CHAPTER XIV
With the year 1914, the world entered a new era of thought, for the effect upon civilization of that great convulsion which afflicted the world in 1914 was felt far beyond the arenas upon which the World War was fought. The conflict was on too gigantic a scale for it to be grasped during its waging. It tested civilization to a supreme degree. Loosely knit bonds, that in all reason should have parted under the immense strain to which they were submitted, held all the tighter under the tugs to which they were subjected. That portion of humanity which had least to give, gave with a fullness beyond the imagination of man. Nothing in all time has ever equalled the volunteer movement of the men of Britain and her dominion states. Conscription might have produced a more efficient army and less weakened the State; but the great soldier and greater man, who in the main fashioned the armies of Britain to the admiration of his country’s foes, knew that, in that great hour, nothing could equal the moral effect of that wonderful volunteer movement. Democracy was put to the test and rang absolutely true.
So much happened before the United States flung her immense force into the scale, that an infinitude of fact has passed from the memory of men. Never in the history of the world was it more thoroughly demonstrated, that “Order is (not) heaven’s first law.” Democracy moved up to the sacrifice unfalteringly. Autocracy broke under the strain and, in his own appointed time and in spite of all that man proposed, God disposed of the event, in a way no one could have dreamed of. But before the great Republic of the West intervened, in many ways the United States was affected, and in none more profoundly than by the migration of the Negroes from the South and their diffusion throughout the country. The war between the States and emancipation had made this diffusion only a question of time and it had been progressing with a quickened and then a retarded flow, during the decades previous to the Great War; but the war’s great check on immigration from Europe speeded up the movement. Lecturing at the University of Chicago in June, 1916, the author of this study was struck with the nature of the reception accorded the subject: “The Readjustment of the Negro to the Social System of the Sixties,” in which the necessity for diffusion was stressed.
Active from 1890 to 1900, later, the standard of living of the Northern Negro had risen, and just as capital in the North and West had forced out the English, German and Irish workmen and replaced them with cheaper and inferior people; so too, the Northern Negro could not live as cheaply as the Slav, Greek, Italian and Slovene.[352] These in their turn, however, the World War had been sweeping away, since the middle of 1914; and, while the sentimental regard for the Negro’s advancement, which had been very broad and active a generation earlier, had gradually become restricted to assisting in fitting him for a residence in “his natural home, the South,” the need for the brawn and sinew which he could supply, being felt in the North and West, in obedience to its demand, the Negro, for a consideration, was moving out of “his natural home”; for the philanthropy of the North, the greatest in the world, as it draws its supplies from, is to some degree, subservient to, the commercialism of its section.
Almost contemporaneously with the lectures in the great Western city, which is destined to be the center of Northern Negro opinion, from the metropolis of the Union came an utterance of immense importance from the most aggressive, intelligent and humane publication, spreading out its influence from the center of American and world finance.
As viewed by The New Republic, the situation in the summer of 1916 was thus stated:
“To the Northern Negro the war in Europe has been of immense and unexpected advantage. It has shut out the immigrant who is the Negro’s most dangerous competitor, has doubled the demand for the Negro’s labor, raised his wages, and given chances to him, which in the ordinary course would have gone to white men. If immigration still lags after the war or is held down by law, the Negro will secure the great opportunity for which he has been waiting these fifty years.... In Southern cities, Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, Richmond, Nashville, Savannah, Charleston, Mobile, Negroes constitute one-third to one-half the population and more than that proportion of the wage earners and are given a chance to earn their living, because, without them, the work of these cities could not be done. In the city of Philadelphia, on the other hand, Negroes form only 5½ per cent of the population, in Chicago only 2 per cent, in New York a little less than 2 per cent.... If white men will not work with them, if the employer is forced to choose between a large supply of white labor and a small supply of Negro labor, he will choose the former.... The Negro gets a chance to work only when there is no one else.... The wronged are always wrong and so we blame the Negro. If we are fair, however, we must place the responsibility of a social effect for those responsible for the cause. If the Northern Negroes have a higher death rate and breed a larger proportion of criminals and prostitutes than do the whites, it is in large part our own fault. We cannot understand the problems of the Negro in the North unless we constantly bear in mind the fact of industrial opportunity. The Northern Negro has the right to vote, the right and duty to send his children to school, and technically, at least, many civil and political rights. We do not put him into Jim Crow cars or hold him in prison camps for private exploitation. Nevertheless, the pressure upon him is almost as painful, though not nearly so brutal or debasing, as that upon the Southern Negro. The Northern Negro is urged to rise but held down hard.... Immigration after the war seems likely to be kept down at a low level during several years or possibly decades.... It is the Negro’s chance, the first extensive widening of his industrial field since emancipation.”[353]
The fact that this very able statement is not entirely exact in all its details takes very little from the value of the presentation of it. As has been disclosed by Mr. Warne, in his, “Immigrant Invasion,” the Negro had quite a chance until the decade 1900-1910. That he did not improve it as fully as he might have done was due; first, to his ignorance; second, to his retention for quite a while of servile instincts; third, to the determination, on the part of a very considerable and influential portion of the Northern and Western public, that the Negro must be kept out of the North and West; and of the controlling portion of the Southern public, assisted by the Republican Supreme Court of the United States, that he should be kept, as near to the condition of a serf of the soil in the South, as he could be by those so restraining him, keeping themselves, meanwhile, on the windy side of the law; fourth, to an active, continuous, well financed propaganda, led by the most influential member of the race, that he should cling to the South.
