The Rise and Fall of the Branchhead Boys

North Carolina's Scott Family and the Era of Progressive Politics

Rob Christensen

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469651057
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

Louisiana had the Longs, Virginia had the Byrds, Georgia had the Talmadges, and North Carolina had the Scotts. In this history of North Carolina's most influential political family, Rob Christensen tells the story of the Scotts and how they dominated Tar Heel politics. Three generations of Scotts—W. Kerr Scott, Robert Scott, and Meg Scott Phipps—held statewide office. Despite stereotypes about rural white southerners, the Scotts led a populist and progressive movement strongly supported by rural North Carolinians—the so-called Branchhead Boys, the rural grassroots voters who lived at the heads of tributaries throughout the heart of North Carolina. Though the Scotts held power in various government positions in North Carolina for generations, they were instrumental in their own downfall. From Kerr Scott's regression into reactionary race politics to Meg Scott Phipps's corruption trial and subsequent prison sentence, the Scott family lost favor in their home state, their influence dimmed and their legacy in question. Weaving together interviews from dozens of political luminaries and deep archival research, Christensen offers an engaging and definitive historical account of not only the Scott family's legacy but also how race and populism informed North Carolina politics during the twentieth century.

1 ★ HAW RIVER

The farmers seem like unto fruit—you can gather them by a gentle shake of the bush.—Col. Buck Barry, a former Texas Ranger on organizing in North Carolina

As long as he lived, W. Kerr Scott remembered the farm bells tolling long into the night among the farms scattered along the Haw River, which flowed through the gently rolling hills of central North Carolina. By prearrangement, the farm bells—big iron dinner bells with dangling ropes to set their clappers in motion—were rung as a signal that the local referendum passed in 1903, raising a tax to pay for the area’s first public school. It was a small step for progress, but its passage had been in doubt. The campaign was so close and hard-fought that Governor Charles Brantley Aycock had traveled the forty-six miles by train from Raleigh to campaign for it in the small rural community.

What Scott particularly remembered was not just that the referendum passed but how it passed. In the segregated Jim Crow South, where the vast majority of black voters were newly disenfranchised by a literacy test, the school mandate had come down to the vote of one aging black farmhand. Lawson Chavis, a bachelor and ex-slave, was one of relatively few African Americans who were literate and therefore eligible to vote. But the choice was not easy for Chavis. The owner of the farm where he worked opposed the levy and had threatened to evict Chavis if he exercised his franchise. Shortly before the polls closed, James Covington, who owned the farm next to the Scott place, visited Chavis and arranged for him to move to a log cabin on land owned by his mother-in law. Covington took Chavis to the polls and, after supper, moved him to his new home. The measure passed 26–24, and the tolling of the bells began.¹

“When I think back I can’t recollect anything that has ever happened in my life that made a deeper impression on my mind or influenced my public acts more than the ringing of farm bells,” Scott told a radio audience in 1953, a year after he stepped down as one of the most progressive southern governors of the mid-twentieth century.² The lesson, Scott wrote decades later, was “that our people wanted to go forward. Our community, like thousands of others, has done so.”³

Kerr Scott and his brothers and sisters would attend that school, and so, albeit briefly, would his son, Robert W. Scott, a future governor, before it closed in 1936. Although just a simple country school, for Kerr Scott it represented something larger—the push of a poor rural people to build a better life. It was a task the Scott family devoted much of their lives to, using the power of government to build schools and roads, and to push power and telephone companies to extend lines deep into farm country. In a state that had no big cities and little in-migration, this rural progressivism helped shape North Carolina’s politics and gave the state the reputation as among the most moderate and forward-looking in the South in the twentieth century.

BEGINNINGS

Kerr Scott was born April 17, 1896, in the handsome, sizable country home built by his grandfather Henderson Scott before the Civil War. Visitors remarked about the grove of impressive old oaks and the stately row of boxwoods in the semicircular driveway.

The Scotts were part of the great Scots-Irish immigration, or Ulster Irish, that had arrived in Philadelphia and then made their way down the Great Wagon Road to North Carolina in the mid-1700s, drawn to the sassafras- and hickory-covered red hills around the Haw River. But it was Henderson Scott (1814–1870), the modern patriarch of the Scott clan and a figure out of the Old South, who firmly established the family in the middle class. A self-made man, Kerr Scott’s grandfather started out as an eighteen-year-old mechanic in a textile mill before becoming one of the richest men in the county, opening a general store, operating a blacksmith shop, a tannery, and a chewing tobacco factory, and doing a little farming. He also served as justice of the peace and was one of the builders of Hawfields Presbyterian Church, where much of the Scott family still worships and where most of them are buried.

