Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  Such an insistence on fair play was rapidly losing favor. In 1903, Mississippi had elected James K. Vardaman, “the Great White Chief,” governor. He was the first man in Mississippi to realize, in the sense of “making real,” the politics of race hatred. Tall, with a massive head and long black hair draped like a cape over his shoulders, he always wore an immaculate white suit, mastered every stage, was charismatic and demagogic to all, and was demonic and frightening to his many rivals and enemies.

  As governor, Vardaman raised expenditures on white education and regulated railroads and corporations, Percy’s clients, but Percy initially supported him because they agreed on levee board appointments. But he also patronized him. Percy told a friend: “The fundamental trouble with Vardaman is that he honestly believes money is an evil to be guarded against…that Spartan simplicity, virtue and poverty are the virtues which should be emulated. It all comes of an untrained mind grappling with economic questions and trying to be original…. Between barbarism and Wall Street I believe he rather leans toward barbarism.”

  But then Vardaman began to exhibit a truly barbaric side. He denounced the education of blacks as “a positive unkindness because it renders him unfit for the work which the white man has prescribed and which he will be forced to perform.” Besides, it made no sense to have education “dissatisfy [the Negro] and then kill him if he undertakes to enjoy the prerogatives of citizenship.” He called blacks “lazy lying lustful animal[s] which no amount of training can transform into a tolerable citizen.”

  Appalled not only by Vardaman’s comments but by the support they engendered, Percy believed that the time had come to respond. At a meeting of the Mississippi Bar Association in Vicksburg he made a remarkable speech. In it, he was very consciously preparing the ground for what would become a long war over race, a war that would last until the end of his life and beyond. He believed that his position represented civilization and decency, that Vardaman’s represented evil. If his position also represented self-interest—even if the experiment with Italian sharecroppers proved successful, the Delta would still need black labor and Vardaman was threatening to drive blacks away—he considered that perfectly consistent with morality.

  Ultimately, the Mississippi River would show that in race matters Percy’s self-interest was not consistent with morality, and the river would force him to choose. In the meantime, his views on race were as progressive as those of any mainstream figure in the nation.

  Percy began his speech with the observation “[t]hat man is a lover of his country, and a true patriot, who humbly strives to do his duty and to discharge the obligations of citizenship in that locality to which Fate may have assigned him.” It therefore behooved him to act. He continued: “An erroneous statement, oft repeated by those high in place, if permitted for long to go uncontradicted, soon passes current as axiomatic truth…. Such an erroneous statement has come much into vogue in the South, and especially in Mississippi in regard to the negro and education…. The statement is daily heard that education ruins the negro…. I deny that any man is rendered worse by having his intelligence quickened, his mental horizon widened.” It was a long speech. It affirmed the moral reasons for educating blacks and treating them fairly and honestly, including the fact that abusing blacks corrupted whites. Another reason for education was money. “The negro must be educated,” he concluded. “But not as a matter of justice to him alone is his education necessary, but because the industrial development of the South demands it.”

  His speech would have impact. Jacob Dickinson, a former assistant U.S. attorney general and general counsel of the Illinois Central, a man Percy described as “an intense southerner,” sent a copy of the speech to Roosevelt.

  Roosevelt already trusted Percy and respected him. He also liked him. Only a few weeks earlier Percy had stopped at the White House to say hello. Roosevelt had greeted him cordially and urged him to return for lunch the next day, when he had talked of hunting and his fight with Edward Harriman, whom Percy knew well from Harriman’s days as vice president of the Illinois Central. Finally the president had laughed: “Percy, by George, I like the Kaiser, he is a fine fellow. If you would put him down in Chicago he would carry his ward but the Czar would not. He would be president of the Mugwump Society.” Now, Roosevelt, fully understanding the political forces at work in the South and understanding the storm Percy was calling down upon his own head, forwarded Percy’s speech to the Outlook, the country’s leading Progressive magazine, which published it. On August 11, 1907, he sent Percy a note saying, “I hailed that article of yours with genuine delight. I have long since become convinced that while in each section of the country there are wrongs to be remedied,…the only effective way to remedy them…[is] to back the man on the ground who is acting well and wisely. My dear sir, as an American I felt I owed you a debt of gratitude.”

