“Dancing lightly between the styles of Faulkner and William Price Fox, one time journalist Jerry Dean Pate delves into the knotiest of southern cultural contradictions, it being the tension between the realities of southern history and those powerful southern myths about the nobility of what is still called The Lost Cause. Like a double helix of story tales, Jerry then weaves together the strands of truth and falsehood as they exist today. Plagued By Bad Beliefs deals with the micro of talking “around things lest someone take offense” through the horrors of the Haigler’s Crossing shooting of workers in 1934, and how it still lies to the present day population that doesn’t trust yankees, doesn’t trust the federal government, and, most of all doesn’t trust unions. Even the sympathetic voice of FDR is muted, much as much of it was overturned, when the Depression could not withstand the depravities of hunger, ignorance, and a lying aristocracy of self-seeking old and wealthy southern families. Not surprisingly, the settlement with some textile workers after a strike, or a fear of a strike, invariably included the vow of silence about who got what. Could any of this plaque still live in figures like Senators Graham and Scott, most of our members of the House, and our governor? Or the legislature? – William P. Kreml, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, The University of South Carolina