Charles Taylor

Partial Transcript: My name is Charles Taylor; I live on the French Broad and my ancestors came here, to the county, in 1850s. They came to Western North Carolina in 1792.

Partial Transcript: Farming, that sort of thing to start with, banking after that. Most of what you did in the mountains then – a variety of things.

Partial Transcript: Well most of it was open for settlement; my great great grandfather was in the Revolutionary War and some of the relatives were and they settled, came down to this area and my great great grandfather settled in Western Virginia. His father, or sons, came over into North Carolina which was all one county, Burke County at that time.

Partial Transcript: Well, course, I was involved in the county – Burke. I worked personally in keeping different things, including grocery work and so forth and built some capital and started my business 61 years ago when I was 16. Then I carried on throughout college, university and law school and so forth and it was focused on timber, leather and _____, and then financial services.

Partial Transcript: It was announced in the 60s. I started looking up the history up to that point. In the 1940, when TVA was becoming a part of the southeast, they looked at this part of western North Carolina had been part of the TVA dams at that time; they did a study, and I have a copy of it here for that. They did not obviously have enough money so they didn’t put the plan in at that time. 1961 the Soil and Water Conservation did a study - flood control for part of the French Broad and then in 1964, thereabouts, 65, the North Carolina United States senator then introduced a bill to come back and put the dams in. He did a study again, they copied the same study and charged a quarter of a million dollars for the same thing. Things were going to be flooded throughout Transylvania. Transylvania would have lost most of its upper part, the Pisgah Forest area where ______ and other things are there, the Little River, a good portion of the Little River, then it went into Mud Creek and Henderson County and all and there was one area lumped into Buncombe and Madison.

Partial Transcript: Well my senior year of law school, I filed for the house seat in this area and won that fall. And I was interested in a variety of changes because voting was a real problem, was much fraud going on in the voting process, and then of course, I was looking at other things. And I took the recommendations that the county (00:05:02) ___ had to say about it. And then looked at the research. Most of what they were saying was not true; not that they were lying, they just hadn’t looked into it enough. For instance, they were looking at the dams as being great recreation facilities. Most of the time it would be (00:05:32) dry dams and only in flood periods would they ¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬¬_____ so it would have no recreational, so that was false even though, as I said, they weren’t lying about it; it was just the fact they hadn’t looked further into it and that was the real problem. And, also it would take out hundreds of home of people who were here, and they would have to go somewhere else; plus, it would be a negative amount of economic impact rather than a positive economic impact.

It was mostly for the folks in Tennessee to furnish water for Douglas Dam; so, if you looked at it, it had very little benefits for us. It would have flooded your home, that is if you flood all of Henderson county, then wouldn’t have to worry about flood control.
It would be all under water.

Partial Transcript: We thought that there were alternatives. The Saw Conservation Study, for instance, was better for the public. Eventually, neither plan came into action. But,we stopped the one that would have taken a good portion of the Upper French Broad and it would have been disastrous for us here and there was a long fight. We had the money being pushed in Congress by the senator and then, of course, I took my case to the house where Congressman Charles Jonas was a ranking member on Appropriations and he studied it with me what was available and later a number of people contacted him with the same information and he was able to stop the appropriation.

Partial Transcript: Well, I was elected in ’66. The TVA was not a part of the campaign at the time because most of the people did not know much about it. After I was elected as a representative to this area, all of Transylvania, as well as other areas, I started studying what the plan was about, and that is where I found it was negative for Transylvania; it was not a good plan for us. I then brought to the attention - I published a full-page interview with the Transylvania Times, outlining some of the arguments we talked about. That was a shock to the county commissioners and they published a full page talking about the virtues of it.

And that is when it all started, the debate started. A number of people, including my Latin teacher, helped organize with other citizens of this area and outside Transylvania, a study seeing the detriment it was to the community. They then signed on and started doing a variety of things, including contacting federal officials and others.

Partial Transcript: Of course, Martha Boswell was the Latin teacher that worked with us and Hap Simpson was another. There‘s a park named for him here now. Martha published a small book called Grass Roots. She put a story in this little book, and a lot of people read there. But they had a variety of activity working with state government and other officials.

