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Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years
Virginia Foster Durr (1903-1999) was a monumental champion of civil rights and yet, as a privileged white southern woman, an unlikely one. Freedom Writer is a collection of her letters from across three decades of struggle for the cause of racial equality. In 1951, returning to her native Alabama after a twenty-year absence, Durr was deeply affronted by the same unchecked racism she recalled from her childhood. To help understand the South and battle her sense of isolation, Durr wrote hundreds of letters--humorous, sharp, and observant--to her friends outside the region, among them Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Hugo Black, Jessica Mitford, and C. Vann Woodward.
Durr often wrote from the movement's front lines--the sit-ins, freedom rides, and student protests. Moving in the same circles as Rosa Parks, E. D. Nixon, Martin Luther King Jr., and others, Durr often put her life on the line as a bridge between blacks and whites during dangerous times. Countless details of this personal journey, and the shifting political landscape across which it unfolded, found their way into Durr's correspondence.
Originally published on the one hundredth anniversary of Durr's birth, Freedom Writer explores the life and times of a woman whose insatiable appetite for justice immersed her in many of the defining issues and events of the day.
Durr often wrote from the movement's front lines--the sit-ins, freedom rides, and student protests. Moving in the same circles as Rosa Parks, E. D. Nixon, Martin Luther King Jr., and others, Durr often put her life on the line as a bridge between blacks and whites during dangerous times. Countless details of this personal journey, and the shifting political landscape across which it unfolded, found their way into Durr's correspondence.
Originally published on the one hundredth anniversary of Durr's birth, Freedom Writer explores the life and times of a woman whose insatiable appetite for justice immersed her in many of the defining issues and events of the day.
442 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2006
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June 13, 2020
Virginia Foster Durr and the Salvation of Alabama
Five stars. In fact, this book makes me think I should go downgrade a bunch of 5-star ratings I've posted on this site to 4 stars. Very few books I've read are as moving, imp
Virginia Durr (1903-1999), a stalwart of the civil rights movement who preferred to keep out of the spotlight for personal, pragmatic and political reasons, was a hero on the grand scale, as was her husband Clifford Durr (1899 – 1975).
Having both been born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, into reasonably prominent families, the Durrs moved as newlyweds to Washington DC, where Clifford, a lawyer, worked in the FDR administration during the heady days of the New Deal. Virginia, in addition to giving birth to and raising five children, one of whom died in infancy, became active in progressive politics. The Durr family lived near the capital city for nearly twenty years, and then, for reasons that reflect well on both of them[1], they returned to Montgomery, where, at great personal cost, over the next twenty five years they became two of the most prominent white activists for the rights of African Americans. The more one learns about this remarkable couple, the more their courage and unshakable decency leave one awestruck.
Through all those years in Montgomery, as Virginia became sucked up in the vortex of the epochal changes in social relations in the South, she wrote letters. Some of her letters were to famous people she knew quite well (Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Hugo Black, Jessica Mitford); others were to people you’ve probably never heard of. Her letters were by turns hysterically funny, profound, amazingly politically astute, eloquent, angry, or philosophical, but they were always passionate and always written in as distinctive a literary voice as you’re likely to encounter anywhere. They are marvels of English expository writing.
Freedom Writer, published in 2003, includes about 100 of such letters, presented in chronological order, grouped into four sections corresponding to periods in the civil rights movement. Patricia Sullivan (whose book Lift Every Voice, a history of the NAACP I reviewed here) edited the book. She provides a 26 page biographical introduction and introductions (of four or five pages each) to each of the four sections, in which she explains the wider context of the time. Sullivan also provides the occasional footnote to identify people or events referred to in the letters, and dozens of short introductions to particular letters that help the reader understand the context that the letter’s recipient would have. There is a short epilogue.
Virginia Durr was a remarkable and historically important woman, and Freedom Writer is a magnificent book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. You should buy a copy and read it right now.
From Washington to Alabama: A Willing Return to Hell
After seeing Eyes on the Prize — in which, if I remember right, Virginia Durr is one of the few white people interviewed and the only one not introduced or captioned — I learned that Rosa Parks had done some sewing for the Durr family, and that on the night Mrs. Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus, Virginia and Clifford had gone to the jail with NAACP leader E.D. Nixon to secure her release. From this history I made the entirely incorrect inference that the Durrs somehow stumbled into being civil rights activists by virtue of doing a kindness for somebody they knew as an employee, unaware of the possible implications of their good deed.