By 1860, Henderson Scott was one of the largest slaveholders in the county, with thirty-seven enslaved people, ranging in age from one to eighty. Although it was common for Haw River farmers to own slaves, most white households in Alamance County (65.1 percent) owned no slaves.⁴ Crippled in 1857 when he was thrown by a mule, Henderson Scott did not see combat during the Civil War, although his tannery provided shoes and leather for the Confederacy.⁵

The old Scott family home, built before the Civil War by Henderson Scott and where Farmer Bob raised his family. Farmer Bob stands on the steps. Kerr is one of the two children seated in the middle next to their grandmother. Photo taken around 1900. (Courtesy of State Archives of North Carolina)

After the war, Henderson Scott joined one of the most active Ku Klux Klan organizations in the state. The group included much of the old white power structure, and membership in Alamance County numbered an estimated five hundred to seven hundred individuals. Particularly fervent and brutal, the Alamance KKK terrorized blacks who sought advancement and any whites who helped them, including lynching and murdering a black town councilman and white state senator. Henderson Scott’s Klan activity landed him in jail when Republican governor William Holden sent in former Union troops to help restore order in what became known as the Kirk-Holden War, but Scott was soon released. Several months later, his leg deteriorated. A Hillsborough doctor ran out of anesthesia during an operation to amputate his foot, and Henderson Scott died from shock three days later, on October 11, 1870, at age fifty-six.⁶

To understand Henderson Scott’s grandson, Kerr Scott, one must first understand Kerr Scott’s father, Robert W. Scott (1861–1929). Everyone who knew the two men said so: the father’s life was devoted to farming, politics, and the church—and so was the son’s. The father was involved in a pitchfork rebellion; so was the son. The father ran for state agriculture commissioner, and so did the son.

Educated largely at private academies in an age with few public schools, by age seventeen Robert W. Scott was already managing his mother’s farm. Two years later in 1880, Scott bought out the interests of his brothers and sisters in the home place of 668 acres for $4,250, excepting his mother’s dower interest of 213 acres.⁷ Apart from the acquisition of land, a young farmer had few options to improve himself in the years before North Carolina had an agricultural school or county farm extension agents. So Scott did something unusual for the time. In late 1881, he apprenticed himself for six months to an experimental farm in the Hudson Valley region of New York that was owned by a wealthy northern industrialist.

Returning to North Carolina, he married his girlfriend, Lizzie Hughes, in 1883, and set about building a model farm. Under the management of tenants, Scott’s family acreage had deteriorated, with badly washed gullies, half the fields in timber, and its irregular fields full of stones. But with his new knowledge, Scott practiced diversity, self-sufficiency, and crop rotation, vastly improving the farm’s output of wheat, corn, oats, cattle, and sheep.

After transforming his own farm, Scott began traveling across North Carolina as a missionary for good farming methods. He wasn’t alone: a wave of late nineteenth-century agricultural reforms gave rise to the practice known as scientific farming as well as to agricultural fairs and publications. In time, Scott became one of the founders of the Farmers’ Institute program, forerunner of the extension service, which at its height in 1912 held 502 institutes around the state. He was also the first president of the North Carolina Farmers’ Convention; selected a “Master Farmer,” he gained such a reputation that he became known across the state as “Farmer Bob.” It was a short step from being a farm proponent to becoming a lieutenant in a powerful agrarian political movement that upended Tar Heel politics and helped set the course for rural progressivism for the next century.

The pitchfork rebellion began in Lampasas County, Texas, in 1875, led by a group of small frontier farmers who combined to protect themselves against foreign-owned land syndicates, cattle kings, and rustlers. The Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union advocated taxing and controlling the railroads, establishing interstate commerce regulation, and expanding the currency. By 1886, the Texans decided to spread their gospel across the South and Midwest. Although allied with unions, the alliance was primarily driven by farmers. The South in particular faced a farming crisis, and no state was more fertile territory for the Texans’ message than North Carolina, where farmers were still feeling the effects of economic destruction caused by the Civil War, the emancipation of 350,000 slaves, an overdependence on cotton, and the lack of credit that led to the exploitive sharecropping system.

The Texans moved into North Carolina in May 1887 under the leadership of sixty-six-year-old former Texas Ranger J. B. “Buck” Barry. A North Carolina native, Barry had fought in the Mexican and Civil Wars, led vigilante groups against Indians and horse thieves, served in the Texas legislature, and operated a farm in Bosque County, Texas. By August, Barry had organized thirty Farmers’ Alliance chapters, or suballiances, in Wake County alone. In Harnett County, he organized eleven chapters in twenty-one days, and in fourteen days he organized ten more in Moore County. By 1890, the Farmer’s Alliance had 2,147 local organizations in North Carolina and ninety thousand members.⁸

Among the farmers going into politics was Farmer Bob, the head of the Alamance County Alliance, who was elected to the state House in 1888 at the age of twenty-seven with the alliance’s backing. In North Carolina that same year, the alliance elected eight congressmen and seized control of the state legislature. In 1892, the head of the alliance, Elias Carr, a farmer from Edgecombe County, won the governorship. Similar developments occurred across the South: the alliance won other state and legislative offices, including Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman as governor of South Carolina and James “Big Jim” Hogg of Texas as governor. In total, Farmers’ Alliance strength took over eight southern legislatures, elected six alliance-pledged governors, and seated more than fifty congressmen.⁹

