Journalist, memoirist. Ben Robertson was born on June 22, 1903, in Clemson, South Carolina. His father, a member of the first graduating class of Clemson College, was a chemist for the Agricultural Extension Service. His mother, Mary Bowen, died when he was ten years old, and his stepmother, Hattie Boggs, died in the 1918 influenza pandemic. Robertson was a respected and well-traveled journalist and war correspondent and the author of three books, including a memoir of his youth in the South Carolina upcountry.<\/p>\n
After graduating in 1923 from Clemson, where he edited the student newspaper, Robertson attended the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri and, after a year with the Charleston News and Courier, <\/em>took his second bachelor\u2019s degree in 1926. That same year he landed a job with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, <\/em>leaving soon afterward to write for the News <\/em>in Adelaide, Australia. After a few months with the U.S. Consulate in Java, he returned home to South Carolina by way of India and Europe.<\/p>\n In 1929 Robertson became a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune. <\/em>He moved to Washington, D.C., in 1934 to cover the New Deal for the Associated Press but resigned after two years. He then returned to Pickens County to write a novel. Travelers\u2019 Rest, <\/em>published privately in 1938, was neither a critical nor a popular success, and Robertson went back to journalism, covering South Carolina politics for the Anderson Independent. <\/em>In 1940 he was hired by PM, <\/em>an innovative left-liberal newspaper published by the former Fortune <\/em>editor Ralph Ingersoll, as its London correspondent during the Battle of Britain. During a two-month furlough in early 1941, he wrote I Saw England, <\/em>a well-received account of British resolve in the face of constant bombardment by the German Luftwaffe that reached a wide audience after being condensed by Reader\u2019s Digest.<\/em><\/p>\n After another stint in London, Robertson returned to Clemson in August 1941 and began work on Red Hills and Cotton: An Upcountry Memory, <\/em>which he finished in January 1942. A celebration of Scots-Irish folkways and the agrarian lifestyle, Red Hills and Cotton <\/em>evokes a simpler time in rural South Carolina through a nostalgic portrayal of several generations of Robertson kin. While proudly asserting his heritage\u2013\u201cHonor is at the base of our personal attitude toward life\u201d\u2013he also looks to the future: \u201cThe South is our South and it must progress.\u201d An outspoken, if idiosyncratic, liberal during the 1930s, Robertson, who once said, \u201cWhat we need is a man with the heart and mind of Jefferson and the tactics of Huey Long,\u201d may have softened his politics in Red Hills and Cotton <\/em>in anticipation of a run for public office.<\/p>\n Over the course of 1942 Robertson covered World War II from Libya, the Soviet Union, and India for PM. <\/em>In January 1943 he was hired again by the New York Herald-Tribune, <\/em>this time to run its London Bureau. He never made it back to England. On February 22, 1943, the flying boat Yankee Clipper <\/em>crashed into the Tagus River on its approach to Lisbon, Portugal, killing Robertson at the age of thirty-nine. His remains were returned to South Carolina and buried in the family burial plot near Liberty in Pickens County. The Liberty Ship SS Ben Robertson <\/em>was launched in Savannah, Georgia, in January 1944 and supported the invasion of Normandy later that year. Robertson was posthumously inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors in 1992.<\/p>\n Ford, Lacy K., Jr. \u201cThe Affable Journalist as Social Critic: Ben Robertson and the Early Twentieth-Century South.\u201d Southern Cultures <\/em>2 (Winter 1996): 353\u201373.<\/p>\n Robertson, Ben. Red Hills and Cotton: An Upcountry Memory. <\/em>1942. Reprint, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Journalist, memoirist. Ben Robertson was born on June 22, 1903, in Clemson, South Carolina. His father, a member of the first graduating class of Clemson College, was a chemist for the Agricultural Extension Service. His mother, Mary Bowen, died when he was ten years old, and his stepmother, Hattie Boggs, died in the 1918 influenza […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":-1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","class_list":["post-10412","entry","type-entry","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","ecms-a-z","ecms-anderson-county","ecms-encyclopedia","ecms-great-depression-1930-1938","ecms-jazz-age-1919-1929","ecms-literature","ecms-military","ecms-pickens-county","ecms-popular-culture","ecms-r","ecms-turn-of-the-century-1890-1913","ecms-upstate","ecms-world-war-i-1914-1918","ecms-world-war-ii-1939-1945"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n