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Wilson historians twist and squirm to excuse the old boy for his racism and his racist policies. They point to a letter from just after he left office about regretting not having done more for "those people." As if that changes things. In their minds it does.

Race in the Progressive Era is far more complicated than we can appreciate it today. It's within the generation of Plessy, and it's withing 2-3 generations of slavery itself. The Jack Johnsons, the DEB Dubois's hammered against the barriers. The Booker Washingtons, the G.W. Carvers, instead, pushed them back, patiently, moving them away rather than smashing them all at once. Was the one right, the other wrong? I think they're all part of the fight. I think that Washington was correct to brag of the incredible progress of a race that was only half a century before held in slavery. There are some amazing articles in the early 1910s on this economic advance in such a short period of time. For all the problems, there was, it is often forgotten, incredible progress.

The fight, ultimately, must be gauged by the outcome, and by its essence. What principles do we apply? Woodrow Wilson stood for Jim Crow. He loses in history, and there's no arguing. His vision was wrong, and it is dead. Dubois, so glorified, loses in his lifetime, yet triumphs, after all -- but for his goals and not for his process. Booker Washington, far more than Dubois, wins -- in his lifetime and today -- for his vision of self-reliance, of self-improvement, of independence and education of economic equality as essential to political and social equality proved correct in means and ends. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments ultimatel prevail, and due in no small part to the Republican party's upholding them as core principles through a period that pushed hardily against them..

The standard take on the Progressive Era Republicans is that they failed the emancipation. They are accused of that vile Nixon "Southern Strategy," a damning association for good company and high school textbooks. Of them, only Theodore Roosevelt is excused, for he invited Booker T. to the White House for lunch. Roosevelt, as ever, has a stupidly mixed record -- good on rhetoric, confused on product. As ever, McKinley is missunderstood. As ever Taft is fat, dumb and stupid -- and if you listened to the blowhards at last autumn's WW Conference, a racist fool.

Here for some good reads on all this:

Calvin Coolidge and Race: His Record in Dealing with the Racial Tensions of the 1920s by Alvin S. Felzenberg. Felzenberg discards the Mckinley-TR-Taft Republicans without considering Coolidge's inheritance, especially from Taft.

Judicial Power & Civil Rights Reconsidered by David E. Bernstein and Ilya Somin. This is a significant paper (in draft?) that illuminates the previously unheard committment of the Taft-appointed Court towards Civil Liberties and the rights of African-Americans.
For some views of the more dubious Roosevelt record on race, see the 1960s-era essays from the Journal of Negro History, William D. Crum: A Negro in Politics by Willard B. Gatewood (1968), and President Theodore Roosevelt and the Negro, 1901-1908, by Seth M. Scheiner (1962). Sorry no links. J-STOR has them.

It is less puzzling than distressing to see how blacks migrated from Taft Republicanism to the Bull Moose and to Wilson in 1912. They craved more from Taft, and they might well have expected it. His weakness, as ever, was in rhetoric, and in a day when rhetoric stood far above what Taft treasured, principle. He did speak for their rights, and he was consistent in his policies in their support. While seeking to defuse "racial feelings" over Federal appointments in the South, he at the same time appointed blacks to Federal positions in the North, including one to the highest ranking Federal officer up to the time, Asst. Attorney General. Still, I understand that in 1912 there was a yearning for more. That's natural and a product of the road paved before them.

Nevertheless, Taft was the only candidate of that year to stand for them beyond politics. He alone spoke during the election of the great 50th anniversary celebration of the Altoona Conference and the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. On the anniversary, while the other candidates went stupidly silent, Taft said,

The issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation was the initial and the most important step in the freeing of five millions of slaves, who, with their descendants, have now grown into ten millions and constitute more than 10 per cent of our total population. It is, of course, an event in which every lover of his country takes an intense interest. Until the emancipation of the negroes the assertion that ours was the country of liberty was untrue. The Constitution and the Declaration were utterly at variance with each other in the recognition that the former gave to property in human kind. The excision of the cancer represented in the social institution of slavery enabled all Americans to look the world in the face, and say that our pretensions to absolute freedom were founded on actual fact, and did not need saving exceptions to make them truthful.

Throughout that year that was so riled by "nationalism" and "socialism," Taft was the only candidate to speak of the 15th amendment, and of individual and civil rights. Over the hysteria of that election year, Taft's stand for civil rights has been lost. I'll do what I can to remind.

Nicollo unmasked: Bromleyisms here

Constitution's Bodyguard
William Howard Taft and His Defense of the Constitution
During the Election of 1912