Thomas Lunsford Stokes

Background

Thomas Lunsford Stokes, Jr. was born on November 1, 1898, in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. He was the son of Thomas, a part owner of an Atlanta department store, and Emma (Layton) Stokes.

Education

Stokes graduated from the University of Georgia in 1920.

Career

Stokes began his journalistic career working as a reporter for Georgia newspapers and then moved to Washington in 1921. Stokes arrived in Washington something of an idealist, but his illusions began to be shattered as he watched the Harding cabinet fill government posts with political appointees. The numerous scandals of the Harding administration and the influence of business in the Coolidge administration began to take their toll on Stokes’s idealism.

By the end of the Hoover administration, the sensitivities produced by Stokes’s Georgia upbringing, his disillusionment with the successive Republican administrations, and his perception of a conflict in government between the interests of big business and the public interest created in Stokes a receptiveness to the change that the American public embraced in Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Stokes’s coverage of the Roosevelt era is considered superb. His coverage of the early days of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration brought him to the attention of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, thus he landed a job with Scripps-Howard’s United Press. His bureau manager was Raymond Clapper, to whom Stokes later attributed his knowledge of the aspects of politics.

Stokes traveled the nation with FDR in 1936 and caught the spirit of optimism the nation drew from the president. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s chief service has been to show America to itself, to open its eyes.

But, in 1938, Stokes wrote a series of expose articles in response to lips that abuses were to be found even among the beloved programs of FDR. Stokes traveled through Kentucky collecting evidence to show that the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was being used by politicians to collect votes in what Stokes called "a grand political racket in which the taxpayer is the victim." In 1944, Stokes moved to United Features Syndicate and began writing a political column. Soon more than 100 newspapers were running the column to represent the liberal viewpoint. This column was the center of Stokes’s work for the rest of his life.

Achievements

• Thomas L. Stokes is chiefly known for his coverage of virtually every phase of the national government during the 1920s and 1930s and for his political columns beginning in 1944. Stokes’s work in Washington is perhaps best measured by the kinds of awards he received. Most of his awards were granted by colleagues who understood and appreciated the strength of his coverage of Washington. Both as a columnist and as a reporter, he set standards for covering Washington that served as the measure for those who have followed. His influence was as powerful in his time as that of any Washington correspondent.
  
  Stokes covered Washington, DC, for Scripps-Howard organizations for more than thirty-five years. His work included reporting, editing, and column writing, and his contributions won him a variety of honors ranging from the election as president of the Washington Gridiron Club to a Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for his 1938 coverage of corruption in the Kentucky Works Progress Administration program. As a reformer who believed in the ‘New Deal’ promised by Franklin D. Roosevelt, despite the corruption that Stokes himself uncovered in those programs, Stokes was one of the most important newspaper writers extolling the merits of FDR’s approach to government.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Savannah 1951
  • Chip Off My Shoulder 1940

Politics

Stokes was regarded as the watchdog of the liberal point of view. Stokes was a chief defender of the Roosevelt programs when the reaction against many of those programs began. He became known for his political perception and knowledge of Washington.

Views

Stokes wrote in high romance and stark realism and with wisdom and understanding of what his story meant. However, Stokes laid himself open to a great many mistakes in small matters of detail; but the great sweep of his story was correct and wise.

Stokes was interested in environmental issues before such concerns became fashionable. He traveled extensively, and would occasionally comment in his column on the beauty of the land and the importance of preserving it. This interest also manifested itself in his 1951 book, The Savannah, in which he recounted the history of the Savannah River and its role in the development of the state of Georgia.

Quotations: "Ignorant and faithless stewardship lay back of this catastrophe. As a reporter and an observer I saw the curtain torn away.”

Membership

Stokes was a member of the National Press Club and elected president of the Gridiron Club in Washington in 1950.

Personality

Stokes’s youth was filled with poignant scenes of a quiet Southern childhood among fragrant magnolias and oaks in middle-class Atlanta. His early experiences created in him a sense of a society of classes. He was repulsed by that sense. This discomfort later manifested itself in the crusades he mounted as a reporter exposing corruption or covering injustice in national labor activities.

He was so popular that United Features Syndicate used his name and column in advertisements designed to attract buyers for the service. He was considered tough and thorough, and whether readers agreed with him or not his was a column that they found they needed to read.

Quotes from others about the person

• “Where Mr. Stokes is a reporter of what he saw and heard, he is both readable and important; where he is only commenting he is still readable, but not important except as a witness to the merits and limitations of a first-class newspaperman.” - critic for Times Literary Supplement
  
  “In September 1921, Stokes covered a rape-murder for which a black man was arrested. He then covered the story of a mob that took the man from his jail cell and lynched him. The lynching so affected Stokes, that he left the South that month... with a sense of sadness about the South that would always be with him. He left, too, with a sense of injustice that would characterize his political writing for the next thirty-seven years.”

Connections

On January 10, 1924, Stokes married Hannah Hunt. They had two children, Thomas Lunsford III and Layton (daughter).

Father:

Thomas Lunsford Stokes

Mother:

Emma (Layton) Stokes

Wife:

Hannah Hunt Stokes

Son:

Thomas Lunsford Stokes III

Daughter:

Layton Stokes

References

• Washington Dateline
  1941
• Journalists of the United States
  1991
• The News In America
  1952
• Editor and Editorial Writer
  1948