by Jon Meacham
STANDING CORRECTED Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, 101.
THE MISTAKE WAS Ibid., 101.
“ROOSEVELT’S FREQUENT INVOCATION” Ibid., 91–92.
WE OF TO-DAY Theodore Roosevelt, “Lincoln and the Race Problem,” February 13, 1905, BlackPast.org, http://www.blackpast.org/1905-theodore-roosevelt-lincoln-and-race-problem.
THE COFOUNDER OF HULL-HOUSE See, for instance, Louise W. Knight, Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (New York, 2010); Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes, ed. Victoria Bissell Brown (Boston, 1999); Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (Urbana, Ill., 2002).
“JUSTICE AMONG THE NATIONS” Roosevelt, Rough Riders and An Autobiography, 243–44.
SHE WAS DELIGHTED Knight, Jane Addams, 173.
“WE FIGHT IN” Collier with Horowitz, Roosevelts, 166.
“EXACTLY AS MUCH” Roosevelt, Rough Riders and An Autobiography, 417.
BY HIS OWN ACCOUNT Ibid.
“A VOTE IS” Ibid., 417–18.
BECAUSE “HE IS” William Draper Lewis, The Life of Theodore Roosevelt (Philadelphia, 1919), 377.
THE CROWD HAD Knight, Jane Addams, 177–78.
“A GREAT PARTY HAS” Addams, “Why I Seconded Roosevelt’s Nomination,” 257.
“I PRIZED YOUR ACTION” “Telegram from Theodore Roosevelt to Jane Addams,” Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library, Dickinson State University, http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record?libID=o230361.
ISRAEL ZANGWILL WROTE ROOSEVELT Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, 131.
NOW AS A MATTER Ibid.
LEAVING THE HOTEL GILPATRICK Patricia O’Toole, “Assassination Foiled,” Smithsonian, November 2012.
“THEY WANTED TO” Frederick S. Wood, Roosevelt as We Knew Him: The Personal Recollections of One Hundred and Fifty of His Friends and Associates (Philadelphia, 1927), 278.
“AT ONE TIME” Theodore Roosevelt, “It Takes More Than That to Kill a Bull Moose: The Leader and the Cause,” October 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt Association, http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/site/c.elKSIdOWIiJ8H/b.9297449/k.861A/It_Takes_More_Than_That_to_Kill_a_Bull_Moose_The_Leader_and_The_Cause.htm.
“I ASK IN” Ibid.
FROM AN EMBOLISM “Theodore Roosevelt Dies Suddenly at Oyster Bay Home; Nation Shocked, Pays Tribute to Former President; Our Flag on All Seas and in All Land at Half Mast,” NYT, January 17, 1919.
“THERE CAN BE” Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 453.
FOUR · A New and Good Thing in the World
IT WAS WE, THE PEOPLE Susan B. Anthony, “Is It a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?” April 3, 1873, Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project, http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/anthony-is-it-a-crime-speech-text/.
I WOULD BUILD A WALL OF STEEL Clifford Walker, “Americanism Applied,” Proceedings of the Second Imperial Klonvokation Held at Kansas City, Missouri, Sept. 23, 24, 25, and 26, 1924, 27.
TYPED THE SPEECH Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 302.
HAD HARDLY BEEN AN ENTHUSIASTIC SUPPORTER John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York, 2009), 335–36 and 411–15; A. Scott Berg, Wilson (New York, 2013), 486–94. “I…am tied to a conviction, which I have had all my life, that changes of this sort ought to be brought about state by state,” Wilson said in 1915. Berg, Wilson, 487.
AFTER GENERATIONS OF ACTIVISM Flexner and Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle; Jean H. Baker, Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists (New York, 2005), and Baker’s edited volume Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited (New York, 2002); Sally G. McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York, 2008); Kathryn Kish Sklar, ed., Women’s Rights Emerges Within the Anti-Slavery Movement, 1830–1870: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 2000); Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York, 1981); Elizabeth Frost-Knappman and Kathryn Cullen-DuPont, eds., Women’s Suffrage in America: An Eyewitness History (New York, 2005).
A WAR FOR A MORE INCLUSIVE Berg, Wilson, 493. Wilson’s son-in-law William McAdoo, the secretary of the treasury, had told the president: “I felt that since no President of the United States had ever spoken in favor of woman’s suffrage, and that since we were fighting a war for democracy, it seemed to me that we could not consistently persist in refusing to admit women to the benefits of democracy on an equality with men.” Ibid.
