers, New York Herald Tribune to Seattle Times, and it got everybody talking. The South got all pissed off. They never printed a word of Sprigle's series, not one paper in the South carried it. It was all carried in the South, and they wrote editorials decrying it and praising it, depending on whether you were in the North or South. Columnists in the North and South wrote about it. Eleanor Roosevelt went gaga over it, Walter White was talking to all the publishers in New York, and Sprigle very quickly got a book deal.
That came out in the spring of '49 called, "In The Land of Jim Crow." Then, there was at the time, there was a show, a radio program called "Town Meeting of the Air" which nobody remebers. It must have been in it's 25th or 30th year by this time in 1948 and it was heard by as many as 10 million people every Tuesday night, and Sprigle, Walter White, Hodding Carter who was the liberal voice of the South, he treated blacks well and he treated them well in his newspaper in Greenville, Mississippi, by he was the diehard segregationist.
Then, Harry Ashmore, who would win a Pulitzer for covering the Little Rock Central High School integration scene in the 1950's, the four of them had this hour long debate. Several million people heard it, 2500 letters were sent in to the program. There were I would say hundreds of editorials, scores and scores of editorials, hundreds of letters to the editor, thousands of letters to the radio station. For about four months, "Segregation, what should we do about legal segregation?" Was debated in the national media and in the local media which was your daily paper, from coast to coast. It came and went and it was all a result of one man, Ray Sprigle. It shows you the power of a single journalist in those days.
Nick Gillespie: And it certainly fed into ... I mean, you were talking earlier about how after World War 2, where blacks had an expanded role in the armed forces and they came back, certainly soldiers, veterans, and they were pissed, even more pissed because you fight for your country and then you're told to eat standing up in the back of the restaurant if you're allowed in at all, but Sprigle's work obviously built into that movement which I guess peaked first with the integration of the armed forces during the Korean War, and then Brown versus Board of Education in 1954. It was part of a moment of not just consciousness, being raised on the part of blacks and calls for equality, but also on the parts of whites.
Bill Steigerwald: Yes. It came and went, unfortunately, because this again was in 1948, so it was, what? Six years before Brown versus Board of Education, about seven or eight years before Emmett Till was murdered. That was really the event that caught the attention of the white North. Prior to what Sprigle did, the white North read white papers, and the black folks of America read black papers, and they never read ... Well, blacks had to read white papers, but white people never read black papers, and papers like the Pittsburgh Courier, the largest at the time, wrote constantly for decades about how awful Jim Crow was, how blacks were persecuted and political and social and economic problems for the South, the lynchings, and the trials of lynching.
They were over the top advocates for the black people and all rules of journalism were thrown away by these black papers, but white people never read them, so they didn't know what was going on, and white papers didn't cover blacks in the South, in Africa, or in their own backyards, in Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh papers, three dailies in 1948 hardly ever wrote a word about the 120,000 blacks living in their area.
Nick Gillespie: The book is "30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South." The author is Bill Steigerwald. Bill, your previous book was about another famous American who took a road trip, John Steinbeck. You retrace the steps that he laid out or the route that he claimed to have taken in "Travels With Charley." Give us a quick capsule summary of what you found, and obviously there's a pattern here. You like guys who go out and spend a lot of time in a car driving around the country, but it turned out you caused a stir yourself when you retraced "Travels With Charley," and what did you immediately find out about Steinbeck's veracity?
Bill Steigerwald: Well, I like to say that I found that Steinbeck was basically a lying bastard. When he did what was supposed to be a nonfiction account, a true account of his trip for his book, "Travels With Charley" which he made in the fall of 1960, and he was on the road 75 days and he drove from Long Island to the top of Maine, out through Chicago, Seattle, Monterey, California, Texas, New Orleans and back. Everybody loves it, kids love it, older people love it because they read it as kids, but I wanted to follow his trail exactly as a journalist, 50 years later, which I did do. My idea at the time was just to compare 2010 America with 1960 America, and the changes and everything.
In the course of doing the research, I very quickly found out that Steinbeck had made up quite a bit of his book, including most of the characters he said he met. I basically proved to the satisfaction of the publisher who changed the introduction to the book for its 50th anniversary and said, "Hey, this isn't quite a true account. It's more fiction than nonfiction."
Nick Gillespie: You even got the New York Times to rail against Steinbeck 50 years after the ...
Bill Steigerwald: As a Libertarian and as someone who has spent his life criticizing the liberal bias of the New York Times, to read an editorial, in-house editorial. I mean, we newspaper guys know how important they are. It said, "Bill Steigerwald has discovered an intriguing fact" or something. That's the way it started out. I'm thinking, "All right." But basically what I showed was that Steinbeck's book, "Travels With Charley," which was the only book he ever had that made number one on the New York Times Best Seller list, by the way, and it's nonfiction, that it was a myth that he traveled rough, that he traveled alone, that he traveled slow to discover America, and that he liked America because he didn't like America at all, but he didn't put that in the book.
He traveled with his wife more than half the time, he drove as fast as he could from city to city. I may have overdone it but I think I pretty thoroughly showed that he was a lying bastard. Also, his publisher did a lot of it, too. Steinbeck wrote the original draft which I looked at, handwritten, and then you can see the edits, and the marketing people and the editors at Viking Press were very sly in their way they edited the original draft to make it appear that Steinbeck.
Nick Gillespie: Well it is a kind of fascinating companion to "30 Days a Black Man" because both of these accounts, the power of "Travels With Charley," if it was a novel, it wouldn't have mattered in the same way that the idea that it was a true eyewitness account of 1960's America matter. For Ray Sprigle, that he was telling the truth, and that he was giving details on a word that was real, very important. I find both of these books just tremendous reads and the first one was I mean, "Dogging Steinbeck" is a great work of journalistsic and literary detective work, and it was interesting that biographers of Steinbeck didn't really want to engage you because it complicates all sorts of shit.
