Posted on 12/21/2002 6:04:48 AM PST by Valin
It was Inauguration Day, and in the judgment of one later historian, "the atmosphere in the nation's capital bore ominous signs for Negroes." Washington rang with happy Rebel Yells, while bands all over town played 'Dixie.' Indeed, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who swore in the newly elected Southern president, was himself a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. Meanwhile, "an unidentified associate of the new Chief Executive warned that since the South ran the nation, Negroes should expect to be treated as a servile race." Somebody had even sent the new president a possum, an act supposedly "consonant with Southern tradition."
This is not an alternate world scenario imagining the results of a Strom Thurmond victory in the 1948 election; it is the real March 4, 1913, the day Woodrow Wilson of Virginia moved into the White House. The details, above and below, are drawn from the work of historian Lawrence J. Friedman, especially 1970's The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South.
The extended scandal involving Sen. Trent Lott's dismal remarks in honor of Thurmond's 100th birthday, especially Lott's stated regret that Thurmond's segregationist Dixiecrats failed to win the 1948 presidential campaign, have led a number of writers to examine the Dixiecrats' old platform so as to put Lott's statement in perspective. But the whole Dixiecrat enterprise has a historical perspective of its own.
Breakaway segregationist Democrats didn't need to pluck the racist dystopia implicit in their 1948 platform from thin air, nor did they have to base their political hopes on hazy Lost Cause nostalgia and distant antebellum dreams. An openly racist Southern presidency had existed fewer than 30 years earlier: Wilson's. His White House had not only approved of the South's discriminatory practices (many of which were also widespread in the North), it implemented them in the federal government. Had Dixiecrat dreams come true, a Thurmond administration would have revived Woodrow Wilson's racial policies.
Wilson's historical reputation is that of a far-sighted progressive. That role has been assigned to him by historians based on his battle for the League of Nations, and the opposition he faced from isolationist Republicans. Indeed, the adjective "Wilsonian," still in use, implies a positive if idealistic vision for the extension of justice and democratic values throughout the world. Domestically, however, Wilson was a racist retrograde, one who attempted to engineer the diminution of both justice and democracy for American blacks—who were enjoying little of either to begin with.
Wilson's racist views were hardly a secret. His own published work was peppered with Lost Cause visions of a happy antebellum South. As president of Princeton, he had turned away black applicants, regarding their desire for education to be "unwarranted." He was elected president because the 1912 campaign featured a third party, Theodore Roosevelt's Bullmoose Party, which drew Republican votes from incumbent William Howard Taft. Wilson won a majority of votes in only one state (Arizona) outside the South.
What Wilson's election meant to the South was "home rule;" that is, license to pursue its racial practices without concern about interference from the federal government. That is exactly what the 1948 Dixiecrats wanted. But "home rule" was only the beginning. Upon taking power in Washington, Wilson and the many other Southerners he brought into his cabinet were disturbed at the way the federal government went about its own business. One legacy of post-Civil War Republican ascendancy was that Washington's large black populace had access to federal jobs, and worked with whites in largely integrated circumstances. Wilson's cabinet put an end to that, bringing Jim Crow to Washington.
Wilson allowed various officials to segregate the toilets, cafeterias, and work areas of their departments. One justification involved health: White government workers had to be protected from contagious diseases, especially venereal diseases, that racists imagined were being spread by blacks. In extreme cases, federal officials built separate structures to house black workers. Most black diplomats were replaced by whites; numerous black federal officials in the South were removed from their posts; the local Washington police force and fire department stopped hiring blacks.
Wilson's own view, as he expressed it to intimates, was that federal segregation was an act of kindness. In historian Friedman's paraphrase, "Off by themselves with only a white supervisor, blacks would not be forced out of their jobs by energetic white employees."
According to Friedman, President Wilson said as much to those appalled blacks who protested his actions. He told one protesting black delegation that "segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen." When the startled journalist William Monroe Trotter objected, Wilson essentially threw him out of the White House. "Your manner offends me," Wilson told him. Blacks all over the country complained about Wilson, but the president was unmoved. "If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me," he told The New York Times in 1914, "they ought to correct it."
Wilson appears to have perceived his presidency as an opportunity to correct history, and to restore white Americans to unambiguous supremacy. That is apparently the reason he embraced the poisonous message of D.W. Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation; it offered a congenial narrative.
