These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  The war that began in Cuba in 1898 and was declared over in the Philippines in 1902 dramatically worsened conditions for people of color in the United States, who faced, at home, a campaign of terrorism. Pro-war rhetoric, filled with racist venom, only further incited American racial hatreds. “If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched,” the governor of Mississippi pledged in 1903. Mark Twain called lynching an “epidemic of bloody insanities.” By one estimate, someone in the South was hanged or burned alive every four days. The court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson meant that there was no legal recourse to fight segregation, which grew more brutal with each passing year. Nor was discrimination confined to the South. Cities and counties in the North and West passed racial zoning laws, banning blacks from the middle-class communities. In 1890, in Montana, blacks lived in all fifty-six counties in the state; by 1930, they’d been confined to just eleven. In Baltimore, blacks couldn’t buy houses on blocks where whites were a majority. In 1917, in Buchanan v. Warley, the Supreme Court availed itself of the Fourteenth Amendment not to guarantee equal protection for blacks but to guarantee what the court had come to understand as the “liberty of contract”—the liberty of businesses to discriminate.16

  In the spring of 1899, while teaching at Atlanta University, W. E. B. Du Bois was walking from his rooms on campus to deliver to the offices of a city newspaper a restrained essay about the lynching of Sam Hose, a black farmer, when he saw, displayed in a store window, Hose’s knuckles. Hose had been dismembered, and barbecued, his body parts sold as souvenirs. Du Bois, who had earned a PhD in history at Harvard in 1895 before studying in Europe, had pioneered a new method of social science research that had become a hallmark of Progressive Era reform: the social survey. In 1896, he’d gone door-to-door in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward and personally interviewed more than five thousand people in order to prepare his study The Philadelphia Negro. In 1898, he’d delivered a meticulously argued academic lecture on “The Study of the Negro Problems,” which, while brilliant, was cluttered with blather like “the phenomena of society are worth the most careful and systematic study.” But on that spring day in 1899 when he saw what had once been Hose’s hands, he turned around, walked back to his rooms, threw away his essay, and decided that “one could not be a calm, cool and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.”17

  Charles Mitchell was lynched in Urbana, Ohio, in 1897, one of thousands of black men lynched during the Jim Crow era. A lot of other people decided that they, too, couldn’t keep calm—and, like Du Bois, that they could no longer live in places like Georgia. “We are outnumbered and without arms,” Ida B. Wells wrote. Instead, they packed up and left, in what came to be called the Great Migration, the movement of millions of blacks from the South to the North and West. Before the Great Migration began, 90 percent of all blacks in the United States lived in the South. Between 1915 and 1918, five hundred thousand African Americans left for cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland, Chicago and Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Detroit. Another 1.3 million left the South between 1920 and 1930. By the beginning of the Second World War, 47 percent of all blacks in the United States lived outside the South. In cities, they built new communities, and new community organizations. In 1909, in New York, Du Bois helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the next year began editing its monthly magazine, The Crisis, explaining that its title came from the conviction that “this is a critical time in the history of the advancement of men”—a crisis for humanity.18

  White Progressives, who borrowed from the social science methods pioneered by Du Bois, turned a blind eye to Jim Crow. Like Populists before them, when Progressives talked about inequality, they meant the condition of white farmers and white wage workers relative to business owners. Yet Progressives were undeniably influenced by the struggle for racial justice, not least by the investigative journalism methods pioneered by Wells, with her exposé of lynching: the exposé became Progressives’ sharpest tool. After Theodore Roosevelt, alluding to Pilgrim’s Progress, damned “the Man with the Muck-rake,” who “consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing,” investigative journalism came to be called muckraking.19 It first became a national phenomenon at McClure’s, a monthly magazine, when in 1902 its publisher, an Irish immigrant named Samuel Sidney McClure, gave an investigative assignment—designed to expose corruption and lawlessness—to each of his three best writers, charging Ray Stannard Baker with writing about unions, Ida Tarbell about Standard Oil, and Lincoln Steffens about big-city politics. (Steffens later hired as his assistant a very young Walter Lippmann.) None of these people liked being described as a writer who sees only filth. Tarbell, who’d earlier written biographies of Napoleon and Lincoln, considered herself not a muckraker but a historian. And, as Baker later insisted, “We muck-raked not because we hated our world but because we loved it.”20

  In a 1910 magazine cover, top-hatted banker J. Pierpont Morgan grabs at all of New York City’s banks—even a toddler’s piggy bank. Tarbell’s indictment of Standard Oil, a catalogue of collusion and corruption, harassment, intimidation, and outright thuggery, first appeared as a nineteen-part series in McClure’s. Standard Oil, Tarbell wrote, was the first of the trusts, the model for all that followed, and “the most perfectly developed trust in existence.” Tarbell, who’d grown up next to an oil field—“great oil pits sunken in the earth”—had watched Standard Oil crush its competition. Often investigated by state and local governments, the company had left behind a paper trail, which Tarbell had followed, doggedly, in the archives. But it was her writing that brought her argument home. “There was nothing too good for them, nothing they did not hope and dare,” she wrote of a group of young men starting out on their own in the industry, unaware of Standard Oil’s methods. “At the very heyday of this confidence, a big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future.”21

