The Association was in deep financial difficulty, and the legislative effort seemed stalled. Federal harassment of the ExSlave Association slowed the receipt of membership dues to a trickle. The chapters continued to provide mutual assistance but national political action came almost to a halt. Each time the association sought revocation of the fraud order, the assistant attorney general requested another supposed “investigation” of their current affairs. After the usual lack of investigation, government officials always reached the same conclusion: that Mrs. House and the others were “colored agitators and crooks.” This time inspector G. B. Keene reported that the national office of the association had not actually carried on any activities in two years since the fraud order “choked off” their resources. He calculated that since June 1905, based on intercepted mail, $95.53 had been collected and $62.93 disbursed, but a “considerable bill” for office rent had gone unpaid. Also, according to Keene, the secretary’s salary of $5 per week had not been paid in full. The association was bankrupt. Again, the officials made no effort to investigate the local chapters’ activities. Keene thought the fraud order should stand. Basing its decision on the report of inspector Keene, on January 18,1906, the Post Office Department denied the application for revocation.24
While the Association appealed to federal officials, developments in Congress further strengthened the Post Office Department’s hand. Assistant Attorney General Tyner expressed the same concern that association lawyers and others had raised about the postmaster issuing fraud orders without due process and suggested that individuals should have the right to a speedy appeal of such orders. However, Tyner was precisely the wrong person to lead the cause, as he had been identified as one of the principal corrupt officials in the Post Office Department. Everyone assumed that Tyner, upon his imminent retirement, wanted to protect clients from enforcement of the orders.25
James Tyner, assistant attorney general for the Post Office Department, authorized Harrison Barrett, his nephew and assistant, to harass the association with a fraud order. The order closed the mails to the group.
However, Congressman Edgar Crumpacker of Indiana, as persuaded as Mrs. House was that there was a due process problem, followed up by introducing a bill that would have impounded the mail while a hearing and judicial resolution took place. He complained that the number of fraud orders, most of which constrained business enterprises, had increased to 630 in the preceding two years, 71 more than in any four previous years. In addition, during the preceding year, every request for an injunction had been denied. The courts had said complainants could obtain a review of the decision but not of the facts to determine whether fraud actually existed. Crumpacker’s bill required judicial review of the law and the facts. Although the Judiciary Committee supported it, at first unanimously in January 1907, the Post Office Department ultimately managed to kill the legislation.26
Postmaster General George Cortelyou went public in April 1907 in an article in the North American Review, vigorously defending the existing procedures as in the public interest. Cortelyou, who presumably had the support of the Roosevelt administration in whatever he did, had extensive connections within the president’s party. A New Yorker, he had been secretary to several powerful men, including Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. As chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1904, he had conducted the campaign that elected Roosevelt. He brooked no interference with or curtailment of his powers as postmaster general. Cortelyou also had Tyner’s support of the legislation as an easy target. The postmaster insisted that fraudulent enterprises would simply continue to gouge the public during the legal appeals and that judicial review in advance would compromise the post office’s work of protecting consumers. In response, the Senate simply buried the bill in the committee. The Congress and officials within the department and the Roosevelt administration had squelched attempts to introduce reform and thwarted a measure that might have given due process to the association. As a result, the post office remained unfettered in making unilateral decisions on the subject.27
Mrs. House and the Association decided to try again to have the fraud order lifted. This time, on April 20,1907, Attorney Thomas Jones, representing R. E. Gilchrist, born a slave in Virginia in 1847 and the Association’s new secretary, wrote Assistant Attorney General R. F. Goodwin, asking that the fraud order be revoked. The letter explained that whatever had happened before, “future business methods here in Washington as elsewhere shall be clean.” Gilchrist had not known of the fraud order when he was elected, but he also knew of no “wrongdoing” by Dickerson, Callie House, and others.28
The board of the Association expelled Dickerson, despite no evidence of “wrongdoing” on his part, hoping that would please the officials. Being “embarrassed and interfered with,” Gilchrist wanted the fraud order withdrawn. He still believed the ex-pension measure was “a just one, and should be agitated by every intelligent colored man, until sufficient sentiment is created as will cause the enactment of some measure to relieve.” He pointed out that the group had new officers: A. W. Rogers of Williamstown, N.C., had been president of the association since May 1904, and Parker Moten, a Washington, D.C., shoemaker served as treasurer. When Rogers arrived in Washington to lobby for the association, The Washington Post reported that he hoped to achieve passage of a law to pension the ex-slaves.29
Despite her previous experiences, Mrs. House harbored a faint hope that this time the effort would succeed. No one involved with the Association realized that no matter what they said or did, the government was bent on suppressing the pension movement. But then the assistant attorney general’s response on May 16,1907, made clear that the problem was the very existence of the pension movement. He pointed out that in the meeting on April 18, Gilchrist had “state[d] plainly his intention of continuing to promote the same business.” The letter stated that not only would the department decline to revoke fraud orders against businesses and other institutions, it would not permit Gilchrist to use the mails individually unless he withdrew altogether from the pension movement. Just as the Post Office Department had done with Mrs. House, Dickerson, and other officials, the Association’s new leader could not personally send or receive mail. Gilchrist refused to withdraw from the association, and the order remained in force.30
The Association reorganized twice, to no avail. It clarified its mutual-aid function in their certificates and literature and elected new officers—excluding Callie House—hoping to reduce any antagonism caused by her defiance and the outspoken letters she had written to officials. The second reorganization and the expulsion of Dickerson had still garnered nothing. They did not understand at first how deeply committed the officials were to stopping the movement. Prosecution of obvious impostors and fraud orders against bona fide leaders in the movement provided a rationale for cutting off all financial support and mail, even from leaders’ friends and family, until the Association leaders had no alternative except to stop the work. Pension Bureau and postal officials repeatedly made a judgment that the pension idea undermined the national interest, which was keeping African Americans passive; the Association, the officials asserted, misled “credulous” African Americans, who did not understand that legislation would never pass. Because the organization and its leaders must agree that they would fail, they engaged in fraud by continuing to operate as if they had a chance to succeed. By the same standard any organization devoted to a remote, or an improbable legislative goal, was at risk. Gauged by such a measure, the NAACP’s long and unsuccessful struggle to gain an antilynching law could have been considered fraudulent.