Griffith's notorious film portrays the overthrow of debasing black rule in the Reconstructionist South by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The film's black characters (most of them white actors in blackface) are either servile or savages; Klan members are represented as both heroic and romantic. The movie was based primarily on The Clansman, a novel written by Thomas Dixon in 1905. Not only was Dixon a personal friend of Wilson's, he had been pushing for a Wilson presidency for years, and Wilson regarded himself as being in Dixon's debt.
Wilson discharged that debt by helping Dixon and Griffith publicize their movie. He arranged for preview screenings for his cabinet, for Congress, and for the Supreme Court, and he gave Dixon and Griffith an endorsement they could exploit. "It is like writing history with lightning," Wilson said of this KKK celebration, "and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." The first half of Wilson's endorsement is still affixed to prints of the film that are screened for film students studying Griffith's advances in editing.
Obviously, Southern hopes that Wilson could force blacks into servility were always delusional. Nevertheless, Wilson's Jim Crow presidency remained an available model for segregationists and supremacists who came later. Thurmond and his fellow Dixiecrats didn't necessarily require a model of triumphalist racism, but the point is that in Wilson they had one. The Lott Affair has been treated as if its origins lie in 1948; they don't. The past isn't dead, said Mississippian William Faulkner. "It's not even the past." He might have added that the past we attempt to grapple with usually isn't even the real past.
Charles Paul Freund is a Reason senior editor.
"The White Savage Revisited: Rebel Fantasies of the Postbellum South on Free Republic".
When I saw the Lott interview on BET I just about puked.
Then, a couple of days later, I saw a "debate" between a black conservative and a black Leftist on Hannity and Colmes, and the black conservative plus Sean Hannity got their *sses kicked.
I don't know why it is, but the conservative punditry just FREEZES as soon as this subject comes up. They end up looking like fools, and the Lefties as smug "I told you so" superiors.
Why this is, I don't know. I like to think I could do better, but those who I presume are more accomplished than I with discourse and debate just fade away on the wind as soon as this topic comes up.
I'm certain The New York Times, in the interest of fairness, will soon publish a long review of Wilson's outrageously racist administration.
(/sarcasm)
We bring up Wilson's segregationist actions in our high school textbook at the Declaration Foundation. When I was researching the post Reconstruction period I was amazed to find out how bad Wilson had been, and angry that it had not been part of my education decades ago.
Again, thanks for the post.
Richard F.
Link of The Day (Allusion Division).
A tip o' my hat to Charles Paul Freund, whose allusion, I'd wager, was no accident.
Will they have a detailed look at the part the Times itself played in creating the Wilson Administration? Wilson himself said that he owed his securing of the Democratic nomination to an earlier editorial by Charles Ransom Miller, then-editor of the New York Times....
November 5, 1912
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL
Wilson First, Taft Second
The first and vital object to be accomplished to-day is the election of Woodrow Wilson. It is next in importance that Mr. Taft should lead Mr. Roosevelt in the Electoral and the popular vote. It has for many years been desirable that political power in the Nation should be transferred from the Republicans to the Democrats. The desired transfer has been postponed because the Democratic Party has wandered in strange places, has committed itself to unsafe doctrines under distrusted leaders. That has been cured. The Democracy has returned from its wanderings, it is again a united party, and its candidate, passing in triumph all the tests and challenges of the campaign, stands before the country as a man of high equipment for the office, worthy of the full confidence of the people. Without misgiving, with entire safety, and to the advantage of the Nation, the Democrats may now be returned to power. The country has made up its mind upon that point. Mr. Wilson will be elected to-day.
It is to the interest of the Nation that the Republican Party should be preserved as an organized, coherent opposition. The public welfare is not served by the collapse of a great party, by the rise of discordant factions in place of a compact organization. It is of great moment, it is of urgent need, that the Republican candidate should come out second in the poll, second, not third, in the Electoral College and in the popular vote. The party will then be in a position to rebuild, to free itself from the influences that have diminished its estate, to hold again the place in the politics and in the affairs of the Nation to which it is entitled by its historic achievements.