Partial Transcript: the upper part, the Cathey’s Creek and the area above Brevard ______ would all be flooded; that would have taken a lot of residents out. Plus, the whole, both Brevard north and the area of Rosman would go. Then of course, Davidson River _______ had just been developed, there would have been out under water. And the whole entrance into Brevard, and the whole entrance into Pisgah Nation Forest would have been under water. Then, of course, down in Little River, a growing community, all of that would have been put under water. And then moving into Henderson County - Mud Creek and other parts of Henderson County. Jere Brittain, who was one of the leaders with the citizens at the time, knew about what an impact it would have on Henderson County and Mills River, and, of course then it moved into parts of Buncombe and a good bit of Madison.

Partial Transcript: Well, a lot of times, the government officials will get on a plan where large amounts of government money coming into the area. For instance, they were sold on growth in the area, yet this plan gave no growth. It took, it flooded most places that are now industrial sites, as proved later, and, of course, then it did not have any tourist development because it only had water in it at the time when flooded. And you couldn’t build a house and never see the water except maybe a month out of the year, if that. So, it really was contrary, even though it was portrayed as being a development in a positive note, that really was not the case when you got into it. It was mostly a dry dam operation until the flood periods, which came once a year, maybe once every five years.

Partial Transcript: Martha was a strong ally when I ran for office. TVA was not part of the race at that time, but it became. She was a real encouragement; as I say, Martha was a Latin teacher my first two years in high school and we got to know each other. And, of course then, we were interested in a variety of other things, but she then became very much interested in the TVA and helped bring together a number of people for the events of the TVA. For instance, I was the only governmental official that worked, but had to have background from citizens who saw it as I saw it. And she helped organize that, along with Hap Simpson and others, Jere Brittain and others, who then got behind it and started furnishing information, writing, having meetings, education. Those things are necessary for the final demise of the TVA in this area.

Partial Transcript: Martha, who lived to be 104, I believe, she had a great deal of energy in this area. She’d been here since 1900 at the time; and she worked with encouraging people, bringing groups together. Had a number of contacts and that helped because she had to educate a lot of the people and they had to then say what they had learned to other elected officials. Eventually, they even changed the county commission so that the county commission later became negative to the idea as they learned about it more.

Partial Transcript: She passed away in her facility and I visited her when I was in Congress in Henderson County where she died. But she was very active right up until the last few days.

Partial Transcript: I had to have a long ___ to be elected because 3 counties I ran in were heavily registered Democrat. Martha was a Democratic leader in the Democrat party at the time, so we looked at it as something that would be good, or bad for the community at the time and actually stopping it was good for the community. And we got a cross-section of Democrats, Independents and Republicans. It was not a Republican issue by itself. But we got a lot of people involved. Of course, we were building a two-party system election. We got things like election reform; in one of the counties I represented had more people registered than there was population and they were still voting. Some of them said Jonas came back and voted and didn’t even tell us about it. And he’d been dead for a number of years. And election reform was another positive that Martha and others were involved in because it was reform that was badly needed at the time.

Partial Transcript: I was the youngest member of the house; later, as the second youngest, I was elected head of the Republican delegation. We’d gotten about one-third of the House by that time. When I started, we only had one or two members of a 120-member House. And we eventually built up to about one third. I was Republican leader for about two terms. Then I went to the Senate, where I was Republican leader. Each of those times, I was the youngest leader and member of the house in the Senate while I was there. I was in my mid-twenties by the time I came into leadership and then went on for 8 years in the State House, House and Senate. Later, I served 16 years in the United States Congress. Of course, a number of years in appointed positions, not voluntary ___ Commerce and other things, Parks and Recreations. I did serve in those things when I was out of office. But mostly, I was ___ on my own company and in the legislature when I first came into the house all you got paid a per diem and it might have covered your travel and room perhaps, but it wasn’t a salary.

