Tar and feathers

by Victor Rubin

Hamilton was aristocratic as only a thorough Democrat can be—that is a Southern Democrat. And his ideas came by heredity. He believed, first, in the absolute supremacy of the white race, as distinguished from the colored races; second, of the Anglo-Saxon as distinguished from the rest of the Caucasian race; third, of the residents south of the Mason and Dixon line, as distinguished from the rest of the Anglo-Saxons; and fourth, of the Hamiltons. Although he no longer attended church regularly, he was a firm believer in God—a deity not unlike the oil paintings of the ancestral Hamilton, who had received the grant from Oglethorpe—only infinitely more powerful and grand. Hamilton’s God was a god of the cotton plantations and the mills, although Hamilton himself would have been the first person to deny it. His voice was heard in the thunder and His rain made the cotton plants to grow. His hand could be seen ruling the waters and turning the wheels of the cotton mills. His anger flashed in the lightning and was seen in the uprisings of white men to stamp out transgressions of His law.

Yet it was a just God and a beneficent one; for though it had been God who had created the different races and classes and who had destined some to rule and others to be ruled, He gave to all alike the beauty of sunsets and sunrises, of misty mountain peaks, of majestic expanses of ocean, of flowers and forests. And He allowed the rain to fall alike on the highest white man in His caste, and upon the lowliest black.

At college Hamilton’s conceptions had broadened sufficiently for him to admit that all of God’s people were not concentrated south of the Mason-Dixon line—though they might be more thickly settled there.

His first contact with theories of evolution advanced fifty years ago, but new to him, for a time threatened to shake his belief in the god of the clan, but eventually he absorbed the new teachings and catalogued them as part of the inscrutable plan, the mysterious ways in which God moved His wonders to perform.

All this sounds very ponderous for a young man at the threshold of life. As a matter of fact, these concepts played but a small part in his actual life. He was fond of outdoor sports, tennis and golf, had gone on several fishing trips in northern Maine with a Harvard chum, and was a fair horseman. He had belonged to an exclusive club at Harvard and held a membership in the best club in Corinth. He attended all the dances in his set, sometimes led a cotillion, flirted lightly with the belles, took them motoring, was the life of house-parties and had a reputation as one of the keenest hands at poker in Georgia.

He drank like a gentleman and had an utter contempt for anyone who couldn’t. Women liked him naturally, because he was tall and athletic, conversed interestingly and could make love—of the mock variety—delightfully. But he had never carried his mild philanderings to the dangerous stage—far less violated the code that holds a woman’s honor inviolate—in his own set.

Robert was preparing to succeed his father in the control of the Hamilton interests gradually. But neither father nor son had any illusions about the inherent value or nobility of learning the business from the bottom. Father and son planned that when the time came for the younger man to step into control that a competent staff should continue to attend to all the details of the Hamilton enterprises, leaving to the son only the outlining of broad policies. This arrangement would leave Hamilton free to live his own life, according to his own theories and untrammeled by business cares.

Hamilton was living in a New York apartment, learning the details of the distribution of cotton from the New York office, and incidentally learning how to pick a Follies girl from the first row, when the United States entered the World War. He immediately applied for a commission in the army and was accepted as an officer candidate at Plattsburg. Here his ideas of inherent aristocracy received a jolt. In the bunks adjoining his were a Jew who had worked his way through the College of the City of New York and had just entered the practice of law, and an Italian-American who had formerly been a mounted policeman in Pennsylvania. He found neither particularly greasy, as he might have expected. Near him were men of German, French, Norwegian and Southern European descent. Best of all, however, he liked William McCall, New York correspondent for a Chicago newspaper, a clever, whimsical sort of fellow of Robert’s own age—a dreamer and a holder of startling, but interesting, theories of art, poetry and life. He was a brother dilettante, with an added knack of doing things—besides.

McCall and Hamilton received second lieutenancies and were assigned to the same company in the New York division of the national army (the draft army). Here Hamilton’s ideas received another jolt, for men and officers represented every nation and creed. And here for the first time the idea of such phrases as “the melting pot” and “the army of democracy” began to sink into his consciousness.

His engagement to Margaret Forsyth had come quite suddenly and logically. Since childhood they had frequented the same circles. They had attended the same dances and receptions. They had played, as children, in each other’s homes, and made faces at each other across the same table. When Robert was eight and riding through the streets of Corinth on a white pony that caused all the children in sight to shout envious “ohs” and “ahs,” he formed the plan of eloping with Margaret. She agreed with alacrity. When they had reached the outskirts of the city, however, and Margaret discovered that it wasn’t a make-believe elopement, she began screaming so loudly that Robert was obliged to turn back. From that time on he pretended to have a supreme disdain for the opposite sex. In his fifteenth year, however, while home on a vacation from “prep” school, he had once more succumbed to feminine wiles—and intermittently thereafter.