In an effort to satisfy federal officials, this new certificate displays prominently the mutual assistance work of the association chapters.
Over the next few years, federal officials continued to fill their files with “sightings” of persons erroneously identified as Dickerson or Callie House. These imposters used their names to collect money from freedpeople. For example, on January 24, 1905, the pre
sident signed Senate Bill 2009, giving a pension to white veteran Richard Dunn of Cambridge, Maryland. Richard Dunn “colored,” of Chattanooga, wrote to the bureau that someone he identified as “L. Dickerson” had put a mark on the Congressional Record by the white Dunn, told him he represented the government, collected one dollar, and claimed that they, as ex-slaves, would receive a pension. He said Dicker-son also collected from other “colored” men. He wanted to know if pensions had been enacted. He described Dickerson as about forty years old, five feet, four inches tall, and weighing about 160 pounds. Even H. V. Cuddy, chief of the Law Division of the Pension Bureau, admitted that Dickerson did not fit the description of the man described but in passing described Dickerson as “an extremely smooth talker” with “the delivery of a trained orator.” He did not know Dickerson’s whereabouts, but the Washington office had been closed for more than a year. Cuddy noted that Dickerson had worked with Cal-lie House, but erroneously described her as “a thin-faced mulatto, who writes a fairly plain hand, and is an excellent talker.” Callie House was in fact a dark, heavyset woman. Cuddy thought that bureau officials should take testimony from Dunn to see if they could establish that he had given Dickerson money because he represented himself as a government employee. If so, they could prosecute Dickerson, Cuddy hoped.31
The post office seemed to view every piece of information it received as another opportunity to cast suspicion on Callie House. On December 28, 1906, Nashville Postmaster Wills wrote to Washington that he had a letter addressed to Thomas House that had previously been sent to her from the same address and returned to sender. On December 26, 1906, the superintendent of letter carriers told Wills that he thought the writer wanted to reach her by using Thomas House as an addressee, which “I believe to be a fictitious name used by Callie House.” On March 11, 1907, Wills responded that even though he had made no investigation he thought the letters addressed to “her brother” Thomas belonged to her and that the mailing “indicates to me she still continues the fraudulent business, and I think the case should be investigated at an early date.” Callie House, indeed, asked correspondents to send letters to her children, including Thomas, hoping to communicate with the chapters. However, they could have easily ascertained Thomas’s identity. The Nashville City Directory included the information that Callie House and Thomas House, her son, who worked as a railroad car cleaner, lived at the same address.32
The association continued to hold annual conventions without interruption despite the federal harassment. At the June 1907 convention in Washington, D.C., at Miles Memorial Church, A. W. Rogers of Newbern, North Carolina, presided as president. Reverend L. E. B. Rosser, pastor of the church, spoke, as did Armond Scott, a Washington attorney. The resolution endorsing the pension bill took a new tack; adding the rationale pushed originally by Vaughan: “to refill the depleted treasury of the South, made so by the ravages of war.” The strategy did not gain more support in Congress.33
On November 26, 1907, when inspector W. E. Greenaway asked what “is the status of this case?” Wills, the Nashville chief postmaster, replied, “Petered out entirely. The parties have evidently quit business—because we made it too hot to continue.” The post office believed it had successfully killed the organization by stopping its mail.34
A change in the White House after the 1908 election did not change the government’s stance toward the association. However, Mrs. House and other advocates continued to collect signatures and to organize in the ex-slave pension cause, even though the new Taft administration appointees and career officials in the Pension Bureau and Post Office Department continued their harassment. After Dickerson’s death in 1909, Mrs. House, described in the 1910 Census as a “traveling Lecturer” for the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, stayed on the road even more than before. Her children were able to care for themselves; the youngest child, Annie, was sixteen, and Mrs. House’s brother and his wife still lived next door. Mrs. House collected funds personally at local meetings and carefully stretched whatever she received to pay her fare to the next place. She met with agents and supervised their work. She stayed with local chapter members and had them send correspondence to her family. The group also had to hold more frequent local meetings to share information, instead of distributing flyers and other materials because of the government harassment. Association officers also tried to use intermediaries to send and receive mail pertaining to headquarters operations. None of these special efforts was easy and their movement suffered.35