Partial Transcript: Well the truth is another thing. If you read these reports, it clearly was there that you could see it was not going to have points of development even though it was being pushed by
those who were pushing it. It was negative to development, it was negative to economic growth by the fact it would wipe out hundreds of people’s homes, probably have to leave the area, plus the sites that we had for manufacturing were being put under water. Those things were just the truth, they were simple, once you saw what the truth was, but if you didn’t know about it, then you’d have a problem. I found that throughout Congress and other times in the State House, things that were being pushed if you delved into them, saw in a non-partisan way and said what is really happening here, you’d find that things that were being pushed for policy.

There are many things now; for instance I disagree as far as states voting in drugs and so forth. If you go to what is the cost of that, what Is the long term loss of young people, you find it is not the positive way that you might be thinking about.

Partial Transcript: They were bureaucratic, a bureaucratic organization does not seek much information from the public as long as it can go. If you can replace that leadership, you can make a difference. We eventually, under the Nixon administration, got a new head for TVA who became friendly to our organization that helped change the direction of seeking to enlarge TVA. I found most government areas want to grow. And TVA growth was moving into western North Carolina, and it was a clear path of growth and it was not good for us, but it was good for the bureaucrats, most of them organized and worked around eastern Tennessee. So that bureaucracy when I see it grow, I saw it throughout Congress. When we started cutting the budget, a lot of the organization or ¬¬¬¬____ became obsolete but they never become obsolete in the people’s minds, they keep growing, because if I’m working there, if I can grow that bureaucracy, then I can move up as head and more salary and so forth and that’s the nature of bureaucracy.

Partial Transcript: TVA was formed with the Roosevelt Administration as part of our atomic program, which was such a success in WWII. It had that at Oak Ridge, had that kind of aura about it, that was positive about it and after the war was over retained that positive image, even though it wasn’t necessarily needed at that time. It was in the beginning because the energy that was provided in the south was the kind of energy to help do the work that Oak Ridge was doing. Later we worked with Oak Ridge in other areas, and it’s a very positive organization there, but it was bureaucratic. It was a situation where they didn’t have to feel, certainly not in the 40’s when the work they were doing for the atomic information, couldn’t be much said about it and anything, questions were never asked, it just carried over after the war.

Partial Transcript: Charles Jonas who was the ranking member in the ___ House was able to stop it in ’67, and ’68 and 69 ____ as he came in from the Senate, he could stop it in the House. Then when President Nixon was elected, and he wasn’t for it then Jonas persuaded him not to be for it. That ended it because ___ the senator that proposed it was defeated in a primary and that stopped that side so the new head of TVA was named in the early 70’s after ’69 when Nixon was elected, he was a friend that I knew and the whole process started moving in the other direction. TVA itself was certainly moving that way and ____ started moving that way and the senator who’d proposed it was defeated in a primary, plus we started electing Republicans county commissioners and that started moving in the right direction.

Partial Transcript: It was a factor in the sense that it wasn’t going to build up and start anew because Jim Holshouser was much better towards saving money; his focus was on education and highways and he did not back anything about the TVA up here.

Partial Transcript: Well, what is an environmentalism? I tackled some of the questions about environmentalism as I did in TVA. Let’s look for the truth; ____ feelings; a lot of the environmental programs really do damage to the environment. For instance, I backed (passed) a piece of legislation that helped us salvage timber, where forests are burned, fallen down, taking that debris out and get some use out of it. At the same time, you have the wood cleared so you don’t get the forest fires. In California right now, the massive fires are based a lot on downed trees because you have so much fuel there, it is dry, it starts burning, it‘s almost impossible to get it out. So many of the things that ‘re being pushed by environmentalists at the time were not good for the environment. You need to look for the truth, you need to research it, you don’t want to condemn with the easy way to say you are against the environment, you are against education you are against something else, everybody says you are supposed to believe it. It is much better to see what is the program, is it really working, should it be continued? That should be our approach in government and in 1995 we actually saved, we started the first fifty billion dollars in savings. And eventually we got almost ____ million dollars actually cut from the budget before things changed in 9/11 and changed it detrimentally for spending in the United States.

