If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are - if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

Let there be no doubt about it, human beings love a good myth.

For the past couple of days on television news shows, the nation’s top broadcasters gushed on and on about the “legendary” Tim Russert, who asked questions of politicians on Meet the Press for the past 17 years.

But to call him a “great journalist” is a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? OK, say he was a fine man. An able questioner. Knowledgeable about American politics. But a “great journalist?”

Hmmm.

Before that show took over the national airwaves, I had just started reading The Prince of Frogtown, the new book out by former New York Times correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg. It’s the third in a trilogy about his Appalachian family.

It paints a compelling and accurate picture of another time, but it is not a book for everybody. I will read it because he is my friend. We are nearly the same age, from nearly the same place, and agree on almost everything, even if our approach to news reporting and writing is a bit different.

He is more likely to build up the myths; I am more likely to break them down.

But that is the subject of a longer essay, and the truth is, there are some people worthy of myth, and some who are not.

The current issue of Alabama Heritage Quarterly, for example, features a full-page cover photo and story of Nathan Bedford Forrest, which glorifies his military career and portrays him in romantic tones. But Forrest was not just “any” Confederate Civil War figure. He was the pivotal character involved in the founding of the Ku Klux Klan and served as its Grand Wizard, and his record of hate speech and pernicious racist views were remarked upon even by his contemporaries, according to sources who are now working up a critique of the piece.

The mythical figures I am more interested in are courageous newspaper editors. Whatever happened to the courageous newspaper editor? They are all business suits now, driven by the desire to survive in a world where democracy means capitalism and money means everything and the Net is seen as a threat.

If you do some Googling around for editors who fought the Ku Klux Klan in the South, for example, you will run across Ralph McGill (1898-1969).

You might also run across those who promulgate great myths surrounding the first publisher of the New York Times, Adolph Ochs, although you might also find articles that drive cracks into that myth.

The Family Behind the Times: Powerful but no longer private

Back in 1990, when I was in the middle of covering a string of victories for the environment on the Gulf Coast, I had the occasion to interview one legendary Alabama character named Gould Beech.

Alabama Public Television produced a documentary on Beech and his wife Mary called “Against The Mainstream,” which documented the legend of how the Beeches fought for civil rights in Alabama before it was a popular thing to do.

APT’s Alabama Experience: Against The Mainstream

That show was inspired and informed by a two-part series I did on Beech in 1990. The producers found out about Beech from me when I was in the Master’s program at UA on the 100th anniversary of the Crimson White newspaper, which Beech had edited in the early 1930s.

Unfortunately, that series and the APT show are not available on the Web. And due to flaws in online archiving of The Southerner magazine (which I am in the process of trying to fix), the original obituary I published on Beech when he died in 2000 is no longer available online either.

So on this Father’s Day Sunday, instead of remembering a broadcast guy, I will honor Gould Beech by republishing the obituary I wrote for the first magazine ever published online. At least Googlers will be able to find it here. When his daughter read this back when, she called me in Knoxville to tell me she cried when she read it.

And oh yea, I think the Beeches followed their bliss. I know I always follow mine, if it’s not always blissful, like dealing with the Alabama heat on a blistering June day. But there’s always the coolness of The Bunker and some golf on TV after a fine Southern breakfast of scrambled eggs with cheese, cheese grits, crisp bacon, biscuits with local honey and a slice of fresh tomato from the new garden. With a little smoke and a cool Yuengling Black and Tan, now that’s bliss : )

Populist Gould Beech Dies at 87

by Glynn Wilson

KNOXVILLE, Tenn., Nov. 27, 2000 - It just goes to show you that if you do the right thing in life and live long enough people will notice.

Gould Beech, one of the last of America’s Populists, died Sunday, Nov. 5 in a Daphne, Ala. hospital of complications from Parkinson’s disease. He was 87.

Beech and his wife Mary Foster Beech, who also died this year on July 10, were among a small group of liberal Whites who fought against racial discrimination in the South in the 1930s and ’40s. But they were basically run out of the state in the days before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision after being branded “radical” and “socialist.”

But by the 1980s, Beech was regarded as a significant figure by historians in Alabama, both for the stands he took against racism and for his associations with such figures as Gov. “Big Jim” Folsom, the courageous newspaper editor Grover Hall Sr., George Washington Carver, the liberal democratic U.S. Sen. Lister Hill, and the liberal Senator and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.

In 1986, the Alabama Senate passed a resolution honoring Beech. In 1995, Alabama Public Television broadcast a documentary about Gould and Mary Beech’s work on behalf of civil rights. The show was inspired by and informed in part by a two-part series I did for Gulf Coast Newspapers in 1990.

“The god-awful waste of prejudice, that’s been mine and Mary’s constant theme over the years,” Beech told the Mobile Register in 1993. In 1990, he told me in an interview for Gulf Coast Newspapers that there still exists a “hidden racism” in Alabama and the nation, but not to the extent that everyone “was preoccupied with it.”

