Henry W. Grady
From Freepedia
Henry Woodfin Grady (May 17,1851 – December 23,1889) was a journalist and orator who did much to help reintegrate the states of the former Confederacy into the union after the American Civil War. As a teenager, he witnessed probably the fiercest fighting of that war in his home state and lost his father to a Yankee bullet.
He was educated in the classical tradition of a southern gentleman of the time at the University of Georgia and the University of Virginia, where he was especially interested in Greek and Anglo-Saxon Languages, history, and literature. Upon graduation he held a series of brief journalistic jobs with the Rome Courier, the Atlanta Herald, and the New York Herald.
After New York, Grady returned to the South as a reporter-editor for the Atlanta Constitution. In 1880 with borrowed money, he bought a fourth interest in the paper and began a nine-year career as one of Georgia's most celebrated journalists. On the business end, he quickly built the newspaper into the state's most influential with a national circulation of 120,000.
In the tumultous decades following the war when hatreds lingered in many, it was a conciliatory Grady who sought to establish a New South in which the past was put to rest. "There was a South of slavery and secession - that South is dead. There is now a South of union and freedom - that South, thank God, is living, breathing, and growing every hour," he said in an 1886 speech before a dinner audience in New England that included J.P. Morgan and H.M. Flagler.
He popularized an antithesis between the “old South” which “rested everything on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth,” and a “new south” – “thrilling with the consciousness of growing power and prosperity”.
In 1887 he promoted the creation in Atlanta of the Georgia Institute of Technology, a state vocational-education school.
Grady was also praised for his great passion for political oratory (he supported Prohibition and a Georgia veterans' home for disabled or elderly Confederate soldiers), commitment to the new peace, and well-known sense of humor.
That sense of humor and quick wit got Grady through more than one difficult situation. Once at a banquet of northern elites, he was waxing eloquently about the brilliant prospects for northern investments in a New South determined to rise from the ashes of defeat. When Grady spotted General William T. Sherman in the audience, the celebrated Yankee soldier who was credited with defeating and burning much of Georgia, and particularly Atlanta, on his infamous "march to the sea." Without missing a beat, Grady acknowledged the general by noting that the people of Georgia thought Sherman an able military man, "but a might careless about fire."
In another speech, Grady wanted to chastise gently his Southern audience for what he believed to be Georgia's economic shortcomings. Rather than pounding them with statistics, he entertained them with stories that made the points. He said,
"Once I attended an unusually sad funeral in Pickens County. The deceased was an unfortunate fellow of the one-gallus brigade, whose breeches struck him underneath the arm-pits and hit him at the other end at about the knee...They buried him in the midst of a marble quarry. They cut him through solid marble to make his grave, and yet the little headstone they put above him came from Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest and yet the rude pine coffin was imported from Cincinnati. They buried him within touch of an iron mine, and yet the nails in the coffin and the shovel they used was imported from Pittsburgh. They buried him by the side of the best sheep-grazing country on earth, and yet the wool inside the coffin and the wool bands they used in lowering his body were brought from the North. The South furnished nothing for that funeral but the hole in the ground and the corpse."
Grady's prestige reached such a height that he became the only non-member ever to adjourn the Georgia Legislature. It occurred on the election of Grover Cleveland to the presidency. News of the close contest arrived at 11 a.m. during the Legislature's session. In his exhuberance, Grady rushed to the Capitol with the announcement. He brushed past the door keeper and into the chamber shouting in senatorial tones, "Mr. Speaker, a message from the American people."
Sensing the purpose of the intrusion, the Speaker offered Grady a place by his side. However, Grady strode up the aisle to the Speaker's desk, grabbed the Speaker's gavel, and cried out, "In the name of the American people, I declare this House adjourned in honor of the election of the first Democratic President in twenty-five years."
Grady, however, passed away as quickly as he gained fame. By age 39, Henry W. Grady was dead. True to his flare for drama, he was buried on Christmas Day in 1889, the victim of what was believed to have been pneumonia.
Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta and Grady County, GA is named for him, as well as Atlanta Public Schools Communication Magnet, Henry W. Grady High School and the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia; the journalism school is one of the best in the country and annually awards the George Foster Peabody Awards, considered the Pulitzer Prize for Broadcast Journalism.
