THE NEGRO IN POLITICS
The discussion of the Negro in politics will of necessity deal chiefly with conditions in the South; for it is there, and there only, that the Negro is, at the present time, a great political problem. Negroes in the North are indeed beginning to play a conscious part in politics; but they are only one element among many. They take their place with the “Irish vote,” the “German vote,” the “Polish vote,” the “labour vote,” each of which must be courted or placated by the politicians. I have looked into Negro political conditions in several cities, notably Indianapolis and Philadelphia, and I cannot see that they are in any marked way different from the condition of any other class of our population which through ignorance, or fear, or ambition, votes more or less en masse. Many Negroes do not vote at all; some are as conscientious and incorruptible as any white citizen; but a large proportion, ignorant and short-sighted, are disfranchised by the use of money in one form or another at every election. One of the broadest observers in Indianapolis said to me:
“The Negro voters are no worse and no better than our foreign voting population.”
Mayor Tom Johnson, himself Southern by birth, writes me regarding the Negro vote of Cleveland:
“I do not believe there is any larger percentage of unintelligent or dishonest votes among the coloured voters than among the white voters in the same walks of life.”
Negro a National Problem
I wish here to emphasise again the fact that the Negro is not a sectional but a national problem. Anything that affects the South favourably or unfavourably reacts upon the whole country. And the same latent race feeling exists in the North that exists in the South (for it is human, not Southern). The North, indeed, as I have shown in previous chapters, confronted with a large influx of Negroes, is coming more and more to understand and sympathise with the heart-breaking problems which beset the South. Nothing short of the patient coöperation of the entire country, North and South, white and black, will ever solve the race question.
In this country, as elsewhere, political thought divides itself into two opposing forces, two great parties or points of view.
Whatever their momentary names have been, whether Federalist, Democratic, Whig, Republican, Populist, or Socialist, one of these parties has been an Aristocratic or conservative party, the other a democratic or progressive party. The political struggle in this country (and the world over) has been between the aristocratic idea that a few men (or one man) should control the country and supervise the division of labour and the products of labour and the democratic idea that more people should have a hand in it.
The abolition of slavery in the South was an incident in this struggle. Slavery was not abolished because the North agitated, or because John Brown raided or Mrs. Stowe wrote a book, or for any other sentimental or superficial reason, but because it was undemocratic.
What Slavery Did
This is what slavery did: It enabled a comparatively few men (only about one in ten of the white men of the South was a slave-owner or slave-renter) to control eleven states of the Union, to monopolise learning, to hold all the political offices, to own most of the good land and nearly all of the wealth. Not only did it keep the Negro in slavery, but nine-tenths of the white people (the so-called “poor whites,” whom even the Negroes despised) were hardly more than peasants or serfs. It was in many ways a charming aristocracy, but it was doomed from the beginning. If there had been no North, slavery in the South would have disappeared just as inevitably. It was the restless yeast of democracy, spreading abroad upon the earth (in Europe as well as America) that killed slavery and liberated both Negro and poor white men.
Revolutions such as the Civil War change names: they do not at once change human relationships. Mankind is reconstructed not by proclamations or legislation or military occupation, but by time, growth, education, religion, thought.
When the South got on its feet again after Reconstruction and took account of itself, what did it find? It found 4,000,000 ignorant Negroes changed in name from “slave” to “freeman,” but not changed in nature. It found the poor whites still poor whites; and the aristocrats, although they had lost both property and position, were still aristocrats. For values, after all, are not outward, but inward: not material, but spiritual. It was as impossible for the Negro at that time to be less than a slave as it was for the aristocrat to be less than an aristocrat. And this is what so many legal-minded men will not or cannot see.
What happened?
Exactly what might have been predicted. Southern society had been turned wrong side up by force, and it righted itself again by force. The Ku Klux Klan, the Patrollers, the Bloody Shirt movement, were the agencies (violent and cruel indeed, but inevitable) which readjusted the relationships, put the aristocrats on top, the poor whites in the middle, and the Negroes at the bottom. In short, society instinctively reverted to its old human relationships. I once saw a man shot through the body in a street riot. Mortally wounded, he stumbled and rolled over in the dust, but sprung up again as though uninjured and ran a hundred yards before he finally fell dead. Thus the Old South, though mortally wounded, sprung up and ran again.
The Struggle in South Carolina
The political reactions after Reconstruction varied, of course, in the different states, being most violent in states like South Carolina, where the old aristocratic régime was most firmly entrenched, and least violent in North Carolina, which has always been the most democratic of Southern states.
In South Carolina then, for example, the aristocrats in 1875 returned to political supremacy.
General Wade Hampton, who represented all that was highest in the old régime, became governor of the state. A similar tendency developed, of course, in the other Southern states, and a notable group of statesmen (and they were statesmen) appeared in politics—Hill and Gordon of Georgia, Lamar and George of Mississippi, Butler of South Carolina, Morgan of Alabama, all aristocrats of the old school.
Apparently the ancient order was restored; apparently the wounded man ran as well as ever. But the Old South, after all, had received its mortal wound. There had been a revolution; society had been overturned. The institution on which it had reared its ancient splendour was gone: for the aristocrat no longer enjoyed the special privilege, the enormous economic advantage of owning his labourers. He was reduced to an economic equality with other white men, and even with the Negro, either of whom could hire labour as easily and cheaply as he could. And the baronial plantation which had been the mark of his grandeur before the war was now the millstone of his doom.
Special privilege, always the bulwark of aristocracy, being thus removed, the germ of democracy began to work among the poor whites. The disappearance of competitive slave labour made them unexpectedly prosperous; it secured a more equable division of wealth. With prosperity came more book-reading, more schooling, a greater feeling of independence. And this feeling animated the poor white with a new sense of freedom and power.
Enter now, when the time was fully ripe for a leader, the rude man of the people.
How often he appears in the pages of history, the sure product of revolutions, bursting upward like some devastating force, not at all silken-handed or subtle-minded, but crude, virile, direct, truthful.
Tillman, the Prophet
So Tillman came in South Carolina. I can see him as he rode to the farmers’ fairs and court days in the middle eighties, a sallow-faced, shaggy-haired man with one gleaming, restless, angry eye. He had been long preparing in silence for his task—struggling upward in the poverty-stricken days of the war and through the Reconstruction, without schooling, or chance of schooling, but endowed with a virile-mindedness which fed eagerly upon certain fermentative books of an inherited library. Lying on his back in the evening on the porch of his farmhouse, he read Carlyle’s “French Revolution” and Gibbon’s “Rome.” He had in him, indeed, the veritable spirit of the revolutionist: in the days of the Patrollers, he, too, had ridden and hunted Negroes. He had seen the aristocracy come again into power; he had heard the whisperings of discontent among the poor whites. And at fairs and on court days in the eighties I hear him screaming his speeches of defiance, raucous, immoderate, denouncing all gentlemen, denouncing government by gentlemen, demanding that government be restored to the “plain people!” On one of the transparencies of those days he himself had printed the words (strange reminder of the Commune!):
“Awake! arise! or be forever fallen.”
He spoke not only to the farmers, but he flung defiance at the aristocrats in the heart of the aristocracy. At Charleston, one of the proudest of Southern cities, he said:
“Men of Charleston, I have always heard that you were the most self-idolatrous people that ever lived; but I want to say to you that the sun does not rise in the Cooper and set in the Ashley. It shines all over the state.... If the tales that have been told me or the reports which have come to me are one-tenth true, you are the most arrant set of cowards God ever made.”
And everywhere he went he closed his speeches with this appeal:
“Organise, organise, organise. With organisation you will become free once more. Without it, you will remain slaves.”
Once, upon an historic occasion on the floor of the United States Senate, Tillman paused in the heat of a debate to explain (not to excuse) his fiery utterances.
“I am a rude man,” he said, “and don’t care.”
