Slavery by Another Name
Page 24
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