The Soul of America Page 11
Among the visitors, William Monroe Trotter of Boston, a prominent editor, was the most direct. With W.E.B. Du Bois, Trotter had founded the Niagara Movement, a forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Niagara’s guiding principles included this one: “We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults.”
In 1909, in the aftermath of a 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, Oswald Garrison Villard, a grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, had written The Call: A Lincoln Emancipation Conference to Discuss Means for Securing Political and Civil Equality for the Negro. “ ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand,’ ” Villard wrote, and “this government cannot exist half-slave and half-free any better today than it could in 1861. Hence we call upon all the believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty.” Issued on Lincoln’s Birthday—it was the Great Emancipator’s centennial—the statement, signed by whites and blacks, including Du Bois, led to the creation of the NAACP in 1909.
Three years later, in the 1912 presidential election, blacks faced what Du Bois called “desperate alternatives.” Neither William Howard Taft, the Republican nominee, nor Theodore Roosevelt, the third-party Bull Moose candidate (despite his Lincoln Day rhetoric, his support for black appointees in the South, and the Booker T. Washington dinner) were thought to have enough to offer African Americans seeking to stride toward equality. Many gambled, then, on Wilson and the Democrats—to their great disappointment.
Opposition to the Wilson administration’s segregationist policies offered twentieth-century America a glimpse of what would become decades of civil rights activism. Through reports, open letters, and mass meetings, the NAACP sought to dramatize the moral stakes in the hope that protest would fill the void left by the president. Equally significant, the organization, through its Legal Bureau, used the courts to fight segregation and discrimination.
In the November 1914 White House meeting with Wilson, Trotter was blunt. “Only two years ago you were heralded as perhaps the second Lincoln, and now the Afro-American leaders who supported you are hounded as false leaders and traitors to their race,” Trotter told Wilson. “What a change segregation has wrought!”
Wilson replied that “it takes the world generations to outlive all its prejudices,” yet Trotter pressed his point.
“We are not here as wards,” Trotter said. “We are not here as dependents. We are here as full-fledged American citizens.”
Trotter spoke heatedly, and Wilson snapped: “Let me say this, if you will, that if this organization wishes to approach me again, it must choose another spokesman….You are an American citizen, as fully an American citizen as I am, but you are the only American citizen that has ever come into this office who has talked to me with a tone [and] with a background of passion that was evident.”
“I am from a part of the people, Mr. President,” Trotter replied.
“You have spoiled the whole cause for which you came,” Wilson said, dismissing the delegation. (Wilson would later refer to Trotter as “that unspeakable fellow.”)
From the president’s perspective, the White House exchange was disastrous. (Given his experience with Alice Paul and her suffrage colleagues, Wilson did not have the best record with visiting delegations.) “I was damn fool enough to lose my temper and to point them to the door,” Wilson remarked after the Trotter meeting. “What I ought to have done would have been to have listened, restrained my resentment, and, when they had finished, to have said to them that, of course, their petition would receive consideration. They would have withdrawn quietly and no more would have been heard about the matter. But I lost my temper and played the fool.”
As a Democrat whose base included white Southerners, Wilson supported Jim Crow regulations within the government and, as his biographer John Milton Cooper, Jr., has written, “readily…accepted the customary racial inequalities and indignities of the time.” In 1918, however, Wilson purged from the party two racist Democratic senators who opposed the administration—James K. Vardaman of Mississippi and Thomas Hardwick of Georgia—and strongly denounced lynching. The statement on lynching, Cooper writes, “gave a hint of what a powerful civil rights president he might have been if he had put his heart and mind into the cause. But they were not there….His impatience with agitation over race from any quarter made him resemble northern whites of that time more than fellow southerners, but he had grown up despising abolitionists and regarding Reconstruction as an injustice.” The freed slaves of the South, Wilson wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in 1901, had been “excited by a freedom they did not understand, exalted by false hopes; bewildered and without leaders, and yet insolent and aggressive; sick of work, covetous of pleasure—a host of dusky children untimely put out of school.”
William Monroe Trotter, a founder of the Niagara Movement, challenged President Wilson on civil rights in a contentious White House meeting that ended with Wilson preemptorily dismissing Trotter’s delegation.
At the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, in the summer of 1913, Wilson had addressed a gathering of Union and Confederate veterans in terms Edward Alfred Pollard himself might have applauded, casting the war as one between men of goodwill. “These venerable men crowding here to this famous field have set us a great example of devotion and utter sacrifice,” Wilson said. “They were willing to die that the people might live….Their work is handed on to us, to be done in another way, but not in another spirit. Our day is not over; it is upon us in full tide.”
