Word: laird
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Born Nov. 18, 1904, son of a minor Lowland laird...
...theater is Tuxahatchie County, with its poor-white farms and rich bottom lands. Virtue is represented by Fate Laird, who comes onstage with a roll of factory-wage dollar bills pinned to his work shirt. He has a vision of the good life, where he plows a straight furrow in bare feet, and feels the good black soil of the valley squinch between his toes. It is Faulkner country, but there is a difference between Deal's Tuxahatchie and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. In Faulkner's unprincipled principality, it is the proletarian Snopses who slither to power over...
Book Gresham's evil power is opposed by Brother Cox, the "webbed faced" preacher who tries to close the valley honky-tonk but loses his "holy war agin sin" when Book frames him for "a sight of carrying-on'' with a no-good girl. Fate Laird takes on too much when he gives Bodoc a job and takes the preacher's side against the courthouse-cathouse gang. Laird's son Clay shoots a mean deputy and is convicted of murder in Book Gresham's court. But in the end a sort of moral truce...
Marland appointed Laird to the state board of education, where he faced the segregation problem, came to a personal conclusion that "the Supreme Court's opinions are the law of the land." (West Virginia has moved as rapidly toward integration as any border state.) Later Marland switched Laird to the state tax commission. The new Senator is a Presbyterian, a Lion, a Mason and an American Legionnaire (eligibility: a six-month Navy hitch in World War II during which he rose to seaman second class before receiving a medical discharge...
...While Laird was being sworn into the Senate (and parrying questions about any intention of remaining there), Democrats at home jockeyed for election to the Kilgore term, which runs until Jan. 3, 1959. Among the contestants: ex-Classmate William C. Marland...