That is Tillman. They tried to keep him and his followers out of the political conventions; but he would not be kept out, nor kept down. Years later he himself expressed the spirit of revolt in the United States Senate. Zach McGhee tells how he had been making one of his fierce attacks, an ebullition in general against things as they are. A senator arose to snuff him out in the genial senatorial way.
“I would like to ask, Mr. President, what is before the Senate?”
“I am before the Senate,” screamed Tillman.
In 1890 Tillman was elected governor of South Carolina: the poor white, at last, was in power.
The same change was going on all over the South. In Mississippi the rise of the people (no longer poor) was represented by Vardaman, in Arkansas by Jeff Davis, and Georgia and Alabama have experienced the same overturn in a more complicated form. It has become a matter of pride to many of the new leaders of the “plain people” that they do not belong to the “old families” or to the “aristocracy.” Governor Comer told me that he was a “doodle-blower”—a name applied to the poor white dwellers on the sand hills of Alabama. Governor Swanson of Virginia is proud of the fact that he is the first governor of the state wholly educated in the public schools and colleges. Call these men demagogues if you will, and some of them certainly are open to the charge of appealing to the prejudices and passions of the people, they yet represent a genuine movement for a more democratic government in the South.
The old aristocrats gibe at the new leaders even to the point of bitter hatred (in South Carolina at least one murder has grown out of the hostility of the factions); they see (how acutely!) the blunders of untrained administrators, their pride in their states is rubbed blood-raw by the unblushing crudities of the Tillmans, the Vardamans, the Jeff Davises. Go South and talk with any of these men of the ancient order and you will come away feeling that conditions in the South are without hope.
“High Men” of the Old South
And those old aristocrats had their virtues. One loves to hear the names still applied at Richmond, Montgomery, Macon, and Charleston to the men of the old type, by other men of the old type. How often I have heard the terms a “high man,” an “incorruptible man.” Beautiful names! For there was a personal honour, a personal devotion to public duties among many of these ante-bellum slave-owners that made them indeed “high men.”
When they were in power their reign was usually skilful and honest: the reign of a beneficent oligarchy. But it was selfish: it reigned for itself—with nine-tenths of the people serfs or slaves. Its luxuries, its culture, its gentleness, like that of all aristocracies, was enjoyed at the fearful cost of poverty, ignorance, and slavery of millions of human beings. It had no sympathy, therefore it perished from off the earth.
The new men of the Tillman type made glaring, even violent mistakes, but for the most part honest mistakes; they saw clearly what they wanted: they wanted more power in the hands of the people, more democracy, and they went crudely at the work of getting it. In spite of the bitterness against Vardaman among some of the best people of Mississippi I heard no one accuse him of corruption in any department of his administration. On the whole, they said he had directed the business of the state with judgment. And Tillman, in spite of the dire predictions of the aristocrats, did not ruin the state. Quite to the contrary, he performed a notable service in extending popular education, establishing an agricultural college, regulating the liquor traffic (even though the system he established has since degenerated). Never before, indeed, has South Carolina, and the South generally, been more prosperous than it has since these men went into power, never has wealth increased so rapidly, never has education been so general nor the percentage of illiteracy so low. The “highest citizen” may not be so high (if it can be called high) in luxury and culture as he was before the war, but the average citizen is decidedly higher.
Having thus acquired a proper historical perspective, we may now consider the part which the Negro has played in the politics of the South. Where does he come in?
Where the Negro Comes In
Though it may seem a sweeping generalisation, it is none the less literally true that up to the present time the Negro’s real influence in politics in the South has been almost negligible. He has been an issue, but not an actor in politics. In the ante-bellum slavery agitation no Negroes appeared; they were an inert lump of humanity possessing no power of inner direction; the leaders on both sides were white men. The Negroes did not even follow poor old John Brown. And since the war, as I have shown, the struggle has been between the aristocrats and the poor whites. They have talked about the Negro, but they have not let him talk. Even in Reconstruction times, and I am not forgetting exceptional Negroes like Bruce, Revels, Pinchback, and others, the Negro was in politics by virtue of the power of the North. As a class, the Negroes were not self-directed but used by Northern carpetbaggers and political Southerners who took most of the offices and nearly all of the stealings.
In short, the Negro in times past has never been in politics in the South in any positive sense. And that is not in the least surprising. Coming out of slavery, the Negro had no power of intelligent self-direction, practically no leaders who knew anything. He was still a slave in everything except name, and slaves have never yet ruled, or helped rule.
The XV Amendment to the Constitution could not really enfranchise the Negro slaves. Men must enfranchise themselves.
And this political equality by decree, not by growth and development, caused many of the woes of Reconstruction.
Two distinct impulses mark the effort of the South to disfranchise the Negro. The first was the blind revolt of Reconstruction times, in which force and fraud were frankly and openly applied. The effort to eliminate the Negro brought the white people together in one dominant party and the “Solid South” was born. For years this method sufficed; but in the meantime the Negro was getting a little education, acquiring self-consciousness, and developing leaders of more or less ability. It became necessary, therefore, both because the Negro was becoming more restive, less easily controlled by force, and because the awakening white man disliked and feared the basis of fraud on which his elections rested, to establish legal sanction for disfranchisement, to define the political status of the Negro by law.
Now, the truth is that the mass of Southerners have never believed that the Negro has or should have any political rights. The South as a whole does not now approve and never has approved of the voting Negro. A few Negroes vote everywhere, “but not enough,” as a Southerner said to me, “to do any hurt.”
The South, then, has been placed in the position of providing by law for something that it did not really believe in.
 | ||
| Photograph by G. V. Buck | ||
| COLONEL JAMES LEWIS United States Receiver at New Orleans | W. T. VERNON Register of the United States Treasury | RALPH W. TYLER An auditor of the Government at Washington |
It was prophesied that when the Negro was disfranchised by law and “eliminated from politics” the South would immediately stop discussing the Negro question and divide politically along new lines. But this has not happened. Though disfranchisement laws have been in force in Mississippi for years there is less division in the white party of that state than ever before.
Why is this so? Because the Negro, through gradual education and the acquisition of property, is becoming more and more a real as well as a potential factor in politics. For he is just beginning to be really free. And the South has not yet decided how to deal with a Negro who owns property and is self-respecting and intelligent and who demands rights. The South is suspicious of this new Negro: it dreads him; and the politicians in power are quick to play upon this sentiment in order that the South may remain solid and the present political leadership remain undisturbed.
For the South, however much it may talk of the ignorant masses of Negroes, does not really fear them; it wants to keep them, and keep them ignorant. It loves the ignorant, submissive old Negroes, the “mammies” and “uncles”; it wants Negroes who, as one Southerner put it to me, “will do the dirty work and not fuss about it.” It wants Negroes who are really inferior and who feel inferior. The Negro that the South fears and dislikes is the educated, property-owning Negro who is beginning to demand rights, to take his place among men as a citizen. This is not an unsupported statement of mine, but has been expressed over and over again by speakers and writers in every part of the South. I have before me a letter from Charles P. Lane, editor of the Huntsville (Alabama) Daily Tribune, written to Governor Comer. It was published in the Atlanta Constitution. The writer is arguing that the Negro disfranchisement laws in Alabama are too lenient, that they permit too many Negroes to vote. He says:
We thought then (in 1901, when the new Alabama Constitution disfranchising the Negro was under discussion), as we do now, that the menace to peace, the danger to society and white supremacy was not in the illiterate Negro, but in the upper branches of Negro society, the educated, the man who, after ascertaining his political rights, forced the way to assert them.
He continues:
We, the Southern people, entertain no prejudice toward the ignorant per se inoffensive Negro. It is because we know him and for him we entertain a compassion. But our blood boils when the educated Negro asserts himself politically. We regard each assertion as an unfriendly encroachment upon our native superior rights, and a dare-devil menace to our control of the affairs of the state.
