Clayton Rand Papers

Clayton Thomas Rand was born on May 25, 1891, in Onalaska, Wisconsin, to Artemus and Cora Shaul Rand. When he was seven, his family moved to the sawmilling town of Bond, Mississippi. Artemus Rand passed on his love of classical literature to his son and in 1907 Clayton Rand entered Mississippi A&M College. Rand sold peanuts on campus to pay his way but also found time to establish the first dramatic club at the college and edit The Reflector. He also won the state oratorical contest and used this to get a scholarship from Harvard University, graduating with another B.S. in 1913. He entered Harvard Law School in 1914 but left soon after to unsuccessfully pursue various business ventures in New England. He also married Mary Ella Smylie that year and they had one son, Clayton Thomas, Jr.

By the end of 1914 he was back in Mississippi, where he studied law in Jackson and passed the bar examination in 1918. He again became engaged in business, managing the Neshoba Land Company for a group of speculators of which he was one. Having failed to gain a forum in the local paper, the Neshoba Democrat in Philadelphia, Mississippi, he decided to buy it. Rand campaigned to bring electricity, modern plumbing, and good roads to his small town and to engender civic pride. He was successful in improving local conditions and a public library was established. But his crusades against corruption and the Ku Klux Klan alienated many. Undaunted, he took his campaign into neighboring Kemper County, establishing another weekly newspaper, the DeKalb Independent, there. So successful was he that he was approached to take over the struggling weekly in Tunica, which he gave to Turner Catledge to run. However, this last venture proved more difficult and he soon sold it.

With the promise of more economic opportunity on the Gulf Coast, Rand sold his other two papers and moved to Gulfport where he acquired the Dixie Press in 1925 and started the Dixie Guide. It was the first Mississippi paper to employ photographers, have an engraving plant and include pictures with its stories. Rand’s continued crusades won him attention in the state and in 1925 he was elected president of the Mississippi Press Association. But it was during his almost half century in Gulfport that he developed a national reputation. His column ‘Crossroads Scribe’ was syndicated to newspapers across the country and he won two national editorial awards. In 1930 he was elected to the board of directors of the National Press Association and in 1936 became its president. He also became a popular lecturer and after-dinner speaker.

While Rand may have been sympathetic to liberal ideas as a young man, he became increasingly conservative. In 1936 he published Abracadabra: Or, One Democrat to Another which was a scathing attack on Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Rand was not only critical of government interference with private enterprise but also of America’s intelligentsia and immigrants. He would write four more books and many pamphlets, including Ink on My Hands and Men of Spine in Mississippi (1940), Stars in Their Eyes: Dreamers and Builders in Louisiana (1953); and Sons of the South: Portraits by Dalton Shourds, Harry Coughlin, and Constance Joan Noar (1961). Rand died on February 26, 1971.

Source: Lloyd, James B. (ed), Lives of Mississippi Authors, 1817-1967, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981, pp.382-385.