Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (46 page)

Addressing the Democrats’ 1896 nominating convention, the silver-tongued Bryan captured the audience of 20,000 with a speech regarded as the most thrilling and effective in party convention history. Raising the banner of silver against gold, western farmers against eastern business, Bryan said, “Burn down your cities and leave our farms and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

With a great theatrical flourish, he concluded, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,” and extending his arms like Christ crucified, Bryan said, “You shall not crucify mankind on a Cross of Gold.”

The speech was met with wild acclaim, and the following day, Bryan—who was being subsidized by western silver and copper interests—was named the Democrats’ choice—at age thirty-six the youngest presidential nominee ever. With the Democrats chanting “Cross of Gold,” the Populist platform had been co-opted and the Populists were forced to throw their support behind Bryan. Populism was Jonah in the belly of the mainstream Democratic whale.

In the meantime, the guiding hand and pocketbook of the wealthy Ohio industrialist “kingmaker” Mark Hanna literally bought the Republican nomination for Ohio’s governor William McKinley (1843–1901). In a campaign thoroughly modern in its “packaging” of a candidate, the Hanna-led Republicans outspent the Democrats by $7 million to $300,000. McKinley’s election marked the triumph of eastern industrial interests over western farm interests. One of McKinley’s first acts in office was to kick Senator John Sherman up to the State Department, allowing Hanna to take Sherman’s Senate seat. Populism as an effective political third party was just about finished, joining the long list of American third parties that had burst into prominence, only to flicker and fade after a brief flash of brilliance.

What did “separate but equal” mean?

Homer Plessy was seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth black. But when he tried to sit in a railroad coach reserved for whites, that one-eighth was all that counted. Plessy was arrested, in accordance with an 1890 Louisiana law separating railroad coaches by race. Plessy fought his arrest all the way to the Supreme Court in 1896. Unfortunately, this was the same Supreme Court that had protected corporations as “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment, ruled that companies controlling 98 percent of the sugar business weren’t monopolies, and jailed striking workers who were “restraining trade.”

In Plessy’s case, the arch-conservative, business-minded Court showed it was also racist in a decision that was every bit as indecent and unfair as the
Dred Scott
decision before the Civil War. The majority decision in the case of
Plessy v. Ferguson
established a new judicial idea in America—the concept of “separate but equal,” meaning states could legally segregate races in public accommodations, such as railroad cars and public schools. In his majority opinion, Justice Henry Brown wrote, “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

The problem with this fine notion, of course, was that every facet of life in the South was increasingly separate—schools, dining areas, trains and later buses, drinking fountains, and lunch counters—but they were never equal.

The lone dissenter in this case, as in so many others during this period, was John Marshall Harlan (1833–1911) of Kentucky. In his eloquent dissent, Harlan wrote, “The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race, while they are on a public highway, is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.

“. . . We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow-citizens, our equals before the law.”

In practical terms, the Supreme Court of this period had turned congressional Reconstruction upside down. Its perversion of the Fourteenth Amendment had been used to protect corporations instead of blacks.
Plessy v. Ferguson
had given the Court’s institutional stamp of approval to segregation. It would be another sixty years before another Supreme Court decision overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine.

Who was Jim Crow?

With the blessing of the Supreme Court, the floodgates opened. In the years following the
Plessy
decision, almost every former Confederate state enacted “separate but equal” laws that merely gave the force of law to what had become a fact of life—slavery under a new name. And to blacks and whites alike, the name was Jim Crow.

Like Uncle Tom of the minstrel shows that followed in the wake of Stowe’s momentous novel, the name Jim Crow came from a white man in blackface. According to historian Lerone Bennet Jr., a white entertainer named Thomas Dartmouth Rice wrote a song-and-dance tune that became an international hit in the 1830s.

Weel a-bout and turn a-bout

And do just so

Every time I weel about

I jump Jim Crow.

“By 1838,” writes Bennett, “Jim Crow was wedged into the language as a synonym for Negro.” And the image it conveyed was of a comic, jumping, stupid rag doll of a man.

Jim Crow railroad cars came first, creating the situation addressed in
Plessy
. Afterward came separate waiting rooms, factory entrances, and even factory windows. Eventually Jim Crow said that white nurses couldn’t tend black patients and vice versa. Black barbers couldn’t cut the hair of white women and children. Perhaps most damaging was the separation of education into white and black schools, a system in which white schools regularly received ten times the funding of black schools, and teaching was as segregated as the classrooms. Some states failed to provide blacks with high schools, a fact that carried over well into the twentieth century. In fact, there was no facet of life that was untouched by Jim Crow, even criminal life: in New Orleans, prostitution was segregated.

At the roots of Jim Crow were two fears. One was sexual—the fear, either primal or institutionalized, of black men having sexual contact with white women. In the words of one notable southern politician of the time, “Whenever the Constitution comes between me and the virtue of the white women of the South, I say to hell with the Constitution.”

The other fear combined politics and economics. When the Populist movement threatened to unite poor blacks and whites, the old elite white regimes in the South drove poor whites back into line with fear of black economic power. Voting fell back along strict racial lines. Ultimately, Jim Crow meant the end of black voting power in the South, as restrictive registration laws kept blacks away from the ballot boxes through poll taxes, literacy requirements, and a dozen other technical tricks.