In this are we not speaking the truth? Does not every Southern Caucasian “to the manor born” bear witness to this version? Hence we present that the way to dampen racial prejudice, avert the impending horrors, is to emasculate the Negro politically by repealing the XV Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
I use this statement of Mr. Lane’s not because it represents the broadest and freest thought in the South, for it does not, but because it undoubtedly states frankly and clearly the point of view of the majority of Southern people. It is the point of view which, talked all over Georgia last year, helped to elect Hoke Smith governor of the state, as it has elected other governors. Hoke Smith’s argument was essentially this:
Hoke Smith’s Views
The uneducated Negro is a good Negro; “he is contented to occupy the natural status of his race, the position of inferiority.” The educated and intelligent Negro, who wants to vote, is a disturbing and threatening influence. We don’t want him down here; let him go North.
This feeling regarding the educated Negro, who, as Mr. Lane says, “ascertains his rights and forces his way to assert them,” is the basic fact in Southern politics. It is what keeps the white people welded together in a single party; it is what sternly checks revolts and discourages independence.
Keeping this fact in mind, let us look more intimately into Southern conditions.
Following ordinary usage I have spoken of the Solid South. As a matter of fact the South is not solid, nor is there a single party. The very existence of one strong party presupposes another, potentially as strong. In the South to-day there are, as inevitably as human nature, two parties and two political points of view. And one is aristocratic and the other is democratic.
It is noteworthy in the pages of history that parties which were once democratic become in time aristocratic. We are accustomed for example, to look back upon Magna Charta as a mighty instrument of democracy; which it was; but it was not democracy according to our understanding of the word. It merely substituted a baronial oligarchy for the divine-right rule of one man, King John. It did not touch the downtrodden slaves, serfs and peasants of England. And yet that struggle of the barons was of profound moment in history, for it started the spirit of democracy on its way downward, it was the seed from which sprung English constitutionalism, which finally flowered in the American republic.
Tillman, as I have shown, wrung democracy from the old slave-owning oligarchy. He conquered: he established a democracy in South Carolina which included poor whites as well as aristocrats. But Tillman in his fiery pleas for the rights of men no more considered the Negro than the old barons considered the serfs of their day in the struggle against King John. It was and is incomprehensible to him that the Negro “has any rights which the white man is bound to respect.”
In short we have in the South the familiar and ancient division of social forces, but instead of two white parties, we now see a white aristocratic party, which seeks to control the government, monopolise learning, and supervise the division of labour and the products of labour, struggling with a democratic party consisting of a few white and many coloured people, which clamours for a part in the government. That, in plain words, is the true situation in the South to-day.
Has the Spirit of Democracy Crossed the Colour Line?
For democracy is like this: once its ferment begins to work in a nation it does not stop until it reaches and animates the uttermost man. Though Tillman’s hatred and contempt of the Negro who has aspirations is without bounds, the spirit which he voiced in his wild campaigns does not stop at the colour line. Movements are so much greater than men, often going so much further than men intend. A prophet who stands out for truth as Tillman did cannot, having uttered it, thereafter limit it nor recall it. As I have been travelling about the country, how often I have heard the same animating whisper from the Negroes that Tillman heard in older days among the poor whites:
“We are free; we are free.”
Yes, Tillman and Vardaman are right; education, newspapers, books, commercial prosperity, are working in the Negro too; he, too, has the world-old disease of restlessness, ambition, hope. And many a Negro leader and many a Negro organisation—and that is what is causing the turmoil in the South, the fear of the white aristocracy—are voicing the equivalent of Tillman’s bold words:
“Awake! arise! or be forever fallen.”
Now we may talk all we like about the situation, we may say that the Negro is wrong in entertaining such ambitions, that his hopes can never be gratified, that he is doomed forever to menial and inferior occupations—the plain fact remains (as Tillman himself testifies), that the democratic spirit has crossed the colour line irrespective of laws and conventions, that the Negro is restless with the ambition to rise, to enjoy all that is best, finest, most complete in this world. How humanly the ancient struggle between aristocracy seeking to maintain its “superiority” and democracy fighting for “equality” is repeating itself! And this struggle in the South is complicated, deeply and variously, by the fact that the lower people are black and of a different race. They wear on their faces the badge of their position.
What is being done about it?
As every student of history is well aware, no aristocracy ever lets go until it is compelled to. How bitterly King John fought his barons; how bitterly the South Carolina gentlemen fought the rude Tillman! Having control of the government, the newspapers, the political parties, the schools, an aristocracy surrounds and fortifies itself with every possible safeguard. It maintains itself at any cost. And that is both human and natural; that is what is happening in the South to-day. Exactly the same conflict occurred before the war when the old slave-owning aristocracy (which everyone now acknowledges to have been wrong) was defending itself and the institution upon which its existence depended. The old slave-owning aristocrats believed that they were made of finer clay than the “poor whites,” that their rule was peculiarly beneficent, that if anything should happen to depose them the country would go to ruin and destruction. It was the old, old conviction, common to kings and oligarchies, that they were possessed of a divine right, a special and perpetual franchise from God.
The White South Defends Itself
The present white aristocratic party in the South is defending itself exactly after the manner of all aristocracies.
In the first place, having control of the government it has entrenched itself with laws. The moment, for example, that the Negro began to develop any real intelligence and leadership, the disfranchisement process was instituted. Laws were so worded that every possible white man be admitted to the franchise and every possible Negro (regardless of his intelligence) be excluded. These laws now exist in nearly all the Southern states. Although the XV Amendment to the Federal Constitution declares that the right to vote shall not be “denied or abridged ... on account of race or colour or previous condition of servitude,” the South, in defence of its white aristocracy, has practically nullified this amendment. Governor Hoke Smith of Georgia, for example, said (June 9, 1906):
Legislation can be passed which will ... not interfere with the right of any white man to vote, and get rid of 95 per cent. of the Negro voters.
Not only do the enacted laws disfranchise all possible Negroes, but many other Negroes who have enough property or education to qualify, are further disfranchised by the dishonest administration of those laws. For the machinery of government, being wholly in white hands, the registers and judges of election have power to keep out any Negro, however fit he may be. I know personally of many instances in which educated and well-to-do Negroes have been refused the right to register where ignorant white men were readily admitted.
The law, after all, in this matter, plays very little figure. The white majority has determined to control the government utterly and to give the Negro, whether educated or not, no political influence. That is the plain truth of the matter. Listen to Hoke Smith in his campaign pledge of last year:
“I favour, and if elected will urge with all my power, the elimination of the Negro from politics.”
Let us also quote the plain-speaking Vardaman in his address of April, 1907, at Poplarville, Miss.:
How is the white man going to control the government? The way we do it is to pass laws to fit the white man and make the other people (Negroes) come to them.... If it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.... The XV Amendment ought to be wiped out. We all agree on that. Then why don’t we do it?
It may be argued that this violent expression does not represent the best sentiment of the South. It does not; and yet Vardaman, Tillman, Jeff Davis, Hoke Smith, and others of the type are elected, the majority in their states support them. And I am talking here of politics, which deals with majorities. In a following chapter I shall hope to deal with the reconstructive and progressive minority in the South as it expresses itself especially in the more democratic border states like North Carolina.
Thus the spirit of democracy has really escaped among the coloured people and it is running abroad like a prairie fire. Tillman, the prophet, sees it:
“Every man,” he says, “who can look before his nose can see that with Negroes constantly going to school, the increasing number of people who can read and write among the coloured race ... will in time encroach upon our white men.”
Demand Repeal of XV Amendment
In order, then, to prevent the Negro getting into politics, the Tillmans, Vardamans, and others declare that the South must strike at the foundation of his political liberty: the XV Amendment must be repealed. In short, the moment the Negro meets one test of citizenship, these political leaders advance a more difficult one: now proposing to take away entirely every hope of ultimate citizenship. In the recent campaign for the United States senatorship in Mississippi, Vardaman and John Sharp Williams were quite in accord on this point, though they disagreed on methods of accomplishing the purpose. When the political liberty of the Negro has thus been finally removed, the South, say these men, will again have two parties, and will be able to take the place it should occupy in the counsels of the nation.