“In those days, race was the end all be all. Everything in politics rested on that issue,” he said. “You couldn’t talk about the real issues of poverty and disease and what to do about education.”

In 1990, he said, things were different.

“People can talk about something else other than stirring up racial antagonism. I don’t know of any sane person who would consider turning back the clock,” he said. “We are in a period of peaceful, evolutionary change, when great things are being accomplished through peaceful means and moralsuasion — the moral power and force that can be generated by people without a gun, a rock or even a stick.”

That was not the case in 1947, when Gov. Folsom appointed Beech to the Auburn University board of trustees. Protests against his appointment from the old Farm Bureau were so vehement that the state Legislature refused to confirm him. So in 1950, the Beeches moved to Houston, Texas, where he ran a radio station and worked against Eisenhower and “anybody else who tried to keep the little man down,” he said.

Beech was born in Graceville, Fla., but grew up mostly in Foley and Montgomery. His mother died when he was 5, so he was raised by female relatives and his father, a conductor for the railroad who was an outspoken critic of the Ku Klux Klan. Beech graduated from Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery in 1930, then enrolled at the University of Alabama, where he met Mary Foster in a chemistry class and got into journalism. He became the editor of the student newspaper, the Crimson White. He was honored at the 100th anniversary of the paper in 1994.

After graduating from Alabama, Beech attended the University of North Carolina on a fellowship, but then returned to Alabama and taught journalism for a time at Alabama Polytechnic Institute, which is now Auburn University.

Beech went back into the newspaper business and worked for the Anniston Star, then took a position as associate editor of the Montgomery Advertiser. It was there he worked under Pulitzer Prize-winning editor Grover Hall Sr., also known for his courageous stands against racism and the KKK, and in favor of anti-lynching laws. He also attacked Gov. Frank Dixon for making off-the-record racist remarks to reporters. Beech befriended both T.M. Campbell, the state’s first black extension service agent, and George Washington Carver, Tuskegee’s famed horticulturist.

During World War II, Beech was an Army officer stationed in Washington, D.C. There the Beeches were known to socialize with other liberals from Alabama who played crucial roles in the Civil Rights movement, including Clifford and Virginia Durr, who became famous for bailing Rosa Parks out of jail when she refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery.

After the War, Beech and Aubrey Williams got financing from Marshall Field, a Chicago businessman, to buy a newspaper called the Southern Farmer. Among patent medicine advertisements and advice to the lovelorn, they published articles and editorials calling on white farmers and black farmers to work together.

“That’s what they wanted to do, put together a coalition of working class whites and blacks,” Sam Webb, a history professor at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, told the Associated Press. “It was a dream that grew out of their understanding of the Populist movement.”

In 1946, while editing the Southern Farmer, with 1 million subscribers, Beech became interested in the populist-sounding themes of Jim Folsom of Cullman, who was running for governor for the second time. So he arranged a meeting in hotel room on the campaign trail.

He asked Folsom if he knew anything about the Populist movement. When Folsom told him his grandfathers on both sides had been Populists, Beech said: “Well, maybe I can go with you.”

With no discussion of pay, Beech became Folsom’s informal adviser and speech writer, tailoring his message for radio. When Folsom was inaugurated in early 1947, Beech wrote the address, which contained this telling passage:

“There are those who are frightened by real democracy. They have always worked to trim it down a little here and trim it down a little there. They want to keep power in the hands of a few. I am not afraid of too much democracy. I am afraid of what happens to people when they have too little democracy.”

After spending more than 20 years in Texas, the Beeches moved back to Alabama in 1972 to live on the Magnolia River in Baldwin County. They spent their honeymoon there in 1935, and were drawn to the place where the mail is delivered by boat, the last year-round river mail route in the country. They moved into their dream house in 1978, according to Mary Beech Finger.

They had a golden retriever named Trumpet, a true yellow-dog democrat, who would not eat peanut brittle when Beech said it was sent by a Republican. When Beech would name a Democrat, Trumpet would take the peanut brittle. People would always ask how he did it, and Beech would put on his poker face and say, “You’ve got to teach ‘em to read and make up their own minds,” a line he stole from his daughter.

Beech is survived by a daughter, Mary Beech Finger of Magnolia Springs; a son, Ed Beech of Pascagoula, Miss.; grandsons Shawn Beech and Edward Alan Finger, nieces and nephews. A memorial service was held Saturday Nov. 11 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Magnolia Springs.

Among the speakers was former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, who called Beech a true hero. They sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and then closed with the Hank Williams classic, “I Saw the Light.”

Even though he was hospitalized for his last three weeks, he managed to cast his final vote in the first election of the new millennium, thanks to a dedicated daughter.

When she told him in the hospital about sending in the absentee ballot, she said, “he blinked eight times,” a sign he understood and was pleased. “Of course,” Ms. Finger said, “it was a straight Democratic ticket.”

Tags: Glynn Wilson, The Power of Myth, Under the Microscope

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