If this was a handicap in 1916, what must it have been in 1865? Forty one years before this Negro scholar discovered the handicap, the South, in attempting to readjust itself to the consequences of defeat and the overthrow of its industrial system, had legislated to preserve that acquaintanceship by a system of apprenticeship, which if it was calculated to work out the problem very slowly; yet was calculated to produce something superior even to the free persons of color that slavery had evolved, a worthy product which no Negro or Northern scholar has ever had the patience to think about. Little as the author of this study knows about the free persons of color whom the South reared; yet it is not fair to accuse them of what Pickens is absolutely justified in stating with regard to the mass of Southern colored citizens who were the product of Congressional Reconstruction. Pickens indeed is refreshingly frank in this respect and so much so that the Negroes will avoid his book. It will not be found advertised in any list of the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored Race. He is dangerously near William Hannibal Thomas in the following:
“Till this day the Negro is seldom frank to the white man in America. He says what he does not mean; he means what he does not say. I have heard Negro speakers address mixed audiences of white and colored persons and both white and black go away rejoicing, each side thinking that the speaker had spoken their opinions, altho the opinions of the blacks were very different from those of the whites, even contradictory. This is one reason for the great misconception in the white race respecting the desires, ambitions and sentiments of the black.”[361]
But in the year which followed that in which Pickens’s book was published the United States entered the World War.
Before discussing the effect of that great adventure upon the Negro minority of one-tenth of the population of the United States, the force which swung the whole should have some slight consideration, and from the pen of a political opponent, the editor of the greatest Republican paper of the West this is pictured as follows:
“Our chief admiration for Mr. Wilson is for the manner in which he drove the war activities once we were committed. That determination was evolved from his character. He used conscription. He furnished the Allies with what they needed—men, money and materials in the amounts needed. Weakness at this time might have ruined us. A man less determined to have his own way, less impervious to what was said of him, might have flinched at conscripting soldiers. He might have tried to fight the war with volunteers. He might even have tried to fight it with money and materials. He might have tried to spare the nation human sacrifices or to limit the expenditure of human life. Then we should have entered a losing war and have been among the losers, just in time to be in the wreckage. Conscription was his big decision and whether he realized it or not was his most dangerous one. Hughes might have had serious draft riots. From Wilson the people took the draft with hardly a murmur, and the war was won right then. The President did not allow the people to draw back from a drop in the cup. He took their money. He spent it without a thought for the waste of it. There had to be waste. He put the United States behind the Allies with a promise of the last man and the last dollar. It required courage, intelligence and character; and all the ruggedness and wilfulness of Mr. Wilson’s temperament served the country as it needed to be served. Those were the high moments of his career. He sent 2,000,000 men to France before the astonished Germans thought that it was possible to do so. He had 2,000,000 in America training camps and more were being drafted. Then also from the White House came the thunders of rhetoric which stupefied the German people behind their armies and disintegrated them in the rear of their fighting forces. As American divisions put the pressure on German divisions, Mr. Wilson’s words destroyed the morale of the German people who had been steadfast; and the war was won.”[362]
But he did more, a Southerner, conscious of the deep prejudices of his own section and against the protests of many State officials, he determined that a certain proportion of colored men should have training as officers; nor did he permit this military training to be stopped even after the Houston riot, when for the second time Negro soldiery shot up a Southern city. Those who were guilty were court martialed promptly; but to the surprise of not a few of the Negro aspirants for office, the training of Negro officers proceeded. Again not quoting from a friend; but taking a Negro’s statement we note:
“As many as 1200 men became commissioned officers ... Negro nurses were authorized by the War Department for service in base hospitals at six army camps—Funston, Sherman, Zachary Taylor and Dodge, and women served as canteen workers in France and in charge of hostess houses in the United States. Sixty Negro men served as chaplains, 350 as Y. M. C. A. secretaries and others in special capacities.... In the whole matter of the War the depressing incident was the Court Martial of sixty-three members of the Twenty Fourth Infantry, U. S. A. on trial for rioting and the murder of seventeen people at Houston Texas, August 23rd, 1917. As a result of it thirteen of the defendants were hanged, December 11th, forty-nine sentences to imprisonment for life, four for imprisonment for shorter terms and four were acquitted.”[363]
President Wilson’s action in this matter was a vindication of President Roosevelt’s action in the previous riot at Brownsville and a stern condemnation of the sentimentalists, white and black whose strictures upon Roosevelt had led the Negro soldiery to harbor the amazing idea, that troops of any color could take the law into their own hands and make Zaberns in America, on a scale beyond the wildest imaginations of any War Lord’s minions, in Europe.
FOOTNOTES:
[352] Warne, Immigrant Invasion, p. 174.