Slavery by Another Name

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Slavery by Another Name Page 24

by Douglas A. Blackmon


  Pierpont Morgan and the masses of laborers and immigrants

  streaming into the bulging metropolises of the North and Midwest.

  Theodore Roosevelt came to serve as McKinley's vice president in

  1900 almost accidental y. His place on McKinley's presidential

  ticket was engineered by old-guard Republican leaders in New York

  primarily to get Roosevelt, the state's unexpectedly popular new

  governor, out of their way. Roosevelt was barely set led into

  Washington when McKinley was shot by an anarchist while standing

  on a receiving line for public visitors at an international exhibition

  in Bu alo, New York. McKinley died eight days later, and Roosevelt

  in Bu alo, New York. McKinley died eight days later, and Roosevelt

  was sworn in as president on September 14, 1901.

  Roosevelt, who had been a child when the Civil War was fought,

  saw himself not as heir to McKinley's archaic nineteenth-century

  political regimes and the contradictory outcomes of Reconstruction

  and industrialization. Instead, he imagined his rise to the White

  House as a catalyst for reconciling Americans to what Roosevelt

  perceived as the great missed opportunities of the nation's political

  and economic freedoms.

  Roosevelt was also at least nominal y concerned about the chasm

  between blacks and whites, and the gap between the conditions of

  African Americans and the promises made to them at the end of

  slavery. But none of this was to Roosevelt an intractable dilemma.

  Just forty-two years old upon becoming president, the youngest yet

  in U.S. history, he believed that Americans were a people of

  seminal y good character, reasonable thinking, and, as a body, of

  singular wisdom. Reminded of their fundamental principles, al

  white Americans would see the necessity of fairness to freed slaves

  and their descendants, Roosevelt thought—just as he was con dent

  that the leaders of the new steel, coal, railroad, and banking trusts

  ultimately could be relied on to balance pro ts against the needs of

  al the nation's workers.

  The United States was emerging as an authentic global power for

  the rst time in its history. The country's economic and military

  prowess outside the national borders was greater than at any time

  since the declaration of the republic. The nation was in the midst of

  an explosion of new economic production and wealth. In the South,

  centers of industry were rising in Birmingham and Atlanta.

  Industrial combinations such as Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.

  were moving to chal enge northern rivals like U.S. Steel and

  Carnegie Steel. The landscape of the South remained de ned by the

  abject poverty of mil ions of plebeian black and white farmers, but

  there was a sense of psychic resurgence in the region. The actual

  horrors and injuries of the Civil War were receding from col ective

  memory. Nostalgia for the antebel um South and cal s for reunion

  and reconciliation among veterans of the armies for both sides were

  and reconciliation among veterans of the armies for both sides were

  becoming national obsessions. The literature of Joel Chandler

  Harris and scores of imitators—chock-ablock with white writers’

  stylized depictions of "Negro" dialect and the most benevolent

  images of slave masters and slaves imaginable—had supplanted the

  canon of abolitionist novels and rsthand accounts of slaves that

  dominated American book sales and lecture tours in the previous

  generation.

  The long-standing excuse for southern malevolence toward blacks

  — that the region left prostrate by war, the ending of slavery, and

  the ostensible agonies of Reconstruction couldn't help but abuse its

  former slaves—struck Roosevelt and his breed of proactive

  Americans as tired, dul , and simply wrong. The assertion by white

  southerners of a de facto right to reverse the guarantees of voting

  rights and citizenship to blacks seemed to Roosevelt so absurd that

  it could only be truly supported by extremists. He reckoned— using

  the same logic that compel ed him to chal enge the abuse of

  immigrant and impoverished laborers in the factories and coal elds

  closer to his home at Oyster Bay, New York—that a reasonable and

  progressive northern man such as himself could surely safeguard the

  fundamental needs of southern blacks while stil reassuring

  southern whites that they had nothing to fear from al owing

  authentic citizenship for al .

  Roosevelt could hardly have been more wrong in his judgment of

  the political and racial realities of the South. But in addition to his

  instinctive, if ultimately naive, sympathy for African Americans,

  Roosevelt had explicitly political motivations for befriending blacks

  as wel . The new president was anything but a celebrated gure

  within his own Republican Party. Viewed suspiciously by

  Republican leaders in New York, he was despised by leaders of the

  national party's archconservative big business faction, who in the

  previous three decades had engineered the steady drift of

  Republicans from radical abolitionist roots toward a new position

  as the party of unrestrained commerce. Roosevelt needed a novel

  strategy if he hoped to secure the nomination for the presidential

  election in 1904.

  election in 1904.