  It was into that relationship that the arrest of Percy’s partner intruded.

  SOON AFTER his partner’s arrest Percy left for Washington. When he needed action there, he usually relied upon either his own congressional delegation, which included the House Democratic leader, or Speaker Cannon. But Congress could not help in this matter. Only two men, the attorney general or the president, could.

  So Percy met first with Attorney General Charles Bonaparte. The meeting went badly. He wrote home, “I believe he will give what trouble he can in the premises.” Only Roosevelt remained.

  Percy had never asked a favor of the president, refusing, as he told one man who sought his help, to make a “social acquaintance the basis of a request for political favors.” But he did not hesitate to discuss policy with Roosevelt. Only days earlier Percy had urged Parker to join him in asking Roosevelt to help southern banks through the Panic of 1907. Whether because of them or not, Roosevelt did move $50 million of federal deposits into those banks.

  Now Percy called at the White House. Roosevelt knew the subject of the visit and saw him at once. Percy had prepared for this meeting as thoroughly as for any court appearance. He would not confuse business with friendship and refrained from any talk of hunting or mutual friends. Instead, he presented his brief, explaining, “You are fully aware of the absolute necessity for immigration to the Delta section of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, that the country is less than one-third developed and its development absolutely arrested for lack of labor.”

  Mary Quackenbos was threatening this immigration despite, he charged, her “most profound and remarkable ignorance…. There was not a condition, a custom, a form of contract, or a crop raised about which she had the slightest information.” Percy cited specific errors she had made, including a grossly overestimated calculation of Sunnyside’s profits based on her stunningly mistaken belief that the plantation produced two cotton crops a year.

  He did not ask the president to quash the grand jury that would consider indicting his partner. He did not fear the law, he said, nor did Quackenbos care about the law. Indeed, he argued, “Her manner was that of a ‘Lady Bountiful’ dispensing alms, a philanthropic humanitarian, a doctrinaire, seeking to remove poverty wherever she finds it…without discrimination as to whether that poverty is due to unjust treatment or oppression, or is the result of necessary conditions and environment.” It was simply the world, a hard world, which caused the immigrants’ pain, he argued. Not even the South. The world. The fitter survive.

  But if the legal process did not worry him, he continued, the press did. Quackenbos was leaking her report in bits and pieces to the press. Washington papers were suggesting that charges of “sensational character” would be made, and the southern press was reprinting the stories.

  He then made three requests. First, believing that “the publication at this time of an unfavorable Government report would be absolutely fatal to any chance of securing immigration,” he asked that “no publicity be given [her report] and no action be taken on it by the government until it be verified.” Second, he asked that an investigation by “men of practical underst
anding” be conducted, and, third, that she not be sent south again.

  Roosevelt listened closely. He approved of Quackenbos. When Florida congressmen had earlier erupted in outrage over her investigation of turpentine camps, Roosevelt had backed her absolutely. Just recently, he had sent a newspaper clipping about her offending southern timber interests to Bonaparte with the notation “very amusing.” But Roosevelt trusted Percy. That was not something easily achieved or discounted.

  After a moment he gave Percy the answers he wanted. Quackenbos would be removed from the investigation. There would be no publication of her report unless it was verified.

  Then the president invited Percy to dinner. Percy declined. Few people would decline an invitation to dinner with the president, fewer still who had just won a favor from him. It was part of what Roosevelt liked about Percy.

  IN A NARROW SENSE Percy had succeeded. A federal grand jury in Jackson, Mississippi, refused to indict Crittenden, despite a charge from the judge almost requiring them to do so. Quackenbos was reassigned, and all copies of her report were removed from Justice Department files.

