Most people quickly acknowledge the importance, as a regional treasure, of Southern storytellers, from William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe to Eudora Welty and Walker Percy and Shelby Foote. But little attention has been given to the commanding presence of truly outstanding Southern journalists in the South’s transition and development.
In a tradition that dates back to George Washington Cable in New Orleans, Henry Grady in Atlanta, Henry Watterson in Louisville, and W.J. Cash in Charlotte, the South has given the region and the nation its most persuasive and progressive voices — the Hodding Carter family and Willie Morris in Mississippi, Howell Raines and Brandt Ayers in Alabama, John Seigenthaler in Tennessee, Ralph McGill in Atlanta, Tom Wicker, Charles Kuralt and Harry Golden in North Carolina, and a hundred or so more.
What they all had in common were an ability to articulate and to analyze, a patience and endurance in resisting our Southern resistance to change, a high set of ethical standards by which they judged themselves and their society severely, and a “sense of place,” an appreciation for roots and geography and history and traditions.
A Southern Journalism Hall of Fame would cover a coliseum wall. It would end with the end of the 20th Century. Newspaper closings and mergers have trimmed outlets to a pitiful few, and corporate ownerships, profit-line publishing, and shouting-head television “journalists” do not encourage courageous editors.
Edwin M. Yoder Jr. would certainly be in a pantheon of great Southern journalists. Son of a North Carolina father and a Georgia mother, he entered journalism as editor of the prestigious UNC Daily Tar Heel, the immediate successor to his lifelong friend Charles Kuralt.
A Rhodes Scholar in the same 1956 class as Willie Morris, editor of the University of Texas campus newspaper, and Neil Rudenstein, a future president of Harvard, Yoder returned from Oxford in 1958 and immediately returned to journalism, writing editorials for The Charlotte News, later moved home to The Greensboro Daily News, then became editorial-page editor for The Washington Star until its 1981 demise, spent a long stint as a syndicated columnist with The Washington Post Writers Group, and finally taught five years as professor of journalism and humanities, a faculty position Robert E. Lee had himself established.
Yoder keynoted the Wofford symposium. Tall, crowned with long white hair, Yoder is strikingly articulate, a very good listener but equally entertaining teller of Southern tales, sensitive and sensible, courtly, gentle and genial, engaging and intelligent.
He has authored five books, three of which I own and have read over the years, collections of his best essays: “The Night of the Old South Ball,” “The Unmaking of a Whig,” and, just off the presses, “Telling Others What to Think: Recollection of a Pundit” (LSU Press, 2004, 245 pp.). (He also wrote “Joe Alsop’s War.”)
He is far from being a name-dropper, but Yoder does seem to have known a host of opinion-shapers and to have been close friends with many of them — Kuralt, Morris, Rudenstein since Oxford days, Meg Greenfield, Mary McCrory, Ben Bradlee, fiction writer Peter Taylor, George Will, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, Jonathan Yardley, and Father Timothy Healey among them.
He acknowledges the transformation of the South, which he views, Quentin Compson-like, half with affectionate nostalgia and half with distaste. He believes and practices the arts of attribution (freely and frequently acknowledging the influences of others on his career and life), allusions (making frequent but footnoted recitations of some line from a novel or poem or piece of non-fiction), and precision (choosing sometimes lengthy sentences and esoteric words in the interest of saying exactly what he means, but forcing his reader to rise to his level instead of lowering himself).
Now past 70, Yoder is embarking on yet another career, writing historical novels. In one, Hamlet is a student of Martin Luther’s at Wittenberg University. In another Sigmund Freud meets Henry James. In another, Caddy Compson (last seen in Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” turns up with a German officer in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.
The shift to the genre of fiction is no shift at all for Yoder. He has always known that great Southern writers are great story-tellers, and that the line between good journalism and good fiction is a faint one indeed.
Larry McGehee, professor and vice president at Wofford College, may be reached at mcgeheelt@wofford.edu.
