For thirty years the South has been struggling to establish White Supremacy, and to diminish the political importance of the negro.
Yet in this campaign of 1908 we heard Bryan’s lieutenant, Henry Watterson, declare that the time had come for the Negroes to divide and thus increase their political importance. The whole Bryanite campaign was pitched to that key. “The time has come to increase the political importance of the negro!”
In other words, the Bryanites deserted the Democratic position on the negro question, and went over to the Thad Stevens-Sumner position, at the very time that the Republicans, led by Roosevelt and Taft, were coming over to the Southern view. We saw Bryan flirting with the negro leaders, and seeking to make a Democratic asset out of the resentment which they felt because of Roosevelt’s pro-Southern position on the matter of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. We likewise saw Mr. Bryan witness with seeming approval, the parade of negro clubs on whose banners were displayed extracts from Foraker’s speeches denouncing the President for his dismissal from the army of the black brutes who on their way to Brownsville insolently declared “When we get there all the women will look alike to us, white, black and Mexican”; and who put a climax to a series of outrages and threats by shooting up the town—killing one man at his own gate, bringing down the Chief of police with a shattered arm, riddling hotel and private houses with bullets; and terrorizing men, women and children.
Yes, we saw Bryan receiving negro delegations who came to confer with him about the negro soldiers; we saw the colored delegations cordially met and hospitably entertained; and we heard them say, that they were perfectly satisfied with the assurances which Mr. Bryan had given them. They circulated, by the hundred thousand, a letter, bearing the names of the most prominent negroes of the land, in which the statement occurs that “We have been in communication with Mr. Bryan for weeks and have received satisfactory assurances from him” as to patronage, recognition, and the amendments.
Mr. Bryan must have been aware of the fact that this circular letter was being used in his behalf. It is highly probable that his Campaign Committee furnished the money which paid for the printing and the mailing of it; and there is no doubt that the negro speakers who went about asking for votes for Bryan, because of Brownsville and because of the Southern Disfranchisement laws, were paid by the Bryanite Committee.
It would have been a calamity to the country had the desperate tactics of the Bryanites met with success. The impression would have been made that the negro vote elected him, and there is no telling how far that would have influenced Mr. Bryan in his official dealings with the negro leaders.
We must remember that he earnestly supported the candidacy of a negro against a white man, in Nebraska. The negro got the office. It is said that no such thing had occurred in Nebraska before.
He educated his daughter and one of his sons at the Social Equality “University of Nebraska,” and another of his sons is a student there now. To this Social Equality College, Mr. Bryan annually donates two hundred and fifty dollars.
He has never uttered a word against the mixed schools of Nebraska wherein the negro children are educated on terms of Social Equality with the whites. He has never condemned the intermarriage of blacks and whites. There is no law against it in Nebraska, and miscegenation is common.
Born and reared in Illinois, Mr. Bryan holds the anti-Southern view of the race question. By birth, education and environment, he got the belief that Social Equality is right, and he practices what he believes when he sends his children to be educated along with the negroes.