Take the next point in the logic of the political leaders. It is a fact of common knowledge in history that aristocracies cannot long survive when free education is permitted among all classes of people. Education is more potent against oligarchies and aristocracies than dynamite bombs. Every aristocracy that has survived has had to monopolise learning more or less completely—else it went to the wall. It is not surprising that there should have been no effective public-school system in the South before the war where the poor whites could get an education, or that the teaching of Negroes was in many states a crime punishable by law. Education enables the Negro, as Mr. Lane says, to “ascertain his rights and force his way to assert them.” Therefore to prevent his ascertaining his rights he must not be educated. The undivided supremacy of the white party, it is clearly discerned, is bound up with Negro ignorance. Therefore we have seen and are now seeing in certain parts of the South continuous agitation against the education of Negroes. That is one reason for the feeling in the South against “Northern philanthropy” which is contributing money to support Negro schools and colleges.
“What the North is sending South is not money,” says Vardaman, “but dynamite; this education is ruining our Negroes. They’re demanding equality.”
A Southern View of Negro Education
When I was in Montgomery, Ala., a letter was published in one of the newspapers from Alexander Troy, a well-known lawyer. It did not express the view of the most thoughtful men of that city, but I am convinced that it represented with directness and force the belief of a large proportion of the white people of Alabama. The letter says:
All the millions which have been spent by the state since the war in Negro education ... have been worse than wasted. Should anyone ask “Has not Booker Washington’s school been of benefit to the Negro?” the so-called philanthropists of the North would say “yes,” but a hundred thousand white people of Alabama would say “no.”... Ask any gentleman from the country what he thinks of the matter, and a very large majority of them will tell you that they never saw a Negro benefited by education, but hundreds ruined. He ceases to be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water....
Exclude the air and a man will die, keep away the moisture and the flower will wither. Stop the appropriations for Negro education, by amendment to the Constitution if necessary, and the school-house in which it is taught will decay. Not only that, but the Negro will take the place the Creator intended he should take in the economy of the world—a dutiful, faithful, and law-abiding servant.
These are Mr. Troy’s words and they found reflection in the discussions of the Alabama legislature then in session. A compulsory education bill had been introduced; the problem was to pass a law that would apply to white people, not to Negroes. In this connection I heard a significant discussion in the state senate. I use the report of it, for accuracy, as given the next morning in the Advertiser:
Senator Thomas said ... he would oppose any bills that would compel Negroes to educate their children, for it had come to his knowledge that Negroes would give the clothing off their backs to send their children to school, while too often the white man, secure in his supremacy, would be indifferent to his duty.
At this point Senator Lusk arose excitedly to his feet and said:
“Does the Senator from Barbour mean to say that the Negro race is more ambitious and has more aspirations than the white race?”
“The question of the gentleman ... is an insult to the senate of Alabama,” replied Senator Thomas deliberately. “It is an insult to the great Caucasian race, the father of all the arts and sciences, to compare it to that black and kinky race which lived in a state of black and ignorant savagery until the white race seized it and lifted it to its present position.”
The result of this feeling against Negro education has shown itself in an actual reduction of Negro schooling in many localities, especially in Louisiana, and little recent progress anywhere else, compared with the rapid educational development among the whites, except through the work of the Negroes themselves, or by Northern initiative.
In cutting off an $8,000 appropriation for Alcorn College (coloured) Governor Vardaman, as a member of the board of trustees, said:
“I am not anxious even to see the Negro turned into a skilled mechanic. God Almighty intended him to till the soil under the direction of the white man and that is what we are going to teach him down there at Alcorn College.”
Without arguing the rights or wrongs or necessities of their position, I have thus endeavoured to set down the purposes of the present political leadership in the South.
Economic Cause for White Supremacy
Now the chief object of any aristocracy, the reason why it wishes to monopolise government and learning, is because it wishes to supervise the division of labour and the products of labour. That is the bottom fact.
In slavery times, of course, the white man supervised labour absolutely and took all the profits. In some cases to-day, by a system of peonage, he still controls the labourer and takes all the profits. But as the Negro has grown in education and property he not only wishes to supervise his own labour, but demands a larger share in the returns of labour. He is no longer willing to be an abject “hewer of wood and a drawer of water” as he was in slavery times; he has an ambition to own his own farm, do his own business, employ his own professional men, and so on. He will not “keep his place” as a servant. And that is the basis of all the trouble.
Many of the utterances of white political leaders resolve themselves into a statement of this position.
At the American Bankers’ Association last fall Governor Swanson of Virginia said:
“At last the offices, the business houses, and the financial institutions are all in the hands of intelligent Anglo-Saxons, and with God’s help and our own good right hand we will hold him (the Negro) where he is.”
In other words, the white man will by force hold all political, business and financial positions; he will be boss, and the Negro must do the menial work; he must be a servant.
Hoke Smith says in his speech (the italics are mine):
“Those Negroes who are contented to occupy the natural status of their race, the position of inferiority, all competition being eliminated between the whites and the blacks, will be treated with greater kindness.”
In other words, if the Negro will be contented to keep himself inferior and not compete with the white man, everything will be all right. And thus, curiously enough, while Hoke Smith in his campaign was thundering against railroad corporations for destroying competition, while he was glorifying the principle of “free and unrestricted trade,” he was advocating the formation of a monopoly of all white men by the elimination of the competition of all coloured men.
Indeed, we find sporadic attempts to pass laws to compel the Negro to engage only in certain sorts of menial work. In Texas not long ago a bill was introduced in the legislature “to confine coloured labour to the farm whenever it was found in city and town communities to be competing with white labour.” In the last session of the Arkansas legislature Senator McKnight introduced a bill providing that Negroes be forbidden “from waiting on white persons in hotels, restaurants, or becoming barbers, or porters on trains, and to prevent any white man from working for any Negro.”
In a number of towns respectable, educated, and prosperous Negro doctors, grocers, and others have been forcibly driven out. I visited Monroe, La., where two Negro doctors had been forced to leave town because they were taking the practice of white physicians. In the same town a Negro grocer was burned out, because he was encroaching on the trade of white grocers.
Neither of the laws above referred to, of course, was passed; and the instances of violence I have given are sporadic and unusual. For the South has not followed the dominant political leaders to the extremes of their logic. Human nature never, finally, goes to extremes: it is forever compromising, never wholly logical. While perhaps a large proportion of Southerners would agree perfectly with Hoke Smith or Tillman in his theory of a complete supremacy of all white men in all respects, as a matter of fact nearly every white Southerner is encouraging some practical exception which quite overturns the theory. Tens of thousands of white Southerners swear by Booker T. Washington, and though doubtful about Negro education, the South is expending millions of dollars every year on coloured schools. Vardaman, declaiming violently against Negro colleges, has actually, in specific instances, given them help and encouragement. I told how he had cut off an $8,000 appropriation from Alcorn College because he did not believe in Negro education: but he turned around and gave Alcorn College $14,000 for a new lighting system, because he had come in personal contact with the Negro president of Alcorn College, and liked him.
And though the politicians may talk about complete Negro disfranchisement, the Negro has nowhere been completely disfranchised: a few Negroes vote in every part of the South.
I once heard a Southerner argue for an hour against the participation of the Negro in politics, and then ten minutes later tell me with pride of a certain Negro banker in his city whom we both knew.
“Dr. ——’s all right,” he said. “He’s a sensible Negro. I went with him myself when he registered. He ought to vote.”
