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221 chapter ten Dueling with the New Right When Arthur and Florence Larson arrived in Durham, North Carolina, in mid-September 1958, they took up residence in an area unlike any they had lived in before. The closest earlier experience for them had been their two-year stay in Knoxville, Tennessee. Knoxville, however, had been urban, with a diversi¤ed economy; rates of income, home ownership, and literacy that were high for the South; and a strong two-party political system at the local level. Durham, while not entirely different, contrasted sharply with Knoxville in some important ways. Although census takers in 1960 counted 78,302 residents , it still had the feel of a small southern town. The area’s economy also differed sharply from Knoxville’s. Durham and North Carolina recovered quickly from the 1957–1958 recession, but both remained highly dependent on the traditional sources of Tar Heel prosperity: tobacco, textiles, and forest products . The ¤rst two of these were sectors of the economy notorious for very low wages, and they helped give North Carolina some of the lowest wage levels in the country. Durham’s tobacco-processing plants re¶ected the statewide pattern , as did Durham’s very low rate of unionization. And while the area Arthur and Florence began to call home boasted three major institutions of higher learning (Duke, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina), it lagged signi¤cantly behind national norms for literacy and years of schooling. Even the local political situation posed a contrast with Knoxville. In North Carolina, Dixiecrats dominated the important elective of¤ces and the local Republican Party organization in Durham was weak.1 The Duke Law School faculty, which Larson joined that fall, also differed from the ones of which he had earlier been part. Although Duke’s law school was stronger than the Tennessee Law School, it had not yet achieved national 222 modern republican distinction. In that sense, Larson’s decision to teach at Duke constituted something of a step down from Cornell and Pittsburgh. The nature and terms of his appointment at Duke were, however, far more prestigious and lucrative than those enjoyed by other members of its law faculty. He had been hired primarily to create a major research center and teach courses related to its work rather than the standard offerings he had been obliged to teach earlier in his academic career. At Eisenhower’s suggestion, Larson had insisted on a salary equal to what he had earned as the president’s speechwriter, even if the center venture did not work out and he remained at Duke solely as a law professor. This arrangement guaranteed him an income, he noted in a letter to his mother, “much higher than any non-administrative university salary I have seen.”2 These unusually favorable terms of employment and the substantial amount Larson earned annually from his workers’ compensation treatise and various other writings gave him and Florence the means to buy a large and very attractive Tudor-like house in the af¶uent Hope Valley section of Durham. There they established a home for themselves and their college-age children and set out to make new colleagues and friends. This latest transition proved much easier for Arthur Larson than for Florence. For him, this new setting provided another exciting job and the various personal connections that came with it. He also continued to commute up to Washington one to two days a week to work part-time on Eisenhower’s speeches, in collaboration with political scientist Malcolm Moos of Johns Hopkins. At Larson’s suggestion, Eisenhower had appointed Moos, who had earlier worked as a speechwriting aide to Larson, as his successor. The two men enjoyed a close and friendly working relationship. His frequent trips to Washington also enabled him to keep up with the other friends he had made there. This combination of jobs clearly provided Arthur Larson with a very happy, if at times rather hectic, existence in the late 1950s. His deeply satisfying relationship with Florence and the success of Lex and Anna at Haverford and Sarah Lawrence increased his contentment even more.3 For Florence, the move to Durham proved much more problematic, especially at ¤rst. Durham did not have much of a theater scene in those days, and she found herself unable to restart her career there. The area’s very traditional social structure only increased her sense of isolation. Most of the women she met during her...

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