  In the wake of Tarbell’s indictment, Rockefeller, who’d founded Standard Oil in 1870, became one of the most despised men in America, a symbol of everything that had gone wrong with industrialism. That Rockefeller was a Baptist and a philanthropist did not stop William Jennings Bryan from arguing that no institution should accept a penny from him (Bryan refused to serve on the board of his alma mater, Illinois College, until it broke ties with Rockefeller). “It is not necessary,” Bryan said, “that all Christian people shall sanction the Rockefeller method of making money merely because Rockefeller prays.”22

  Muckraking fueled the engine of Progressivism. But the car was driven by two American presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, men who could hardly have been more different but who, between them, vastly extended the powers of the presidency while battling against combinations of capital that made corporations into monopolies.

  WHEN WOODROW WILSON was a boy reading Sir Walter Scott, he made a paper navy, appointed himself its admiral, and wrote his fleet a constitution. His graduating class at Princeton named him the class’s “model statesman.” At the University of Virginia, he studied law and joined the debating society. A generation earlier, he’d have become a preacher, like his father, but instead he became a professor of political science.23 In the academy and later in the White House, he dedicated himself to the problem of adapting a Constitution written in the age of the cotton gin to the age of the automobile.

  A modernist, impatient with his ancestors, Wilson believed that the separation of powers had gotten thrown out of whack. In Congressional Government, he argued that Congress had too much power and used it unwisely, passing laws pell-mell and hardly ever repealing any. He applied the theory of evolution to the Constitution, which, he said, “is not a machine, but a living thing,” and “falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life.” He came to believe that the presidency had been evolving, too: “We have grown more and more inclin
ed from generation to generation to look to the President as the unifying force in our complex system, the leader both of his party and of the nation. To do so is not inconsistent with the actual provisions of the Constitution; it is only inconsistent with a very mechanical theory of its meaning and intention.” A president’s power, Wilson concluded, is virtually limitless: “His office is anything he has the sagacity and force to make it.”24

  A 1900 cartoon depicts Theodore Roosevelt as a centaur, branded “GOP,” bucking wildly while firing two guns, one labeled “Speeches,” the other, “Wild Talk.” People with a writerly bent who were interested in understanding American democracy tended to produce, in those days, sweeping accounts of the nation’s origins and rise. During the years when Frederick Douglass and Frederick Jackson Turner were wrestling with the story of America, Wilson wrote a five-volume History of the American People and young Theodore Roosevelt churned out a four-volume series called The Winning of the West. Wilson was more interested in ideas, Roosevelt in battles.

  Roosevelt, who looked like a bear and roared like a lion, had finished a law degree at Columbia while serving in the New York State Assembly and spending a great deal of time at his ranch in western Dakota. But it was Roosevelt’s fighting in the Spanish-American War that catapulted him to national fame. On his return from Cuba, he was elected the Republican governor of New York. Two years later, when McKinley faced the Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan, he named Roosevelt as his running mate.

  “It was a mistake to nominate that wild man,” McKinley’s adviser Mark Hanna always said. But that wild man proved a tireless campaigner. “He ain’t running, he’s galloping,” people said. In Roosevelt, Bryan met his match. Bryan traveled 16,000 miles on the campaign trail, so Roosevelt traveled 21,000. Bryan made 600 speeches, so Roosevelt made 673. Publicly, Roosevelt painted Bryan as a crackpot, with “communistic and socialistic doctrines”; privately, he remarked that Bryan was supported by “all the lunatics, all the idiots, all the knaves, all the cowards, and all the honest people who are slow-witted.”25 Bryan, to Roosevelt, was the candidate of the lame-brained.

  When McKinley won, Democrats blamed Bryan, who, while he cornered the rural vote, had won not a single city except silver-mining Denver. Democracy appeared to be dooming the Democratic Party. In 1880, one half of the American workforce worked on farms; by 1920, only one-quarter did. A great many people worked in factories, and a rising number of them, especially women, worked in offices. In 1880, clerks made up less than 5 percent of the nation’s workforce, nearly all of them men; by 1910, more than four million Americans worked in offices, and half were women. By 1920, most Americans lived and worked in cities. Bryan’s followers were farmers, and so long as he led the party, it was hard to see how Democrats could win the White House. Said one character in a humor column, “I wondhur . . . if us dimmy-crats will iver ilict a prisidint again.”26

  In 1901, when McKinley was shot by an anarchist in Buffalo, Roosevelt, only forty-two, became the nation’s youngest president. A great admirer of Lincoln, he wore on his hand a ring that contained a wisp of hair cut from the dead president’s head. He bounded in and out of rooms and slapped senators on the back, but he read widely and deeply, and even though Pulitzer’s World called him “the strangest creature the White House ever held,” he knew how to work the press. He gave reporters a permanent room at the White House, and figured out that the best day to feed them stories was Sunday, so that their pieces would run at the beginning of the week; Roosevelt liked to say that he “discovered Monday.” His lasting legacy was the regulatory state, the establishment of professional federal government and scientific agencies like the Forest and Reclamation Services. Not far behind was the series of wildlife refuges and national parks he created. Much of the rest was bluster. “I am not advocating anything revolutionary,” Roosevelt himself said. “I am advocating action to prevent anything revolutionary.”27

  In the White House, Roosevelt pursued reforms long advocated by Populists. Announcing that “trusts are the creatures of the state,” he set about using antitrust fervor to enact regulatory measures, principally through the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department.28 Reelected in 1904, when he easily defeated Alton B. Parker, a conservative whom Democrats had nominated out of their vexation at Bryan, Roosevelt continued to move to the left, pursuing an agenda, not always successfully, of regulating the railroads, passing pure food and drug laws, and ending child labor.

  Roosevelt also endorsed the income tax, a measure by now nearly universal in Europe. Between 1897 and 1906, supporters of the tax had introduced into Congress twenty-seven bills proposing to defeat, with a constitutional amendment, the Supreme Court’s decision in Pollock, overturning the 1894 federal income tax. “I feel sure that the people will sooner or later demand an amendment to the constitution which will specifically authorize an income tax,” Bryan said at a rally in Madison Square Garden before an adoring crowd of ten thousand, on his return from a yearlong trip around the world.29

  The momentum for change came in the form of an earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1906, spreading fires across the city and, triggered by the collapse of insurance companies that were unable to cover hundreds of millions of dollars in earthquake-damage claims, a financial panic across the country. In the election of 1908, after Roosevelt pledged that he would not run for a third term, a pledge he much regretted, the Republicans nominated William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s secretary of war. The Democrats turned once again to Bryan, who demonstrated, for the third and final time, that, while he could raise a crowd to its feet and leave them weeping, he could not deliver the White House to his party.

  President Taft, who had been a federal judge and who would go on to serve as chief justice of the United States, was perfectly willing to support a federal income tax, but he wanted to avoid signing a law that would end up going back to the Supreme Court: “Nothing has ever injured the prestige of the Supreme Court more than that last decision,” he said about the court’s decision in Pollock.30 Taft decided to support a constitutional amendment, which went to the states for ratification in 1909.

  Constitutional amendments are notoriously difficult to pass. The Sixteenth Amendment was not, and its success is a measure of the reach and intensity of the Progressive movement. It was ratified, handily and swiftly, in 42 of 48 states, six more than required, winning passage in state senates with an average support of 89 percent and, in state houses, 95 percent. In nineteen lower legislatures, the vote in favor was unanimous. The Sixteenth Amendment became law in February 1913. The House voted on an income tax bill in May. When the Bureau of Internal Revenue printed its first 1040, the form was three pages, the instructions only one.31 Americans later came to argue about the income tax more fiercely almost than anything they’d argued about before, but when it started, they wanted it desperately, and urgently.

  INDUSTRIALISM HAD BUILT towers, tipped to the sky, and had cluttered store shelves with trinkets, but it left workers with very little economic security. Beginning in the 1880s, industrializing nations had begun addressing this problem by providing “workingmen’s insurance”—health insurance, industrial accident compensation, and old-age pensions for wage workers—along with various forms of family assistance, chiefly to poor mothers or widows with dependent children. These programs created what came to be known as the modern welfare state. In the United States, the earliest of these forms of assistance were tied to military service. Between 1880 and 1910, under the terms of benefits paid to Civil War veterans and their widows and dependents, more than a quarter of the federal budget went to welfare payments. When Pennsylvania congressman William B. Wilson introduced a pension plan for all citizens over the age of sixty-five, he alluded to this tradition in the measure’s very title, calling it the Old-age Home Guard of the United States Army. Beginning in the 1880s, reformers like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, in Chicago, had been leading a fight for legislative labor reforms for women, including minimum-wage and ma
ximum-hour laws, and the abolition of child labor. Their first success came in 1883, when Illinois passed a law for an eight-hour workday for women. And yet each of these Progressive reforms, from social insurance to protective legislation, faced a legal obstacle: their critics called them unconstitutional.32

  The Illinois Supreme Court struck down the eight-hour-workday law, and, in a particularly remarkable set of decisions issued at a time when courts were coming not only to support government intervention but also to be tools of reform, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled much Progressive labor legislation. The most important of these decisions came in 1905. In a 5–4 decision in Lochner v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court voided a state law establishing that bakers could work no longer than ten hours a day, six days a week, on the ground that the law violated a business owner’s liberty of contract, the freedom to forge agreements with his workers, something the court’s majority said was protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. The laissez-faire conservatism of the court was informed, in part, by social Darwinism, which suggested that the parties in disputes should be left to battle it out, and if one side had an advantage, even so great an advantage as a business owner has over its employees, then it should win. In a dissenting opinion in Lochner, Oliver Wendell Holmes accused the court of violating the will of the people. “This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain,” he began. The court, he said, had also wildly overreached its authority and had carried social Darwinism into the Constitution. “A Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory,” Holmes wrote. “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”33