Boy, was I wrong about that. In fact Clifford and Virginia Durr were entirely aware of what they were doing when they went to Rosa Parks’ assistance. (For a lovely remembrance of the Durr/Parks relationship, see this piece by Dorothy Zellner, who knew them both). By the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott four years after the Durrs’ return to Montgomery, Clifford Durr had already been denounced as a Communist by no less a figure than arch red-baiter Richard Nixon (for the “crimes” of refusing to take or administer a loyalty oath and accepting Communists as legal clients) and editorialized against on the front page of the Montgomery Advertiser. Virtually all of white Montgomery society shunned the Durrs; no whites patronized Clifford’s legal practice (because he also took black clients and had been smeared as a “Communist sympathizer”); their daughters were bullied at school as children of “nigger lovers”. And, although they had once been prosperous, they were poor. Furthermore, although the Durrs had paid Mrs. Parks to sew some dresses for their daughters, she was not their employee. The Durrs were fully aware that by coming to the aid of Mrs. Parks they were risking even greater isolation and danger.
Virginia Durr was 46 years old when she and her husband moved back to Alabama. She had already run for the U.S. Senate in Virginia on the Progressive Party ticket, and had been actively involved in Henry Wallace’s presidential bid. She knew Eleanor Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Pete Seeger and Jessica Mitford (one of her dearest friends and recipient of a large proportion of letters in Freedom Writer). The Durrs were anything but naive or unsophisticated. Virginia had been active for decades in the movement to abolish the poll tax. She was a member of the NAACP. In fact, before Mrs. Parks’ arrest, Clifford Durr had already provided legal representation to Claudette Colvin, a 15 year old girl whose refusal to move to the back of the bus and subsequent arrest provided the inspiration and model for Mrs. Parks’ action later that year. Virginia Durr considered herself Rosa Parks’ friend, not her employer — indeed, the Durrs were essentially broke and only hired Mrs. Parks sporadically — and it had been Virginia who had arranged the scholarship for Mrs. Parks at the Highlander Folk School, an experience that Mrs. Parks later said gave her the vision of what a non-racist America might be like, and thus the courage to do what she did.
Throughout the letters in this book a recurring theme is loneliness. Virginia had attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts, had lived in the hubbub of Washington DC. She had many friends there, black and white. She described herself as gregarious, and everybody who knew her in Washington said she was outgoing, the life of the party, a commanding speaker, a natural leader, a social animal. In Montgomery she was the legal secretary to her husband’s struggling legal practice, who otherwise mostly kept to herself. At home “the phone never rang.” The Durr and Foster families regarded Virginia and Clifford as black sheep; their former friends avoided them, and although they had congenial relationships with many black people, truly intimate friendship among people of different races was impossible–for a black person to even call a white person by his or her first name was to risk being lynched. (Just as a Negro could never call a white person by his or her first name, it was almost as taboo, in white society, for a white person to refer to a Negro using an honorific such as “Mr” or “Mrs”. When, in 1951, Virginia referred to her (black) postman as “Mr. Edwards” instead of by his first name, it was such a scandal that several distant relations never spoke with her again.) For somebody as naturally social as Virginia Durr, this ostracism was nearly unbearable.
But although she wanted friends in the South, Virginia loathed white Southern culture in general. Clifford believed there was some good in traditional Southern ways, but found it harder and harder to find. As Virginia wrote, “Southerners have sacrificed all of the qualities they used to pride themselves upon, good manners, loyalty to old friends, kindness and benevolence. . .in their determination to preserve segregation.” So why did Virginia and Clifford Durr stay in Montgomery? That is the fascinating question at the core of this remarkable book.
