Carl Abrams, Professor of History at Bob Jones University and Chair of the Department of Social Studies Education, has written about American political and religious history of the 1920s and 1930s. His works include Conservative Constraints: North Carolina and the New Deal (Jackson, 1992) and Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920-1940 (Athens, 2001). He is currently writing a history of the ideology of the first generation of fundamentalists.
Douglas Carl Abrams
Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Social Studies Education
Bob Jones University
O. Max Gardner (1882-1947)
O. Max Gardner served as governor of North Carolina from 1929 to 1933, but more importantly, his political organization dominated state politics from the 1920s to the 1940s. As a result, Gardner and his allies controlled the Democratic Party when it dominated the state and the South. Although initially he endorsed publicly the New Deal, Gardner privately criticized some New Deal programs. By the late 1930s, as the New Deal became more pro-labor and anti-business, Gardner privately opposed it and fought to prevent the implementation of Roosevelt’s “court-packing scheme” and supported New Deal opponents during the 1938 election.
Thomas W. Bickett (1869-1921)
Thomas W. Bickett, a native of Monroe and graduate of Wake Forest College, studied law at the University of North Carolina. After a brief tenure in the state House of Representatives, he served as North Carolina attorney general from 1909 to 1917. In 1916 he was elected governor. Inaugurated on January 11, 1917, Bickett's gubernatorial administration included the beginning of a juvenile court system, the expansion of the state's roads and improvements in education, and the prison system.
Clyde R. Hoey (1877-1954)
The administration of Clyde R. Hoey as governor from 1937 to 1941 reaffirmed conservative rule in the state and also the power of the "Shelby dynasty," the label given to the political organization of former governor Max Gardner, Hoey's brother-in-law and fellow resident of Shelby.