Imperialism was the third
i.
The growing clamor to annex Hawaii included the claim that we could govern those brown people better than they could govern themselves. After winning the Spanish-American War, the McKinley administration used the same rationale to defend making war upon our allies, the Filipinos. Imperialism as an ideological fad was sweeping the West, and it both depended upon and in turn reinforced the ideology of white supremacy. After 1890, imperialism led the United States successively to dominate Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, the Virgin Islands, and several other Caribbean and Central American nations. Democrats pointed out the inconsistency of denying real self-government to Hawaiians, Filipinos, Haitians, and others, partly on the basis of their alleged racial inferiority, while insisting on equal rights for African Americans. The Republicans had no real answer.
There were still other causes of the decline of Republican anti-racism. During what some historians call the Gilded Age, some capitalists amassed huge fortunes. Doing likewise became the dream of many Republicans, a goal that was hard to reconcile with the party’s former talk of social justice.
20
This increasing stratification sapped America’s historic belief that “all men are created equal.” To justify the quest for wealth, a substitute ideology was created, Social Darwinism—the notion that the fittest rise to the top in society. It provided a potent rationale not only for class privilege, but for racial superiority as well.
The worsening of race relations cannot be explained by downturns such as the Panic of 1893, for the Nadir began before 1893 and persisted through economic ups and downs. To be sure, economic determinism and racial competition, usually exploited by the Democrats, played a part, as we have seen. But the deepening racism of the Nadir was first and foremost a cultural movement, stemming from the decay of Civil War idealism, the evolution of ideas such as imperialism and eugenics, changes in the Republican Party, and other historical developments. Therefore it was historically contingent, not preordained.
If
President Grant and his successors had achieved a fairer Indian policy,
if
the Senate had passed the Federal Elections Bill,
if
Republicans had not caved in on race after the bill’s defeat,
if
McKinley had not attacked the Philippines and taken us down the road to imperialism,
if
the national government had put down the white violence that ended the last interracial southern political movements between 1890 and 1898,
if
affluent WASPs had rejected instead of embraced the anti-Semitism that flourished around 1900—if any of these had happened, then the Nadir might never have occurred. Then if a town or suburb had tried to drive out or keep out African Americans in 1895 or 1909 or 1954, the federal government under the Fourteenth Amendment might have intervened. So might state governments have done.
Of course, ultimately racial superiority as an ideology derives from slavery. An Arkansas librarian whom I interviewed while doing research for this book put this as succinctly as I’ve heard it: “African Americans were the people enslaved. So whites had to make them intellectually inferior to justify enslaving them.” Because there was slavery, blacks were stigmatized as a race and black skin became a badge of slavery. Because there was slavery, whites made African Americans a pariah people whose avoidance—except on unequal terms—conferred status upon whites. Thus because there was slavery, there was segregation. Ultimately, racism is a vestige of “slavery unwilling to die,” as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas famously put it in 1968. In the final analysis, the Nadir period, as well as the sundown towns and suburbs it spawned, are relics of slavery. Like the Civil War itself, neither the Nadir nor sundown towns would have occurred absent slavery.
21
The Nadir of Race Relations Sets In
We have seen that the Republicans removed themselves as an effective anti-racist force after about 1891. The Democrats already called themselves “the white man’s party.” It followed that African Americans played no significant role in either political party from 1892 on. Now, regardless of which party controlled it, the federal government stood by idly as white southerners used terror, fraud, and “legal” means to eliminate African American voters. Mississippi pioneered the “legal” means in 1890 when it passed a new state constitution that made it impossible for most black Mississippians to vote or hold public office. All other southern and border states emulated Mississippi by 1907.
In 1894, Democrats in Congress repealed the remaining federal election statutes. Now the Fifteenth Amendment was lifeless, for it had no extant laws to enforce it. In 1896, in
Plessy v. Ferguson,
the United States Supreme Court declared de jure (by law) racial segregation legal, which caused it to spread in at least twelve northern states.
22
In 1898, Democrats rioted in Wilmington, North Carolina, driving out the mayor and all other Republican officeholders and killing at least twelve African Americans. The McKinley administration did nothing, allowing this coup d’état to stand. Congress became resegre-gated in 1901 when Congressman George H. White of North Carolina failed to win reelection owing to the disfranchisement of black voters in his state. No African American served in Congress again until 1929, and none from the South until 1973.
Southern whites, at least Confederate and neo-Confederate whites, were delighted. Indeed, in about 1890, the South, or rather the white neo-Confederate South, finally won the Civil War. That is, the Confederacy’s “great truth”—quoting Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, speaking on March 21, 1861: “Our new government’s foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man”—became national policy. States as far north as North Dakota passed new laws outlawing interracial marriage. Lynchings rose to their all-time peak, and not just in the South. A lynching is a public murder, not necessarily of an African American, although four of every five lynching victims have been nonwhites. The public nature of a lynching signaled that the dominant forces in the community were in league with the perpetrators. Portfolio 5 shows the further development of the “spectacle lynching,” publicized ahead of time, that drew crowds in the hundreds, even thousands. White Americans, north and south, joined hands to restrict African Americans’ civil and economic rights.
23
After 1890, as in the South, Jim Crow practices tightened throughout the North. The so-called Progressive movement was for whites only; often its “reforms” removed the last local black leaders from northern city councils in favor of commissioners elected citywide. Northern whites attacked African Americans, verbally and often literally. Segregation swept through public accommodations. In 1908, the famous reporter Roy Stannard Baker toured the North for an article, “The Color Line in the North.” He noted the deterioration even in Boston, the old citadel of abolitionism: “A few years ago no hotel or restaurant in Boston refused Negro guests; now several hotels, restaurants, and especially confectionery stores, will not serve Negroes, even the best of them.” Writing of the day-to-day interactions of whites and blacks in the Midwest, Frank Quillen observed in 1913 that race prejudice “is increasing steadily, especially during the last twenty years.” In the 1920s, Harvard barred an African American student from the very dormitory where his father had lived decades earlier when attending the university.
