The Americans

by Hugo Münsterberg

All this was suddenly changed on the great day when freedom was declared; no one compelled the negro to work then; he was free to follow his instinct to do nothing; no one punished him when he gave himself over to sensuality and indolence. But on the other side nobody now took care of him; in becoming his own master he remained his own slave. He was suddenly pushed into the struggle for existence, and the less he was forced to learn the less he was ready for the fight. There thus grew up an increasing mass of poverty-stricken negroes, among whom immorality and crime could thrive; and oftentimes the heavy weight of this mass has dragged down with it those who would have been better. Worst of all, it has strengthened the aversion of the whites a hundred-fold, and the best members of the negro race have had to suffer for the laziness, the sensuality, and the dishonesty of the great masses.

The real tragedy is not in the lives of the most miserable, but in the lives of those who wish to rise, who feel the mistakes of their fellow-negroes and the injustice of their white opponents, who desire to assimilate everything high and good in the culture about them, and yet who know that they do not, strictly speaking, belong to such a culture. The negroes of the lower type are sunk in their indifference; they while away the hours in coarse enjoyments, and are perfectly content with a few watermelons while they dance and sing. The onlooker is disheartened, but they themselves laugh like children. The better negroes, on the other hand, feel all the hardship and carry the weight of the problem on their souls. They go through life fully conscious of an insoluble contradiction in their existence; they feel that it is denied them to participate immediately in life, and that they must always see themselves with the eyes of others, and lead in a way a double existence. As one of them has recently said, they are always conscious of being a problem.

They themselves have not chosen their lot, they did not come of their own accord from Africa, nor gladly take on the yoke of slavery; nor were they by their own efforts saved from slavery. They have been passive at every turn of fortune. Now they wish to commence to do their best and to give their best, and they have to do this in an environment for which they are wholly unprepared and which is wholly beyond them in its culture They have not themselves worked out this civilization; they belong historically in another system, and remain here at best mere imitators. And the better they succeed in being like their neighbours, the more they become unlike what they ought naturally to develop into.

This feeling of disparateness leads directly to the feeling of embitterment. In the general masses, however, it is the feeling of incompetence to support the struggle for existence successfully which turns necessarily into a bitter hatred of the whites. And the more the lack of discipline and the laziness of the black cause the whites to hold him in check, so much the more brightly burns this hatred. But all students of the South believe that this hatred has come about wholly since the negro was declared free. The slave was faithful and devoted to his master, who took care of him; he hated work, but did not hate the white man, and took his state of slavery as a matter of course, much as one takes one’s inability to fly. A patriarchal condition prevailed in the South before the war, in spite of the representations made by political visionaries. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult not to doubt whether it was necessary to do away with slavery so suddenly and forcibly; whether a good deal of self-respect would not have been saved on both sides, and endless hatred, embitterment, and misery spared, if the Northern States had left the negro question to itself, to be solved in time through organic rather than mechanical means. Perhaps slavery would then have gone gradually over into some form of patriarchal relation.

It is too late to philosophize on this point; doctrinarianism has shaped the situation otherwise. The arms of the Civil War have decided in favour of the North. It is dismal, but it must be said that the actual events of the ensuing years of peace have decided rather in favour of the view of the South. To comprehend this fully, it is not enough to ask merely, as we have done so far, how the negro now feels; but more specially to ask what the American now thinks.

What is to-day the relation between the white man and the negro? There is a difference here between the North and the South, and yet one thing is true for both: the American feels that the cleft between the white and black races is greater now than ever before. So far as the North is concerned, the political view of the problem has probably changed very little. Specially the New England States, whose exalted ethical motives were beyond all doubt—as perhaps is not so certain of the Middle States—still sympathize to-day with the negro as a proper claimant of human rights. But unfortunately one may believe in the negro in the abstract, and yet shrink from contact with him in the concrete. The personal dislike of the black man, one might even call it an æsthetic antipathy, is really more general and wide-spread in the North than in the South. South of Washington one can scarcely be shaved except by a negro, while north of Philadelphia a white man would quite decline to patronize a coloured barber. A Southerner is even not averse to having a black nurse in the house, while in the Northern States that would never be thought of. Whenever the principle is to be upheld, the negro is made welcome in the North. He is granted here and there a small public office; he delivers orations, and is admitted to public organizations; he marches in the parades of war veterans, and a few negroes attend the universities. And still there is no real social intercourse between the races. In no club or private house and on no private occasions does one meet a negro. And here the European should bear specially in mind that negroes are not seldom men and women whose faces are perhaps as white as any Yankee’s, and who often have only the faintest taint of African blood.

