| A longtime columnist for the Raleigh News and Observer,
Cornelia Battle Lewis earned a national reputation in the 1920s
and 1930s for her courageous advocacy on behalf of women’s
rights, African Americans, and labor unions. Late in her life,
however, after fighting mental illness, Lewis reversed many
of her stances and railed against the liberalism she had spent
her life advancing. In Battling Nell, Alexander S.
Leidholdt tells the compelling and ultimately tragic life story
of this groundbreaking journalist against the backdrop of the
turbulent post-Reconstruction Jim Crow South and speculates
about the cause of her extraordinary transformation.
The daughter of North Carolina’s most prominent public
health official, Lewis grew up in Raleigh, but her experiences
at Smith College in Massachusetts, and later in France during
World War I, led her to question the prevailing racial attitudes
and gender roles of her native region. In 1920, Lewis began
her storied career with the News and Observer. Inspired
by H. L. Mencken’s scathing criticism of the South,
she soon established herself as the region’s leading
female liberal journalist. Her column, “Incidentally,”
attacked the Ku Klux Klan, lobbied against the exploitation
of mill workers, defended strikers during the notorious communist-organized
Gastonia labor violence, mocked religious fundamentalists
who fought the teaching of evolution, and decried lynch law.
A suffragist and a feminist who saw women’s rights as
inextricably linked to human rights, Lewis ran for state legislature
in 1928 and was one of the first women in North Carolina to
be admitted to the bar.
In the 1930s, however, Lewis faced repeated institutionalizations
for a debilitating bout of mental illness and sought treatment
from Christian Science practitioners, spiritualists, and psychotherapists.
As she aged, her views grew increasingly reactionary, and
she insisted that she had served as a communist dupe during
the Gastonia strike and trials, that communists had infiltrated
the University of North Carolina, and that many of her former
progressive allies had ties to communism. Finally, many of
her opinions completely reversed, and in the wake of the 1954
Brown v. Board decision, she served as an influential
spokesperson for the South’s massive resistance to public
school desegregation. She continued to espouse these conservative
beliefs until her death in 1956.
In his detailed retelling of Lewis’s fascinating life,
Leidholdt chronicles the turbulent history of North Carolina
from the 1920s through the 1950s, as industrialization and
racial integration began to tear at the region’s conservative
fabric. He vividly explains the background and ramifications
of Lewis’s many controversial stances and explores the
possible reasons for her ideological about-face. Through the
extraordinary story of “Battling Nell,” Leidholdt
reveals how the complex issues of gender, labor, and race
intertwined to influence the convulsive events that shaped
the course of early twentieth-century southern history.
Alexander S. Leidholdt is also the author
of Editor for Justice: The Life of Louis I. Jaffé
and Standing before the Shouting Mob: Lenoir Chambers
and Virginia’s Massive Resistance to Public-School Integration.
The Ruth D. Bridgeforth Professor of Media Arts and Design
at James Madison University, he lives in McGaheysville, Virginia. |
