I'm watching a PBS special (as us stuffy university types do) on Dick Cavett's talk-show during the Vietnam war. At one point, Cavett mentions some viewers wrote in accusing his commentary of being "Communist," while others praised his "Conservative" coverage. At one point, he discusses a piece of hate-mail from "Waco, Texas, the hate mail capital of the world." Is there any reason why Cavett would think so much hate mail comes out of Waco?
This has been sitting here unanswered for a while, so I am going to throw out a possible connection. William Cowper Brann, editor and editorial-writer of the Waco Iconoclast . To read Brann is to be continually amazed at his gift for invective. When heiress Consuela Vanderbilt was married to the Duke of Marlborough in an obvious nobility-for-money transaction, Brann called the Duke "a syphilitic little simian". He met his end in 1898: he managed to enrage someone enough to be shot by him in the street... Brann returned fire, and both died.
I know we're to refrain from speculation, here, but if Cavett ever read any of The Iconoclast, he would have recalled it if he got hate mail from Waco.