Like Reconstruction, the Nadir of race relations was national.
24
A 1912 referendum across President Garfield’s home state of Ohio exemplified most dramatically America’s grievous retraction of “the full rights of citizenship” for African Americans, about which he had rightly bragged in 1881. In 1912, even blacks’ right to vote was questioned in Ohio, when voters rejected an amendment to the state constitution removing “white” from the clause defining eligibility for the franchise. In 1870, Ohio had ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted African Americans the right to vote. Ever since the amendment became law in that year, black men had been voting in Ohio. Because federal law superseded state law, the 1912 action was only cosmetic, to bring the state constitution in line with the federal one. Yet by rejecting the change, white Ohioans in 1912 made clear that they wanted black voting to stop.
25
Leola Bergmann carefully analyzed Iowa newspapers and found a shocking decrease in sympathy and increase in antipathy among whites in that state, which President Grant had called “bright radical star” after it granted African Americans the right to vote. In the quote at the head of the chapter, she tells of the inclusion of “the organized activities and individual happenings within the Negro group” in newspapers up to about 1880. Then such stories gradually stopped appearing. Worse, she noted, “in the kind of news that was reported one can detect the opposition that slowly accumulated in the public mind.” Nearly all the stories about African Americans that newspapers printed in the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s concerned crime. “If colored groups engaged in worthwhile educative or social projects—and certainly they did—newspaper readers were not often apprised of it.” Bergmann supplies an example—a black Iowan was named ambassador to Liberia in 1890—that went wholly unreported in the Iowa press.
26
Occupationally, blacks fared even worse. Before the Nadir, African Americans worked as carpenters, masons, foundry and factory workers, postal carriers, and so on. After 1890, in both the North and the South, whites expelled them from these occupations. The expulsions were most glaring in sport, supposedly a meritocracy that rewards superior performance no matter who exhibits it. African Americans had played baseball in the major leagues in the 1880s. Whites forced out the last black at the beginning of the Nadir, in 1889; the last African Americans left the minor leagues in the 1890s. In 1911, the Kentucky Derby eliminated black jockeys. Only boxing offered a relief, but Jack Johnson’s 1910 victory over Jim Jeffries, the Great White Hope, just confirmed whites’ stereotype of African Americans as dangerous fighters.
27
The
Chicago Defender,
a nationally important black newspaper, was full of articles between 1910 and 1925 chronicling the erosion of black employment. In 1911, an article headlined “The Passing of Colored Firemen in Chicago” lamented that only seven black firefighters were left, whites having forced out all the rest. Indeed, in some ways the North proceeded to treat African Americans
worse
than the South did. Ironically, segregation, which grew more entrenched in the South than in the North after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, created some limited opportunities for African American workers in Dixie. If the job was clearly defined as inferior, southern whites were happy to hire African Americans to cook their food, drive their coaches and later their cars, be their “yard boy,” even nurse their babies. (The term
boy,
applied to adult male African Americans, itself implies less than a man.) Thus traditional white southerners rarely drove all African Americans out of their communities. Who would then do the dirty work? During and after slavery this pattern spread to the North, but only to a limited degree. Around 1900, many white Americans, especially outside the traditional South, grew so racist that they came to abhor contact with African Americans even when that contact expressed white supremacy. If African Americans were inferior, they reasoned, then why employ them? Why tolerate them at all?
28
How the Nadir Gave Birth to a Sundown Town
Harrison, Arkansas, had been a reasonably peaceful interracial town in the early 1890s. “The town had its colored section in those days,” in the words of Boone County historian Ralph Rea. “There was never a large Negro population in Harrison, probably never more than three or four hundred, but they had their church, their social life, and in the main there was little friction between them and the whites.” Rea goes on to tell how whites and African Americans patronized a black barbecue to help fund a school for African American children. While the whites already
had
a school, of course, funded by public tax monies, nevertheless the barbecue shows cordial social intercourse between the races. Then, throughout Arkansas as elsewhere, race relations worsened around the turn of the twentieth century. Democrat Jeff Davis (no relation to the Confederate president) successfully ran for governor in 1900, 1902, and 1904, and then for the U.S. Senate in 1906. His language grew more Negrophobic with each campaign. “We have come to a parting of the way with the Negro,” he shouted. “If the brutal criminals of that race . . . lay unholy hands upon our fair daughters, nature is so riven and shocked that the dire compact produces a social cataclysm.”
29
Another factor was the bankruptcy on July 1, 1905, of the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad, intended to connect Harrison with Eureka Springs and ultimately St. Louis and the world. This put unemployed railroad track layers, some of them African American, on the streets of Harrison and was also an economic hardship for townspeople who had invested in the scheme. Then, according to Arkansas researchers Jacqueline Froelich and David Zimmermann, on Saturday night, September 30, 1905, “a black man, identified only as Dan, reportedly seeking shelter from the cold, was arrested for breaking into the Harrison residence of Dr. John J. Johnson and was jailed with another African-American prisoner, called Rabbit.” Two days later, whites in Harrison took Davis’s campaign rhetoric to heart. In Zimmermann’s words:
A white mob stormed the building and took these two Negroes from jail along with several others, to the country, where they were whipped and ordered to leave. The rioters swept through Harrison’s black neighborhood with terrible intent. The mob of 20 or 30 men, armed with guns and clubs, reportedly tied men to trees and whipped them, tied men and women together and threw them in a 4-foot hole in Crooked Creek, burned several homes, and warned all Negroes to leave town that night, which most of them did without taking any of their belongings.