They stayed because Clifford strongly, and Virginia somewhat, considered Montgomery home, and home was where one stayed. They stayed because they didn’t have better prospects anywhere else, given the red-baiting and witch hunts going on around the country (they had tried living in Denver for a year and hated it). But increasingly they stayed in Montgomery because they felt that the very soul of America was at stake, that the epicenter of the struggle was right there in Montgomery, that the South would either become more and more like Nazi Germany and take down the whole country with it, or it would experience a progressive rebirth — all depending on what happened in the civil rights movement. They stayed because they could do their best work to save America by staying where they were and working for change there.
Virginia deeply feared that fascism would overtake all of America — she considered the South virtually a country unto itself, and a fascist one at that–and that unless the Negroes (the word she used until the 1980’s or so) were made free, as free in every way as every other citizen, America itself would cease to be: the country would be torn apart by its own internal contradictions, and probably in a race war. She came to believe she had a moral obligation to stay on the front lines until the battle was won.
And she was never sure that the battle would be won. From the perspective of 2011, the successes of the civil rights movement seem inevitable. To people living through it, these letters show, the ultimate outcome was anything but clear. Virginia wrote often of how afraid she was, how she didn’t want to be a target of the Klan, how “I have a tendency to vomit when I read the papers, but that is getting under control.”
The line Virginia walked was exceedingly fine, a tightrope that she lived on for decades. She and her husband could provide legal aid to “Negroes”, be friendly with them, but they must not do so too visibly. To speak out too loudly, to take a stand too publicly, was to court the seething hatred at the heart of the Jim Crow South, and that, Virginia knew, might easily get them or their daughters killed. She watched with horror as the White Citizens Council and Klan attacked and destroyed Juliette Morgan, whose worst crime was to write a letter to the newspaper in which she called white men cowards (their cowardly response –ceaseless anonymous harassment, culminating in a cross-burning on her front lawn– proved her right, of course). This was a time when the federal government was virtually invisible in the South (except at the military bases that pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the otherwise backward economy), and state prosecutors made a mockery of the law. Not only did murderers go free, they were feted as public heroes. Virginia Durr had very good reason to want try to attract as little notice as she could.
As a political matter, too, she believed that whites should not assume leadership positions in the civil rights movement lest there be an implication of whites “giving” rights to blacks. Negroes were not being “given” anything, she insisted. They were merely claiming something that was theirs. (Despite Virginia’s efforts to stay out of the limelight, she was still forced to appear before a Senatorial inquiry, a kind of traveling kangaroo court organized by the odious Senator Eastland, of Mississippi. She said she wasn’t a Communist, then refused to testify any further. She regretted even that admission.)
So she wrote letters to people of influence in the North (excoriating Northerners for their cowardice, heaping scorn on Northern liberals); she supported her husband’s efforts to provide legal representation to Blacks in Montgomery and to help young Black lawyers gain experience, provided behind-the-scenes help in support of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (in photos taken inside churches where Martin Luther King spoke, Virginia and her teenage daughter Tilla are the only whites); provided a place to stay and local intelligence to visitors from the North (“an underground railroad in reverse”). These visitors came once or twice a year in the early days, but as the movement gathered steam, word spread that the Durr house was a safe place to stay. After the “Freedom Summer“, the visitors came by the hundreds. At the time of the Selma marches, her house was a virtual hotel and command center.
Here are a few representative samples from the letters.
In 1951 she wrote letter to her friend Otto, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, that correctly predicted the path her life would take:
“It is hard to even carry on an intelligent conversation as the basic premises are so different. Of course it is a constant pain to see the steady and continuous and taken for granted oppression of the Negroes. It is like a great stone that is lying on them–but it lies just as heavily on the white people too–and I feel so continually guilty that I am not doing anything about it. [. . .] I think the Negroes are stirring and they won’t be held down much longer–but I don’t see how they will ever forgive us for what we have done to them. And yet we must learn to live together here in the rest of the world. I puzzle over it a great deal to see if I can find a crack or an opening but I know all the time is that the real difficulty is that I want to help them but not at the price of being thrown out of my own group–which is what it amounts to here, just complete ostracism and loneliness, and then too no way to make a living–but all this is old stuff to you.”
