Federal officials who earnestly hoped that local law enforcement would join in the effort to stop the movement, rejoiced at what they regarded as a bit of good news from Wills: he gleefully reported that “the General Manager Dickerson is in jail in Atlanta” and hoped he would implicate Callie House. Dicker-son had appealed but was “simply playing for time in order to pay his fine of $1,000.00 and continue his rascally proceedings.” Wills forwarded to Washington headquarters clippings from the Atlanta Constitution and the Nashville American and Banner, containing inflammatory invective about the case from the local judge, who had said it was “such a succinct history of the life and possible death of I. H. Dickerson, General Manager, and the death of the Association.” Wills thought they should “congratulate” themselves.27
The press clippings claimed that Dickerson had “deluded darkies” in thirty-four states and the Atlanta chapter sued and had him jailed for nonpayment of $800 bail. He allegedly owned considerable real estate in Nashville, dressed like a bishop, and appeared as a “thoroughly poised negro of the straight strain.” At a time when secretaries and clerks were men, he traveled with “a female secretary named Callie House.” The press also reported falsely that hundreds of witnesses had appeared in court. A story in the Nashville Banner of March 5, 1901, erroneously reported the filing of twenty-two cases against Dickerson already and that he and House had “reaped a rich harvest.” In a March 6, 1901, article the Banner inadvertently affirmed the grassroots support for the Association by complaining about the proliferation of chapters “in almost every little hamlet and village throughout the south.”
The Georgia State Supreme Court summarized the case very differently from the news stories: a local court had convicted Dickerson of “swindling” for his organizational activities in March 5, 1901. The judge had sentenced him to a fine of $1,000 and twelve months on the chain gang. However, the prosecution introduced only one witness, who accused Dicker-son of selling three membership certificates for seventy-five cents each, promising to send the money to Vaughan’s group in Washington and failing to send the funds. Dickerson testified that he had had no dealings with Vaughan and had never said he did. A local mutual assistance fund for burying the dead and caring for the sick controlled the funds in question. The State Supreme Court overturned Dickerson’s conviction on July 22, 1901. At a time when most cases went no further than the local courts, the Association used its limited funds to pay for the appeal.28
The Georgia State Supreme Court, removed from the local judge’s rhetorical battering of the ex-slave pension cause, treated the case as a routine fraud charge. They announced that in order to swindle, Dickerson needed to state that pensions had been passed, and not that he wanted legislation enacted, a perfectly legal organizing goal. In August, two weeks after the State Supreme Court decision, Wills told his superiors that, unfortunately, Dickerson’s conviction had been reversed but that he “had a good time for thought, having been confined in jail for a number of months” for not posting bond. However, Dickerson remained a “bad fellow, and I should to wonder if his confinement has given him an opportunity to invent new ideas to start in the work again.” They would “watch and wait,” he told his superiors in Washington.29
The prey the federal officials were determined to ensnare was Callie House. The production of the single witness against Dickerson and his prosecution seemed tied to the efforts of A. Wills and others in the Post Office Department and the Pension Bureau to make a case against her. Secretary of the Interior Ethan A. Hitchcock wrote to the postmaster general on March 18, 1901, forwarding a letter from Commissioner of Pensions Evans about Dickerson’s conviction. The forwarded letter stated, “Callie House (Dickerson’s Private Secretary) was charged with being implicated with Dickerson in this matter but could not be located and arrested.” Meanwhile, Wills insisted that the department should have House prosecuted in Atlanta. He made it clear that he regarded her “as being as bad, if not worse than Dickerson.”30
The postmaster general’s office passed along the false information that Dickerson had been convicted and House charged to its legal department to include in a review of whether to grant the Association’s request to lift the fraud order. The post office cited the Dickerson “conviction” and the implication of House as a reason to refuse the revocation of the fraud order. Federal officials made the most of Dickerson’s “conviction” in attacking House.31
Struggling to stay afloat, House and the local chapters repeatedly used not only the more expensive railway express but the names and addresses of various other individuals as mail recipients. However, House’s name on anything raised suspicion. On September 25,1901, the post office issued a fraud order against Delphia House, Callie’s middle name and the name of her daughter, and A. W. Washington of Arcola, Mississippi, when Washington sent Delphia a money order for $1.80. The Arcola postmaster, on the alert for anyone involved in the movement and seeing the name House, stopped the letter, claiming that it had been “mailed open,” which gave him an excuse to read it. The quite innocent letter asked for twelve membership certificates at fifteen cents each, stating, “I wants them so I can Collected National annual Dues from each member.” Washington said she had received their notice about trying to have the fraud order revoked to “give us a clear speech with each other and our Governments.” She had had extra meetings and would send $5 “on that fraud order to help have it revoke pass.” Her local chapter “wants to hear Prof. I. H. Dickerson very bad.” If he would come, they would “take care of him and pay his way down and back home from Nashville.” The correspondence indicated strong local support for the movement, which only increased the federal officials’ anxiety over the impact of the ex-slave pension cause.32
Mrs. House complained repeatedly about the denial of their First Amendment right to petition and the unfair lack of due process involved in the government’s harassment of the association. She insisted that the unreviewable powers of the government could lend themselves to abuse. As if to validate her concerns, in 1904 the Justice Department indicted Harrison Barrett and Assistant Attorney General James Tyner, nephew and uncle, as well as the two principal Justice Department officials who harassed Mrs. House and the association, for collusion to profit by abusing their discretion under the fraud laws. Tyner, age seventy-seven, who had served as postmaster general under President Hayes, was planning to close out his career as assistant attorney general for the Post Office Department.
