“A pleasant man in Washington, with a pleasant smile,” remarked Virginia’s Carter Glass at a dinner of the Southern Society of New York in Manhattan last week, “once called me an unreconstructed rebel.” The pleasant man, said Senator Glass, dropping the cloak of implication, was Franklin Roosevelt. Wrapping the light garment about him once more, the peppery little old Democrat then served notice that his campaign truce with the New Deal was over by enlarging as follows on an anecdote of a famed Confederate general: “Jube Early was an unreconstructed rebel to the day of his death. He used to come frequently into my newspaper office and one day he said to me: ‘Carter, I had hoped to repent my past sins in the hope that when I died I would go to heaven and see Robert E. Lee. But I have changed my mind. I want to go to hell to see the devil burn those Yankee uniforms off Joe Wheeler and Fitz Lee.*— I had thought,” continued the sabre-tongued Senator from the side of his mouth, “that I would like to go to heaven and commune with the spirits of Patrick Henry, Clay and Calhoun, Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson. But, like old Jube, I seem disposed to change my mind, and to go, temporarily, to the other place to see the devil when he burns those strange uniforms off of some people who think they are Democrats but don’t believe in the reserved rights of the States or the checks and balances provided by the Constitution of the United States, but who are mere opportunists and think the majority is always right.”
*Confederate generals who served with the U. S. Army in the Spanish-American War.