A few months later she wrote again to Otto:
“Now I am utterly cut off. . . I listen to the conversations here and it is sometimes like a long dirge. Sickness–death–sorrow–drunkeness, despair, madness, faithlessness, brutality and corruption.[. . .] Cliff is a stronger person than I am and he is not so much affected, and then perhaps doesn’t expect as much as I do, he is always surprised and delighted when he finds even a glimmer among the people we see. I think it is so dim. . . the sullen repressed resentment of the Negroes–the bleak despair of the poor whites–and the frustrated cheapness of so many people who have some economic security but no moral security whatever–and what we see so often among the “old families” is the resigned acceptance of despair and tragedy and often madness. . . unless I can find some means of working to change it, or at least helping in some way however small, I think it would drive me to despair.”
This is a theme that Virginia comes back to over and over — that Southern white society is literally insane. And over the years, as African Americans begin to make real gains and the possibility of the crumbling of the old order becomes more real, the full ferocity of this madness manifests itself. Virginia ponders the origin of this insanity and comes up with some stunning insights (see below).
In 1952, after
Five stars. In fact, this book makes me think I should go downgrade a bunch of 5-star ratings I've posted on this site to 4 stars. Very few books I've read are as moving, imp
Virginia Durr (1903-1999), a stalwart of the civil rights movement who preferred to keep out of the spotlight for personal, pragmatic and political reasons, was a hero on the grand scale, as was her husband Clifford Durr (1899 – 1975).
Having both been born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, into reasonably prominent families, the Durrs moved as newlyweds to Washington DC, where Clifford, a lawyer, worked in the FDR administration during the heady days of the New Deal. Virginia, in addition to giving birth to and raising five children, one of whom died in infancy, became active in progressive politics. The Durr family lived near the capital city for nearly twenty years, and then, for reasons that reflect well on both of them[1], they returned to Montgomery, where, at great personal cost, over the next twenty five years they became two of the most prominent white activists for the rights of African Americans. The more one learns about this remarkable couple, the more their courage and unshakable decency leave one awestruck.
Through all those years in Montgomery, as Virginia became sucked up in the vortex of the epochal changes in social relations in the South, she wrote letters. Some of her letters were to famous people she knew quite well (Eleanor Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Hugo Black, Jessica Mitford); others were to people you’ve probably never heard of. Her letters were by turns hysterically funny, profound, amazingly politically astute, eloquent, angry, or philosophical, but they were always passionate and always written in as distinctive a literary voice as you’re likely to encounter anywhere. They are marvels of English expository writing.
Freedom Writer, published in 2003, includes about 100 of such letters, presented in chronological order, grouped into four sections corresponding to periods in the civil rights movement. Patricia Sullivan (whose book Lift Every Voice, a history of the NAACP I reviewed here) edited the book. She provides a 26 page biographical introduction and introductions (of four or five pages each) to each of the four sections, in which she explains the wider context of the time. Sullivan also provides the occasional footnote to identify people or events referred to in the letters, and dozens of short introductions to particular letters that help the reader understand the context that the letter’s recipient would have. There is a short epilogue.
Virginia Durr was a remarkable and historically important woman, and Freedom Writer is a magnificent book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. You should buy a copy and read it right now.
From Washington to Alabama: A Willing Return to Hell
After seeing Eyes on the Prize — in which, if I remember right, Virginia Durr is one of the few white people interviewed and the only one not introduced or captioned — I learned that Rosa Parks had done some sewing for the Durr family, and that on the night Mrs. Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus, Virginia and Clifford had gone to the jail with NAACP leader E.D. Nixon to secure her release. From this history I made the entirely incorrect inference that the Durrs somehow stumbled into being civil rights activists by virtue of doing a kindness for somebody they knew as an employee, unaware of the possible implications of their good deed.
Boy, was I wrong about that. In fact Clifford and Virginia Durr were entirely aware of what they were doing when they went to Rosa Parks’ assistance. (For a lovely remembrance of the Durr/Parks relationship, see this piece by Dorothy Zellner, who knew them both). By the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott four years after the Durrs’ return to Montgomery, Clifford Durr had already been denounced as a Communist by no less a figure than arch red-baiter Richard Nixon (for the “crimes” of refusing to take or administer a loyalty oath and accepting Communists as legal clients) and editorialized against on the front page of the Montgomery Advertiser. Virtually all of white Montgomery society shunned the Durrs; no whites patronized Clifford’s legal practice (because he also took black clients and had been smeared as a “Communist sympathizer”); their daughters were bullied at school as children of “nigger lovers”. And, although they had once been prosperous, they were poor. Furthermore, although the Durrs had paid Mrs. Parks to sew some dresses for their daughters, she was not their employee. The Durrs were fully aware that by coming to the aid of Mrs. Parks they were risking even greater isolation and danger.