  A few weeks later Percy invited Stuyvesant Fish and Jacob Dickinson to join him at Sunnyside. “Fish are biting, Mint is growing, soft breezes blowing,” he beckoned.

  Meanwhile, Roosevelt asked Harvard historian Albert Bush nell Hart to investigate Sunnyside. In a letter expressing simultaneously doubts about feminism, concerns about having removed Quackenbos, and the limits of his own power, he wrote, “I am very uneasy about…[her] unsoundness of judgment which is both hysterical and sentimental…. The fact is that on these southern plantations we are faced with a condition of things that is very puzzling. Infamous outrages are perpetrated—outrages that would warrant radical action if they took place in Oyster Bay or Cambridge; but where they actually do occur, the surroundings, the habits of life, the sentiments of the people, are so absolutely different that we are in reality living in a different age, and we simply have to take this into account in endeavoring to enforce laws which cannot be enforced save by juries.” Hart investigated and exonerated Percy.

  Yet Percy actually had failed. The State Department forwarded Quackenbos’ report to the Italian government in confidence. Throughout Italy the government put up signs in railroad depots warning emigrants away from the Delta. The Austrian government simply forbade emigration there.

  Of 8 million people entering the United States from foreign countries between 1892 and 1906, only 2,697 claimed Mississippi as their destination. Most were Italians brought over for Percy’s experiment. There would be few more.

  There was something dark about Mississippi, darker even than the rest of the South. And it would grow darker still.

  Percy concluded, “Italian immigration has not been a success…principally because the people of the Delta accustomed for a good many years to handling negro laborers are not fit to handle any other.”

  But the Delta was still starved for labor. In 1907 the boll weevil crossed the Mississippi River. The Delta suffered, but not as much as elsewhere; its climate and soil gave its cotton some resistance to the weevil. Demand for Delta cotton only increased. Percy observed wryly: “There is no labor…with which to develop [the state]. Mississippians have no idea of doing any work themselves and nobody else on God’s green earth is thinking about coming here or can be made to contemplate such a dire possibility.”

  To seize land from the river, to build his society, more than ever Percy needed labor. In the South labor had always, one way or another, come down to race. Percy had tried to escape that tar pit. He had failed, both in recruiting independent white farmers from the Midwest and white sharecroppers from Europe. The future of the Delta and of whites like Percy was wedded to the black race more than ever, however much men of either race resisted.

  CHAPTER NINE

  IN 1903, THE YEAR Vardaman was elected governor, even W. E. B. Du Bois, the great black leader who was then considered a radical, commended “the representatives of the best white Southern public opinion,” adding “[A] partially undeveloped people should be ruled by the best of their stronger and better neighbors for their own good, until such time as they can start and fight the world’s battles alone.”

  In effect, Du Bois was calling upon men like LeRoy Percy to protect the Negro from emerging southern demagogues and the mob. In order to attract labor to build his society, Percy was doing just that, with some success. Percy’s friend Alfred Stone told the American Economic Association: “If I were asked what one factor makes most for the amicable relations between the races in the delta I should say without hesitation the absence of a white laboring class, particularly of field laborers…. There were no small [white-owned] farms, no towns, no manufacturing enterprises, no foothold for the poor white, who is here a negligible, if not an absolutely unknown quantity.”