Against such forces what could be affected by the few Southern white men, Carlyle McKinley, Wade Hampton, and M. C. Butler, as early as 1889, preaching “Diffusion”?
North and South, in the main for purely selfish reasons, the force of the country was against diffusion of the Negro and for banking him in the South, where he had been so long a slave. For such a paper, therefore, as The New Republic, to advocate diffusion was a matter of the very first importance.
Continuing the discussion in its issue of July 1, 1916. The New Republic declared:
“For the nation as a whole, such a gradual dissemination of the Negro among all the States would ultimately be of real advantage. If at the end of half a century, only 50 per cent or 60 per cent instead of 89 per cent of the Negroes were congregated in the Southern States, it would end the fear of race domination, and take from the South many of its peculiar characteristics, which today hamper development. To the Negro it would be of even more obvious benefit.... For if the Southern Negro finding political and social conditions intolerable, were to migrate to the North, he would have in his hand a weapon as effective, as any he could find, in the ballot box.... Against the opposition of the preponderant white population, the Southern Negro has few defenses. He has no vote, he has no wealth; and as for the protection of the law, that is a sword held by the white man with the edge towards the Negro. He cannot better his condition by political action or armed revolt. His one defense is to move away.”[354]
Weighing duly what is urged above, without necessarily accepting all of it as accurate, is it not apparent, that, for a Southern white man to argue that the Negroes should remain in the South, in the masses in which they now exist there, is an indication that he refuses to consider anything as beneficial, which affects industrial conditions he has become accustomed to? For the Negro so to think is simply the survival of the servile instinct, which the bulk of the Southern whites claim is latent in all Negroes.
To stress the matter a little further, the view of a Southern and a Northern Negro will be submitted and contrasted.
The first is the view of a colored man, Rev. Richard Carroll, who, in 1890, had attracted the attention of George William Curtis, as has been before mentioned, by his bold and original utterance, that Tillman had made the whites as well as the Negroes readers and thinkers. Some eight years later this colored man had served as the chaplain of a colored regiment in Cuba. Later he had occupied himself with a colored school near Columbia, South Carolina, and, to some extent, had become, to the press of the State of South Carolina, the type of the good Negro, who agrees with the best of the whites. That is the distinct ear mark of the “Good Negro.”
Describing the departure of the Negroes from South Carolina in 1916, he states that:
“Hon. H. C. Tillman, son of Senator B. R. Tillman, told me that in the crowd were one or two of the farm hands that had signed contracts to work next year, but that he would not interfere with them.”
Next he describes the tearful, melodramatic appeal of a Georgia divine, entreating the Negroes not to leave the South:
“We have not treated you right; we are going to do better. Let us, white and colored unite to solve the race question on Southern soil. We are in debt to you colored people. First of all we owe you the Gospel; then we owe you protection before the law. There will be no more outrages when we take up this problem, as we should, and solve it by the Gospel.”
Having shown the patriotic unselfishness of Captain Tillman and quoted the wail of the Georgia divine, the colored educator proceeds to state his own view:
“This is the country for the black man; the white people of the South should offer the proper inducements and protection before the law to keep the colored people in the Southland.... It may be as many of our colored people say: ‘God is in this movement.’ But I believe that if the colored people of the South had worked together for the last fifty years for the good of each race and at the same time each race in its place, we would have had better conditions; in the South—no lynchings, no cause for lynchings. If the best people in the South had kept it in the hands of the Gen. Wade Hampton type, this would have been the greatest country on earth.”
Just about fifty years before Carroll’s utterance, people in the South, to some degree answering to Carroll’s description of the Hampton type, framed the Black Codes, as they thought, “for the good of each race, and at the same time each race in its place.” But, after Reconstruction, Wade Hampton thought diffusion of the Negro was the only remedy.