Virginia Durr was 46 years old when she and her husband moved back to Alabama. She had already run for the U.S. Senate in Virginia on the Progressive Party ticket, and had been actively involved in Henry Wallace’s presidential bid. She knew Eleanor Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, Pete Seeger and Jessica Mitford (one of her dearest friends and recipient of a large proportion of letters in Freedom Writer). The Durrs were anything but naive or unsophisticated. Virginia had been active for decades in the movement to abolish the poll tax. She was a member of the NAACP. In fact, before Mrs. Parks’ arrest, Clifford Durr had already provided legal representation to Claudette Colvin, a 15 year old girl whose refusal to move to the back of the bus and subsequent arrest provided the inspiration and model for Mrs. Parks’ action later that year. Virginia Durr considered herself Rosa Parks’ friend, not her employer — indeed, the Durrs were essentially broke and only hired Mrs. Parks sporadically — and it had been Virginia who had arranged the scholarship for Mrs. Parks at the Highlander Folk School, an experience that Mrs. Parks later said gave her the vision of what a non-racist America might be like, and thus the courage to do what she did.
Throughout the letters in this book a recurring theme is loneliness. Virginia had attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts, had lived in the hubbub of Washington DC. She had many friends there, black and white. She described herself as gregarious, and everybody who knew her in Washington said she was outgoing, the life of the party, a commanding speaker, a natural leader, a social animal. In Montgomery she was the legal secretary to her husband’s struggling legal practice, who otherwise mostly kept to herself. At home “the phone never rang.” The Durr and Foster families regarded Virginia and Clifford as black sheep; their former friends avoided them, and although they had congenial relationships with many black people, truly intimate friendship among people of different races was impossible–for a black person to even call a white person by his or her first name was to risk being lynched. (Just as a Negro could never call a white person by his or her first name, it was almost as taboo, in white society, for a white person to refer to a Negro using an honorific such as “Mr” or “Mrs”. When, in 1951, Virginia referred to her (black) postman as “Mr. Edwards” instead of by his first name, it was such a scandal that several distant relations never spoke with her again.) For somebody as naturally social as Virginia Durr, this ostracism was nearly unbearable.
But although she wanted friends in the South, Virginia loathed white Southern culture in general. Clifford believed there was some good in traditional Southern ways, but found it harder and harder to find. As Virginia wrote, “Southerners have sacrificed all of the qualities they used to pride themselves upon, good manners, loyalty to old friends, kindness and benevolence. . .in their determination to preserve segregation.” So why did Virginia and Clifford Durr stay in Montgomery? That is the fascinating question at the core of this remarkable book.
They stayed because Clifford strongly, and Virginia somewhat, considered Montgomery home, and home was where one stayed. They stayed because they didn’t have better prospects anywhere else, given the red-baiting and witch hunts going on around the country (they had tried living in Denver for a year and hated it). But increasingly they stayed in Montgomery because they felt that the very soul of America was at stake, that the epicenter of the struggle was right there in Montgomery, that the South would either become more and more like Nazi Germany and take down the whole country with it, or it would experience a progressive rebirth — all depending on what happened in the civil rights movement. They stayed because they could do their best work to save America by staying where they were and working for change there.
Virginia deeply feared that fascism would overtake all of America — she considered the South virtually a country unto itself, and a fascist one at that–and that unless the Negroes (the word she used until the 1980’s or so) were made free, as free in every way as every other citizen, America itself would cease to be: the country would be torn apart by its own internal contradictions, and probably in a race war. She came to believe she had a moral obligation to stay on the front lines until the battle was won.
