Dixiecrats Triumphant The menacing Mr. Wilson

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."

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.

I know that NYT editorial well. We can't say it won the election for Wilson, but it sure helped him take NY, where the Time's wish for a Wilson-Taft-Roosevelt outcome came true.

You cannot associate this editorial with Wilsonian racial politics. Aside from specific examples we might point to in retrospect, there was little in racist policy that could be nailed on Wilson as Governor of NJ. Perhaps he didn't have time. The NY Times was ecstactic for Wilson for two reasons: the tariff and Roosevelt. The Times hated both. In the tariff, the Times saw only betrayal by Taft and salvation in Wilson. In Roosevelt, the Times would take whatever it could get besides Roosevelt, and the paper correctly layed its bet on Wilson.

The Times was very positive towards Taft by 1911, but Wilson and the Democrats represented a lower tariff, which was the paper's overwhelming attitude. The other problem with Taft was his anti-trust position, which Wilson ended up endorsing (excepting unions and farmers; now there's some old time Democratic politics for ya!). During the election of 1912, Wilson played both sides of this question, thus avoiding the Time's condemnation for any anti-trust talk as being anti-business.

The Times was enthusiastic for Taft's racial politics, particularly his abandonment of the Roosevelt race card, and Taft's general color-blindness. I don't recall seeing anything in the Times during 1912 or 1913 that encouraged or supported Wilsons' racism and racial politics.

I don't think the Times was explicitly endorsing racism, either. However, if one is going to endorse a candidate, it seems that it is incumbent upon you to ensure that his policies are representative of what you think the proper course of action is. Much as Trent Lott has recently discovered. ;)

I don't think that Wilson turned out the way the Times intended, to be sure. But they did help make him, and thus bear some responsibility for him. Keep in mind, however, that while Wilson was indeed stunningly racist, I'm not really in the camp that tends to assign him blame for everything that's gone wrong since 1917 or so.

I don't think we disagree about New Deal historiography. By "a simple story of good and evil," I meant a simple, "black and white" "story of good versus evil." Anything else, anything that took in more complexity or ambiguity wouldn't be so simple. That was the point I was trying to make.

But about TR: his invitation of Booker T. Washington to the White House certainly was a high point in recognition of African Americans in his admittedly prejudiced era. TR also spoke out strongly against lynching. His treatment of Black soldiers in Texas was wrong and counterproductive, as were his racial views in general, but was he truly worse on race than were his predecessors?

You may remember a thread in the past few years criticizing current Presidential advisor Karl Rove's hero McKinley for abandoning the civil rights cause. I didn't buy that either, but I do think that the turn away from African American rights was continuous. I don't think there was less concern for civil rights under TR than under McKinley, because there was so little interest in Blacks in general. Nor was there more interest in African-Americans under Harrison's Presidency, though some Congressmen kept up the fight. You'd have to produce evidence to convince me that McKinley or Harrison was better for Blacks than Roosevelt.

Roosevelt's expressed racial views may lead to his being taken as more racist than preceding or following Presidents. He did believe in race, and he left a paper trail, though what race meant to him is open to question. It definitely did include color, but wasn't restricted to it. Roosevelt, though, came out of the ethnically more complex politics of New York and this did provide a place for African-Americans.

As to his using Negroes as a means, I'm not sure this differs from earlier or later practice. Roosevelt was certainly aware of the problems African-Americans faced in the political world. If his New York background helped TR to understand the politics of the melting pot, his Georgia ancestry meant that he had a long way to go to come to terms with Black aspirations. He certainly went further in that direction than Wilson. I'm not convinced that McKinley, a former Union officer, went further.

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.

Thanks for remembering my thread on McKinley.

I've been doing more research on this lately, and it might be enlightening to restart the question.

Cheers,

Richard F.

Oh, hell. A friend pinged me over to an immigration thread, and I got caught up in a brawl. Gallons of whiskey last night didn't help either. I ended up saying I'm Mexican. Maybe I really was at that point... I hate to lie here at FR, and I think this was the first time. Not a lie, exactly, as I was just being an ass, but a lie nonetheless. The results were fun, however.

I owe you a good response to this post. I think I was reading too much into some of your comments. Still, on TR, I am concerned. Perhaps I've defined my definition of him by his last two years in office, but he did, too. Do you know about the Crum affair? Crum was a black TR appointed to Customs Collector in SC. I think he first did it in 1905, but I'm not sure, could have been earlier.

Did you read me correctly? A black customs collector at Charleston!

TR's motivation was not to elevate Crum. He was sticking Crum in Pitchfork Ben's eye (SC Senator, folks). TR carried it out all the way to his last week in office, even though he said before that he wouldn't play those games after the 1908 election. That was not constructive racial politics. It was race baiting of the lowest order, and it smacked of the worst of Reconstruction.

Taft got Crum to resign, and moved him to someplace more appropriate. The difference between eleveting the black and using him was slight in those days. Taft was definitely more honest about it than TR.

I don't know about McKinley. I haven't gotten into his papers, and his biographies don't get much into it. McKinley started the end of Republican racial politics, however, with his rapprochement to Southern whites. This was not anti-black. It was an amazing gesture. I think TR thought he was doing the same. I know Taft did. I'd be interested to know more about McKinley and blacks.

I know an historian (historiette?) who can answer this question. I'll send her a note.

I haven't gotten to your links. Will do next. Thanks.

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