So personal relationships, the solving touch of human nature, play havoc with political theories and generalities. Mankind develops not by rules but by exceptions to rules. While the white aristocracy has indeed succeeded in controlling local government in the South almost completely, it has not been able to dominate the federal political organisations, which include many Negroes. And though often opposing education for the Negro, the aristocracy has not, after all, monopolised education; and the Negro, in spite of Jim Crow laws and occasional violence, has actually been pushing ahead, getting a foothold in landownership, entering the professions, even competing in some lines of business with white men. So democracy, though black, is encroaching in the world-old way on aristocracy; how far Negroes can go toward real democratic citizenship in the various lines—industrial, political, social—no man knows. We can see the fight; we do not know how the spoils of war will finally be divided.
CHAPTER XII
THE BLACK MAN’S SILENT POWER
HOW THE DOMINANCE OF THE IDEA OF THE NEGRO STIFLES FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH IN SOUTHERN POLITICS
At present the point of view of a large proportion of Southern white people on the Negro question is adequately expressed by such men as Tillman, Jeff Davis, and Hoke Smith. They are the political leaders. Their policies are, in general, the policies adopted; they are the men elected to office. Even in the border states, where the coloured population is not so dense as in the black belt, the attitude of the politicians is much the same as it is in the black belt. So far as the Negro question is concerned, Governor Swanson of Virginia stands on practically the same platform as Tillman and Hoke Smith—though he has not found it necessary to express his views as vigorously. And the position of the black-belt states in regard to the disfranchisement of the Negro and the extension of “Jim Crow” laws is being accepted by the border state of Maryland and the Western state of Oklahoma.
But there also exists, and particularly in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, a vigorous minority point of view, which I have referred to in a former chapter as the “broadest and freest thought of the South.” Although it has not yet attained political position, it is a party of ideas, force, convictions, with a definite constructive programme. To this constructive point of view I have been able, thus far, to refer only incidentally.
In the present chapter I wish to consider some of the effects upon Southern life of the domination of the Negro as a political issue, and the result of the continued supremacy of leaders like Tillman.
 | |
| J. POPE BROWN of Pulaski County, Georgia | EX-GOVERNOR JAMES K. VARDAMAN of Mississippi |
 | |
| Photograph by Harris-Ewing | Copyright, 1906, by Hallen Studios |
| SENATOR JEFF DAVIS of Arkansas | GOVERNOR HOKE SMITH of Georgia |
 | |
| Photograph by F. B. Johnston | |
| SENATOR B. R. TILLMAN of South Carolina | EX-GOVERNOR W. J. NORTHEN of Georgia |
In the next chapter, under the title “The New Southern Statesmanship,” I shall outline the programme and recount the activities of the new Southern leaders.
The Most Sinister Form of Negro Domination
Travelling in the South one hears much of the “threat of Negro domination,” by which is generally meant political control by Negro voters or the election of Negro officeholders. But there already exists a far more real and sinister form of Negro domination. For the Negro still dominates the thought of the South. For over eighty years, until quite recently, few great or serious issues have occupied the attention of the South save those growing out of slavery and the Negro problem. Though the very existence of our nation is due largely to the courage, wisdom, and political genius of Southern statesmanship—to Washington, Jefferson, Marshall, Patrick Henry, and their compatriots—the South, since the enunciation of the Monroe doctrine in 1823, has played practically no constructive part in national affairs. As Professor Mitchell of Richmond well points out, the great, vitalising influences which swept over the entire civilised world during the first half of the nineteenth century, the liberalising, nationalising, industrialising influences, left the South untouched. For it was chained in common slavery with the Negro. Instead of expanding with the new thought, it clung to slavery in opposition to the liberal tendency of the age, it insisted upon states’ rights in opposition to nationality, it contented itself with agriculture alone, instead of embracing the rising industrialism. “It was an instance,” as Professor Mitchell says, “of arrested development.”
Dr. John E. White of Atlanta has ably expressed the ethical result upon a people of confining their thought to a single selfish interest:
“As long as we struggled for that which was good for everybody everywhere,” he says, “we moved with Providence and the South led the van. There were great human concerns in the building up of the Republic. The whole world was interested in it. It was a work ennobling to a people—the inspiration of a great national usefulness. The disaster began when the South began to think only for and of itself—began to have only one problem.”
Thus the South, owing to the presence of the Negro, dropped behind in the progress of the world. And while the new and vitalising world influences are now spreading abroad throughout the South, manifesting themselves in factories, mines, mills, better schools, and more railroads, the old, ugly Negro problem still shackles political thought and cripples freedom of action. In other words, the South is being rapidly industrialised, but not so rapidly liberalised and nationalised, though these developments are certainly following.
Exploiting Negro Prejudice
The cause of this dominance of thought by the Negro lies chiefly with a certain group of politicians whose interest it is to maintain their party control and to keep the South solid. And they do this by harping perpetually on the Negro problem. I observed, wherever I went in the South and found busy and prosperous industries, that the Negro problem was little discussed. One manufacturer in New Orleans said to me, when I asked him about the Negro question:
“Why, I’m so busy I never think about it.”
And that is the attitude of the progressive, constructive Southerner: he is impatient with the talk about the Negro and the Negro problem. He wants to forget it.
But there remains a body of men in the South who, not prosperous in other industries, still make the Negro a sort of industry: they live by exploiting Negro prejudice. They prevent the expression of new ideas and force a great people to confine its political genius to a worn-out issue.
Roosevelt Democrats Down South
Talking with all classes of white men in the South, I was amazed to discover how many of them had ceased to be Democrats (in the party sense) at all, and were followers in their beliefs of Roosevelt and the Republican party. Many of them told me that they wished they could break away and express themselves openly and freely, but they did not dare. A considerable number have ventured to vote the Republican ticket in national elections (especially on the free-silver issue), but few indeed have had the courage to declare their independence in state or local affairs. For the instant a rift appears in the harmony of the white party (and that is a better name for it than Democratic) the leaders talk Negro, and the would-be independents are driven back into the fold. Over and over again leaders with new issues have endeavoured to get a hearing. A number of years ago the Populist movement spread widely throughout the South. Tom Watson of Georgia, Kolb of Alabama, Butler of North Carolina, led revolts against the old Democratic party. By fusion with the Republicans the Populists carried North Carolina. But the old political leaders immediately raised the Negro issue, declared that the Populists were encouraging the Negro vote, and defeated the insurgents, driving most of their leaders into political obscurity. Now, I am not arguing that Populism was an ideal movement, nor that its leaders were ideal men; I am merely trying to show the cost of independence in the South. A number of years ago Emory Speer, of Georgia, now Federal Judge, ran for Congress on an independent ticket. His platform was “The Union and the Constitution, a free ballot and a fair count.” The inevitable Negro issue was raised against him, it was insisted that there must be no division among white people lest the Negro secure the balance of political power, and Speer was finally defeated. He became a Republican and has since had no influence in state politics.
Upon this point an able Southern writer, Professor Edwin Mims of Trinity College, N. C., has said:
“The independents in the South have to face the same state of affairs that the independents of the North did in the ’80’s—all the better traditions connected with one party, and most of the respectable people belonging to the same party. Just as George William Curtis and his followers were accused of being Democrats in disguise and of being traitors to the ‘grand old party’ that had saved the Union and freed the slaves, and deserters to a party of Copperheads, so the Southern independent is said to be a Republican in disguise, and is told of the awful crimes of the Reconstruction era. When all other arguments have failed, there is the inevitable appeal to the threatened domination of an inferior race which is not now even a remote possibility.”
As a result of this domination of a worn-out issue, political contests in the South have ordinarily concerned themselves not with stimulating public questions, but with the personal qualifications of the candidates. The South has not dared to face real problems lest the white party be split and the Negro voter somehow slip into influence. A campaign was fought last year in Mississippi. Of course the candidates all belonged to the white party; all therefore subscribed to identically the same platform—which had been prepared by the party leaders—so that the only issue was the personality of the candidates. Let me quote from the Mississippi correspondent of the New Orleans Times-Democrat, April 29, 1907:
The only “issue” ... is the personality of the candidate himself. The voter may take the speeches of each candidate and analyse them from start to finish, and he will fail to find where there is any difference of opinion between the candidates on any of the live questions of the day which are likely to affect Mississippi. He must, therefore, turn from the speeches to the candidate himself for an “issue” and must take his choice of the several candidates as men, and decide which of them will do most good to the state and be the safest man to entrust with the helm.