We've seen that in other memoirs where people say certain things that either didn't happen or they compile and collate many different people into one character who is not quite really. That's always an ongoing thing, but then "30 Days a Black Man," this book Bill, I just can't praise it enough. It is so harrowing. It's got a great introduction by Juan Williams who helps set the stage, and throughout the book, the way that you go from the larger context of where America was and how black were treated, and then to Sprigle's particular experiences in the way that he came to understand a world that he had been transparent or invisible to him.
What's the takeaway of "30 Days a Black Man?," of Ray Sprigle's living in the Jim Crow South in 21st century America? What do you hope readers take away from this?
Bill Steigerwald: I hope that they take away what I took away after doing the research. I thought I knew enough when I started the book. By the time I was doing, by the time I read about what they had written into the housing codes in Baltimore and Washington and Seattle that said no house shall be sold to a non-Caucasian. By the time I saw the depth and the width and the horrible humiliations imposed upon 10 million American citizens. These weren't immigrants. These were American citizens whose constitutional rights had been deprived. They never really got their full ones, and they were treated like second class, third class citizens. What I would take away from it is that when you see, as you nicely described, the scope of what America was like in 1948, North and South.
Mainly South because it was legalized segregation. It was apartheid. We basically had apartheid before South Africa did, and when you see what black people had to put up with and you see the extent of it, and you think, "Man, I didn't know that going into this." Sprigle didn't know when he went on his trip. I certainly didn't know when I started this book, but I have such a deeper appreciation for the punishment that black people received from their government for so long and the crass politics that perpetuated it. The blindness of the North and the white people. The best people of the North, the good white people of the North had no idea what was going on in the South, had no idea that people were living like it was 1880 in the Mississippi Delta.
None of this was known to the people in 1948 and here I am, I'm 70 years old almost and I'm supposed to be an educated guy, and a man of the world, a newspaper guy, yada-dada-da, and I didn't know 90% of this stuff. Most white people and many, many black people don't know how bad it was, what a nasty country this was, and it was nasty. People can be nasty to each other, as we know, but I contend based on my trip around the country several times in cars that most people are good people and nice people and treat people with respect and dignity and all that good stuff.
But when you are able to impose a regulatory system on a whole set of people the way Jim Crow was, and there was all this extra legal and subtle I guess, "subtle" stuff with the housing policies and things that perpetuated segregation in the North, when you see all that, you think, "Man, we're lucky black people didn't have a lot of guns." They had every right to revolt.
Nick Gillespie: Well, you know, the other thing I think that comes through loud and clear in the book, too, you talk about the half dozen superstars, but whether it's Ray Sprigle or John Wesley Dobbs or Walter White or Eleanor Roosevelt, or John Dewey, the individuals who really stepped up and made a difference, it's also inspiring. I mean, it shouldn't have to happen and it all took too long, but there's also that.
Bill Steigerwald: Absolutely, and somebody like Walter White whose been very much forgotten. He's had a couple books written about him, he wrote some books. He's a good reader and all this stuff. I mean, there should be a mega movie about this guy. He was a total superstar, and there's all kinds of drama because he was so white and the white/black thing, and I mean, it gets complicated.
Nick Gillespie: well. The courage or maybe the stupidity almost of having a choice in 1930's America where you could identify as white or black and choosing black, that's a goddam incredible statement.
Bill Steigerwald: Absolutely. Also, when you ask what I learned, I come up with a three part slogan, and that is what I learned in doing this book and I think you often learn this when anybody goes back in history, that nothing is new, everything was worse, and what you thought was simple or true was not. When you look back at '48 and you see this stuff, and Ray Sprigle's reporting, he was a reporter. When he heard guys in Atlanta say, "Oh, Atlanta's a great city for black people. Nothing ever happens here." Well, he went down the courthouse and dug up some records and he came up with three cases in the last two years where young black males, this sounds a little familiar, were shot dead by cops or trolley conductors who were armed at the time and were able to shoot anybody.
They were shot dead and the defense was always, "Oh, I thought he was reaching for a gun or something. I shot him dead," and they all got off. I mean, you could take those examples and put them in the paper today and people would say, "Well yeah."
Nick Gillespie: Well, we will leave it there. Bill, thank you. Bill Steigerwald, a retired newspaper man who you've been writing more since you've retired, I suspect? Or at least as much. The latest book is "30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South." It's out, you can pick it up at Amazon and Barnes & Noble in all sorts of formats. It tells the tale of Ray Sprigle, a famous journalist from Pittsburgh, a white man who traveled the South as a black man for a month in 1948. Bill, thanks so much. Is there a next project on the drawing board already?
Bill Steigerwald: No, I don't know. Yeah, getting a movie made so I can get paid for all my hard work. No, I mean, I loved doing this story and it was my responsibility to do it about Sprigle. I knew that if I didn't do it, no one ever would because I know his daughter who's still alive, a wonderful person, and I had accumulated information and gone on trips in the South that retrace parts of his original journey. I did that in 1998 and in 2009, so it was either me or nobody, and right now I'm just sort of ... I'm an Uber driver, I'm a happy Uber driver. Maybe I'll write a mystery novel about an Uber driver.
Nick Gillespie: Well that, we'll have a different podcast about your experiences as an Uber driver and as part of the sharing and gig economy, because I know that you're a big supporter of that, at a time where the tide seems to be turning but we'll leave that conversation for another time. Thanks again. We've been talking with Bill Steigerwald, the author of "30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South." Bill, thanks so much.
Bill Steigerwald: Thank you, Nick.
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Nick Gillespie is the editor at large of Reason and the co-author, with Matt Welch, of The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America (2011/2012).