by H. W. Brands
But equally inevitable was continuing consolidation in the capitalist sphere. “Small businesses, as far as they still remained, were reduced to the condition of rats and mice, living in holes and corners, and counting on evading notice for the enjoyment of existence. The railroads had gone on combining till a few great syndicates controlled every rail in the land. In manufactories, every important staple was controlled by a syndicate. These syndicates, pools, trusts, or whatever their name, fixed prices and crushed all competition except when combinations as vast as themselves arose.”
Workers and others decried the consolidation and demanded its undoing. But they were shouting into the wind, for the trend was irresistible. “Early in the last century”—the twentieth—“the evolution was completed by the final consolidation of the entire capital of the nation.… The epoch of trusts had ended in The Great Trust.” But because the Great Trust controlled the entire productive capacity of the nation, the people recognized that it was nothing other than the nation itself. Capitalism no longer commanded the nation, for capitalism was no longer distinct from the nation.
“In a word, the people of the United States concluded to assume the conduct of their own business, just as one hundred-odd years before they had assumed the conduct of their own government, organizing now for industrial purposes on precisely those same grounds that they had organized for political purposes. At last, strangely late in the world’s history, the obvious fact was perceived that no business is so essentially the public’s business as the industry and commerce on which the people’s livelihood depends, and that to entrust it to private persons to be managed for private profit is a folly similar in kind, though vastly different in magnitude, to that of surrendering the functions of political government to kings and nobles to be conducted for their personal glorification.”
Julian, having listened in astonishment, remarks that the final step—the nationalization of industry and commerce—must have entailed terrible convulsions.
“On the contrary,” Dr. Leete replies. “There was absolutely no violence. The change had been long foreseen. Public opinion had become fully ripe for it, and the whole mass of people was behind it.” And capitalism itself had been the agent of the people’s education.
“They had seen for many years syndicates handling revenues greater than those of states, and directing the labors of hundreds of thousands of men with an efficiency and economy unattainable in smaller operations. It had come to be recognized as an axiom that the larger the business the simpler the principles that can be applied to it.… Thus it came about that, thanks to the corporations themselves, when it was proposed that the nation should assume their functions, the suggestion implied nothing which seemed impracticable even to the timid.”14
BELLAMY’S BOOK INCLUDED a great deal more: of elaboration on how democracy’s takeover of capitalism occurred, of detail regarding daily life under the new socialist order, of insight into relations between the sexes in the twenty-first century (including the inevitable love affair between Julian West and Edith Leete). Many reviewers and perhaps a comparable portion of readers found the narrative framework flimsy, but the glories of postmodern science and technology appealed to the same American audience that for decades had been snatching up translations of the works of Jules Verne.
Yet it was the promise of an end to strife, of the peaceful resolution of the problems that appeared so insoluble to Americans in the late 1880s, that caused Bellamy’s book to create a political sensation. Looking Backward sold 200,000 copies in its first year; meanwhile it inspired the establishment of “Nationalist Clubs” all across the country, comprising doctors and lawyers, journalists and professors and clergymen. William Dean Howells of the Atlantic Monthly urged Bellamy to head up a Nationalist political party embodying the principles of the book. Some Boston Bellamyites started a newspaper called the Nationalist and drafted a declaration of principles embracing brotherhood as “one of the eternal truths,” decrying competition as “the application of the brutal law of the survival of the strongest and most cunning,” and echoing Bellamy in calling for democracy to seize control of capitalism and “have all industries operated in the interest of all by the nation.”15
The Bellamyites thrilled as the Nationalist idea caught on. “The intelligent and educated are joining,” one exulted. “Men and women of wealth, brains, and of heart are interested.… This movement has reached out and is beginning to unite the farmers with the toilers of the city. It has inspired and is inspiring countless books, magazine articles, editorials and articles in the daily press. We have fifty or more papers unreservedly advocating Nationalism.” When skeptics and defenders of the capitalist status quo attacked Bellamy’s ideas, the Nationalists mobilized in defense. “Professor Harris remarks sententiously: ‘Real human beings have other needs than food, clothing, and shelter,’ ” the Nationalist declared of one critic. “He seems to forget, however, that these wants must be satisfied before any other needs can be considered. Would the professor try to feed the hungry on a lecture entitled ‘The Higher Aims of the Concord Philosophy’? … Man must have bread before Browning.” The professor and his ilk had better beware. “Two strong currents of thought are converging toward Nationalism—one running through the hearts of the wage-slaves, the other through the minds and hearts and consciences of clear-headed, men-loving men and women. Does Prof. Harris stand so firm that neither current may sweep him off his feet?”16
Part Five
THE DECADE OF THE CENTURY
Chapter 16
MEET JIM CROW
In December 1890 Booker Washington received a letter from a woman he had heard of but hadn’t met.
Prof. B. T. Washington:
I am so impressed with the reply to your critics in the current issue of the Plaindealer that I at last do what I have been intending ever since I read your manly criticism of our corrupt and ignorant ministry—write to one who is a stranger to me in every respect save that of reputation.