Negro Holds Democratic Party Together
I am speaking here, of course, of the Negro as a dominant issue, the essential element which holds the Democratic party together and without which other policies could not be carried or candidates elected. Vigorous divisions on other issues have taken place locally within the lines of the Democratic party, especially during the last two or three years. The railroad and trust questions have been prominently before the people in most of the Southern states. During his long campaign for governor Hoke Smith talked railroads and railroad influence in politics constantly, but in order to be elected he raised the Negro question and talked it vigorously, especially in all of his country addresses. It is also highly significant that the South should have taken so strong a lead in the prohibition movement, although even this question has been more or less connected with the Negro problem, the argument being that the South must forbid the liquor traffic because of its influence on the Negro. No states in the Union, indeed, have been more radical in dealing with the trust question than Texas and Arkansas; and Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina have been the scenes of some of the hottest fights in the country on the railroad question. All this goes to show that, once freed from the incubus of the Negro on Southern thought, the South would instantly become a great factor in national questions. And being almost exclusively American in its population, with few rich men and ideals of life not yet so subservient to the dollar as those of the North, it would become a powerful factor in the progressive and constructive movements of the country. The influence of a single bold man like Tillman in the Senate has been notable. In the future the country has much to look for from the idealism of Southern statesmanship.
Stifling Free Speech
But the unfortunate result of the dominance of the single idea of the Negro upon politics has been to benumb the South intellectually; to stifle free thought and free speech. Let a man advance a new issue and if the party leaders do not favour it they have only to cry out “Negro,” twisting the issue so as to emphasise its Negro side (and every question in the South has a Negro side), and the independent thinker is crushed. I once talked with the editor of a newspaper in the South who said to me, “such and such is my belief.”
“But,” I said, “you take just the opposite position in your paper.”
“Yes—but I can’t talk out; it would kill my business.”
This timorousness has touched not only politics, but has reached the schools and the churches—and still shackles the freest speech. George W. Cable, the novelist, was practically forced to leave the South because he advocated the “continual and diligent elevation of that lower man which human society is constantly precipitating,” because he advocated justice for the Negro.
Professor Andrew Slade was compelled to resign from Emory College in Georgia because he published an article in the Atlantic Monthly taking a point of view not supported by the majority in Southern sentiment! Professor John Spencer Bassett was saved from a forced resignation from Trinity College in North Carolina for a similar offence after a lively fight in the Board of Trustees which left Trinity with the reputation of being one of the freest institutions in the South.
The situation in the South has made people afraid of the truth. Political oratory, particularly, often gets away entirely from the wholesome and regenerative world of actual facts. I quoted in the last chapter from a speech of Governor Swanson of Virginia, in which he said: “The business houses and financial institutions are in the hands of intelligent Anglo-Saxons, and with God’s help and our own good right hand we will hold him (the Negro) where he is.”
Negro’s Progress in Richmond
What a curious thing oratory is! Right in Governor Swanson’s own city of Richmond there are four banks owned and operated by Negroes; one of the Negro bankers sat in the convention to which Governor Swanson was at that moment speaking. There is a Negro insurance company, “The True Reformers,” in which I saw eighty Negro clerks and stenographers at work. It has a surplus of $300,000, with a business in thirty states. Negroes also own and operate in Richmond four clothing stores, five drug stores, many grocery stores (some very small, of course), two hotels, four livery stables, five printing establishments, eight fraternal insurance companies, seven meat markets, fifty eating-places, and many other sorts of business enterprises, small, of course, but growing rapidly. In Richmond also, there are ten Negro lawyers, fifteen physicians, three dentists, two photographers, eighty-five school teachers, forty-six Negro churches.
Southerners Who See the Danger
When I make the assertion regarding “free speech” and the fear of truth in the South, I am making no statement which has not been far more forcibly put by thoughtful and fearless Southerners who see and dread this sinister tendency.
The late Chancellor Hill, of the University of Georgia, spoke of the “deadly paralysis of intellect caused by the enforced uniformity of thought within the lines of one party.” He said:
“Before the war the South was in opposition to the rest of civilisation on the question of slavery. It defended itself: its thinking, its political science, even its religion was not directed toward a search for truth, but it was concentrated on the defence of a civil and political order of things. These conditions made impossible a vigorous intellectual life.”
William Preston Few, dean of Trinity College, North Carolina, writes (South Atlantic Quarterly, January, 1905):
“This prevalent lack of first hand thinking and of courage to speak out has brought about an unfortunate scarcity of intellectual honesty.”
An excellent illustration of this condition grew out of the statement of Dr. Edwin A. Alderman, president of the University of Virginia, at a dinner a year or so ago, in which he compared the recent political leadership of the South somewhat unfavourably with the statesmanship of the Old South. Upon hearing of this remark Senator Bailey of Texas angrily resigned from the alumni committee of the University. Chancellor Hill said, concerning the incident:
“The question whether Dr. Alderman was right or wrong becomes insignificant beside the larger question whether Senator Bailey was right or wrong in his method of dealing with a difference of opinion. And this leads to the question: Have we freedom of opinion in the South? Must every man who thinks above a whisper do so at the peril of his reputation and his influence, or at the deadlier risk of having an injury inflicted upon the institution which he represents?”
In giving so much space to the words and position of Vardaman, Tillman, Hoke Smith, and others, I have not yet sufficiently emphasised the work and influence of the thoughtful and constructive men of the South. But it must be borne in mind that I am writing of politics, of majorities: and politicians of the Tillman type are still the political forces in the South. They are in control: they are elected. Yet there is the growing class of new statesmen whose work I shall recount in the next chapter.
Whites Disfranchised as Well as Blacks
But the limitation of intellectual freedom has not been the only result of the political dominance of the Negro issue. It is curious to observe that when one class of men in any society is forced downward politically, another is forced up: for so mankind keeps its balances and averages. A significant phase of the movement in the South to eliminate the Negro is the sure return to government by a white aristocracy. For disfranchisement of the Negro has also served to disfranchise a very large proportion of the white people as well. In every Southern state where Negro disfranchisement has been forced, the white vote also has been steadily dwindling. To-day in Alabama not half the white males of voting age are qualified voters. In Mississippi the proportion is still lower.
In the last Presidential election the state of Mississippi was carried by Parker with a total vote of only 58,383, out of a total of 349,177 citizens (both white and coloured) of voting age. Only one-third of the white men voted. It has been found, indeed, in several counties in Mississippi, that while the number of white eligibles has been decreasing, the number of Negroes on the registration lists has been increasing. In the city of Jackson, Miss., last year, 1,200 voters were registered out of a population of 32,000 people.
To show the dwindling process, take the single country of Tallapoosa in Alabama. The last census shows 4,203 whites and 2,036 blacks of voting age, 6,259 in all. After the adoption of the new constitution disfranchising the Negro in 1901, the total registration was 4,008. Last fall, although the important question of prohibition had arisen and an especial effort was made to get voters out, an investigation showed there were only 1,700 qualified voters in the country.
This astonishing condition is due primarily to the fact that there is no vital party division on new issues in the South; but it is also due to the franchise tests, which, having been made severe to keep the Negro out, operate also to disfranchise hundreds of thousands of poor and ignorant white men. I spent much time talking with white workingmen, both in the cities and in the country. I asked them why so many workingmen and farmers did not vote. Here is one comprehensive reply of a labour leader:
“What’s the use? We have to pay two dollars a year poll-tax, and pay it nearly a year before election. And why vote? There are no real issues at stake. An election is merely a personal quarrel in the clique of men who control the Democratic party. Why should we pay two dollars a year and go to the bother of satisfying the personal ambition of some man we are not interested in?”
