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250 1. A. H. Stone, “Some Recollections,” chap. 1, p. 11. Stone’s words were, “They would sit in its shade, on its gnarled and exposed roots, for what seemed to me hours at a time, and discuss crops, war, negro voters and negro labor, politics and reconstruction. It was in this rustic forum that I first learned of the problems of our people.” 2. For a thoughtful analysis of Stone’s receptivity to different points of view, see John David Smith, “Alfred Holt Stone and Conservative Racial Thought in the New South,” The Human Tradition in the New South, ed. James C. Klotter (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 47–65. 14 AND IN PRIVATE THINKING As a public servant, Alf Stone was an innovator. As a racial theorist, he was a traditionalist. Stone stuck to ideas about the race problem that he had formed as a boy listening to his father and his father’s friends when they gathered under a giant sycamore in front of the family house on Deer Creek.1 Although Stone claimed repeatedly that he was receptive to other points of view, he did not let alternative explanations of the racial phenomena he presumed to understand affect his opinions, and despite his paeans to openness , Stone’s mind remained closed when it came to issues involving the race problem.2 Stone’s intransigence was not unusual given his time and place. Most people that Stone knew thought the same way he did and held to their convictions with a determination that matched his own. For that reason, Stone always found a sympathetic audience for what he said and became a spokesperson for people who shared his pessimistic assessment of the ability of African Americans to prosper and advance. What made Stone different from other white southerners who subscribed to traditional views of the race problem was his prominence on a national level. Stone’s articles and papers were widely read, and his writings influenced the thinking of some of the country’s most prominent men and 251 AND IN PRIVATE THINKING 3. For Rhodes’s racial views, see Cruden, James Ford Rhodes, 82, 166–67, and Smith, Old Creed for the New South, 116. 4. John David Smith, “James Ford Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, and the Passing of the Amateur Historian of Slavery,” Slavery, Race, and American History, by Smith, 16–17. According to Smith, Ford’s History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, published in 1892, was “one of the earliest analyses of slavery as an institution in the Old South.” See also Smith, Old Creed for the New South, 115. 5. Rowland wrote, “We have been close friends for many years, in fact, from our student days at the University,” in a letter to Judge R. H. Thompson dated October 2, 1933, in regard to Stone’s nomination to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s board of trustees (Dunbar Rowland Letter Books and Correspondence [box 4743], MDAH). 6. Dunbar Rowland, The Mississippi Plan for the Preservation of State Archives: An Address Dewomen . This accomplishment was remarkable, given that Stone was an amateur competing with professionals, and although he was not professionally trained as were most of the social scientists with whom he associated, he was a member of their societies, a presenter at their meetings, and a confidant among their leaders. In many ways, Stone’s emergence as an authority on the race problem was reminiscent of another amateur, James Ford Rhodes, who gained widespread respect as a historian in the 1890s with the publication of his multivolume History of the United States.3 Independently wealthy, Rhodes had pursued his passion for history without the accoutrement of an academic degree and, like Stone, gained distinction the old-fashioned way through “hard work and determination .”4 But there was more to Stone than hard work and determination . Stone was able to garner respect among his peers because he embraced the new wave of scientific thinking. By the turn of the century, the scientific method had gained ascendancy among social theorists because it was considered to involve the objective assessment of large amounts of data in order to discover the “truth” of the phenomenon being studied. Dunbar Rowland, the first director of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and one of Stone’s close friends, embraced the scientific method and described it in a language that Stone understood and appreciated.5 “History, in...

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