“LOOKING TO THE GREAT” Woodrow Wilson, “Address to the Senate on the Nineteenth Amendment,” September 30, 1918, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=126468. He concluded: “That is my case. This is my appeal. Many may deny its validity, if they choose, but no one can brush aside or answer the arguments upon which it is based. The executive tasks of this war rest upon me. I ask that you lighten them and place in my hands instruments, spiritual instruments, which I do not now possess, which I sorely need, and which I have daily to apologize for not being able to employ.” Ibid.
ON ARRIVING IN WASHINGTON Baker, Sisters, 184.
“WHERE,” WILSON ASKED Ibid.
THE DEMONSTRATION THAT DAY Ibid., 185. See also Flexner and Fitzgerald, Century of Struggle, 256–57.
ANGRY MEN TAUNTED Flexner and Fitzgerald, Century of Struggle, 257.
THE Baltimore American REPORTED Ibid., 375.
“PRACTICALLY FOUGHT THEIR WAY” Ibid., 256.
ONLY THE ARRIVAL OF CAVALRY TROOPS Ibid., 256–57.
IN A SMALL MEETING Baker, Sisters, 205.
ALICE PAUL, A LEADING ADVOCATE Ibid., 183–220, is a useful sketch of Paul’s life and work. See also Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign (Champaign, Ill., 2007); J. D. Zahniser and Amelia R. Fry, Alice Paul: Claiming Power (New York, 2014); Mary Walton, A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot (New York, 2015); Christine Lunardini, Alice Paul: Equality for Women (New York, 2012); Bernadette Cahill, Alice Paul, the National Woman’s Party and the Vote: The First Civil Rights Struggle of the 20th Century (Jefferson, N.C., 2015).
THE FACT THAT THE FIGHT Baker, Sisters, 205.
THE FOUNDING CONVENTION McMillen, Seneca Falls, 71–103.
“I DO NOT CARE” Baker, Sisters, 205. “The president announced that he had never thought about women’s suffrage,” Baker wrote. “It had not, he said duplicitously, been brought to his attention. He did not know what his position might be on this new matter, but he hoped for more information. In the meantime the ladies must try to ‘concert opinion.’ ” Ibid. For evidence of Wilson’s anti-suffrage views, see ibid., 186–87.
ALICE PAUL HEADQUARTERED HERSELF Ibid., 207.
A PERSISTENT CAMPAIGN Ibid., 207. “Alice Paul intended to make the president, for the first time in American history, the specific target of a political movement,” Baker wrote. Ibid., 187. See also Flexner and Fitzgerald, Century of Struggle, 256.
BORN IN 1885 TO A DISTINGUISHED QUAKER FAMILY Baker, Sisters, 191–92.
HAD BEEN INFLUENCED BY Flexner and Fitzgerald, Century of Struggle, 255–56.
THE MORE MILITANT BRITISH Ibid., 243–47.
FROM 1907 TO 1910 Ibid., 255–56.
EMMELINE PANKHURST’S WOMEN’S SOCIAL AND POLITICAL UNION Ibid., 244; Baker, Sisters, 194–98.
FACE-TO-FACE CHALLENGES Baker, Sisters, 194–95.
WOULD REFUSE FOOD IN JAIL Flexner and Fitzgerald, Century of Struggle, 244.
HIGHLY PUBLICIZED FORCE-FEEDINGS Ibid.; Baker, Sisters, 196–97. To her mother in America, Paul wrote: “Force feeding is simply a policy of passive resistance. As a Quaker thee ought to approve
of it.” Ibid., 196.
THE GRUESOME DETAILS Ibid., 197.
“THE ESSENCE OF THE CAMPAIGN” Ibid., 197–98.
“I LONG TO HEAR” Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31–April 5 1776, Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17760331aa. Mrs. Adams added:
That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness. Ibid.
THE JULY 1848 SENECA FALLS McMillen, Seneca Falls, 71–103, covers the gathering itself. “At Seneca Falls, for the first time, women and men gathered for the sole purpose of articulating female grievances and demanding women’s equality,” McMillen wrote. “As Susan B. Anthony observed in the early 1880s, ‘Women had not been discovered fifty years ago.’ Before Seneca Falls, no one could imagine that anyone would dare challenge, in such an organized manner, women’s subservience or their legal, social, and political oppression.” Ibid., 3–4.
“WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS” “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Woman’s Rights Convention, Held at Seneca Falls, 19–20 July 1848,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Papers Project, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, http://ecssba.rutgers.edu/docs/seneca.html.
“IT WAS WE, THE PEOPLE” Anthony, “Is It a Crime?” April 3, 1873.
DEMONSTRATORS KNOWN AS “SILENT SENTINELS” Baker, Sisters, 214.
WHEN ARRESTED (ON CHARGES OF INTERFERING WITH TRAFFIC) Ibid., 216–21.
DURING THE 1916 STATE OF THE UNION Ibid., 207.
FOR “THE FIRST TIME IN AMERICAN HISTORY” Ibid., 216–17.
“WILL YOU TAKE” Frost-Knappman and Cullen-DuPont, Women’s Suffrage in America, 352.
“AS I LOOK BACK” Ibid.
ELLEN, HIS BELOVED WIFE, HAD DIED Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 260–61; Berg, Wilson, 334–35. “It is pathetic to see the President; he hardly knows where to turn.” Francis B. Sayre, Sr., wrote. Berg, Wilson, 335. That August Wilson wrote: “I never understood before what a broken heart meant, and did for a man. It just means that he lives by the compulsion of necessity and duty only.” Ibid., 338.
THE PRESIDENT RECEIVED A DELEGATION Ibid., 345–47; Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 270–72.
HAD PROMISED AFRICAN AMERICANS For Wilson and segregation in the federal government, see Eric S. Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2013); Berg, Wilson, 305–12; Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 205–26.
“ABSOLUTE FAIR DEALING” Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service, 72–73. See also Nancy J. Weiss, “The Negro and the New Freedom: Fighting Wilsonian Segregation,” Political Science Quarterly 84, no. 1 (March 1969), 63.
ONLY TO ALLOW THE SEGREGATION Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 27–34. See also Yellin, Racism in the Nation’s Service. Wilson also gave in to a trio of Southern senators to block the appointment of an African American to a post traditionally held by a black man. Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 27. Hearing reports of the institution of Jim Crow in government offices—which included segregated bathrooms and lunchrooms—Wilson approved, saying that he had “made no particular promises to Negroes, except to do them justice.” Ibid., 28.
TROTTER HAD FOUNDED THE NIAGARA MOVEMENT Kate Tuttle, “Niagara Movement,” Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (New York, 2005), 226. See also “Niagara Movement (1905–1909),” BlackPast.org, http://www.blackpast.org/aah/niagara-movement-1905-1909.
“WE REFUSE TO” “Niagara Movement (1905–1909),” BlackPast.org.
IN 1909, IN THE AFTERMATH Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 3–15, details this period of the formation of the NAACP.
“ ‘A HOUSE DIVIDED’ ” “NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom,” Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/naacp/founding-and-early-years.html#obj2.
ISSUED ON LINCOLN’S BIRTHDAY Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 6.
WHAT DU BOIS CALLED “DESPERATE ALTERNATIVES” Ibid., 26.
NEITHER WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT Ibid. See also Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 170. “Taft had made overtures toward the white South early in his administration, and Roosevelt had allowed the Progressives to organize in the South as a lily-white party,” Cooper wrote. Ibid.
MANY GAMBLED, THEN Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 26.
THE NAACP…THROUGH ITS LEGAL BUREAU Ibid., 42–50.
“ONLY TWO YEARS AGO” Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 270.
WILSON REPLIED THAT Ibid.
“WE ARE NOT HERE” Ibid.
“LET ME SAY THIS” Ibid., 271.
“I AM FROM” Ibid.
“YOU HAVE SPOILED” Ibid.
“THAT UNSPEAKABLE FELLOW” Woodrow Wilson to Joseph Tumulty, April 24, 1915, Woodrow Wilson Papers, 33:68.
“I WAS DAMN FOOL” Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 271.
JIM CROW REGULATIONS Ibid., 205. A significant issue for white Southerners, Cooper wrote, was “racial mingling in federal offices, particularly in the case of black supervisors overseeing white clerks.” Ibid. For Wilson and race more generally, see ibid., 409–11. I am also grateful to Professor Cooper for his guidance on these points.
“READILY…ACCEPTED” Ibid., 410.