  This did not make the Delta the promised land. Lynchings did occur there—one occurred even in Percy’s own Washington County—and they reverberated through the region’s overwhelmingly black population, which in some areas exceeded 90 percent of the total. And, few places in the South saw more brutality than Delta levee camps. The camps were often isolated, surrounded by jungle, where one or two white men controlled a hundred “of the most reckless meanest niggers in the world,” according to William Hemphill, a young engineer from the North who worked above Greenville and who also worked on the Panama Canal. He found the camps hellish. “You have seen a swarm of gnats bunched together. You can form some idea of how thick the mosquitoes are here…I killed a bluestriped scorpion which I found in my bedclothes.” But mostly he found violence: “The way these levee niggers shoot one another is something fearful. One got shot in a crap game last night. It didn’t even stop the game. If one of the white foremen shoots a couple of niggers on the works and it is by no means an unheard of or infrequent thing the work is not stopped…. The long arm of the law does not reach [here].” Once a levee contractor even murdered “the Mercy Man,” a white man who issued fines for mistreating mules. On the levees mules were worth more than blacks. Black levee workers recited a saying, “Kill a mule, buy another. Kill a nigger, hire another.”

  Yet the Delta did offer blacks at least relative promise. Judge Robert R. Taylor of Indiana, a member of the Mississippi River Commission, pointed out that levees, by allowing the mining of the river’s wealth, also allowed “the negro to better his condition…. In considerable and increasing numbers he is buying land and becoming an independent cultivator…. Nowhere else in the South are as favorable opportunities offered to the black man as in the reclaimed Mississippi lowlands, and nowhere else is he doing as much for his own up-lifting.”

  Percy and the men with whom he dominated the region, and particularly Washington County, did create something special—at least given the times. Largely because of Percy, who was on the board of one bank and influenced others, lenders did not hesitate to offer blacks mortgages. In 1900 blacks owned two-thirds of all Delta farms, probably the highest proportion of black land ownership in the country. Also largely because of Percy, Greenville had black policemen, a black justice of the peace, and every mailman in the city was black. In 1913 the Census Bureau concluded that the plantation organization was “more firmly fixed in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta than in any other area of the South.” But even sharecropping could offer opportunity. Alfred Stone founded an agricultural experiment station to develop better cotton and, as a social scientist, kept meticulous records of his settlements with sharecroppers. (He would also later make Mississippi the first state to enact a sales tax.) In 1901 the average family on his plantation cleared $1,000 after all expenses were deducted, and in 1903 they cleared roughly $700.

  Mississippi outside the Delta contrasted sharply with this picture. There, whites were driving blacks off the land, burning down their barns, whipping them, forcing them to sell at a loss, murdering them. In one Mississippi county 309 men, including the sheriff, were indicted; some towns bragged that they were “nigger-f
ree.” More important was an outbreak of lynchings of almost incomprehensible viciousness. Ho Chi Minh, then a French journalist, collected clippings that included headlines such as, from the New Orleans States, “Today a Negro Will Be Burned by 3,000 Citizens,” and from the Jackson (Mississippi) Daily News, “Negro J.H. to Be Burnt by the Crowd at Ellistown This Afternoon at 5 P.M.” The Vicksburg Evening-Post reported the lynching of a black husband and wife accused of murdering a white man: “The blacks were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murders [sic] were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his skull was fractured, and one of his eyes, knocked with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket….[A] large corkscrew…. was bored into the man and woman…and then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering flesh.” Then the crowd burned them at the stake, after partially filling their mouths and nostrils with mud to prevent a fast death from smoke inhalation.

  Vardaman, the governor, fed on, and fed, the hatred. Although he sent troops to prevent one lynching, he also said it did not matter whether innocent blacks were lynched since “[t]he good [Negroes] are few, the bad are many, and it is impossible to tell what ones are…dangerous to the honor of the dominant race until the damage is done.” Once he stated, “We would be justified in slaughtering every Ethiop on the earth to preserve unsullied the honor of one Caucasian home.” Another time he said, “If it is necessary every Negro in the State will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”

  Percy had already attacked Vardaman’s race-baiting, most publicly in the speech that Roosevelt had so liked. Since then Vardaman’s rhetoric had only grown more barbaric. When Vardaman began pursuing a seat in the United States Senate, Percy moved to block him, denouncing his racial views as “infamous,” condemning his willingness to use race “to inflame the passions and hatred of his audience, hoping out of it to gain a few paltry votes.”