Where laws failed to keep blacks in their place, another technique proved even more effective: the terror of lynching. Blacks were strung up throughout the South with impunity through much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often but not always on the pretext of the rape of a white woman. Lynchings of blacks became so commonplace that they were advertised in newspapers, providing a sort of spectator sport.

Out of this period stretching from the late nineteenth century to the recent past, the major black voice in America was one of accommodation. Booker T. Washington (1859–1915) was born a slave but was able to receive an education under congressional Reconstruction. Working as a janitor to pay his way through Hampton Normal and Agricultural School, he became a schoolteacher. He was clearly an impressive figure who could mesmerize a crowd, as Frederick Douglass had done a generation earlier. Almost single-handedly he built Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute from a shack beside a church into the major vocational training school for blacks in the country. In a sense, Washington was trying to adopt the rags-to-riches American dream for southern blacks, preaching the virtues of hard work and economic survival through education and advancement into the professions. Critics of Washington, both in his day and later, complained that his accommodation to and acceptance of the status quo was weak, even cowardly. Others have defended Washington as one man who was doing his best in a time of very limited options. After all, he lived in a time when a lynch mob needed no more excuse to hang a man than that he was “uppity.”

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON,
“The Atlantic Compromise” (1895):

To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are. . . .”

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest of folly.

Who fought in the Spanish-American War?

The racism expressed in Jim Crow didn’t end at southern, or even American, borders. The vigorous rise of a belief in white, Anglo-Saxon superiority extended overseas. One popular writer of 1885 was the clergyman Josiah Strong, who argued that the United States was the true center of Anglo-Saxon virtue and was destined to spread it over the world. “This powerful race,” wrote Strong in the best-selling book
Our Country
, “will move down upon Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the islands of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond.” Then, borrowing from Charles Darwin, whose ideas were being floated around, Strong concluded, “Can any one doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the ‘survival of the fittest’?” Strong left no doubt as to who he thought the “fittest” was.

Strong’s message found a receptive audience in the corridors of American power, and a few years later the message went out in a war with Spain. This was America’s muscle-flexing war, a war that a young and cocky nation fought to shake off the cobwebs, pull itself out of the economic doldrums, and prove itself to a haughty Europe.

Watching England, Germany, France, and Belgium spread their global empires in Asia and Africa, America fought this war to expand and protect its trade markets overseas, capture valuable mineral deposits, and acquire land that was good for growing fruit, tobacco, and sugar. It was a war wanted by banks and brokers, steelmakers and oilmen, manufacturers and missionaries. It was a war that President McKinley didn’t seem to want, and a war that Spain certainly didn’t want. But there were a lot of powerful people who did want it. And, perhaps above all, it was a war the newspapers wanted. War, after all, was good for circulation.

The ostensible reason for going to war with Spain was to “liberate” Cuba, a Spanish colony. A fading world power, Spain was trying to maintain control over a native population that demanded its freedom, as America had demanded and won its independence a century earlier. When Spain sent a military governor to throw rebels into concentration camps, America acted the part of the outraged sympathizer. It was a convenient excuse. But an element of fear also played into the game. There was already one black republic in the Western Hemisphere, in Haiti. The United States didn’t want another one in Cuba.

Forces outside the government were matched by powerful men inside it who wanted war. Chief among them were Henry Cabot Lodge (1850–1924), the influential senator from Massachusetts; Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, and Captain Alfred Mahan, author of a book called
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783
, an influential work calling for expansion of American naval power to bases around the world, especially in the Pacific. Roosevelt, the great admirer of the cowboy spirit, once told a friend, “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”

Lodge was an even more outspoken booster of American imperialism. When President Cleveland failed to annex Hawaii in 1893, Lodge lashed out angrily and spoke about his aims for America: “In the interests of our commerce and our fullest development, we should build the Nicaraguan canal, and for the protection of that canal and for the sake of our commercial supremacy in the Pacific we should control the Hawaiian Islands and maintain our influence in Samoa. . . . Commerce follows the flag, and we should build up a navy strong enough to give protection to Americans in every quarter of the globe.”

Pressing the war cries from the outside were the two most powerful newspaper czars in American history, William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) and Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911). Both men had learned from the Civil War that war headlines sold newspapers. Tabloid headlines depicting Spanish atrocities against Cubans became commonplace, and the influential papers of both men were outdoing each other in the sensationalized screaming for war. The expansionist doctrine that had grown out of Manifest Destiny also sold newspapers, so the papers of both men were soon hawking war. When the artist Frederic Remington (1861–1909) went to Cuba to send back pictures for Hearst’s papers, he cabled his boss he couldn’t find a war. “You furnish the pictures,” Hearst supposedly responded in a fury. “I’ll furnish the war.” Whether apocryphal or not, the story is an accurate indication of how both Hearst and Pulitzer viewed the war—as a circulation boon—and they were not afraid of sensationalizing any accounts of Spanish atrocities to heighten the war fever.