Wilson was implicitly seeking support for his progressive agenda, one that included measures aimed at economic fairness. “Whom do I command?” he asked the crowd at Gettysburg. “The ghostly hosts who fought upon these battlefields long ago and are gone? These gallant gentlemen stricken in years whose fighting days are over, their glory won?…I have in my mind another host….That host is the people themselves, the great and the small, without class or difference of kind or race or origin; and undivided in interest, if we have but the vision to guide and direct them and order their lives aright in what we do.”
The duality of Wilson’s Gettysburg speech—on the one hand ratifying the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War while calling for vigorous public action, at the federal level, to reform basic elements of national life—reflected the duality inherent in many American hearts.
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There was no more vivid manifestation of those lengthening shadows in the first decades of the twentieth century than the new Ku Klux Klan. A trilogy of novels by Thomas W. Dixon, Jr., a Lost Cause devotee, helped lead to the Klan’s rebirth. Born in 1864 in North Carolina, Dixon published The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden—1865–1900 in 1902 and followed it with The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan in 1905 and The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire in 1907. The books were widely read, and Dixon, who became a popular figure, went on the lecture circuit to spread his message of white superiority. “My object is to teach the north, the young north, what it has never known—the awful suffering of the white man during the dreadful reconstruction period,” Dixon said, for “the white man must and shall be supreme.” He adapted The Clansman for the stage, and, in 1914, joined forces with the filmmaker D. W. Griffith to make a movie of it. The film’s ultimate title: The Birth of a Nation, a celebration of white supremacy and a sustained attack on African Americans.
Dixon, who understood that the rise of cinema opened a world of possibilities in terms of reaching the public, was ecstatic about the movie project. “The whole problem of swift universal education of public opinion is thus solved by this invention,” Dixon said of motion pictures. “Civilization will be saved i
f we can stir and teach the slumbering millions behind the politician. By this device we can reach them. We can make them see things happen before their eyes until they cry in anguish….Its scenes will be vivid realities, not cold works on printed pages, but scenes wet with tears and winged with hope.”
At a running time of 187 minutes, Griffith’s film, which featured Lillian Gish, was grand spectacle—and immensely profitable. The title cards included a version of a pro-Klan quotation from Woodrow Wilson from his scholarly days: “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation…until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”
D. W. Griffith’s 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation, a cinematic celebration of white supremacy based on a novel by Thomas W. Dixon, Jr., helped inspire a new Ku Klux Klan.
Wilson and Dixon had overlapped for a time at Johns Hopkins University, and Dixon reached out to the president in the effort to publicize the film. Wilson agreed to host a screening. On Thursday, February 18, 1915, in the East Room, the president watched the movie. He offered little visible reaction to what he saw. An alleged remark—“It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true”—was almost certainly manufactured. Yet word of the presidential viewing offered a tacit endorsement that the film’s promoters were more than happy to have.
The Birth of a Nation provoked protests in several cities, including Boston and New York, and offered the nascent NAACP an opportunity to organize and make the case for fairness in the public square. During a demonstration against the film in Boston at the Tremont Theatre, an African American observer noted, “As I looked over that vast crowd of Negro men and women, this thought came to me: this is a united people, though in the minority, and they are going to win.” The NAACP’s Crisis, the magazine edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, hailed the efforts against Griffith’s movie. “It is gratifying to know that in this work,” The Crisis noted, “we have the cooperation of all elements of colored people.”
The reaction to the film as racist propaganda was compelling enough that President Wilson distanced himself from the entire enterprise. “It is true that ‘The Birth of a Nation’ was produced before the President and his family at the White House, but the President was entirely unaware of the character of [the film] before it was presented and has at no time expressed his approbation of it,” Wilson wrote in a third-person statement. “Its exhibition at the White House was a courtesy extended to an old acquaintance.”
Whatever his prejudices and however strong he believed the constraints of the age on racial justice, the president was conscientious enough to know that there was something wrong with the familiar narrative of white supremacy.
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Yet the film and its broader influence could not be contained. After The Birth of a Nation, a small group of men met on Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, on Thursday, November 25, 1915. Led by William J. Simmons, an Alabama-born, circuit-riding minister and veteran of the Spanish-American War, the gathering burned a cross and founded a new Ku Klux Klan. Simmons claimed his father, a doctor and mill owner in Harpersville, Alabama, about thirty miles southeast of Birmingham, had been “an officer of the old Klan” in the 1860s. The son’s imagination was fired by the stories of former days. “On horseback in their white robes they rode across the wall in front of me,” Simmons said, describing an alleged childhood vision. “As the picture faded out I got down on my knees and swore that I would found a fraternal organization that would be a memorial to the Ku Klux Klan.”
