Slavery by Another Name (32 page)

railroad cars, restrooms, restaurants, neighborhoods, and schools.

Al of this had been accomplished in a sudden, unfet ered grab by

white supremacists that was met outside the South with lit le more

than quiet assent. During the thirty years since Reconstruction—

despite its being a period of nearly continuous Republican control

of the White House—federal o cials raised only the faintest

concerns about white abuse of black laborers. Southern leaders

were astonished that such a protest had inexplicably arisen now.

For blacks it seemed that a true friend had miraculously come to

occupy the White House, that somehow the assurances of American

democracy might actual y ful l themselves. "The South … is in the

hands of unfriendly white men…It has been left to the Federal

Government, under that administration of President Roosevelt, to

expose this iniquity …and stretch out the long arm of the Nation to

expose this iniquity …and stretch out the long arm of the Nation to

punish and prevent it," wrote the black commentator Charles W

Chesnut . "The President has endeavored to stem the tide of

prejudice, which, sweeping up from the South, has sought to

overwhelm the Negro everywhere; and he has made it clear that he

regards himself as the representative of the people."3

This dramatic turn of events—so revolting to southern whites, so

euphoric to blacks—began with the assassination of President

Wil iam McKinley two years earlier in September 1901.

McKinley had represented more than any other American leader

at the turn of the twentieth century the experiences of those who

directly participated in the war between the North and the South

and came to see that struggle as a moral crusade against slavery and

for the preservation of the union. A young private when he

volunteered, McKinley rose steadily to the rank of major by the end

of the war on the basis of modest acts of heroism. He was the last

president who had served as an o cer in Abraham Lincoln's Grand

Army, and mil ions of aging Union veterans continued to greet him

af ectionately as Major McKinley.

But by the fal of 1901, the veterans he marched with through the

great bat les of the con ict had become a geriatric generation, their

luster increasingly pale against the new economic dramas playing

out between fabulously rich titans of manufacturing and production

such as John D. Rockefel er, Andrew Carnegie, and banker John

Pierpont Morgan and the masses of laborers and immigrants

streaming into the bulging metropolises of the North and Midwest.

Theodore Roosevelt came to serve as McKinley's vice president in

1900 almost accidental y. His place on McKinley's presidential

ticket was engineered by old-guard Republican leaders in New York

primarily to get Roosevelt, the state's unexpectedly popular new

governor, out of their way. Roosevelt was barely set led into

Washington when McKinley was shot by an anarchist while standing

on a receiving line for public visitors at an international exhibition

in Bu alo, New York. McKinley died eight days later, and Roosevelt

in Bu alo, New York. McKinley died eight days later, and Roosevelt

was sworn in as president on September 14, 1901.

Roosevelt, who had been a child when the Civil War was fought,

saw himself not as heir to McKinley's archaic nineteenth-century

political regimes and the contradictory outcomes of Reconstruction

and industrialization. Instead, he imagined his rise to the White

House as a catalyst for reconciling Americans to what Roosevelt

perceived as the great missed opportunities of the nation's political

and economic freedoms.

Roosevelt was also at least nominal y concerned about the chasm

between blacks and whites, and the gap between the conditions of

African Americans and the promises made to them at the end of

slavery. But none of this was to Roosevelt an intractable dilemma.

Just forty-two years old upon becoming president, the youngest yet

in U.S. history, he believed that Americans were a people of

seminal y good character, reasonable thinking, and, as a body, of

singular wisdom. Reminded of their fundamental principles, al

white Americans would see the necessity of fairness to freed slaves

and their descendants, Roosevelt thought—just as he was con dent

that the leaders of the new steel, coal, railroad, and banking trusts

ultimately could be relied on to balance pro ts against the needs of

al the nation's workers.

The United States was emerging as an authentic global power for

the rst time in its history. The country's economic and military

prowess outside the national borders was greater than at any time

since the declaration of the republic. The nation was in the midst of

an explosion of new economic production and wealth. In the South,

centers of industry were rising in Birmingham and Atlanta.

Industrial combinations such as Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.

were moving to chal enge northern rivals like U.S. Steel and

Carnegie Steel. The landscape of the South remained de ned by the

abject poverty of mil ions of plebeian black and white farmers, but

there was a sense of psychic resurgence in the region. The actual

horrors and injuries of the Civil War were receding from col ective

memory. Nostalgia for the antebel um South and cal s for reunion

and reconciliation among veterans of the armies for both sides were

and reconciliation among veterans of the armies for both sides were

becoming national obsessions. The literature of Joel Chandler

Harris and scores of imitators—chock-ablock with white writers’

stylized depictions of "Negro" dialect and the most benevolent

images of slave masters and slaves imaginable—had supplanted the

canon of abolitionist novels and rsthand accounts of slaves that

dominated American book sales and lecture tours in the previous

generation.