After detailing cases, where he claimed to know that Negro men of property had been ordered out of the State simply because they owned property and were prosperous, Carroll states that when they came to him for advice, he advised them to—
“try to get to some other white men in the county or community, as there are plenty of white men in South Carolina, who would give justice and protection.”[355]
The Black Codes made this obligatory on all masters for their servants. The framers of the codes were raised in the school of politics which Rhett, in 1850, announced the basic principle of, as follows:
“Where there is but one race in a community there may be political equality in rights—but this cannot give equality in mind, character and condition. Servitude still prevails in one form or another, from a necessity as stern as the laws. But when the races are different and one race is inferior to the other, the inferior race must be exterminated or fall into such a state of subjection as to present motives for their preservation to the stronger race.”[356]
Residence in the South, a considerable time after maturity, had therefore apparently lessened the independence of this colored man. He had come, not unnaturally, to prefer security to independence.
But, in the same year and about the same time, there appeared in the same paper a temperately worded article from the pen of another Negro, also a minister, R. R. Wright, Jr., residing in Philadelphia, who had been employed at various times by the United States Bureau of Labor and the University of Pennsylvania.
He had also, at an earlier date, published an essay on the Negro Problem, which treats the subject as a scientific investigation, in which all temper and feeling is out of place. With regard to the movement of the Negroes he declared there had been at least four different migrations of the Negroes from the South to the North since the war between the States, and estimating in 1916 that there were then, in that section, usually called the North but embracing a considerable portion of the West, he thought, of the 1,600,000 Negroes there, three fourths had been born in the South. With regard to the number of Negroes in the North at that date this estimate was above what the Census of 1920 disclosed; for by it, the date 1910, there were only 1,059,000 Negroes in the North and West and therefore, even if they had increased by 1916 to 1,600,000, three fourths of these could not have been from the South, even if the total addition of 541,000 had come from that section, as of the 1,059,000 in 1910, only forty per cent were from the South;[357] but whether 40%, 50% or 75% were from the South, Wright believed 80% of those who had moved up would stay, because he was confident, the most efficient could compete with the Slavs and Italians in rough work. Indeed he claimed it was no uncommon thing to see a Negro foreman over groups of Italians in Pennsylvania. Having seen the same thing practically as to Negroes and Spaniards, during the World War the writer can believe this. Higher wages and better educational facilities also Wright claimed would draw the Negro, North and West, and finally he cited what is in his opinion the most powerful inducement, for the Negro to move in increasing numbers from the South to the North:
“The opportunity to vote will also tend to hold them. Politicians are encouraging Negroes to remain; as they are very generally Republican. Northern Negroes are encouraging them to stay because it gives them more power; and after the Negro casts his vote and takes part in political meetings, he is just like the naturalized foreigner—he likes it and stays. Of course the white people rule, because superior intelligence and wealth always rule. But the black man enjoys being a part of the Government and being called upon every year to have his “say”.... While there is no more social equality in the North than there is in the South, and practically no desire for the same, the longer the Negro lives there, the opportunities to enjoy himself according to his means appeal to him. He earns more money, can live in a better house, buy better clothes, develops more accomplishments, has more leisure and has more protection in his enjoyment. Personally, I think it is good both for the Negroes and for the whites that a million or two million Negroes leave the South. It will make room for a large number of foreigners to come to the South and will tend to divorce the South’s labor problem more widely from its race problem, and will give it a new perspective. It will also rob the South of the fear of ‘Negro domination’ and will give it a chance to give a better expression to our democratic principles. On the other hand the scattering the Negroes throughout the country will bring them in touch with the forces of organized labor in a way to bring them better protection, while it will also acquaint the North with the Negro in such a way as to give it a more intelligent grasp of our general problem of racial relations.”[358]
Meanwhile with views for and views against, shouted to them, from all sides, the Negroes moved up from the South to the North and West and to the great centers of industry, to supply the place of immigrants and soldiers passed and passing to Europe for the great war.
