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We Happy WASPs: Virginia in the Days of Jim Crow and Harry Byrd
Book by Rouse, Parke S., Jr.
244 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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About the author
Parke Rouse Jr.
23 books1 followerParke Shepherd Rouse Jr. (1915 – March 5, 1997) was an American journalist, writer and historian in Tidewater Virginia. Born in Smithfield, Rouse grew up in Newport News. He attended Washington and Lee University, later moving to Williamsburg, where he worked as director of publications at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Rouse also held several public positions in the Hampton Roads area during his career.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 30, 2023
This book was an encounter with a world passed in the adult lifetime of my great grandparents and the childhood of my grand parents. It was the rare opportunity to speak with a man who remembered the way it was, and didn't hate it. Parke Rouse, Jr. is a man who loves his home, and has a circumspection about the way things turned out, even as he worked to change the way it was.
This book is a memoir in the form of short thoughts and conversations, none extending more than a page or so. In the midst of these loosely connected pages we get to see the way a different America operated. Did you know it was illegal to drink alcohol in public (including restaurants) during 1940s Richmond? Or that it was illegal to dance? I had never heard of the three old Democrat widows who censored every film for propriety before it as shown in theaters, or the intentionality behind the single-sex boarding schools for building an aristocracy, or the traditionalist "Cavalier" Thomas Lomax Hunter whose paper column decried the American "Babylon" (New York City) and tile floors.
Below is are two excerpts, the first about the primary subjects of the book, the second a typical account of Richmond at the time.
"Like most rich men, Commonwealth Club members generally deplored Franklin Roosevelt as a traitor to his class. Most were adherents of Harry Byrd and, like him, anxious to keep government small. They were "Byrd Democrats" as opposed to "New Deal Democrats." They liked male prep schools and colleges, wives who stayed home and reared children, summers at the Rivah, well-trained hunting dogs, and movies about rich people. They were WASPs.
They mourned the passing of McGuire's University School, the disappearance of alligators from the Jefferson Hotel lobby, the decline of unlimited duck-shooting, the revocation of the poll tax, and the repeal of Sunday blue laws. They didn't like women in public life or the revision of the Book of Common Prayer [1928]. And they hated anti-tobacco laws.
They also missed the many casualties of the industrial age: house servants, Confederate idolatry of Lee and Jackson, and river steamers that knit together the tidewater. Life that had once been deliberate and intimate had become fast and furious. A city that had once been small and paternalistic was becoming big, bureaucratic, and impersonal. Virginia was getting to be like ordinary states. I could sympathize with some of that."
"The Virginia museum of fine arts, founded in the 1930s, was beginning to make itself felt as the first state art museum in the nation. One of its attractions was a biennial exhibition of Virginia paintings. A few were modernist works, criticized as "communist" by a few conventional Virginians. I thought most of them were pretty awful myself. Letters to the press derided them as efforts to undermine democracy. Wasn't Picasso a communist?
At the Monument Avenue rooming house where I lived, a mischievous commercial artist named Jimmy Swann decided to have a laugh at the museum's expense. He painted a meaningless blob of colors, typed a label to match the museum's, and hung the concoction in the exhibition when no one was looking. Jimmy's "Untitled" went undetected for days until I wrote a tongue-and-cheek exposé for the newspaper, revealing the hoax.
Jimmy became a hero in the letters to the editor, but the Virginia Museum was not amused."
This book is a memoir in the form of short thoughts and conversations, none extending more than a page or so. In the midst of these loosely connected pages we get to see the way a different America operated. Did you know it was illegal to drink alcohol in public (including restaurants) during 1940s Richmond? Or that it was illegal to dance? I had never heard of the three old Democrat widows who censored every film for propriety before it as shown in theaters, or the intentionality behind the single-sex boarding schools for building an aristocracy, or the traditionalist "Cavalier" Thomas Lomax Hunter whose paper column decried the American "Babylon" (New York City) and tile floors.
Below is are two excerpts, the first about the primary subjects of the book, the second a typical account of Richmond at the time.
"Like most rich men, Commonwealth Club members generally deplored Franklin Roosevelt as a traitor to his class. Most were adherents of Harry Byrd and, like him, anxious to keep government small. They were "Byrd Democrats" as opposed to "New Deal Democrats." They liked male prep schools and colleges, wives who stayed home and reared children, summers at the Rivah, well-trained hunting dogs, and movies about rich people. They were WASPs.
They mourned the passing of McGuire's University School, the disappearance of alligators from the Jefferson Hotel lobby, the decline of unlimited duck-shooting, the revocation of the poll tax, and the repeal of Sunday blue laws. They didn't like women in public life or the revision of the Book of Common Prayer [1928]. And they hated anti-tobacco laws.
They also missed the many casualties of the industrial age: house servants, Confederate idolatry of Lee and Jackson, and river steamers that knit together the tidewater. Life that had once been deliberate and intimate had become fast and furious. A city that had once been small and paternalistic was becoming big, bureaucratic, and impersonal. Virginia was getting to be like ordinary states. I could sympathize with some of that."
"The Virginia museum of fine arts, founded in the 1930s, was beginning to make itself felt as the first state art museum in the nation. One of its attractions was a biennial exhibition of Virginia paintings. A few were modernist works, criticized as "communist" by a few conventional Virginians. I thought most of them were pretty awful myself. Letters to the press derided them as efforts to undermine democracy. Wasn't Picasso a communist?
At the Monument Avenue rooming house where I lived, a mischievous commercial artist named Jimmy Swann decided to have a laugh at the museum's expense. He painted a meaningless blob of colors, typed a label to match the museum's, and hung the concoction in the exhibition when no one was looking. Jimmy's "Untitled" went undetected for days until I wrote a tongue-and-cheek exposé for the newspaper, revealing the hoax.
Jimmy became a hero in the letters to the editor, but the Virginia Museum was not amused."
March 21, 2019
A more appropriate subtitle would be "Richmond, Virginia during 1940-42," as this is the author's reminiscences about the three years he spent as a reporter for the RTD before leaving to serve in WWII. An interesting book, composed mostly of anecdotes and vignettes, it does have an arrogant smuggish air that is offputting, though no doubt intentional.
May 7, 2020
Mostly an anecdotal memoir about Rouse's time as a newspaper reporter in Richmond, VA during the early 1940s. Maybe not essential for RVA historians, but it's a breezy read with plenty of whimsy and memorable tales about WASPy Richmonders, old money, and the shameful legacy of segregation. Read mostly for research.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews