PARKER AND ROOSEVELT had had similar childhood experiences and had become friends. Parker, an asthmatic and weak child, had learned judo, performed hard manual labor, bred fighting cocks, and avoided church. He grew tall, proud, determined, and successful, and became president of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange and the New Orleans Board of Trade and a director of the Illinois Central; he went back and forth between Mississippi and his mansion in the New Orleans Garden District.
Through Parker, Percy also became a friend of Roosevelt. Roosevelt understood the South; his mother was a Georgia aristocrat and two of his uncles had fought for the Confederacy. Both he and Percy loved to hunt, with Percy traveling as far as Alaska to shoot and Roosevelt traveling even farther. They were both direct, humorous, charming, charismatic. No one could dominate a room like Roosevelt; his energy simply filled it. But Percy’s presence in a room was felt too. LeRoy’s son Will, while attending Harvard Law School, met Roosevelt and judged him “scarcely a genius…[but] the biggest man I have ever seen outside of private life.” In private life, Will considered his father bigger.
Percy met Roosevelt on a bear hunt Parker organized, a gathering of money and power in the Delta wilderness, including the president, two cabinet secretaries, Percy, Fish, and several others. (Governor Andrew Longino had been invited but, having just annoyed Percy over legislation involving the Hartford Insurance Company, was never informed of the time or place of the hunt, and so was left behind.) The guide was Holt Collier, born a slave of the Percy family.
The hunt itself was brutal and intimate. The dogs cornered the first bear in a lagoon surrounded by tall cane; there the bear stood at bay. Collier and Parker found it there and wanted Roosevelt to have the first kill. So Collier roped the bear to prevent its escape. Then Roosevelt arrived. He refused to shoot it. Parker also disdained a distant kill, instead circling behind the bear as dogs leaped at its front, then ramming his hunting knife under the bear’s ribs and into its heart. It was November and crisp. Parker stood there, his chest heaving, his hands dripping blood, his boots covered with mud, as the bear died.*
After this hunt, Percy routinely dined with Roosevelt whenever he visited Washington. There Percy and Parker could count among their friends an extraordinarily powerful grouping: both the Republican Speaker of the House and the House Democratic leader John Sharp Williams, a Delta planter from Yazoo City, along with the Republican chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the president. Parker confided that he never “made any direct request of President Roosevelt for that would embarrass him.” Instead, he and Percy would go through back channels to “Speaker Cannon and whatever was desired would be realized.”
Percy’s experiment with Italian labor would soon force him to call upon his powerful friends.
THE EXPERIMENT took place at the vast, 11,000-acre Sunnyside Plantation in Chicot County, Arkansas, directly across the Mississippi River from Greenville. The plantation already had its own railroad and a telephone line to Greenville in 1898, when the O. B. Crittenden Company, Greenville cotton factors, took it over. The company’s partners were Crittenden, Percy, and Morris Rosenstock (whose grandson is Civil War historian Shelby Foote). Percy was not the first to bring Italians there. Sunnyside’s previous owner had started doing so in 1895, but after only a few months he had died in an accident in New York. Then malaria and yellow fever had struck the Delta. The tiny Italian colony had disintegrated.
Percy was intent on succeeding. He and Scott personally went to Italy to recruit workers and hire labor agents. In all, they brought several thousand Italians to the Delta, not all for Sunnyside. They performed well enough that in 1904 Percy boasted to the Manufacturer’s Record that Italians were “in every way superior to the negro…. If the immigration of these people is encouraged, they will gradually take the place of the negro without their being any such violent change as to paralyze for a generation the prosperity of the country.”
Soon 47 Delta plantations were working as many as 180 Italian families each. Alfred Stone, a Percy friend and neighbor who was both an agricultural and social scientist, had earlier written in Publications of the American Economic Association, “Every step taken in the development of this section has been dependent upon, and marked by, an increased negro population.” Now Stone seconded Percy’s opinion: “It is always difficult to get a negro to plant and properly cultivate the outer edges of his field—the extreme ends of his rows, his ditch banks, etc. The Italian is so jealous of the use of every foot for which he pays rent that he will cultivate with a hoe places too small to be worked with a plough.”
But the Italians did not consider the experiment so successful. The South did not welcome them. The most grievous incident occurred in 1891, when a corrupt New Orleans police chief involved himself in Mafia rivalries and was murdered; a jury was supposedly either bribed or frightened into acquitting the murderers. The next day many of the city’s young leaders—including John Parker—issued a “call for action”; in response a crowd stormed the jail and lynched eleven Italians, including those just acquitted. The incident was hardly isolated. A year later three Italians were lynched in Hahnville, Louisiana; in 1899 five were lynched in Tallulah, Louisiana; in 1901 two were murdered outside Percy’s own Greenville. In 1907, after another violent incident in Mississippi prompted the Italian government to demand an investigation, the governor informed the State Department that the victim deserved his fate because he was “a very dirty, low-caste Italian, of the ‘Dago’ type—very mouthy…causing [others] to be discontented with their work.”
Though some Italians at Sunnyside were making money—in six years a single family saved $15,000 in cash—most were sinking into debt and growing bitter. Percy squeezed his tenants hard, charging “flat” annual interest of 10 percent on all advances, whether borrowed for one month or twelve, a routine practice in Mississippi but one that violated Arkansas law. Yet Percy ended the practice only after his manager warned, “I think we are taking some risk…. [Tenants are] making very close investigations about this point.”
One Italian answered with a pamphlet titled Don’t Go to the Mississippi, warning that there Italians would find only “slavery and fever”; he distributed it in New Orleans and Italy. In December 1906 a barn at Sunnyside exploded into flame. It was arson; the Italians were learning the revenge of the poor white.
In response, men with guns began patrolling the plantation. Some Italians were beaten. Some ran off. Tensions escalated.
When a labor agent tried to help some unhappy Sunnyside tenants relocate, Percy warned him “an unfriendly attitude on my part would be an injury to you.” And when Percy learned some Sunnyside Italians were at the Greenville train depot, he told other planters not to take them on and sent a manager to intimidate them into returning.
Federal law prohibited “debt peonage,” forcing people to work to pay off debts. Percy was pushing against the edge of the law. Federal law also prohibited advancing travel expenses and bringing in foreign workers under contract. Percy believed he had found a loophole in this law; more likely he had violated it.
Then Percy’s partner Crittenden pushed beyond the edge of the law. Two Italian tenants walked into his office, announced they were leaving for jobs in Alabama coal mines, and promised to repay money owed. They walked out, but Crittenden followed with a Greenville policeman and forcibly pulled them off a train and returned them to Sunnyside.
In the spring of 1907, complaints from the Italians reached Italian Ambassador Baron Edmondo Des Planches. To co-opt him and regain their customary control of the situation, Percy, Charles Scott, Stuyvesant Fish, and others invited Des Planches to tour the plantation. Percy showed off the families whose acreage was highly profitable, pointed out the modern cotton gin, the railroad, the office for the doctor who was on call, the place reserved for Catholic services. Others tactfully let Des Planches know that Percy’s wife, Camille, was Catholic. Afterward in Greenville, already a city with a sophistication beyond its small size, Pe
rcy hosted a dinner for the group at the Mirror Restaurant, an opulent restaurant run by two Italians that resembled Antoine’s in New Orleans. Percy, an engaging and cultured host, entertained with grace and elegance and seemed to win Des Planches over. As Des Planches was leaving, he clasped Percy’s hand and said, “Mr. Percy, I assure you we will send you Italians, who not only will make good farmers but will make good first class American citizens.”