A White Oligarchy
So the white vote is dwindling; the political power is being gathered into the hands of fewer and fewer men. And there is actually springing up a large class of non-voting white men not unlike the powerless “poor whites” of ante-bellum times. The white politicians, indeed, in some places do not encourage the poorer white men to qualify, for the fewer voters, the more certain their control.
Of course the chief fights in Mississippi and elsewhere are not at the elections, but in the Democratic (white) primaries; but this fact only accentuates the point I wish to make: the limitation of political independence of action. Such conditions are deeply concerning the thoughtful men of the South; but while they think, few dare to brave political extinction by speaking out. One would think that the Republican party, which ostensibly stands for the opposition in the South, would cry out about conditions. But it does not. The fact is, the Republican party, as now constituted in the South, is even a more restricted white oligarchy than the Democratic party. In nearly all parts of the South, indeed, it is a close corporation which controls or seeks to control all the federal offices. Speak out? Of course not. It, too, is attempting to eliminate the Negro (in some places it calls itself “lily white”), and it works not inharmoniously with the Democratic politicians. For the Republican machine in the South really has no quarrel with the Democratic machine; it takes the federal offices which the Democrats cannot get, and the Democrats take local offices which the Republicans know they cannot get.
The South a Weapon in National Conventions
The Republican Presidents at Washington have, unfortunately, played into the hands of the Southern office-holding machine. Why? Partly because Republicans are few in the South and partly because a solid Republican delegation from the South, easily handled and controlled and favouring the administration, is a powerful weapon in national conventions. McKinley played almost absolutely into the hands of this Southern Republican machine, and Hanna operated it. Indeed, McKinley’s nomination was probably due to the skill with which Hanna marshaled this solid phalanx of Southern delegates. Roosevelt has made a number of first-class appointments outside of the machine, even appointing a few Democrats of the high type of Judge Jones of Alabama.
Over and over in this book I have spoken of the Negro as a national, not a Southern issue; and in politics this is peculiarly true. Though having few Republicans, the South, through its office-holding Republican delegations, has largely influenced the choice of more than one Republican president. The “Solid South” is as useful to the Republican party as to the Democratic party. Why the certainty expressed by Republican politicians of the nomination of Taft? Because the national organisation felt sure it could control the Southern delegations. It counted on the “Solid South.”
Thus in a very real sense the government of this entire nation turns upon the despised black man—whether he votes or not!
The Negro’s Political Power in the North
In another way the Southern attitude toward the Negro affects the nation. Owing to disfranchisement and “Jim Crow” laws, thousands of Negroes have moved northward and settled in the great cities, until to-day Negro voters, though they may not (as has been claimed) hold the balance of power, yet wield a great influence in the politics of at least four states—Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, and Rhode Island—and are also considerable factors in the political destiny of Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, and Delaware. The potential influence of the Negro voter in the North is excellently illustrated in the recent campaign for the Republican nomination to the Presidency, especially in the fight in Ohio between Foraker and Taft and in the eagerness displayed by Taft to placate the Negro vote.
In still another way the Negro affects the entire nation. Through its attitude of exclusion the South exercises an influence on national legislation out of all proportion to its voting population. Though nearly all Negroes are disfranchised, as well as a large number of white voters, all these disfranchised voters are counted in the allotment of Congressmen to Southern states.
Out of this has grown a curious condition. In 1904 Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Mississippi, which have thirty-five members in Congress, cast 413,516 votes, while Massachusetts alone, with only fourteen Congressmen, cast 445,098 votes.
Here, for example, is the record of South Carolina:
| Total population of voting age, both white and coloured (1900) | 283,325 | |
| Total white voting population | 130,375 | |
| Total actual vote in 1902 for Congressmen | 32,185 | |
| Total Democratic vote which elected seven Congressmen | 29,343 |
Thus in South Carolina in 1902 an average of about 4,600 voters voted at the election for each Congressman (in 1904, a Presidential year, the average was about 8,100) while in New York State over 40,000 votes are cast in each Congressional district and in Pennsylvania about 38,000.
Now, I am not here criticising this condition; I am merely endeavouring to set down the facts as I find them. My purpose is to illustrate the profound and far-reaching effects of the Negro issue upon the nation. And is it not curious, when all is said, to observe how this rejected black man, whom the South has attempted to eliminate utterly from politics, has been for years changing and warping the entire government of this nation in the most fundamental ways! Did he not cause a civil war, the results of which still curse the country? And though excluded in large measure from the polls, does he not in reality cast his mighty vote for Presidents, Congressmen, Governors?
Often, looking out across the South, it appears to the observer that the Negro has a more far-reaching and real influence on our national life for being excluded from the polls than he would have if he were frankly and justly admitted to the franchise on the same basis as white men.
All the real thinkers and statesmen of the South have looked and longed for the hour when the South, free of this dominance of an ugly issue, should again take its great place in national affairs. In 1875, at the close of Reconstruction, Senator Lamar of Mississippi predicted in a speech at Jackson that the South, having eliminated the Negro from politics, would now divide on new economic issues and become politically healthy. But that has not happened; less division on real issues probably exists in Mississippi to-day than in 1875. Why? Is it not possible that the manner of the elimination of the Negro from politics is wrong? Has it occurred to leaders and statesmen that Negroes who are qualified can be eliminated into politics; that the present method in reality makes the Negro a more dangerous political factor than he would be if he were allowed to vote regularly and quietly?
Southerners Who Are Speaking Out
In spite of the domination of both parties in the South by narrowing groups of leaders there are not wanting men to fight for a new alignment. On the Republican side one of these men is Joseph C. Manning, of Alexander City, Ala., who publishes a paper called the Southern American. He has shown how white men are being disfranchised as well as Negroes, how the South is controlled by a “Bourbon oligarchy” in the Democratic party and a “federal-for-revenue” Republican party—as he calls them. His paper appears every week with his denunciations in big letters, urging the Republican party to reform and become a party of truth and progress.
He says:
THE RALLYING CRY
The great body of the people of the white South, the masses of the white people of Alabama, are to-day suppressed by the strategy of a political autocracy dominating under the guise and pretence of a democracy.
Why not throw off the yoke and get in the fight?
Rise up above this petty delegate getting, patronage manipulating, state chairman squabbling, until this small politics shall become lost in the great and the supreme issue.
Stop this “lily-white” nonsense. Quit being sidetracked by this Bourbon wail of Negro. Recognise this vital force of the immovable truth that an injustice to one American citizen will react upon all. You can’t have one law for the white man and another for the Negro in our form of government. You know that those who have the most talked of suppressing blacks have really suppressed you, white Republicans, and the most of the Southern whites.
The outcry of Negro and social equality and the like is the very essence of political moonshine.
A number of men inside the Democratic party are not afraid to speak out. Ex-Congressman Fleming of Georgia said in a notable address at Athens, Ga.:
“Those whose stock in trade is ‘hating the nigger’ may easily gain some temporary advantage for themselves in our white primaries, where it requires no courage, either physical or moral, to strike those who have no power to strike back—not even with a paper ballot. But these men will achieve nothing permanent for the good of the state or of the nation by stirring up race passion and prejudice. Injustice and persecution will not solve any of the problems of the ages. God did not so ordain his universe.
“Justly proud of our race, we refuse to amalgamate with the Negro, but the Negro is an American citizen, and is protected as such by guarantees of the Constitution that are as irrepealable almost as the Bill of Rights itself. Nor, if such a thing as repealing these guarantees were possible, would it be wise for the South. Suppose we admit the oft-reiterated proposition that no two races so distinct as the Caucasian and the Negro can live together on terms of perfect equality; yet it is equally true that without some access to the ballot, present or prospective, some participation in the government, no inferior race in an elective republic could long protect itself against reduction to slavery in many of its substantial forms—and God knows the South wants no more of that curse.”
