ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the News & Observer's coverage of the pivotal election of 1898 and how that repudiates and contradicts Josephus Daniels's attempt, in his will at least, to reinvent his past. Daniels began his campaign deliberately and methodically nearly half a year before the election. Daniels and the Democrats were desperately worried about the Fusionist movement, the alliance of Republicans, Populists, and African Americans. Daniels and the News & Observer created images of sexually avaricious black men preying on white women. Daniels and his editors used a prominent statewide black politician, Jim Crow Young, as the embodiment of all the evils African Americans visited on North Carolina. Republicans, Populists, and blacks were natural allies, but by appealing to North Carolinians' wider interests as whites, Daniels and his fellow Democrats were able to create a schism between them.