The revolutionary “farmers’ legislature” of 1891, in which Farmer Bob served, passed an extraordinary slate of progressive measures. Many were related to education: the legislature increased the tax rate to finance public schools; created a normal school for white girls that would later become Woman’s College and is now the coeducational University of North Carolina at Greensboro; and initiated an agricultural college and normal college in Greensboro for blacks, now known as North Carolina A&T State University. The Farmers’ Alliance also played a role in establishing what would become N.C. State University in Raleigh. The legislature’s other focus was the railroad, which for many years had enjoyed nearly unfettered power. The legislature put into place regulations forbidding railroad rebates and rate discrimination, and it created a three-member railroad commission empowered to reduce rates and to eliminate the special tax exemptions and lower assessments enjoyed by the railroads.¹⁰

The alliance’s influence would not last, however, as the group splintered into factions. The more radical Farmers’ Alliance members broke from the Democratic Party and formed a coalition with Republicans, then strongly influenced by African Americans, to form a Populist party called Fusionists. The more conservative alliance members, including Farmer Bob, stayed with the Democrats. He lost reelection to his House seat in 1894 to a Fusionist-backed candidate.

THE POPULIST

The Fusion election upended twenty years of Democrat rule in Raleigh, and the new legislature passed a series of progressive reforms, including a 6 percent interest ceiling on loans, a tax hike on railroads and other businesses, and increased spending for public school and colleges. Legislators also made North Carolina’s elections laws the fairest in the South, which led to a surge in black elected local officials.

The Fusion government sparked a brutal conservative reaction. In a campaign financed by business interests opposed to the farmers’ revolt, the Democratic Party in 1898 ran a virulently racist and sometimes violent campaign that drew a wedge between the white Populist farmers and their new allies, the black Republicans. After winning control of the legislature, the Democrats in 1900 elected a Democratic governor and passed a constitutional amendment requiring a literacy test designed to disenfranchise most black voters, ensuring that Democratic power would not again be threatened by a biracial coalition. The white supremacy campaigns of 1898 and 1900 established a pattern in North Carolina politics of progressive reform followed by a race-tainted white backlash.

Nowhere in the country did the farmers’ rebellion have such far-reaching political effects as in North Carolina, a state dotted with small subsistence farmers. Even when the Democrats regained control, it was a changed Democratic Party—no longer quite as reactionary and much more willing to consider spending for education and to consider other reforms. The Farmers’ Alliance for its part refused to give up and hung on in North Carolina longer than anywhere else in the country—a one-time prairie fire reduced to embers. Farmer Bob, a Democrat in good standing but still an old alliance man, returned to the Raleigh in 1901, this time in the Senate. He was elected to the House in 1902 and remained active in politics, pushing for increased funding for education and serving under six governors on the state Board of Agriculture, an important body in a farm-centric state.

In 1908, Farmer Bob unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for agriculture commissioner at a marathon Democratic convention in Charlotte in which sixty-one ballots were cast for governor over four days and four nights. The agriculture commissioner’s race didn’t take that long, with William A. Graham winning the nomination on the sixth ballot in a five-man field. Farmer Bob finished fourth and dropped out after the fourth ballot. He remained active in the Farmers’ Alliance until his death in 1929 and was often joined at its annual meetings in the coastal town of New Bern or at N.C. State University in Raleigh by his son, Kerr, and his daughter-in-law, Mary.¹¹

Farmer Bob and his wife, Lizzie, had fourteen children, three of whom died as infants, one of whom fatally rolled into the burning coals of the fireplace as a baby. Of the children who survived, it was a remarkably high-achieving family. All graduated from college, and many had distinguished careers. Kerr became governor and U.S. senator, while Ralph became a businessman and one of the most powerful North Carolina state legislators of the mid-twentieth century. Elizabeth Scott Carrington helped create the nursing school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Carrington Hall still houses the program and bears her name. Ivy League–educated Floyd Scott worked as a country doctor and delivered an estimated seven thousand babies; Henry Scott, a farmer and businessman, served as chairman of the Alamance County board of education and president of the state school boards association.

Both parents emphasized education. Farmer Bob, who attended the University of North Carolina for one year, served as chairman of the local school board, as a trustee of Flora MacDonald College for women, and as a member of the board of what would become N.C. State University. Lizzie was the daughter of a college-educated schoolmaster, Samuel Wellwood Hughes, who founded Hughes Academy for boys. Similar to a prep school, Hughes Academy drew students from as far away as Texas; it is also where Lizzie met her future husband.¹²

Because of Farmer Bob’s wide connections, the Scott farm received well-known visitors such as Aycock, Josephus Daniels, the Raleigh publisher and Woodro...