Des Planches had shown Percy his diplomatic face. There was another. He had a keen eye and saw deeply. He had seen the shacks in which many of the sharecroppers lived and the long rows of cotton assigned to each family, and he had stopped to try almost undrinkable water. He understood enough. Back in Washington he reported: “The Italian immigrant at Sunnyside is a human production machine. He is better off than the black man, more perfect than the black man, but like the black man still a machine.” He demanded a Justice Department investigation, and specifically asked that Mary Grace Quackenbos conduct it.
MARY QUACKENBOS was strong, tough even, yet oddly naive and vulnerable. Heiress to a modest fortune, she had founded the People’s Law Firm in New York to protect immigrants. As a private individual and at considerable personal risk, she had uncovered conditions of virtual slavery in turpentine and timber camps in Florida and handed over the evidence to the Justice Department, which prosecuted, then hired her as the first female U.S. attorney. Her contest with LeRoy would pit federal law against both Percy’s friendship with Roosevelt and, in effect, all southern society.
From the first their relationship was one of mutual charm, mutual deceit, mutual determination, and, perhaps, even mutual respect. Upon her arrival in Greenville in July 1907, Percy seemed to extend both personal and professional courtesy to her. He hosted a dinner in her honor and gave her warm letters of introduction to X. O. Pindall, governor of Arkansas, and Charles Scott. But Percy also wrote a private letter warning Scott that her queries would be “endless and tedious” and wondering how to prevent her from “convers[ing] freely with the Italians.”
She too operated with guile at dinner, playing the disarmed and disarming guest, saying she so enjoyed Mrs. Percy that she wondered if Mrs. Percy could accompany them on a tour of Sunnyside. Yet she had already dispatched an undercover agent to the plantation to seek evidence against her host. (The investigator was arrested for trespassing.) Soon she went to the plantation herself, slept in a sharecropper’s shack with no screens on windows or doors, was besieged by mosquitoes, and drank the red, iron-laden water.
She returned with accusations of wrongdoing, yet still told her superiors, “Mr. Percy appears to be a man of common sense.” She asked him to improve plantation conditions and rewrite tenant contracts, and he agreed to some changes. But when she pushed for more, he refused. Meanwhile, she had threatened one of Percy’s labor agents with a long jail sentence for violating contract labor laws unless he confessed and helped her. She broke him, and his confession implicated Percy himself.
Percy reacted immediately. Her notes, including those of interviews with potential witnesses, disappeared from her room at the Cowan Hotel in Greenville. They were then “recovered” (Percy’s mocking word) and returned to her by Thomas Catchings, a retired congressman and a close Percy associate. Percy seemed to be telling her she could not touch him, that she was powerless, not only in the Delta but in Washington.
At the time, Percy himself was with President Roosevelt in Memphis, at the largest river convention ever held. More than 10,000 attended. Boosters in every town along every river in the upper Mississippi valley, anticipating the opening of the Panama Canal, were dreaming of direct shipments to South America and the Orient. Roosevelt’s high-pitched voice had pierced the hall. He approved the building of empires and called for great massive dams to generate hydroelectric power, irrigation projects to reclaim the dry West, and flood control too. Roosevelt proclaimed, “The whole future of the nation is directly at stake.” The crowd cheered and cheered, although Roosevelt’s own Army Corps of Engineers was trying to—and would—kill the legislation to carry out his plan.
Roosevelt then spent a week on Parker’s plantation relaxing, hunting, fishing, and talking politics. Percy was with him for much of that time too.
Quackenbos knew of Percy’s friendship with Roosevelt. It put enormous pressure on her. It drove her forward. She would not be intimidated. Instead, she showed her own power. Earlier she had written Attorney General Charles Bonaparte that the situation “at Sunnyside is not exactly peonage as I understand it.” The settlers were making profits, often substantial profits. An assistant attorney general had also visited Sunnyside and found none of the systematic brutality and viciousness “we have seen in cases found in other states.”