And she was never sure that the battle would be won. From the perspective of 2011, the successes of the civil rights movement seem inevitable. To people living through it, these letters show, the ultimate outcome was anything but clear. Virginia wrote often of how afraid she was, how she didn’t want to be a target of the Klan, how “I have a tendency to vomit when I read the papers, but that is getting under control.”
The line Virginia walked was exceedingly fine, a tightrope that she lived on for decades. She and her husband could provide legal aid to “Negroes”, be friendly with them, but they must not do so too visibly. To speak out too loudly, to take a stand too publicly, was to court the seething hatred at the heart of the Jim Crow South, and that, Virginia knew, might easily get them or their daughters killed. She watched with horror as the White Citizens Council and Klan attacked and destroyed Juliette Morgan, whose worst crime was to write a letter to the newspaper in which she called white men cowards (their cowardly response –ceaseless anonymous harassment, culminating in a cross-burning on her front lawn– proved her right, of course). This was a time when the federal government was virtually invisible in the South (except at the military bases that pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the otherwise backward economy), and state prosecutors made a mockery of the law. Not only did murderers go free, they were feted as public heroes. Virginia Durr had very good reason to want try to attract as little notice as she could.
As a political matter, too, she believed that whites should not assume leadership positions in the civil rights movement lest there be an implication of whites “giving” rights to blacks. Negroes were not being “given” anything, she insisted. They were merely claiming something that was theirs. (Despite Virginia’s efforts to stay out of the limelight, she was still forced to appear before a Senatorial inquiry, a kind of traveling kangaroo court organized by the odious Senator Eastland, of Mississippi. She said she wasn’t a Communist, then refused to testify any further. She regretted even that admission.)
So she wrote letters to people of influence in the North (excoriating Northerners for their cowardice, heaping scorn on Northern liberals); she supported her husband’s efforts to provide legal representation to Blacks in Montgomery and to help young Black lawyers gain experience, provided behind-the-scenes help in support of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (in photos taken inside churches where Martin Luther King spoke, Virginia and her teenage daughter Tilla are the only whites); provided a place to stay and local intelligence to visitors from the North (“an underground railroad in reverse”). These visitors came once or twice a year in the early days, but as the movement gathered steam, word spread that the Durr house was a safe place to stay. After the “Freedom Summer“, the visitors came by the hundreds. At the time of the Selma marches, her house was a virtual hotel and command center.
Here are a few representative samples from the letters.
In 1951 she wrote letter to her friend Otto, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, that correctly predicted the path her life would take:
“It is hard to even carry on an intelligent conversation as the basic premises are so different. Of course it is a constant pain to see the steady and continuous and taken for granted oppression of the Negroes. It is like a great stone that is lying on them–but it lies just as heavily on the white people too–and I feel so continually guilty that I am not doing anything about it. [. . .] I think the Negroes are stirring and they won’t be held down much longer–but I don’t see how they will ever forgive us for what we have done to them. And yet we must learn to live together here in the rest of the world. I puzzle over it a great deal to see if I can find a crack or an opening but I know all the time is that the real difficulty is that I want to help them but not at the price of being thrown out of my own group–which is what it amounts to here, just complete ostracism and loneliness, and then too no way to make a living–but all this is old stuff to you.”
A few months later she wrote again to Otto:
“Now I am utterly cut off. . . I listen to the conversations here and it is sometimes like a long dirge. Sickness–death–sorrow–drunkeness, despair, madness, faithlessness, brutality and corruption.[. . .] Cliff is a stronger person than I am and he is not so much affected, and then perhaps doesn’t expect as much as I do, he is always surprised and delighted when he finds even a glimmer among the people we see. I think it is so dim. . . the sullen repressed resentment of the Negroes–the bleak despair of the poor whites–and the frustrated cheapness of so many people who have some economic security but no moral security whatever–and what we see so often among the “old families” is the resigned acceptance of despair and tragedy and often madness. . . unless I can find some means of working to change it, or at least helping in some way however small, I think it would drive me to despair.”
This is a theme that Virginia comes back to over and over — that Southern white society is literally insane. And over the years, as African Americans begin to make real gains and the possibility of the crumbling of the old order becomes more real, the full ferocity of this madness manifests itself. Virginia ponders the origin of this insanity and comes up with some stunning insights (see below).
In 1952, after
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