I have long since seen that some one of the name and standing of yourself, among ourselves, must call a halt and be the Martin Luther of our times in condemning the practices of our ministers, and I know no one more fitted for the task than yourself.…
To a man whose conscience is his guide, words of encouragement and sustenance are not necessary, yet I cannot refrain from adding my mite to the approbation your utterances and work have received from the rank and file of our people.
Respectfully,
Ida B. Wells1
Ida Wells was a few years younger than Washington. Like Washington, she had been born a slave, in her case in Mississippi. Her mother was a cook and her father a carpenter who became active in Republican politics during Reconstruction. “My earliest recollections are of reading the newspaper to my father and an admiring group of his friends,” Ida wrote later. But her father had encountered the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, the purpose of which was precisely to discourage freedmen like him from participating in politics. “I heard the words Ku Klux Klan long before I knew what they meant,” she recounted. “I knew dimly that it meant something fearful, by the anxious way my mother walked the floor at night when my father was out to a political meeting.” Her father survived the Klan and Redemption—although his political career, like the political careers and indeed participation of nearly all Southern blacks, did not—only to succumb, with her mother and youngest brother, to an 1878 yellow fever epidemic. Ida had attended a Freedmen’s Bureau school and the Methodist Rust College, and on the strength of this education and a boldness born of desperation she made herself up to look older than her sixteen years and attempted the state examination to certify teachers. She passed and became the breadwinner to her five surviving siblings.2
In time an aunt invited her to Memphis. Ida found foster families for the elder children and took the younger ones with her. She taught school in Memphis and contributed a regular column to a local black newspaper. “I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things wh
ich concerned our people,” she explained. “Knowing that their education was limited, I never used a word of two syllables where one would serve the purpose.” The column, which was reprinted by other papers, bolstered her confidence and gave her a feeling of responsibility for the black community; when a railroad conductor on the Chesapeake, Ohio & Southwestern one day told her to move from the first-class car to the smoking car, she refused. He tried to move her bodily, and she physically resisted. Finally he stopped the train. This time she did leave, only to march to the courthouse and file suit against the road for assault and illegal discrimination. The trial judge dismissed the assault charge but awarded Wells five hundred dollars in damages on grounds that the railroad had failed to comply with a Tennessee law mandating that railcars set aside for blacks be comparable to those reserved for whites. The victory astonished Memphis. “A Darky Damsel Obtains a Verdict for Damages,” a local paper headlined. “What It Cost to Put a Colored School Teacher in a Smoking Car.”3
The Tennessee supreme court, however, reversed the judgment, accepting the railroad’s argument that the smoking car was comparable to the first-class car (it wasn’t even very smoky, the railroad’s lawyers contended) and that Wells was a chronic troublemaker. Not only did Wells lose the five hundred dollars but she was assessed two hundred dollars in court costs.
The penalty strained her budget, and the notoriety endangered her teaching job, from which she was ultimately fired. But the experience heightened her stature in the African American community. The black press ran stories she wrote of her clash with the railroad and carried her critique of other aspects of life in the South. She didn’t hesitate to challenge black leaders when she thought they fell shy of their obligations to the race; her own criticism of members of the black clergy was what disposed her to congratulate Booker Washington for his efforts in that regard. The owners of a Memphis paper, the Free Speech and Headlight, offered her a regular writing position; she countered with the condition that they accept her as co-owner and equal partner. When they agreed, she became a still greater force in journalism and in African American affairs generally. She attended national conventions of journalists and won election as an officer of the National Colored Press Association. By the early 1890s no black women in America and few black men were better known than Ida Wells.
WASHINGTON WAS HAPPY for Wells’s praise but didn’t know what to make of the rest of her letter. It suggested that she labored under a misconception as to his aims and approach. He was no Martin Luther, and he intended no reformation.
In 1890 Washington headed the Tuskegee Institute, a teacher’s college and industrial school in central Alabama’s cotton belt. He had landed the job nine years earlier on the strength of a recommendation from the Hampton Institute’s General Armstrong, who described Washington to the Tuskegee trustees as “a very competent capable mulatto, clear headed, modest, sensible, polite and a thorough teacher and superior man; the best man we ever had here.” Washington spent the 1880s building Tuskegee from a struggling, unnoticed school for black teachers to a bustling showpiece of African American self-help. To support the school and train the students, he borrowed money, bought a farm, and put the students to work planting and hoeing. To expand the school, he directed the students to build new classrooms and dormitories. “I told those who doubted the wisdom of the plan,” he later explained regarding his construction strategy, “that I knew that our first buildings would not be so comfortable or so complete in their finish as buildings erected by experienced workmen, but that in the teaching of civilization, self-help, and self-reliance, the erection of the buildings by the students themselves would more than compensate for any lack of comfort or fine finish.”