  A key element of the strategy was to forge a political base among

  southern Republicans, almost al of whom were black. Roosevelt

  believed he could cement those loyalties without stirring white

  hostilities by appointing "reasonable" white Democrats to many key

  federal positions—such as judgeships. The plan relied on one of the

  oddest curiosities of the American electoral circumstances at the

  beginning of the twentieth century. While African Americans were

  almost whol y barred from voting in general elections—having been

  disenfranchised in every state in which black voters constituted

  statistical y signi cant numbers—black delegations continued to be

  accorded ful rights at the national conventions of the Republican

  Party. The result was that while African American voters had lit le

  practical impact upon national elections, given that they were

  whol y unable to deliver any electoral votes from the southern

  states where nearly al blacks resided, black Republicans

  nonetheless remained an essential swing factor in selecting

  presidential nominees for their party.

  Theodore Roosevelt made this calculation long before gaining the

  presidency, and intentional y cultivated cordial relations with

  African American leaders he considered moderate. Chief among

  them was Booker T. Washington, the erudite former slave who had

  risen to become the nation's most prominent black leader and the

  founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The two men grew

  progressively more friendly during Roosevelt's months of service as

  vice president. In early 1901, Roosevelt accepted an invitation to

  speak at Tuskegee later that year, as part of a short tour of the

  South that was to include a brief homage to the Georgia plantation

  home in which his
mother had been reared.

  With the death of Frederick Douglass in 1895, Washington was by

  far the best known and most in uential of black leaders in the

  United States— emphasizing black self-improvement, industrial

  education, and acquiescence to white political power. Washington's

  gradualist message to African Americans was epitomized in a

  speech on September 18, 1895, at the Cot on States and

  International Exhibition in Atlanta, urging that blacks accommodate

  International Exhibition in Atlanta, urging that blacks accommodate

  white demands for subservience while building up their own

  industrial skil s, farms, and basic education.

  To thunderous applause from southern whites, Washington said

  of the two races: "In al things purely social we can be as separate

  as the ngers, yet one as the hand in al things essential to mutual

  progress." The black educator, named a "commissioner" of the event,

  urged African Americans across Alabama to use the exposition's

  "Negro Building" as a showcase for black skil s in mining,

  lumbering and farming, the very industries in which they remained

  most oppressed across the South.45

  This ideal of a class of political y and legal y passive but

  industrious African Americans deeply appealed to white economic

  leaders. Near the closing day of the fair in late December 1895,

  when Washington returned to speak on "Colored Teachers Day," the

  exposition program featured on its last page a drawing of the Negro

  Building and a caption praising its black at endants for "at ractive

  neatness." The exhibits were "evidence of the growing skil ,

  advancing intel igence and promotive industry of the race."

  Washington's Tuskegee Institute, located less than fty miles from

  the farm of John Pace, in the town of Tuskegee, became celebrated

  among white northern philanthropists. Washington spent much of

  his time touring the country to raise funds for the school and

  at empting to quietly manipulate government o cials and the

  political process on racial issues.

  Younger black intel ectuals such as Professor W E. B. DuBois in

  Atlanta came to bit erly criticize Washington as too wil ing to

  accept a secondary position for African Americans. But Roosevelt

  perceived Washington's views as sensible, pragmatic, and clearly in

  keeping with his own progressive, but eminently paternalistic,

  beliefs. Washington's emphasis on personal self-reliance and moral

  and religious rectitude as the keys to individual progress

  corresponded to Roosevelt's vision for uplifting yeoman farmers,

  immigrant laborers, ranch hands, and factory workers of whatever

  race or region. Roosevelt was convinced that if the "common man,"

  race or region. Roosevelt was convinced that if the "common man,"

  whether black or white, fol owed these principles and that

  government ensured that no unjust legal obstacles impeded him,

  then the United States could achieve immeasurable progress. Al of

  this could happen, Roosevelt insisted, without disrupting the

  exponential y expanding business, industrial, and banking sectors

  whose fortunes had made families such as Roosevelt's richer than

  most Americans could begin to imagine.

  Washington's approach appealed to Roosevelt, though, only

  because the new president was unwil ing to confront the realities of

  southern whites’ venom toward any African American seeking

  social or political equality. Roosevelt's father was an ardent Lincoln

  Republican, but his mother was born to a slaveholding family in

  Roswel , Georgia, not far from Atlanta. President Roosevelt was

  drawn to a view of the Civil War that emphasized the valor of both

  sides, rather than the evils of whites such as his mother's family in

  perpetuating slavery. Gradual change, during which no one was

  forced to ful y acknowledge past cruelties to blacks, made sense to

  Roosevelt. "I am con dent the South is changing," Roosevelt wrote

  in a postscript to a let er to Washington in 1901.6 Roosevelt's

  approach to the status of African Americans, fundamental y

  acceding to the inferiority of African Americans and anticipating no

  signi cant ful integration into U.S. society, would be the

  conventional wisdom shared for the next six decades by the vast

  majority of white Americans who considered themselves

  "progressive" on race.