Partial Transcript: Well the same thing about the truth. For instance, there is a difference between National Parks, which aren’t to be harvested and so forth and National Parks that are assigned to be harvested. We’re harvesting less than a fraction of 1% of our national forests because it’s against the environmental groups ____ but the need for forest products is...
When you say never cut a tree, that’s really anti-environmentalism. For instance, if you take a table, you will have that table to be built with wood, maybe glass, steel. All those things, (or plastic), all those things are derivatives from resources that are finite. Wood is a renewable resource, so we ought to be encouraging wood as a environmental person because it’s a renewable resource. When you say never harvest a tree, then you aren’t able to, you got to build it with plastic or steel, or a finite product.

Partial Transcript: Well, look at the truth, put aside the politics. Look at the truth, facts, science. What’s the best information you have at the time. For instance, old growth in forests right now - old growth is not the best environmental situation. The carbon dioxide that is taken out by trees works better with young growth than it does old growth. Cut about 2/3 when you go to old growth rather than young growth. So, if you are trying to absorb the detriments to the environment, it is better to have a young forest that is renewable than to have old growth that is going to die and provides about 1/3 of the benefit that new growth provides. So, if you look at it to the facts….

Partial Transcript: Why do they stay in their little political corners? It is because they don’t face the facts, or truth or science or the best information. Once you put aside the politics of it, you approach it from that standpoint, then you get what is best for the environment or the needs of the region or the country. And, so truth, and the best information is what you try to look for, regardless of the politics. If you are willing to listen to an argument and from that information gather the real facts, that’s what you need to do. If you are polarized now you never have a position, or look at the other person’s position, then you don’t get the truth. Regardless of whether you are a Republican or a Democrat.

Partial Transcript: It is, unless they come up with pseudo-science. What am I pushing that is outside science or facts; you come to look at one position and you get locked into that without discussing the other person’s point of view and seeing whether it really is something that you need to change. My position was I was willing to listen to an argument and be persuaded to change if it was sound. If it was sound, truthful, then change your point of view if you listen to it and believe it is sound.

Partial Transcript: Well look at the best, the most reasonable science, the best truth. Go back whether it be trees or water or anything else, if an idea is bad, just because it is being pushed, you need to look at it and see and explain why it’s bad. If you can’t talk to both sides, then you can’t understand. Now you may have a situation where a conservative point of view, contrary to the liberal point of view, and that won’t come together as you may want to, but if it is an argument or information , you put your case forward, and , then of course, the other side puts its case forward and you then, the public makes it decision about where they want to go. When I first came to Congress, there wasn’t that much, it wasn’t as extreme as it is now. You had a liberal side that didn’t dominate, but you had people willing to sit down and talk and I joined in with Democrats and Republicans. For instance, when I chaired the _____ Committee, we went through a variety of things and we _________ vote was unanimous when we came out of committee. That isn’t the case now, you have the situation where Republicans voted for Health Care. That’s on both sides in a sense that you’ve got to be able to present a case that brings some people over, and if you are so extreme that you can’t do that, then you shouldn’t be pushing it.

Partial Transcript: Well, of course, we had one headwater, the largest headwater section, East Fork, the Four Forks, that’s the French Broad, Upper French Broad that starts in this county. And, of course, we owned a good portion of it, about 8,000 acres that took in most of it. And I talked with my three sons and we had several alternatives: we could harvest it all, we could develop it all, we could put together a plan for conservation. And they chose, and I chose, to do the conservation. Because it was a unique situation. They only had 3 owners in the last hundred years, and that’s why it’s never been developed. And we bought it in the early 80’s and ______ company championed bought it in the early 60’s and the ____ company bought it in the teens and that was the three owners that had it for all 100 years. So very little development. Each of us added some to it, and it was a unique situation to get the honor to make that much difference and so we decided to go that way because it was a substantial amount of water and it was all forest. There weren’t any buildings much around.

Partial Transcript: Well, it will be operated as a state forest and it won’t be developed as far as it will go. It may have timber harvesting, it may have fishing and hunting and that sort of thing, recreational things but nothing will endanger the forest. And you know water may be more valuable than oil in the future and that’s a substantial amount of the water coming in the French Broad comes from that area so it was time to make a decision, because once you develop it you are not going to, you have to come back and condemn all that which is contrary to our constitution and also people’s attitudes. So now as it was, it will be a much better situation.