At the very best the Northerner plays philanthropist toward the negro, takes care of his schools and churches, helps him to help himself, and to carve out his economic freedom. But even here the feeling has been growing more and more in recent years that the situation is somehow fundamentally false, and that the North has acted hastily and imprudently in accepting the emancipated negro on terms of so complete equality. The feeling of dissatisfaction is growing in the North, and it is not an accident that the negro population of the North grows so slowly, although the negro is always ready to wander, and would crowd in great numbers to the North if he might hope to better his fortunes there. The negro feels, however, intensely that he is still less a match for the energetic Northerner in the industrial competition than for the white man of the South, and that it is often easier to endure the hatred of the Southerner than the coldly theoretical sufferance of the Northerner when joined, as it is, with a personal distaste so pronounced.

In the South it is quite different. There could hardly be an æsthetic aversion for the race, when for generations blacks and whites have lived together, when all the servants of the home have been coloured, and the children have grown up on the plantations with their little black playmates. There has been a good deal in the easy good-nature of the negro which the Southern white man has always found sympathetic, and he responded in former times to the disinterested faithfulness of the slaves with a real attachment. And although this may have been such fondness as one feels for a faithful dog or an intelligent horse, there was in it, nevertheless, no trace of that physical repulsion felt by the Northerner. The same is fundamentally true to-day, and the rhetorical emphasis of the physical antipathy toward the black which one finds in Southern speeches is certainly in part hypocritical. It is true that even to-day the poorest white man would think himself too good to marry the most admirable coloured woman; but the reason of this would lie in social principles, and not, as politicians would like to make it appear, in any instinctive racial aversion, since so long as the negroes were in slavery the whites had no aversion to such personal contamination.

The great opposition which now exists is two-fold: it is on the one hand political and on the other social. The political situation of the South has been indeed dominated in the last forty years by the negro question. There have been four distinct periods of development; the first goes from the end of the Civil War to 1875. It was the time when the negro had first received the suffrage and become a political factor, the most dreary time which the South ever knew. It was economically ruined, was overrun with a disgusting army of unscrupulous politicians, who wanted nothing but to pervert the ignorant coloured voters for the lowest political ends. The victorious party in the North sent its menials down to organize the coloured quarry, and by mere numbers to outdo all independent activities of the white population.

One can easily understand why a Southern historian should say that the Southern States look back without bitterness on the years of the war, when brave men met brave men on the field of battle; but that they are furious when they remember the years which followed, when the victors, partly out of mistaken philanthropy, partly out of thoughtlessness and indifference, and partly out of evil intent, hastened to put the reins of government into the hands of a race which was hardly out of African barbarism; and thus utterly disheartened the men and women who had built up the splendid culture of the Old South. Perhaps there was no phase of American history, he says, so filled with poetry and romantic charm as the life of the South in the last ten years before the war; and certainly no period has been so full of mistakes, uncertainties, and crime as the decade immediately following. A reaction had to come, and it came in the twenty years between 1875 and 1895. The South betook itself to devious methods at the ballot-box. It was recognized that falsification of election returns was an evil, but it was thought to be a worse evil for the country to be handed over to the low domination of illiterate negroes. The political power of the negro has been broken in this way. Again and again the same method was resorted to, until finally the public opinion of the South approved of it, and those who juggled with the ballot-box were not pursued by the arm of the law, because the general opinion was with them.