PURGED FROM THE PARTY Ibid., 435–37.
STRONGLY DENOUNCED LYNCHING Ibid., 409–10.
“GAVE A HINT” Ibid., 410–11.
“EXCITED BY A FREEDOM” Woodrow Wilson, “The Reconstruction of the Southern States,” The Atlantic Monthly, January 1901.
AT THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY Blight, Race and Reunion, 6–12. Blight opens his book with the scene at Gettysburg half a century on.
“THESE VENERABLE MEN” Woodrow Wilson, “Address at Gettysburg,” July 4, 1913, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=65370.
“WHOM DO I COMMAND?” Ibid.
A TRILOGY OF NOVELS BY THOMAS W. DIXON, JR. James Kinney, “Thomas Dixon, 1864–1946,” Documenting the American South, http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/dixonclan/bio.html; Gerald R. Butters, Jr., Black Manhood on the Silent Screen (Lawrence, Kan., 2002), 64–65. See also Blight, Race and Reunion, 111–12; Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 272; Berg, Wilson, 347–48. Christopher Hitchens remarked on the connection between Kipling’s imperialism and Dixon’s fiction: “There is evidence that Kipling’s self-pitying interpretation of the race question was not lost on those whose main concern was the domestic front. D. W. Griffith’s sinister film masterpiece The Birth of a Nation was based on a racist novel by Griffith’s friend Thomas Dixon, a Baptist ranter from North Carolina whose tale The Leopard’s Spots was published in 1902. Its subtitle was A Romance of the White Man’s Burden. Evidently, the apple did not fall very far from the tree.” Hitchens, Blood, Class, and Nostalgia, 74–75. Dixon also wrote novels designed to attack women’s suffrage and socialism. Kinney, “Thomas Dixon.”
THE BOOKS WERE WIDELY READ Butters, Black Manhood, 64–65.
WHO BECAME A POPULAR FIGURE Kinney, “Thomas Dixon.”
“MY OBJECT IS” Butters, Black Manhood, 65.
HE ADAPTED The Clansman Ibid.
JOINED FORCES WITH Ibid., 65–66. In addition to Griffith’s movie, there were other film treatments of the Klan in these years: 1915’s A Mormon Maid and 1919’s The Heart o’ the Hills, with Mary Pickford. Daniel Eagan, America’s Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the La
ndmark Movies in the National Film Registry (New York, 2010), 44.
OPENED A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES Butters, Black Manhood, 65–66.
“THE WHOLE PROBLEM” Ibid.
A RUNNING TIME OF 187 MINUTES Eagan, America’s Film Legacy, 42.
THE TITLE CARDS INCLUDED Allyson Hobbs, “A Hundred Years Later, ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Hasn’t Gone Away,” The New Yorker, December 13, 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/hundred-years-later-birth-nation-hasnt-gone-away.
WILSON AND DIXON HAD OVERLAPPED Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 272; Berg, Wilson, 348.
WILSON AGREED TO HOST Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 272. It was, Scott Berg wrote, “the first running of a motion picture in the White House.” Berg, Wilson, 348.
HE OFFERED LITTLE VISIBLE REACTION Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 272. “Another member of the audience that night,” Berg wrote, “reported that the President seemed lost in thought during the film and exited the East Room upon its completion without saying a word to anybody.” Berg, Wilson, 349.
YET WORD OF THE PRESIDENTIAL VIEWING Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 272. “Regardless of what he did or did not say,” Cooper wrote, “Dixon and Griffith soon touted the event and insinuated that The Birth of a Nation enjoyed a presidential seal of approval.” Ibid.
PROVOKED PROTESTS IN SEVERAL CITIES Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York, 1977), 53–69. William Monroe Trotter was arrested during the Boston protest; The Washington Post described Trotter as “the man whom President Wilson practically ordered out of the White House a short while ago when he was baiting the President at a conference with colored leaders over alleged discrimination against colored government employees.” “Race Riot at Theater,” The Washington Post, April 18, 1915. See also “Negroes Mob Photo Play,” NYT, April 18, 1915.
OFFERED THE NASCENT NAACP Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 52–69; Sullivan, Lift Every Voice, 48–54.
DURING A DEMONSTRATION Cripps, Slow Fade to Black, 63.
“AS I LOOKED” Ibid.
“IT IS GRATIFYING” Butters, Black Manhood, 83.