Partial Transcript: Well, there’s going to population growth in this country, there’s always going to be in this community but if you protect the reasonable resources you have, then the growth can be accommodated in such a way it won’t denigrate the whole community as you might have. We did 3,000 acres next to the Smokies, now part of the Smoky Mountain park, same situation as we had with this. But we were largest landowners, private landowners in the 90’s that you had in this end of the state, as well as up in Virginia and South Carolina and so forth, and we decided to take without ____, decided to take the program that would mine that into useful forests without being developed. This is free choice; everybody should be able to do with their own property, within reason things you want to do. We chose to voluntarily do this.

Partial Transcript: Well, that we sought to have truth and the best judgment in solving problems because there are plenty of them to be solved in the future. And that approach would be one of the things I most would like.

Partial Transcript: I’ll tell you a little bit about. _____ it has nothing to with TVA. When I first was running, ___ when I was in law school because education was one of theirs. And school boards were being put in based on how much you had to gain. For instance, this person was being elected because he sold a little oil or coal to the school system, elected because of something else and, in large portion of them, had no college education, ____ high school. They were leadership in some cases on school boards, because they weren’t elected, they were appointed by the Democratic chairman, coming through the state up through our way. So, the leadership had more based on your Democratic contribution than had to do with education. That was one of the areas I ran and tried to get. Other was, as I was saying, In one county you had more people registered than you had population. The population started to go down in this county, but yet the registration stayed up. And the people were voting. So, I knew registration was one of the goals and situation where you’d clean the members out, people who died and moved and so forth. So, you had less temptation and you had joint site. In other words, you had one Republican, one Democrat to look at it and that keeps everybody honest. Because if both parties are involved, they won’t cheat each other. And those are some of the things, one case we had where in the primary that year, documented the dead people that voted in the primary and went on the radio and read the names and that was new to have that sort of thing.

Then, it came down to the election. We had a lot of people, of course Democrats and Republicans and Independents, and the night of the election you had a situation where one precinct was held over in one county to see how many Republicans would be needed to put in, and I was able to get one precinct held open in another county, so the numbers that were needed, so at 3:00 in the morning we were sitting there and without the report and I was able to get a Circuit Court Judge and talk to him about what was happening and he knew, because he had helped to do it on his own many times, so he then ordered the precinct ____ that was open to be brought in and put the votes in the jail, not to be tampered in any way, and be counted on Thursday and after that happened we won by a substantial margin. But that was a long process to go through to win. Not just saying people to vote for you but make sure you get involved. And it’s unfortunate that it is still have it going on today. How can you have a precinct in Florida that finds 1,000’s of votes in the process, much later after the polls are closed and everything else, they find enough votes to change. And of course, it’s not just ____. It happened in the presidential election also in 1960 down here again. We need to make that change because it is insulting to a person to vote and see his vote soiled by false hopes at the last minute.

Partial Transcript: We provide research sometimes for students, people like yourself who want to see, some people want to write a paper, they can come see the information here, some are other things we have done. The Salvage Bill is a nationally known bill, we have information on that. We have information on our effort to convince George Bush, George W., that we should not have, we ought to have gotten paid back for the money we put into Iraq, not the military, but all the billions and billions of dollars for schools and roads and things like that ___ left away. Because our ___ was to take oil, about 1/3 of their annual oil and pay back the American taxpayer. It would have saved us about around ____ three quarters of the national debt. We weren’t able to persuade the President and the Secretary of State, General Powell it was at the time ____. We did make an effort. I did not believe in going public and embarrassing president or the administration because the ultimate choice is the administration’s in that matter. But they would change.

The other factor most people didn’t realize that it was over 10 trillion dollars that President Obama added to the national debt for no real reason much. I mean saved the unions, ____ did that way which promoted him. He got disability for anybody taking drugs or alcoholism and funded all those things but the ____ for 10 trillion dollars which put us to the point where we are almost 22 trillion now.