Self-reliance became the Tuskegee motto. In the course of the building campaign Washington decided his students should even make the bricks for their structures. He knew no more about brick-making than they; he tried one recipe, then another and another, all of which failed. Only the fourth try, funded by the pawn of his watch, yielded a passable product. The multiple results of the effort—cheap bricks for the buildings, on-the-job training for the students, a surplus of bricks to sell for cash—exemplified the Washington method. An additional outcome was no less important. “The making of these bricks caused many of the white residents of the neighborhood to begin to feel that the education of the Negro was not making him worthless, but that in educating our students we were adding something to the wealth and comfort of the community.”4
Yet self-reliance had its limits, some of which Washington transcended by ceaseless fund-raising. On numerous trips to the North he became an enthusiast of American capitalism. He called on capitalists and their children to support Tuskegee and his vision of black progress. Many were initially skeptical, but Washington often brought them around. “The first time I ever saw the late Collis P. Huntington, the great railroad man,” Washington remembered, “he gave me two dollars for our school.” Washington interpreted the miserly contribution as a challenge. “I did not blame him for not giving me more, but made up my mind that I was going to convince him by tangible results that we were worthy of larger gifts.” Washington’s persistence paid. “The last time I saw him, which was a few months before his death, he gave me fifty thousand dollars.” Andrew Carnegie was a similar long-term project. “The first time I saw him, ten years ago,” Washington wrote in 1901, “he seemed to take but little interest in our school, but I was determined to show him that we were worthy of his help.” The decade’s effort netted a twenty-thousand-dollar donation.
Washington’s years of asking and receiving inspired him to defend the likes of Huntington and Carnegie against their radical detractors.
My experience in getting money for Tuskegee has taught me to have no patience with those people who are always condemning the rich because they are rich, and because they do not give more to objects of charity. In the first place, those who are guilty of such sweeping statements do not know how many people would be made poor, and how much suffering would result, if wealthy people were to part all at once with any large proportion of their wealth in a way to disorganize and cripple great business enterprises. Then very few persons have any idea of the large number of applications for help that rich people are constantly being flooded with. I know wealthy people who receive as many as twenty calls a day for help. More than once, when I have gone into the offices of rich men, I have found half a dozen persons waiting to see them, and all come for the same purpose, that of securing money.5
That Washington often succeeded where the half dozen didn’t testified to his persuasiveness, but also to his personal conservatism. Washington’s deference to the status quo suited one who constantly solicited the help of the rich and powerful, but it also reflected his deeply held belief that change came best when it came incrementally. He had lived through the dramatic changes of Reconstruction and had watched them provoke the backlash of Redemption. And though the largesse of Northern capitalists underwrote much of what happened at Tuskegee, Washington judged that Southern capitalists were more dependable allies in the long run. Conscience might motivate Huntington and Carnegie for a while, but conscience was fickle. In the spirit of Adam Smith, Washington looked not to the beneficence of whites for Tuskegee’s daily bread but to their self-interest. He would align the self-interest of Southern whites with the success of Tuskegee. The bricks were but the start.
DEMOCRACY WAS EVEN less reliable than conscience. Better than most of his contemporaries, Washington understood that democracy sooner or later expressed the will of the majority, whatever courts or constitutional amendments might declare. Democracy hadn’t prevented Redemption, which in fact had been accomplished in the name of democracy. Blacks were a minority in America and always would be; for them to demand what the majority wasn’t ready to give was to spit into the wind.
Washington had seen the democratic rights of blacks unravel in the wake of Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan delivered the heavy first blows, driving black voter
s from the polls by terror. But the brutal tactics of the Klan—the many hundreds of murders and the countless beatings and threats—compelled the Grant administration to take ameliorative measures, which broke up the Klan. Subsequent methods of disfranchisement, in most cases more subtle, worked better over time. The simplest was fraud: not counting black votes. This could be done by itself or, more easily, in conjunction with the secret ballot, which was catching on across the country as an ostensible step toward greater democracy. Slightly more complicated were various schemes for suppressing registration by blacks. Literacy tests, which required prospective voters to read and interpret constitutional passages to the satisfaction of white registrars, disqualified many African Americans. Extended residency requirements discriminated against those ambitious blacks who moved around trying to better their economic condition. Poll taxes made poor blacks think twice about casting their votes. Racial gerrymandering—dividing the black vote among several districts, in none of which blacks formed a majority—suggested that even if blacks did vote, their votes would be wasted. Grandfather clauses, which exempted potential voters from literacy or other tests if they or their forebears had voted prior to Reconstruction, ensured that the constraints operated upon blacks but not upon whites.
Such tactics, though less egregious than the actions of the Klan, didn’t go unnoticed in the North. Some Republicans bridled at the affront to egalitarianism; others merely chafed at the Democrats’ renewed dominance of the Southern states. Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt’s ally and a Massachusetts congressman, in 1890 proposed a measure to prevent such political discrimination. Lodge’s federal elections bill would place congressional elections under federal supervision; should federal monitors detect fraud, intimidation, or discrimination and the Southern states fail to provide remedies, the president would be authorized to employ the army to guarantee fair elections. “The Government which made the black man a citizen is bound to protect him in his rights as a citizen of the United States,” Lodge declared, “and it is a cowardly Government if it does not do it. No people can afford to write anything into their Constitution and not sustain it. A failure to do what is right brings its own punishment to nations as to men.”6