Now she returned to Sunnyside to spend another night with a tenant family. A foreman ordered her off the property. She refused to obey unless Percy himself told her to leave in writing. Before sunrise the next day a young black man delivered her a note from Percy doing so.
She left but sent Percy a note accusing him of “untrustworthiness and ungentlemanly behavior.” They were two accusations that would have most enraged him, and also revealed the delicate balance between her feminine and professional roles. But she also declared, “I have a perfect right to go upon the Sunnyside property, at any time,” and warned him not to interfere “with my duty as a government official.”
Nine days later she sent an even stronger response, contained in a wire on October 25, 1907, to Attorney General Charles Bonaparte: “O. B. Crittenden arrested for peonage.”
EARLIER THAT YEAR the Delta had survived a major flood of the Mississippi River. Although tens of thousands of acres had gone under, by and large the levees had held. Percy had worked hard in confronting that enemy at his front. He understood now that Quackenbos was an enemy at his rear, capable of threatening not only him personally but the relationship of the entire Delta with the financial markets and Washington.
She was proving a powerful adversary. Not satisfied with the weight of the Justice Department, she also used the press. Northern and Washington newspapers were sensationalizing what were plainly leaks from her. It was the age of muckraking and, like all ages, of scandalmongering, of exposing evil, of bringing down the mighty. It worried him.
But Mary Quackenbos was attacking only a wrong, and a relatively small one at that. To block her attack, Percy would use something far larger as a shield. The shield was the lot of the Negro in Mississippi, an evil that was to the wrong she accused him of as a supernova is to a streetlight.
Percy was no crusader on race. The preceding Christmas, when sharecroppers were signing contracts for 1907, he had warned his foreman that blacks considered him “rough with labor…. A difficulty at this time would be fatal to filling the place up…. [T]ake now what you would not be willing to do after.” He had excepted “a negro named Toler [who] is doing the place a great deal of injury. I don’t mind your being rough with Toler if you find him on the place.” And Percy, like other planters, virtually bought and sold black sharecroppers, paying off their debts as the price of acquiring them as tenants. Typically, he wrote one fellow planter: “I would be willing to pay his account if you are willing for him to leave. I would not even write you about the matter, but he says it is your custom to let them leave whenever they are dissatisfied. If you care to turn him loose, call me over the phone.”
And like many men of his class and time, he fully embraced Social Darwinism and considered blacks unable to compete with whites. He noted, “Those negroes who do receive higher education…in course of time, under the inexorable working out of the ‘survival of the fittest’ they will have to go to the wall.”
This put him squarely in the mainstream of contemporary thought. Roosevelt tempered Social Darwinism with the Social Gospel—decrying “cutthroat competition” and embracing social work—but still used competition to define even friendship. Of a tennis partner Roosevelt said, “If conditions were such that only one could live he knows that
I should possibly kill him as the weaker of the two and he, therefore, worships this in me.” Although he dined with Booker T. Washington in the White House, arousing a fury of outrage in the South, he also said he wanted to “see the South back in full communion” with the rest of the nation, adding that in keeping with Social Darwinism, “The Negro…must take his chances like the rest.”
Percy agreed with that sentiment. But if the idea of social equality with blacks was as abhorrent to him as it was to others of his class, and if he expected blacks to lose a competition, he also believed that each man had to join in that competition. And he viewed a black man as just that, a man.
This set him apart. When a dispute erupted on his Trail Lake Plantation between the white manager and black tenants, it was the black tenant Lewis Levi whom Percy addressed as a man of honor and trust: “I am counting on you to use your influence with the hands for the benefit of the place, as you said you would do. I hope that I will find things straightened out when I get back…. I believe I can rely upon you to do what is right.” And it was the white manager whom Percy patronized and instructed: “You want to get as many of the hands satisfied as you can…. Treat Levi and the other negroes you think are against you exactly like you do the others, give them an equal chance to do day work, etc.”
Rising Tide Page 13