October Newsletter Quotes

course, I loved it”: Ibid. “It fairly well takes the position”: The New York Times, May 23, 1963. He came across the Atlantic: Author interview with Jacqueline Grobarek, October 2013. “if it had not been for”: Peter, Zyklus, unpaginated. “A mighty good American”: Newsletter, The Charles Hancock Reed Papers. “He lives through the Regiment”: Ibid. “He was a peaceful, kind person”: Author interview with Anne Stewart, October 2013. “It was 34 years”: Ibid. The international Lipizzaner registry: Current numbers of Lipizzaners comes from an email interview with Karin Mayrhofer, press spokeswoman for the Spanish Riding School, Vienna.

On October 26, 2016—less than two weeks to election day—travel writer Zach Everson covered the ribbon cutting at the Trump International Hotel in the Old Post Office building in Washington, DC, just a few blocks from the White House. Everson frequently covered hotel openings, which often featured lavish food spreads and “the owners sipping champagne with a few travel writers.” But this one was different. A horde of political reporters trailed Donald and Ivanka Trump as they toured the hotel. “The political reporters were amazed they had complimentary pastries,” Everson said in an interview. 1 A couple months later, Everson got an assignment from Condé Nast Traveller to cover the growing political and social scene at the hotel. In the course of researching that story, Everson booked a night at the hotel. One of his fellow guests told Everson he was about to leave for a restaurant outside the hotel, when he noticed workers polishing the banisters and the manager nervously pacing. The guest concluded, correctly, that the president was on his way, cancelled his outside reservation, and ate at the hotel instead. To track presidential comings and goings for his story, Everson started monitoring social media feeds. And he noticed something: not even a year into Trump’s presidency, the hotel had become a unique locale in Washington. “It became like Melville’s white whale,” Everson said. “If you want it to be your opportunity and a place for you to go and rub elbows with the President, it’s that. If you’re a lobbyist or a businessman or a foreign leader and want to portray you are close to the president, it’s that too. It’s everything you hate or love about Donald Trump.” Everson quit travel writing to cover, full time, the Trump International Hotel. He began publishing a newsletter, 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue. He had plenty of material.

What got Arrington High in trouble was a weekly newsletter he published that argued for integration. He had been editor of a two-page mimeographed broadside, the Eagle Eye, for some fourteen years and had made a name for himself protesting the treatment of colored people in central Mississippi. What got him declared insane, however, was exposing the segregationists who were consorting with prostitutes at a colored brothel that catered only to white politicians. It was a death wish of a crusade that actually may have fit the legal definition of insanity for a colored man in Mississippi at the time. High was taken into custody and committed to the insane asylum in October 1957. It was a sentence that would shut him off, at age forty-seven, from the rest of the world and his wife and four children for the remainder of his life. He was held in confinement deep in the woods, surrounded by guards and hospital personnel, a good fifteen miles from the nearest city. It amounted to a total silencing of a revered dissident of the Mississippi order of things and a slow death in a crazy place where he would be subjected to whatever indignities his keepers devised.