To the reading Negro, wherever he was, North or South in this year just before the entrance of the great Republic into the greatest war of all time, came “The New Negro, His Political and Civil Status and Related Essays,” by William Pickens, Lit. D. Easily comprehended, popularly composed, they opened with the usual attack upon the black laws of the South in the sixties, the author especially singling out the code of South Carolina for criticism. Of them generally he says:
“From the standpoint of the Negro’s interests, however, these laws were ‘black’, not only in name and aim, but in their very nature. Instead of being the property of a personally interested master, the Negro was to be converted into the slave of a much less sympathetic society in general.”[359]
But strange to say this critic, in 1916, actually proclaims that—
“One of the greatest handicaps under which the New Negro lives is the handicap of the lack of acquaintanceship between him and his white neighbor. Under the former order, when practically all Negroes were either slaves or servants, every Negro had the acquaintance of some white man; as a race he was better known, better understood and was, therefore, the object of less suspicion on the part of the white community.”[360]
If this was a handicap in 1916, what must it have been in 1865? Forty one years before this Negro scholar discovered the handicap, the South, in attempting to readjust itself to the consequences of defeat and the overthrow of its industrial system, had legislated to preserve that acquaintanceship by a system of apprenticeship, which if it was calculated to work out the problem very slowly; yet was calculated to produce something superior even to the free persons of color that slavery had evolved, a worthy product which no Negro or Northern scholar has ever had the patience to think about. Little as the author of this study knows about the free persons of color whom the South reared; yet it is not fair to accuse them of what Pickens is absolutely justified in stating with regard to the mass of Southern colored citizens who were the product of Congressional Reconstruction. Pickens indeed is refreshingly frank in this respect and so much so that the Negroes will avoid his book. It will not be found advertised in any list of the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored Race. He is dangerously near William Hannibal Thomas in the following:
“Till this day the Negro is seldom frank to the white man in America. He says what he does not mean; he means what he does not say. I have heard Negro speakers address mixed audiences of white and colored persons and both white and black go away rejoicing, each side thinking that the speaker had spoken their opinions, altho the opinions of the blacks were very different from those of the whites, even contradictory. This is one reason for the great misconception in the white race respecting the desires, ambitions and sentiments of the black.”[361]
But in the year which followed that in which Pickens’s book was published the United States entered the World War.
Before discussing the effect of that great adventure upon the Negro minority of one-tenth of the population of the United States, the force which swung the whole should have some slight consideration, and from the pen of a political opponent, the editor of the greatest Republican paper of the West this is pictured as follows:
“Our chief admiration for Mr. Wilson is for the manner in which he drove the war activities once we were committed. That determination was evolved from his character. He used conscription. He furnished the Allies with what they needed—men, money and materials in the amounts needed. Weakness at this time might have ruined us. A man less determined to have his own way, less impervious to what was said of him, might have flinched at conscripting soldiers. He might have tried to fight the war with volunteers. He might even have tried to fight it with money and materials. He might have tried to spare the nation human sacrifices or to limit the expenditure of human life. Then we should have entered a losing war and have been among the losers, just in time to be in the wreckage. Conscription was his big decision and whether he realized it or not was his most dangerous one. Hughes might have had serious draft riots. From Wilson the people took the draft with hardly a murmur, and the war was won right then. The President did not allow the people to draw back from a drop in the cup. He took their money. He spent it without a thought for the waste of it. There had to be waste. He put the United States behind the Allies with a promise of the last man and the last dollar. It required courage, intelligence and character; and all the ruggedness and wilfulness of Mr. Wilson’s temperament served the country as it needed to be served. Those were the high moments of his career. He sent 2,000,000 men to France before the astonished Germans thought that it was possible to do so. He had 2,000,000 in America training camps and more were being drafted. Then also from the White House came the thunders of rhetoric which stupefied the German people behind their armies and disintegrated them in the rear of their fighting forces. As American divisions put the pressure on German divisions, Mr. Wilson’s words destroyed the morale of the German people who had been steadfast; and the war was won.”[362]
But he did more, a Southerner, conscious of the deep prejudices of his own section and against the protests of many State officials, he determined that a certain proportion of colored men should have training as officers; nor did he permit this military training to be stopped even after the Houston riot, when for the second time Negro soldiery shot up a Southern city. Those who were guilty were court martialed promptly; but to the surprise of not a few of the Negro aspirants for office, the training of Negro officers proceeded. Again not quoting from a friend; but taking a Negro’s statement we note:
“As many as 1200 men became commissioned officers ... Negro nurses were authorized by the War Department for service in base hospitals at six army camps—Funston, Sherman, Zachary Taylor and Dodge, and women served as canteen workers in France and in charge of hostess houses in the United States. Sixty Negro men served as chaplains, 350 as Y. M. C. A. secretaries and others in special capacities.... In the whole matter of the War the depressing incident was the Court Martial of sixty-three members of the Twenty Fourth Infantry, U. S. A. on trial for rioting and the murder of seventeen people at Houston Texas, August 23rd, 1917. As a result of it thirteen of the defendants were hanged, December 11th, forty-nine sentences to imprisonment for life, four for imprisonment for shorter terms and four were acquitted.”[363]
President Wilson’s action in this matter was a vindication of President Roosevelt’s action in the previous riot at Brownsville and a stern condemnation of the sentimentalists, white and black whose strictures upon Roosevelt had led the Negro soldiery to harbor the amazing idea, that troops of any color could take the law into their own hands and make Zaberns in America, on a scale beyond the wildest imaginations of any War Lord’s minions, in Europe.