However, first, Barrett left for private practice. Then he and Tyner colluded to influence businesses to retain his services for protection against the possibility of a fraud order. Since Tyner remained in the government, he could ostensibly have decided to target any business he chose. Upon entering office, the Roosevelt administration found the Post Office Department filled with corruption and began an investigation. As a result, Tyner was accused of bribe taking. His wife and her sister, apparently Barrett’s mother, went to his office and secretly took all the documents from the safe. When Postmaster General Payne learned they had been there, he chased them through the streets of Washington in his carriage, ending up at their house. They refused to admit him. Tyner and Barrett admitted that the charges were valid. However, based on a legal technicality they were acquitted.33
Needless to say, Barrett and Tyner did not offer the Ex-Slave Association the same insulation from fraud orders they dangled before businessmen to collect bribes. They knew the association of impecunious freedpeople could not afford the prices they charged. Their crimes, however, only underscored the unfairness in the Post Office Department’s use of fraud orders.34
After Dickerson’s conviction and the continued harassment and denial of personal mail, Mrs. House began to fathom the deep-seated hostility of the Post Office and the Pension Bureau toward their cause. The association could do little about scam artists and impostors except to report them. However, the officers continued to try to respond to the government’s concerns. As she continued her work in the cause, House d
id not yet accept the reality that federal officials would remain unsatisfied until the association completely abandoned the pursuit of pensions.
CHAPTER 6
Avoiding Destruction
More real harm is probably done by … regular agents…arousing as they do, false hopes concerning a supposedly overdue restitution of Freedmen’s Bureau funds, or reparation for historical wrongs, to be followed by inevitable disappointment, and probably distrust of the dominant race and of the Government.
COMMISSIONER OF PENSIONS H. CLAY EVANS
(1902)
BETWEEN 1901 AND 1915, Mrs. House and the harassed and beleaguered Ex-Slave Association continued to organize local chapters to deliver medical and burial aid to aged members and their families. Association members also continued to collect petitions, believing that recording as many ex-slaves as possible and petitioning the government was not only right but might eventually succeed, although they became increasingly embittered about federal harassment of the movement. Government officials continued to treat them as second-class citizens, unentitled to behave as political agents or free Americans. However, Mrs. House’s persistence kept the movement alive.
House felt little joy at the celebrations of the new century. The expositions and fairs and the widespread expressions of hope that human aspirations would be realized through the wonders of technology and quickened social awareness held little meaning for her. Mrs. House’s cause to help the poor exslaves would seem to have been attractive to progressives, who worked to cure social ills ranging from impure food and drugs to housing for urban immigrants, but wider support remained elusive. A few white progressives helped to found the NAACP and the National Urban League, but nationally whites paid little attention to solving the race problem or to the claims of ex-slaves. The Republican Party platforms of 1900,1904, and 1908 had planks insisting upon the protection of black voters. Twelve more years of Republican control only saw the problem grow in magnitude. Equal protection under the law remained unenforced and the plight of blacks ignored. Between 1901 and 1910, newspapers reported the lynching of at least 846 persons in the United States. Of this number, 754 were African Americans. Ninety percent of the lynchings took place in the South. The largely unresponsive state and federal governments did little or nothing to remedy the abuse.1
While Mrs. House and other African Americans mobilized mutual assistance associations and civil rights organizations, mainstream newspapers’ race coverage was largely devoted to stories about the threat of supposed “black-beast rapists.” The papers also reported such sensational stories as a white woman in Chicago explaining that she had lived with a “Negro” for twelve years because he had held her “captive” in his apartment, too afraid to leave even when he went to work. Such limited documentation of the black experience was augmented by an occasional piece on the professional interests or leisure pursuits of the local African-American business and professional class. Meanwhile, African-American newspapers focused on social engagements, self-help activities toward progress for the race that made no demands on whites and did not upset the established order, and articles on Jim Crow and the absence of civil rights. These papers continued to ignore the embattled pension movement, the loyalty of its members, or its potential for the working class, barely educated nobodies and the poor.2
Also, in Nashville, the home base of House and the ExSlave Association, African-American business and professional leaders totally ignored House and the ex-slave pension cause. For these African Americans, the major stories of the early years of the twentieth century included an unsuccessful boycott of Jim Crow streetcars in 1905. It also included the founding of the Globe by Richard H. Boyd to support the boycott. The newspaper lasted into the 1960s as a voice of middle-class activities and aspirations. Black leaders also pointed proudly to the opening of a segregated public university for blacks, in 1912, the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial (A&I) College, in a period when such colleges were being established by state governments throughout the South. Because of the presence of Meharry Medical College, the black private colleges, the National Baptist Publishing Board, and then Tennessee A&I, Nashville’s professional class of lawyers, physicians, and dentists grew. The city also had a middle class of barbers, ministers, teachers, and semiskilled laborers. These groups were of sufficient size to support Greenwood Amusement Park, the Globe, and a number of civic and social organizations. African-American shoemakers, liquor dealers, blacksmiths, and barbers started to lose to white immigrant competition in 1900-1910. But the businesses that primarily served blacks continued to prosper by serving a segregated “captive” population.3