Men of the type of Mr. Fleming are far in the minority in the South; they are so few as yet as to count, politically speaking, for little or nothing. But the fact that they are there, that they are not afraid to speak out, even though it ruins them politically, is significant and hopeful.
Ante-bellum Aggression
Now it is this way with a party having only one issue: when attacked, it can only become more and more violent and vociferous upon that issue. And this is what we discover in the South: an increasing bitterness of leaders like Tillman and Vardaman, for they know that their own existence and that of the party which they represent depends upon keeping the Negro issue prominent. The very fact that they are violent is significant: it shows that they recognise powerful and growing new elements in the South, which, though not yet apparent politically, are getting hold of the people.
In other words, the present group of autocratic leaders is seeking at any length to defend itself. And its work is not only defensive, it is also offensive. It must be. The institution of slavery might have lasted many years longer if the Southern leaders had been content with the slave territory they already held. But they were not so content. They tried to extend slavery to the new territories of the Union, and it was this aggression that was the chief immediate cause of the Civil War. It was the struggle over Missouri and Kansas, and the policy of the country regarding the new West, whether it should be admitted slave or free, which precipitated hostilities.
“Continual aggression,” John Hay once said, “is the necessity of a false position.” The ante-bellum Southern leaders saw that they must either extend their institution or else face its ultimate extinction.
At the present time we have a repetition of the ante-bellum aggression. As it happened then, we have speakers like Tillman and others coming North urging the validity of the Southern treatment of the Negro. Writers like Thomas Dixon rekindle old fires of hatred. At the same moment that Tillman is abusing the North for its interest in Southern education, he himself is speaking from Northern platforms to make sentiment for the Southern position. So we have the extension of disfranchisement and “Jim Crow” laws to the new Western state of Oklahoma and the agitation for disfranchisement in Maryland. So we have the advancing demand by Southerners in Congress for the repeal of the XV Amendment. And just recently Congressman Heflin of Alabama has introduced a bill seeking to provide for “Jim Crow” distinctions upon the street-cars of Washington. How all this recalls the efforts of the ante-bellum Southern Congressmen to force the United States Government to take the Southern position on the slavery question!
Fighting to Put the Negro Down
I have recently read some of the voluminous discussions upon the subject of slavery which took place before the Civil War, and I have been astonished to find the arguments of the Southern political leaders of to-day almost identical in substance (though changed somewhat in form) with the reasoning of the old slave-owning class. One hears the same arguments regarding the physiological and ethnological inferiority of all coloured men to all white men: the argument that “one drop of Negro blood makes a Negro,” and even that the Negro is not a human being at all, but a beast.
I have before me a book recently published by a Bible house (of all places!) in St. Louis and widely circulated in the South. It is entitled “Is the Negro a Beast?” and it goes on to prove by Biblical quotation that he has no soul! Being a beast, it becomes a small matter to kill him.
One also hears the argument now, as in slavery times, of the divine right of the white man to rule the Negro. “God intended the white man to rule,” says Vardaman, “and the Negro to be a humble servant.” And finally there is the frank argument of physical force; that the white man, being strong, will and must rule the Negro.
Hoke Smith to-day is supporting much the same position that Robert Toombs held before the war. Of course Hoke Smith has receded from the belief in the chattel slavery of the Negro for which Toombs contended; but in many other respects he evidently believes that the Negro should be reduced (as Ex-Congressman Fleming of Georgia says in the quotation given above) “to slavery in many of its substantial forms.” In order to validate its position and keep its place (and make the Negro keep his) the white aristocracy has been forced to defend the doctrine of all monarchies and aristocracies—the inequality of men in all respects. Hoke Smith states the fundamental assumption thus plainly in his address (June 9, 1906):
“I believe the wise course is to plant ourselves squarely upon the proposition in Georgia that the Negro is in no respect the equal of the white man, and that he cannot in the future in this state occupy a position of equality.”
Both the South and the North Undemocratic
Thus I have attempted to present the political situation in the South and the reasoning which underlies it. It possesses a large significance for the entire country.
Here is the fact: the war and the emancipation proclamation did not make the South completely democratic; it merely cut away one bulwark of aristocracy—slavery. The South is still dominated by the aristocratic idea, and more or less frankly so. The South has admitted only grudgingly, and not yet fully, the “poor white” man to democratic political fellowship. There are, as I have shown, hundreds of thousands of disfranchised white Americans in the South. Moreover many white leaders look askance on the new Italian immigrants, though they, too, are white men. The extreme point of view in regard to the foreigner was expressed in a speech by the Hon. Jeff Truly, candidate for governor of Mississippi, at Magnolia in that state on March 18, 1907:
“I am opposed to any inferior race. The Italian immigration scheme does not settle the labour question; Italians are a threat and a danger to our racial, industrial, and commercial supremacy. Mississippi needs no such immigration. Leave your lands to your own children. As governor of the state, I promise that not one dollar of the state shall be spent for the immigration of any such.”
As for the Negro, of course, the South has never believed in a democracy which really includes him.
But neither does the North. When we get right down to it, the controlling white men in the North do not believe in an inclusive democracy much more than the South. I have talked with many Northerners who go South, and it is astonishing to see how quickly most of them adopt the Southern point of view. For it is the doctrine which many of them, down in their hearts, really believe.
In reality the North also has an aristocratic government, an oligarchy based upon wealth and property, which dominates politics and governs the country more or less completely. Roosevelt has been fighting some of the more boisterous aspects of the rule of this oligarchy—and has showed the country how powerful it is!
The Underman Fighting All Over the World
It is curious, indeed, when one’s attention is awakened to the facts, how strong the parallel is between the South and the North. I mean here a parallel not in laws or even in customs, but in spirit, in the living reality which lies down deep under institutions, which is, after all, the only thing that really counts.
The cause of all the trouble in the North is similar to what it is in the South: the underman will not keep his place. He is restless, ambitious, he wants civil, political, and industrial equality. Thus we see the growth of labour organisations, and the spread of populists and socialists, who demand new rights and a greater share in the products of labour. They will not, as Hoke Smith says of the Negroes, “content themselves with the place of inferiority.” The essential feature of the history of the last five years in this country, and it will go down in history as the beginning of great things, has been the vague, crudely powerful effort of the underman (half his strength wasted because he is blind) to limit in some degree the power of this moneyed aristocracy. Such is the meaning of the demand for trust and railroad legislation, such the significance of the insurance investigation, such the effort to curb the power of men like Rockefeller, Harriman, Morgan.
So the North, in spirit, also disfranchises its lower class. It does it by the purchase at elections in one form or another of its “poor whites” and its Negroes. What else is the meaning of Tammany Hall and the boss and machine system in other cities? Tammany Hall is our method of disfranchisement: it is our cunning machine for nullifying the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. While the South is disfranchising by legislation, the North is doing it by cash.
The Question We Are Coming To
I have spoken of the lack of free speech in the South; but that is not peculiar to the South. Though there is undoubtedly a far greater intellectual freedom to-day in the North than in the South, yet the North has disciplined more than one professor for his utterances on the trust or railroad questions. South or North, it is dangerous to attack the entrenched privilege of those in control.
We criticise the frankness of Vardaman in advocating different standards of justice for white men and Negroes, but do we not have the same custom in the North? How extremely difficult it is sometimes to get a rich criminal into jail in the North!
In short, we are coming again face to face in this country with the same tremendous (even revolutionary) question which presents itself in every crisis of the world’s history:
“What is democracy? What does democracy include? Does democracy really include Negroes as well as white men? Does it include Russian Jews, Italians, Japanese? Does it include Rockefeller and the Slavonian street-sweeper? And Tillman and the Negro farmhand?”