  "I so cordial y sympathize," Roosevelt wrote, with Washington's

  "purpose of t ing the Colored man to shift for himself and

  establishing a healthy relation between the colored man and the

  White man who lives in the same states."7 Roosevelt was thril ed

  with Washington's best-sel ing autobiography, Up from Slavery,

  when it appeared in 1901, with the message that quiet

  perseverance and humility—rather than anger against his slave birth

  —had been the keys to the author's success. Roosevelt wrote

  Washington: "I do not want to at er you too much …[but] … I do

  Washington: "I do not want to at er you too much …[but] … I do

  not know who could take your place in the work you are doing."8

  Washington's theories also corresponded to Roosevelt's benign but

  seminal racism. Principles of fair play told Roosevelt that nothing

  should inhibit the individuals in any group who have the ability to

  achieve great success. The extraordinary achievements of black men

  such as Washington were dramatic proof of this to Roosevelt. But at

  the same time, Roosevelt believed that, col ectively, no one should

  or reasonably could deny the obvious racial superiority of whites

  over al others. Indeed, Roosevelt ultimately took the view that

  even when whites most gravely abused the world's darker-skinned

  races—as in the African slaving trade, the removal of native

  populations in the Americas, and his own brutal suppression while

  in the White House of the Philippine Islands—that the outcome was

  overwhelmingly good. "The expansion of the peoples of white, or

  European, blood during the past four centuries …has been fraught

  with lasting bene t to most of the peoples already dwel ing in the

  lands over which the expansion took place," Roosevelt said in

  remarks to a group of white missionaries during his second term as

  president.9

  But even as the southern states used similar logic to justify the

  elimination of black participation in general elections, the

  Republican Party—the party of emancipation—was not yet able to

  do the same. Delegations of African Americans from the southern

  states—even though they could cast no more than the most scant

  votes in the general elections—remained ful - edged and

  prominent players in the national conventions of the Republican

  Party. (Not until after 1912 would Republicans succumb and al ow

  African Americans to be tossed from the party organizations of the

  South.) Roosevelt turned to Booker T Washington to build his base

  among black southern Republicans.

  Before the day of his inauguration was over, Roosevelt had

  writ en Washington to cancel his visit to Tuskegee and implore the

  black leader to v
isit him quickly in Washington. "I must see you as

  black leader to visit him quickly in Washington. "I must see you as

  soon as possible. I want to talk over the question of possible future

  appointments in the south exactly on the lines of our last

  conversation," Roosevelt wrote.10 Washington made immediate

  arrangements to see the new president.

  Less than three weeks later, U.S. District Court Judge John Bruce,

  the longtime federal jurist who presided over much of central

  Alabama, died. Roosevelt and Washington were presented with a

  serendipitous opportunity. The judgeship in Alabama could be an

  early demonstration of Roosevelt's wil ingness to reward a

  progressive southern white leader with an important position—

  regardless of his party a liation. The policy left the smal number

  of white Republicans who had hung on in the South—many of

  whom continued to be viewed by other southerners as radical

  carpetbagger al ies left over from the Reconstruction era—in the

  cold. However, Roosevelt insisted that his cross-party appointments

  go to Democrats who expressed opposition to lynching and support

  for at least minimal citizenship rights for African Americans—and

  most important that they had not actively supported Wil iam

  Jennings Bryan, the Democratic nominee for president in the 1900

  election.

  Washington immediately recommended to Roosevelt that he

  appoint as successor the state's former governor, Thomas Goode

  Jones,11 the political gure about whom John W. Pace and Fletch

  Turner had so vigorously faced o during Alabama's political

  warfare a decade earlier.

  On the surface, it was paradoxical that Washington became the

  champion of former governor Jones, a Confederate veteran who

  served under Thomas J. "Stonewal " Jackson and Brig. Gen. John B.

  Gordon, and who was present at Lee's surrender to Grant at

  Appomat ox. He was reputed to have carried the white ag of

  southern surrender. Jones's successful gubernatorial bids in 1890

  and 1892 were based primarily on the interests of wealthy white

  plantation owners—men who abused African American laborers on

  a greater scale than any other whites. During those campaigns he

  a greater scale than any other whites. During those campaigns he

  was a vocal critic of black political power. Nonetheless, Jones was

  also the cynical y wil ing bene ciary of his faction's reliance on

 

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