African Americans probably thought the Jim Crow chill in the early-twentieth-century air would diminish when, in office only a month, President Theodore Roosevelt not only invited Booker T. Washington to the White House but dined with him during their discussions. The incident outraged white southerners, but blacks hoped this social interaction would lead to a new commitment to punish lynching, ensure access to the ballot, and overturn Jim Crow. Mrs. House and the Ex-Slave Association thought it might lead to an end to their exclusion from the mail service; however, beyond the affirmation of Booker T. Washington’s control of patronage, little of substance resulted.4
By the fall of 1901, Mrs. House and the other Association officers desperately needed the fraud order lifted. Their struggle to keep in touch with agents, the membership, and their families required a great deal of money, time, and energy. Members paid twenty-five cents, collected as an initiation fee, of which ten cents went to the territorial or state council; ten cents to the national; and five cents to the organizers and agents for each new member recruited. The ten cents paid monthly remained in a local fund for use as decided by the chapter for the mutual benefit of members. The national office utilized its funds to prepare and distribute literature, hold conventions and meetings, and to maintain the membership rolls and petitions. Special contributions paid for lobbying. General Manager Isaiah Dickerson’s clerks kept the books and gave receipts to state agents. Callie House lectured and organized chapters and petition signing throughout the South. The association had to pay W. C. Lawson, its first attorney, hired to lobby in Washington when it decided it needed a professional to work on the association’s behalf. In 1899, they paid him $204 for his work. The Association made a few changes in administration in order to restrict the impact of the government’s campaign. In addition to using railway express services, Mrs. House and the agents had to collect funds and distribute materials personally rather than through the mails after the issuance of the fraud order. Also, the board of directors increased the initiation fee. It became “so much harder to obtain enough money to travel from place to place that they raised the amount to fifty cents, including twenty-five cents for the agent.”5
In addition to the changes in operation, the Association decided, in November 1901, to hire an experienced white Washington lawyer, Robert Abraham Lincoln Dick, to seek repeal of the fraud order. Dick specialized in pension matters and had been a law partner of Walter Vaughan at one time. He could see that the government was engaging in selective enforcement. He knew that the Post Office Department had not issued a fraud order or otherwise harassed Vaughan despite his profit seeking in selling his pamphlet and organizing his clubs. Dick believed that
The condition of the colored people in this country today and especially in the south brings forward a number of grave and serious questions, commercial and social as well as political, and the ablest statesmen as well as accomplished scholars and big-hearted philanthropists differ as to a solution of or a remedy for those conditions. The trend of opinion, however, seems in the direction that a national government response is required. A dozen different propositions have been advanced and the pensions idea to some people appeals with as great force as does the colonization idea to others.
He also knew that “the luxury of today becomes the necessity of tomorrow.” And that “a few years ago was generally regarded as a
dream or an absurdity is today existing fact.” He also saw that Callie House and her colleagues “believe that by education and agitation and with a strong organization appealing to Congress that eventually their appeal shall be listened [to] and they [are] earnest and honest in their belief and are acting in good faith.”6
At this time social reformers in the United States routinely sought inspiration, approval, and support from their British counterparts to influence American public opinion. Ida B. Wells had successfully persuaded the British to condemn lynching. Jane Addams modeled the Settlement House movement on private British social welfare programs. Dick knew that the British idea of giving pensions to needy subjects sixty-five years of age or older was under serious consideration. Previously the idea, he surmised, “would have been laughed out of the Parliament with ridicule and contempt.” However, having so many “feeble and decrepit people to support and the method of providing for them raises a serious question this as a matter of analogy.”
Dick also thought that if President Lincoln had lived the southern slave owners might have been paid a million dollars for their slaves as one of the conditions of Reconstruction; also that the “poor unfortunate ex-slaves would have been helped other than merely being told ‘you have your freedom like the animals and the birds,’ now be thankful and fend for yourself.” He also could not understand why the officers of the Ex-Slave Association could not “advocate these positions and not be guilty of any fraud.”
Dick met with Post Office Department and Justice Department officials and explained that members joined the association for a perfectly valid reason: they received mutual assistance for burial or medical costs. But in promoting pensions they gained “the influence and power of organization and association, exchanges of opinion and ideas. The pieces of literature books etc., the attendance upon lectures, debates etc are all potent factors in benefitting mankind in general and especially those who attend such things with proper, lawful and moral motives.” He also carefully outlined how the association handled its financial affairs in the usual pattern of such organizations.
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