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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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from these various colonies were very carefully selected, you must remember, and they didn't by any means represent the whole of their populations. Button Gwinette--you know about Button Gwinette? He didn't represent anything. He was just picked out because held be all right, you know?

I mean, I think it was from that that the strange, rough element of the South Springs. Now, I daresay that many other things have contributed to it. Then, you must remember that we left a lot of rapscallion Union soldiers in the South--a lot of awfully bad eggs.

Interviewer:

I buy poverty and ignorance and malnutrition as a better explanation for 1955's troubles with the roughneck element in the South, than I do Oglethorpe.

Perkins:

Well, I would say myself that Oglethorpe's a long ways off. But that group has always been a low-lived, undernourished, poverty-stricken group--I mean, they've stayed on that level. Then the Civil War came. The Civil War ruined them.

Interviewer:

Why would they stay on that level?

Perkins:

They didn't know where to go. We went in with the Civil War and ruined them. We ruined their industry, we ruined their life. We didn't just ruin their plantation heads. we ruined the lower middleclass whites. We just ruined them.





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