Charles Kuralt anchored CBS Sunday Morning for just about forever. He brought a kind of aw-shucks demeanor to the show, which tended to be a quiet meditation on the news of the week. Still is, I guess — I haven’t seen the show in years. But I used to catch Kuralt on the air when I could. He seemed to be the opposite of overbearing and ideological, a persona that concealed a lot.
Charles Kuralt, CBS’s folksy “On the Road” correspondent, spent years exploring America’s out-of-the-way places in search of oddball stories. But the best story may have been the one he never told.
For 29 years, until his death in 1997, he apparently kept a mistress and maintained a second family. The celebrated journalist was, in effect, husband and father to them, as well as breadwinner, friend and hero.
While his wife remained at their home in the concrete canyons of New York City, he nurtured his secret life along a rushing trout stream in Montana.
None of this would come out, however, until after his death, when his mistress, Patricia Elizabeth Shannon, sued to get a Montana retreat he promised her. Montana’s Supreme Court ruled last month that the woman is entitled to a trial on her claim.
Double lives seem to run in the Kuralt family. His dad, Wallace Kuralt, was a Progressive monster.
Compassionate. Visionary. A champion of women and the poor.
That’s the reputation that Wallace Kuralt built as Mecklenburg County’s welfare director from 1945 to 1972. Today, the building where Charlotte’s poor come for help bears his name – a name made even more prominent when his newscaster son, Charles Kuralt, rose to fame.
But as architect of Mecklenburg’s program of eugenic sterilization – state-ordered surgery to stop the poor and disabled from bearing children – Kuralt helped write one of the most shameful chapters of North Carolina history.
The Charlotte Observer has obtained records sealed by the state that tell the stories of 403 Mecklenburg residents ordered sterilized by the N.C. Eugenics Board at the behest of Kuralt’s welfare department.
It’s a number that dwarfs the total from any other county, in a state that ran one of the nation’s most active efforts to sterilize the mentally ill, mentally retarded and epileptic.
Race played a major role. Of course. Kuralt was a strong Progressive eugenicist.
In 1960, just under 25 percent of Mecklenburg residents were African-American.
But blacks made up more than 80 percent of the people ordered sterilized at the request of the Welfare Department between 1955 and 1966. In 1957, the peak year for Mecklenburg, the state approved sterilizations of 52 blacks and five whites.
Dozens of black women were sent to surgeons at Good Samaritan Hospital, Charlotte’s segregated black facility.
Thereasea Elder, a retired public health nurse who is African-American, recalls a stream of hysterectomies and tubal ligations when she worked there in surgery.
“I never knew the reason why they did so many hysterectomies,” said Elder, 84. “We thought they were diseased. We were never told the reason for the sterilizations.”
The Eugenics Board records reflect the racial attitudes of the times. A 17-year-old white boy with an IQ of 47 was ordered sterilized in 1963. The report notes that he lived in a low-income, racially mixed neighborhood, and “his interest in Negro girls” is one reason cited to stop him from having children.
More about the role of race in Kuralt’s career, here. Eugenics eventually fell out of favor with the public, but not with the senior Kuralt, who died in 1994.
Writer Mary Snead Boger interviewed him for her 1972 book “Charlotte 23,” a collection of profiles of the city’s most important residents. He told her planned parenthood for the poor was his most significant accomplishment.
“I suppose,” he said, “no comparable population in the world has ever received more eugenic sterilizations.”
Frankly, I’m shocked that the Observer worked the phrase “planned parenthood” into this piece, but good on them for that. It’s an entirely appropriate turn of phrase.
(h/t Jonah Goldberg)
You can’t really blame Wallace Kurault. After all, the science was settled….
Whatever the crimes of Woodrow Wilson-style progressives, today it is the conservatives that back “social Darwinism.” They endorse policies that let poor people die or get entrapped in the prison-industrial complex.
Also, the eugenics people have found a new home in the anti-immigration movement, what with their concerns about “population stability” and “aliens” overrunning purebred “real” Americans.
You’re so right! That must be why Planned Parenthood’s most ardent defenders are Republicans. Wait…
Margaret Sanger is dead.
People who accuse welfare moms of being “parasites” are very much alive and are given their own AM radio talk shows.
Alas, Planned Parenthood is not. Millions of innocent Americans have died at the hands of the monster she created.
But the party with a pro-life plank in its platform — they’re the real killers, right AJB?
“prison-industrial complex”?
Seriously?
And how does anyone let someone else get trapped in it?
I have mixed feelings about your post. On the one hand the boldness of your illogic was most amusing.
On the other hand the magnitude of the stupidity was so great I may end up tying my shoes together and putting my pants on backwards.
You could warn a guy first, ya know.
Well, you certainly have the party line well-memorized. Can you do any other tricks?
If you’re going to write satire, you should at least give a hint that you’re kidding.
For instance, try this:
Also, the eugenics people have found a new home in the anti-immigration movement, what with their OOGEDDIBOOGEDDIBAH about “population stability”
See? That’s funny, and people will laugh as you intended them to.
Please let me know if you need more lessons in properly-crafted humorous writing.
I love it when libs conflate a concern with illegal immigration with somehow being equated with being “anti-immigration” overall. It’s the same cheap narrative trick used for “stem cell research,” where the only issue is embryonic stem cell research that bothers SOME conservatives.
AJB – You clearly do not understand the role of a Classical Liberal government (as opposed to today so-called ‘Liberal’ government). In the former, the role of government is neither to help nor to hurt. Its role is not to sterilize people nor to subsidize someone’s lifestyle. Its role is not to take care of our individual health needs nor to determine when we die. In the Classical Liberal government, we make our own decisions and we have to abide them, come hell or high water. We are each responsible for our own actions; I cannot help individuals who have made poor decisions or have taken unadvised risks.
You obviously would not agree with any of that.
You’re not really as ignorant as you act, are you AJB?
Margaret Sanger may be dead, but I happily accept the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood!
The funniest part is that libs/dens/progressives are whining at the GOP controlled NC legislature for not giving the eugenics victims enough money because of what the lefties did.
John Holdren, Obama’s crackpot/quack “science” advisor, still believes in my notions. The main difference is he wants to apply these policies to most of humanity.
Also, it’s kind of funny that, considering I (Sanger) was the tenth child in a poor family, that my policies would have eliminated ME had they been applied much earlier!
“Kind of funny?” How about “utterly logical?” There is immense self-hatred evident in much of the “progressive” effort to control what other people do—but that self-hatred is projected outwards, and onto the acts of others, in order for the person doing the projecting to avoid dealing with it him- or herself.
Precisely, which is why I cooperated with the Women’s Auxiliary of the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan on a plan to exterminate the Negro. People would then associate this effort with the Klan, and not with me.
Wow. I missed the whole story about that Carolina grad, Charles Kuralt. And I sure didn’t know about his pappy. That said, I still liked his reports (though now they have a sordid angle I never would have considered before). “I’ll meet you in Lizard Lick, NC and we’ll party like we did last year in Intercourse, PA.”
Just FYI – Wallace Kuralt not surprisingly received in 1983 the Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger Award – NIFTY HUH? Seems many of the eugenics engineers are being outed by the media and their cozy relationship with Planned Parenthood swept under the rug !!!!!! A great documentary about this Eugenics relationship of Planned Parenthood is the film: Maafa21 – see a clip here http://www.maafa21.com – watch it is full it is a stunning film !