Battling Nell: The Life of Southern Journalist Cornelia Battle Lewis, 1893-1956. Alexander S. Leidholdt (2009).Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. pp. 331.
In the 1920s, Cornelia Battle Lewis wrote strident columns for the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer attacking the Ku Klux Klan, defending Communist-backed strikers at a regional textile mill, and supporting Al Smith’s candidacy for president despite his Catholicism. By the time she died suddenly in 1956, Lewis was still writing strident columns for the News and Observer, Raleigh’s leading newspaper, but these warned of the menace of Communism and urged defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court’s mandate to de-segregate schools. She even denounced her former self.
In Battling Nell, Alexander Leidholdt details the controversial life of the first woman columnist in the South and one of the first in the nation. While the book may offer more information about both Lewis and political controversies in North Carolina than readers outside the state care to know, it is a significant contribution to the literature of both women in journalism and regional journalism history.
Lewis, the daughter of a prominent Raleigh doctor, came of age when privileged North Carolina women “entered the public arena… to exercise their moral authority on behalf of temperance” and became involved in the suffrage movement, women’s clubs, the YWCA, and public service. Other background influences included the older generation’s memories of Civil War devastation (p. 5). Even at her most liberal, Lewis shared the area’s nostalgia for the Confederacy. In later life, she flew the Confederate flag.
Lewis lost her mother when she was young and was raised by a stepmother. Several half brothers also figured in her turbulent life. A rebel from the start, she attended exclusive girls schools but was an indifferent student and rejected her high school’s religious teachings. In later life, she became devout and taught religion at her high school during a hiatus from journalism.
Despite her academic shortcomings, Lewis graduated from Smith College and later earned a law degree from Columbia University. During World War I, while serving with the YMCA in France, she had her only serious romance but the relationship ended when her brothers seem to have warned the young officer that Lewis was mentally unstable.
Her journalistic career began almost by accident. In 1920, when she was out riding her horse past the News and Observer, she impulsively stopped in and asked for a job. Publisher Josephus Daniels announced to readers that he had appointed “Miss Nell Battle Lewis, a gifted young woman who has embraced the profession of journalism.” Daniels, one of the South’s leading progressive publishers, was eager to give women a chance. “Woman is to lose nothing of her grace and charm because she is to become an equal partner in governmental housekeeping” (pp. 59-60).
Lewis, an ardent suffragist, became the paper’s only female reporter, covering that and other women’s issues. She also wrote a children’s page, features, and editorials and, after about a year, became society editor. In 1921, she began writing her column, “Incidentally.” It would provide her with a forum for the rest of her life except for interludes, such as when she was ill or recovering from a breakdown.
In the early days, Lewis fiercely attacked the Ku Klux Klan, although she opposed racial integration. She battled for better conditions for women and girls at state asylums and other institutions. She defended free speech at the University of North Carolina and was mortified when North Carolina joined four other Southern states in backing a Republican rather than Al Smith. Her last great progressive cause was supporting textile mill strikers in 1929 even though Communists also backed them. The strike turned violent and culminated in strike leaders being convicted of second-degree murder. The outcome seems to have had a traumatic effect on Lewis.
Throughout her life, she suffered from a variety of mental and physical problems; Lewis seems to have been manic-depressive. The book covers her health and family problems in detail. While these were important in her life and career, omitting some of the detail would have made the book less turgid. Lewis emerged from a series of hospitalizations in the 1930s and revived her column, but she renounced most of her former leftist stands. She increasingly supported traditionalism and regionalism and opposed Daniels’ more progressive stands. However, he did not try to censor her any more than when she was much further to the left of the paper.
For the remainder of her life, Lewis moved ever further right. She became a fervent anti-Communist in the 1940s, obsessing about the danger of local Communist conspiracies. She could be vicious in her attacks on state and national candidates she opposed and played an especially nasty role in driving out of office the respected longtime University of North Carolina president for protecting academic freedom. She became increasingly militant in defending the Southern way of life and segregation. When she died in 1953, she had just circulated a column to newspapers throughout the South calling for defiance of Brown vs. Board of Education.
Battling Nell is an aptly titled book about an important female journalist who emerged as more interesting than appealing. At times I had to force myself through the details of every episode in her life in this heavily footnoted book. Because this is an authoritative biography of a major figure, the author must have felt it his duty to cover everything rather than highlighting major episodes as a journalist would have done. Unfortunately, this may limit its audience, especially as supplemental reading in undergraduate media history courses.
Although Lewis moved from one extreme to the other politically, her fervor and self-righteousness never changed. If she were to enter journalism today, Lewis might be a talk radio host or a panelist on the cable TV news food fights rather than a newspaper columnist.
As for her place in the history of women in journalism, Lewis was so idiosyncratic that her career sheds little light on the role of most women in Southern journalism during the era. She was hired because of her family’s social position and was granted a freedom to express outrageous views that only a few journalists of either gender ever enjoy. She was the sort of celebrity journalist whose name might draw some readers to the paper, but she has little in common with mainstream women journalists who just wanted to cover the news. Even though she was a suffragist, there is no evidence that she ever tried to open professional doors for other women.
Oddly, because this is a biography, what I found most valuable about the book was its portrait of North Carolina from the 1920s to the 1950s. It’s not easy to find literature on the white South that provides a nuanced portrait of the region rather than merely caricaturing it. Too often Northerners view all Southern editors as cookie cutters while overlooking those, such as Daniels, who struggled with an ugly past that they themselves could not yet abandon. This book sheds light on the role that editors such as Daniels and his son played as the South was forced to confront change. The book’s extensive bibliography will, in itself, make the work valuable to scholars.
Overall, I applaud Leidholdt for this portrait of a major regional figure in journalism who happens to be a woman. Maurine Beasley, the nation’s leading expert on the history of women in journalism, has said that we cannot fully understand the history of American media without doing studies that fill in the large gaps in the history of both regional journalism and women in journalism. This book accomplishes both, although the caveats mentioned about women should be kept in mind.
EILEEN WIRTH
Creighton University