The long-standing excuse for southern malevolence toward blacks

— that the region left prostrate by war, the ending of slavery, and

the ostensible agonies of Reconstruction couldn't help but abuse its

former slaves—struck Roosevelt and his breed of proactive

Americans as tired, dul , and simply wrong. The assertion by white

southerners of a de facto right to reverse the guarantees of voting

rights and citizenship to blacks seemed to Roosevelt so absurd that

it could only be truly supported by extremists. He reckoned— using

the same logic that compel ed him to chal enge the abuse of

immigrant and impoverished laborers in the factories and coal elds

closer to his home at Oyster Bay, New York—that a reasonable and

progressive northern man such as himself could surely safeguard the

fundamental needs of southern blacks while stil reassuring

southern whites that they had nothing to fear from al owing

authentic citizenship for al .

Roosevelt could hardly have been more wrong in his judgment of

the political and racial realities of the South. But in addition to his

instinctive, if ultimately naive, sympathy for African Americans,

Roosevelt had explicitly political motivations for befriending blacks

as wel . The new president was anything but a celebrated gure

within his own Republican Party. Viewed suspiciously by

Republican leaders in New York, he was despised by leaders of the

national party's archconservative big business faction, who in the

previous three decades had engineered the steady drift of

Republicans from radical abolitionist roots toward a new position

as the party of unrestrained commerce. Roosevelt needed a novel

strategy if he hoped to secure the nomination for the presidential

election in 1904.

election in 1904.

A key element of the strategy was to forge a political base among

southern Republicans, almost al of whom were black. Roosevelt

believed he could cement those loyalties without stirring white

hostilities by appointing "reasonable" white Democrats to many key

federal positions—such as judgeships. The plan relied on one of the

oddest curiosities of the American electoral circumstances at the

beginning of the twentieth century. While African Americans were

almost whol y barred from voting in general elections—having been

disenfranchised in every state in which black voters constituted

statistical y signi cant numbers—black delegations continued to be

accorded ful rights at the national conventions of the Republican

Party. The result was that while African American voters had lit le

practical impact upon national elections, given that they were

whol y unable to deliver any electoral votes from the southern

states where nearly al blacks resided, black Republicans

nonetheless remained an essential swing factor in selecting

presidential nominees for their party.

Theodore Roosevelt made this calculation long before gaining the

presidency, and intentional y cultivated cordial relations with

African American leaders he considered moderate. Chief among

them was Booker T. Washington, the erudite former slave who had

risen to become the nation's most prominent black leader and the

founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The two men grew

progressively more friendly during Roosevelt's months of service as

vice president. In early 1901, Roosevelt accepted an invitation to

speak at Tuskegee later that year, as part of a short tour of the

South that was to include a brief homage to the Georgia plantation

home in which his mother had been reared.

With the death of Frederick Douglass in 1895, Washington was by

far the best known and most in uential of black leaders in the

United States— emphasizing black self-improvement, industrial

education, and acquiescence to white political power. Washington's

gradualist message to African Americans was epitomized in a

speech on September 18, 1895, at the Cot on States and

International Exhibition in Atlanta, urging that blacks accommodate

International Exhibition in Atlanta, urging that blacks accommodate

white demands for subservience while building up their own

industrial skil s, farms, and basic education.

To thunderous applause from southern whites, Washington said

of the two races: "In al things purely social we can be as separate

as the ngers, yet one as the hand in al things essential to mutual

progress." The black educator, named a "commissioner" of the event,

urged African Americans across Alabama to use the exposition's

"Negro Building" as a showcase for black skil s in mining,

lumbering and farming, the very industries in which they remained

most oppressed across the South.45

This ideal of a class of political y and legal y passive but

industrious African Americans deeply appealed to white economic

leaders. Near the closing day of the fair in late December 1895,

when Washington returned to speak on "Colored Teachers Day," the

exposition program featured on its last page a drawing of the Negro

Building and a caption praising its black at endants for "at ractive

neatness." The exhibits were "evidence of the growing skil ,

advancing intel igence and promotive industry of the race."

Washington's Tuskegee Institute, located less than fty miles from

the farm of John Pace, in the town of Tuskegee, became celebrated

among white northern philanthropists. Washington spent much of

his time touring the country to raise funds for the school and

at empting to quietly manipulate government o cials and the

political process on racial issues.

Younger black intel ectuals such as Professor W E. B. DuBois in

Atlanta came to bit erly criticize Washington as too wil ing to

accept a secondary position for African Americans. But Roosevelt

perceived Washington's views as sensible, pragmatic, and clearly in

keeping with his own progressive, but eminently paternalistic,

beliefs. Washington's emphasis on personal self-reliance and moral

and religious rectitude as the keys to individual progress

corresponded to Roosevelt's vision for uplifting yeoman farmers,

immigrant laborers, ranch hands, and factory workers of whatever

race or region. Roosevelt was convinced that if the "common man,"

race or region. Roosevelt was convinced that if the "common man,"

whether black or white, fol owed these principles and that

government ensured that no unjust legal obstacles impeded him,

then the United States could achieve immeasurable progress. Al of

this could happen, Roosevelt insisted, without disrupting the