Simmons’s choice of venue for the re-founding of the Klan in 1915 was rich in significance, for the Atlanta United Daughters of the Confederacy were campaigning for the creation of a Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain. “The Birth of a Nation will give us a percentage of the next Monday’s matinee,” the project’s leader, Mrs. C. Helen Plane, wrote. “Since seeing this wonderful and beautiful picture of Reconstruction in the South, I feel that it is due to the Ku Klux Klan which saved us from Negro domination and carpet-bag rule, [to] be immortalized on Stone Mountain. Why not represent a small group of them in their nightly uniform approaching in the distance?” (In the end, the memorial—which was begun by Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who would later carve Mount Rushmore—featured only Lee, Davis, and Stonewall Jackson.)
What began on that November night at Stone Mountain spread across white America. Forty-eight states—which is to say, every state in the Union at the time—had a Klan presence by 1924. Indiana was a stronghold; so were Oregon, Colorado, and Kansas. A combination of factors created a climate conducive to the Klan’s rebirth. There was the wide influence of The Birth of a Nation, unease about crime, worry about anarchists, fear of immigrants flooding in from a Europe desolated by war, and, beginning in 1917, anxiety about Communism and subversion in the New World after the Bolshevik Revolution.
From afar it can be difficult to grasp the second Klan’s reach. Nativism was prevalent; the new Klansmen hated blacks, Roman Catholics, and Jews alike. During a Klan meeting in Georgia, Simmons dramatically drove a bowie knife into a table between two handguns and announced: “Now let the Niggers, Catholics, Jews, and all others who disdain my imperial wizardry, come on.” Simmons hired a pair of public relations experts, Mary Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clarke, to promote the Klan nationally, and the enterprise was financed by a ten-dollar initiation fee known as a “Klectoken” that was split among Simmons, Tyler, Clarke, and the local “King Kleagles,” lower-ranking “Kleagles,” and “Grand Goblins” who recruited new members. Money—including revenue from selling robes and hoods—poured in.
At a time when industrialization and urbanization were transforming the old agrarian world, the Klan promised racial solidarity and cultural certitude. “The Klan offered structure, position, and brotherhood to many restive or disoriented men from small towns and big cities in the America of the 1920s,” the historian David H. Bennett wrote. “It was a movement so remarkably suited to its time and place that its growth matched the boom of the larger nation.” Klansmen held governorships (eleven) and U.S. Senate seats (sixteen); scholars believe “scores” of U.S. House members also belonged to the KKK. (The Klan itself put the House figure at seventy-five in 1923.) In Alabama, Hugo Black, a future justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, joined the Klan. In 1922 in Independence, Missouri, a young Harry Truman, then seeking office as eastern judge of Jackson County, nearly joined the Klan but declined when he was told he would be expected to keep Roman Catholics out of county jobs.
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During the Great War, which America entered in 1917, Wilson and the Congress had restricted freedom of expression in the name of national security. There was legislation to protect the military draft from interference or protest. The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 criminalized dissent in wartime. And Wilson’s Justice Department targeted the Industrial Workers of the World with indictments and trials.
Speech itself was under siege. It was illegal, according to the 1918 legislation, to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States.” Under Wilson and through the direct offices of Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson of Texas, the post office became an enthusiastic and thoroughgoing censor, refusing to distribute publications it deemed unpatriotic. Among numerous other examples—as many as four hundred publications were censored—the suppression of The Masses magazine, edited by the leading radical Max Eastman, was particularly galling to the antiwar community. “I spent the whole winter trying to think up the worst possible consequences of our going to war, and advertise them in the public press,” Eastman said, “but I never succeeded in thinking up anything half so bad as this.”
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The Red Scare era was marked by numerous bombings around the country, including this one on Wall Street in 1920.
On the afternoon of Sunday, June 16, 1918, at Nimisilla Park in Canton, Ohio, the Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, a frequent presidential candidate, delivered an antiwar speech. He took the view—a common one in radical circles of the day—that the Great War was being fought to sustain capitalistic hegemony and imperialism. “And here let me emphasize the fact—and it cannot be repeated too often—that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace,” Debs said. “It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.”
In the fever of wartime, Debs’s words were taken as a violation of Wilson’s Espionage Act, and the Socialist lion was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in prison. “I have been accused of obstructing the war,” Debs told the jury at his trial. “I admit it. Gentlemen, I abhor war. I would oppose it if I stood alone.” With Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., writing the opinion, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the conviction; Debs dismissed the justices as “begowned, bewhiskered, bepowdered old fossils.” President Wilson refused to intervene on Debs’s behalf, and it fell to President Warren G. Harding, Wilson’s Republican successor, to pardon him.