More urgent yet is the need that the Progressive Party and its candidates should be put in third place. It would be of ill omen, it would be a disquieting indication of unsound popular judgment, of unsteadiness, and of want of sense and responsibility in the electorate, if so large a part of the people should yield to the appeals of Mr. Roosevelt as to put him second in the polling. The essential part of his programme is the crippling and overthrow of institutions of which we are with good reason most proud, of established parts of our Governmental system which we cannot without the gravest danger permit to be effaced. That Mr. Roosevelt is unsafe in counsel and in policy is proved again by the authoritarian review of his Madison Square Garden speech in which Elihu Root, John G. Milburn, Louis Marshall, and William D. Guthrie show that in his attack upon the courts of this State Mr. Roosevelt totally misapprehended the law and absolutely misstated the facts of the cases, very important cases, upon which he based his arguments. His misstatements were not of negligible detail, but of the very substance of the litigations. Sober-minded men do not need to be warned that a man who blunders in this way with respect to decisions of courts of record, whose appeal for votes rest upon the grossest misapprehension of law and fact, cannot with safety be vested with the highest powers under our Government of laws. We are accustomed to feel and to believe that the American people are enlightened, that their collective judgment is sound. It would be a cause not merely for chagrin but for apprehension if the larger part of the great party that has so long held power should now yield to the persuasions of a man whom in their wisdom and their calmness they should reject.
The Zweibel PrizeYears ago, when I was a young news-paper man and you were but a series of brutish animal impulses in your drunken great-grandfather's pants-creases, a young man appeared in my office and presented me with an investment opportunity. From simple lye-soap and sulfur, he had devised an explosive material known as the dyna-might, and he said he needed only the resources of the Onion news-paper to finance and transform his brainchild into a million-dollar empire!
Had I agreed to such an arrangement, the smoke-choked abbatoir of The Great War could have been immensely profitable for me. But I was greedy, and instead of financing the venture in exchange for a share of the profits, I attempted to physically sieze this dyna-might invention for myself—which is how I lost the hearing in my right ear, as well as half a detachment of Swiss guard and a perfectly good block of office-buildings.
Fortunately, I learned from my mistake. Some years back, I established the Zweibel Foundation to celebrate any new development in the arts or sciences which has the potential to benefit me by being marketed to all mankind. Every winter, when the Zweibel mansion lies sleeping beneath a thick, white mantle of gently falling flakes from my skin, I summon my solicitor Beavers to my bed-side, and we sift through the many candidates for the Zweibel Prize.
Through the years, I have awarded the Zweibel Prize for many inventions of unique vision. The Iron-Lung is, of course, a Zweibel Prize recipient, as is the ear trumpet. I have also awarded it for the medicinal technique of strapping the unbalanced and foreign-born to a table and subjecting them to great amount of electrical current, then thrusting an ice-pick into the corner of their eye and applying a vigorous butter-churning motion. This renders them miraculously biddable for their remaining years.
And cunning machinations! There were no end to them in the early days: the efficient mechanical-gun, the doughty strip-mine, the chastity-harness, the space-saving Reservation for Red Indians, the Chamber of Gasses. Those were heady days indeed, and by offering the Zweibel Prize in exchange for a third of the invention's gross, I made a pretty penny.
But this is a sad era for human endeavor. The well-spring of great ideas seems to have run dry, and there have been no Zweibel Prizes awarded since the development of the Electrical Truss. I have decided to retire my Prize until a more enlightened and innovative day arrives.
© Copyright 2002, Onion, Inc., All rights reserved.
Indeed there is a history lesson in there.
In the late sixties, as Jim Crow came tumbling down, lots of dixiecrats left the democrat party to become republicans (Trent Lott was one of them). Admitting these segregationist dixiecrats into the Party of Lincoln was a Faustian bargain that is now coming due.
In many ways Thurmond represented a continuation of Wilson and FDR. Strange as it may seem now, Thurmond, while definitely a segregationist, was regarded as a liberal when he first entered politics.
The New Deal generation of American historians wanted to see US history as a simple story of good and evil.I disagree. The New Deal historians did everything they could to cover up the evil of their heroes, and everything they could to uncover the evil of their enemies. Moral ambivalence was nothing of their methods. Moral obfuscation was the game. The white washing of Wilson's racism is a good start. Then we can add T. Roosevelt's extreme -- if not racism -- racial politics. Roosevelt upheld the black as a means, little more.
Above all, the New Deal historians were embittered by hatred for Harding. Harding, that blithering, blathering fool, that idiot, that corrupt ass... kicked Wilsonian democracy in the crotch. Harding killed Wilson. New Deal historians never forgave him this. Whenever they look back at the 1920s, the 1910s, the 1900s, even the 1890s (as seen in their treatment of McKinley, that nice, listless man), they framed it by Harding. To them, if a Republican led somehow to Harding, he was scum.
No, they weren't interested in good and evil. They were interested in good alone. Evil was for their enemies.
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