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61 At forty-three, George Hartzog brought youth, vigor, and change to a largely white male organization that promoted from within its ranks and understood that a reasonably good performance would eventually be rewarded by promotion. When he became director of the National Park Service in 1964, pressures were mounting to include women and members of ethnic groups in professional positions. He could have either ignored these pressures or pushed aggressively for change. What transpired during his tenure was that women and minorities joined the Park Service in unprecedented numbers. To exert leadership in this time of changing attitudes, Hartzog had to transcend stereotypes about women and blacks prevalent during his youth. Although immersed in southern culture, his experiences of family, community , and church belied a number of these stereotypes and opened his mind to the sweeping social movements of the 1960s. Church taught compassion , brotherly love, and the virtues of living a righteous life. Honor, trust, loyalty, and integrity inculcated in the youth provided a moral anchor for the adult. Hartzog’s upbringing brought him face-to-face with blacks’ social standing in southern society. As a child, he grew close to the black family that lived on his father’s farm and helped in the kitchen and fields. That he referred to the big black woman as “Aunt” Lula attests to their close bond. He fondly remembered Aunt Lula coming to his rescue after his angered mother discovered that he had dirtied his newly laundered clothes in a water puddle. He recalled her “big bosoms and holding me with my CHAPTER FIVE Opening the Door to Workforce Diversity 62 chapter five mother standing there with that switch while she talked her out of beating my behind.” Because blacks lived nearest his rural home, Hartzog played with a lot of black children. Aunt Lula’s son Harrison was about his age, and they became constant companions. Despite these bonds, young George undoubtedly grew up knowing that blacks had their place. As he reached his teenage years, societal norms forced aseparationbetweentheraces.Adolescentsseldomsocializedwithsomeone from another race.1 In a particularly revealing story, Hartzog recalled one of his first jobs at a dry cleaners that accepted clothes from both whites and blacks. As part of his training, he was instructed to use one washboard for clothes from white families and another one for clothes from black families.2 The young Hartzog learned that blacks seldom held professional positions . Many people believed that blacks lacked the intelligence and “gumption ” for professional positions. Countering that notion was the black electrician he knew in Walterboro. He was the area’s best tradesman, but he still had to come in the back door and address the teenager as “Mr. George.”3 Through his later work on a timber crew, Hartzog came to learn firsthand that the lower-paying menial positions characteristically went to blacks. In his three-man crew, he held one end of the timber cruiser’s chain while the cruiser calculated the amount of timber in an area and the black man hacked through the dense understory. Hartzog’s job required no special skills and could have just as easily been done by the black man, but in all likelihood he received more money to do less work. Also, the white crewmen had to drop off their black coworker at a black boarding house before returning to their own quarters. Hartzog remembered that working with that “awfully nice guy” for the summer prompted him to examine more closely the treatment of blacks. He recognized “that something was wrong with a society in which you could work with black people all day, but they had to go to a black boarding house to spend the night.”4 While the young Hartzog may have recognized the inequities, like most good Christians he simply accepted discrimination as the way things were done. If blacks faced an unyielding color bar, the southern women of Hartzog’s youth enjoyed only slightly more latitude. Men’s power and influence extended beyond the family farm to neighboring communities and politics, while women’s centered on home, family, and the church. Not just in the South, but elsewhere in America, a woman’s appearance in the workplace outside the home often signified meager family revenue, or worse, the inability of the man of the house to provide adequately for his family, a failing likely to diminish his reputation among his male peers. [18.118.227.69] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 05...

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