Nevertheless, the association’s work in the field continued, as did the petition drive. In December 1909, the U.S. Senate took note of another set of petitions from ex-slaves that arrived at the Capitol but took no action. The petitions asked, as earlier ones had, for the passage of the bill by Senator Mason of Illinois, first introduced on June 6, 1898, and reintroduced in each Congress thereafter. The petition stated that the petitioners had seen service as slaves and believed they deserved pensions, just as did unknown and deceased soldiers. Only a few of the petitions remain in the government’s files. As with previous petitions, the pension seekers included their names, the names of their former owners, their ages, and their present addresses.36
From time to time the Post Office Department and the Pension Bureau would record rumors about Mrs. House and continuing meetings of people in the movement. On January 2, 1911, a constituent from Tuskegee, Alabama, M. A. Warren, sent Congressman Thomas Heflin a circular printed by a “negro preacher, for the purpose, I think, of fraudulently obtaining money from these negroes.” Warren thought the preacher had promised that money had already been appropriated in order to collect $5. He told Heflin, “I think you represent these old negroes in Congress as well as us white people, and if these claims of his are fraudulent, I think you ought to have the government put a stop to him and his association.” The local U.S. attorney told the assistant attorney general that under the “meager facts submitted” the state and not the federal government had jurisdiction so he should give it to the local prosecuting attorney. Still, neither the U.S. attorney nor local officials made any attempt to investigate whether the local chapter engaged in bona fide activities.37
A few complaints of alleged imposters continued to trickle in and the government used the complaints to reinforce the conclusion that the association was engaging in fraud. On April 24,1911, the postmaster general, F. H. Hitchcock, responded to the secretary of the interior concerning a complaint by Henry Parrish of Jackson, Mississippi, that alleged the use of the mails to defraud by two women, one of whom claimed to be Callie House of Nashville, Tennessee. He referred it to the chief inspector for handling. But the description of the woman did not fit Mrs. House. Congressman Swagar Sherley of Kentucky reported to the attorney general, based on a constituent’s letter, that “one of the negroes” employed by the Ohio River Saw Mill Company had given to an ex-slave association. He wanted to know if this violated the law because he believed that “ignorant negroes are being fleeced.” Assistant Attorney General W. R. Hair replied that they were sending the complaint to the Post Office for investigation because they had responsibility for the federal law that covered schemes to defraud through the mails. These complaints were simply acknowledged as additional evidence that the association still operated and as a reason to keep the fraud order in place.38
Even more positive political change in Nashville failed to attract the support for the pension cause Mrs. House still hoped for from African-American leaders. Locally, after William Howard Taft’s election to the presidency in 1908, division among the Democrats in the 1910 election permitted the first Republican governor since 1883, Ben W Hooper, to take office. He named an African-American adviser, a new man in town, Benjamin Carr. Also, President Taft revived James Napier’s political fortunes by naming him register of the Treasury, making him the first nationally recognized black leader from Nashville. Ben Carr was responsible for having Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial, the state college for “negroes
,” located in Nashville. He also engineered the city purchase of the John L. Hadley former slave plantation and its development as the first public park for African Americans, dedicated in 1912. But Carr showed no interest in the pension cause. Federal departments did not modify their behavior toward blacks, and matters worsened when the staunch segregationist Woodrow Wilson became president.39
The association held its Nineteenth Annual Convention on November 23-27, 1914. House managed to distribute a report to members despite the federal harassment. She reported that they met at Mount Gilead Baptist Church in Nashville, pastored by Reverend R. Page. Reverend William Atkins of Lynchburg, Virginia, served as president. “Two white friends” visited the convention before the opening of the meetings and assured them that the movement would succeed someday in having the ex-slaves paid. She asked that contributors continue their commitment to the work and asked that they send any funds to pay expenses. Attempting to bypass the scrutiny of Nashville postmaster Wills, Mrs. House asked that they reply to 1219 William Street in Chattanooga.40
Despite the barriers they faced, the movement had kept up a level of momentum since its inception—albeit inhibited. The chapters continued to provide mutual assistance, and Mrs. House and local chapters continued to gather petitions and work for the legislation. However, even though members kept sending petitions to Congress, passage of the ex-slave pension legislation seemed increasingly unlikely. The movement needed another strategy.41
CHAPTER 7
The Association Goes
to Federal Court
My Face Is Black Is True Page 14