Following the Color Line — The Negro in Politics - part 1

CHAPTER XI THE NEGRO IN POLITICS

The discussion of the Negro in politics will of necessity deal chiefly with conditions in the South; for it is there, and there only, that the Negro is, at the present time, a great political problem.

Negroes in the North are indeed beginning to play a conscious part in politics; but they are only one element among many.

They take their place with the "Irish vote," the "German vote," the "Polish vote," the "labour vote," each of which must be courted or placated by the politicians.

I have looked into Negro political conditions in several cities, notably Indianapolis and Philadelphia, and I cannot see that they are in any marked way different from the condition of any other class of our population which through ignorance, or fear, or ambition, votes more or less _en masse_.

Many Negroes do not vote at all; some are as conscientious and incorruptible as any white citizen; but a large proportion, ignorant and short-sighted, are disfranchised by the use of money in one form or another at every election.

One of the broadest observers in Indianapolis said to me: "The Negro voters are no worse and no better than our foreign voting population."

Mayor Tom Johnson, himself Southern by birth, writes me regarding the Negro vote of Cleveland: "I do not believe there is any larger percentage of unintelligent or dishonest votes among the coloured voters than among the white voters in the same walks of life."

_Negro a National Problem_ I wish here to emphasise again the fact that the Negro is not a sectional but a _national_ problem.

Anything that affects the South favourably or unfavourably reacts upon the whole country.

And the same latent race feeling exists in the North that exists in the South (for it is human, not Southern).

The North, indeed, as I have shown in previous chapters, confronted with a large influx of Negroes, is coming more and more to understand and sympathise with the heart-breaking problems which beset the South.

Nothing short of the patient cooeperation of the entire country, North and South, white and black, will ever solve the race question.

In this country, as elsewhere, political thought divides itself into two opposing forces, two great parties or points of view.

Whatever their momentary names have been, whether Federalist, Democratic, Whig, Republican, Populist, or Socialist, one of these parties has been an Aristocratic or conservative party, the other a democratic or progressive party.

The political struggle in this country (and the world over) has been between the aristocratic idea that a few men (or one man) should control the country and supervise the division of labour and the products of labour and the democratic idea that more people should have a hand in it.

The abolition of slavery in the South was an incident in this struggle.

Slavery was not abolished because the North agitated, or because John Brown raided or Mrs. Stowe wrote a book, or for any other sentimental or superficial reason, but because it was undemocratic.

_What Slavery Did_ This is what slavery did: It enabled a comparatively few men (only about one in ten of the white men of the South was a slave-owner or slave-renter) to control eleven states of the Union, to monopolise learning, to hold all the political offices, to own most of the good land and nearly all of the wealth.

Not only did it keep the Negro in slavery, but nine-tenths of the white people (the so-called "poor whites," whom even the Negroes despised) were hardly more than peasants or serfs.

It was in many ways a charming aristocracy, but it was doomed from the beginning.

If there had been no North, slavery in the South would have disappeared just as inevitably.

It was the restless yeast of democracy, spreading abroad upon the earth (in Europe as well as America) that killed slavery and liberated both Negro and poor white men.

Revolutions such as the Civil War change names: they do not at once change human relationships.

Mankind is reconstructed not by proclamations or legislation or military occupation, but by time, growth, education, religion, thought.

When the South got on its feet again after Reconstruction and took account of itself, what did it find?

It found 4,000,000 ignorant Negroes changed in name from "slave" to "freeman," but not changed in nature.

It found the poor whites still poor whites; and the aristocrats, although they had lost both property and position, were still aristocrats.

For values, after all, are not outward, but inward: not material, but spiritual.

It was as impossible for the Negro at that time to be less than a slave as it was for the aristocrat to be less than an aristocrat.

And this is what so many legal-minded men will not or cannot see.

What happened?

Exactly what might have been predicted.

Southern society had been turned wrong side up by force, and it righted itself again by force.

The Ku Klux Klan, the Patrollers, the Bloody Shirt movement, were the agencies (violent and cruel indeed, but inevitable) which readjusted the relationships, put the aristocrats on top, the poor whites in the middle, and the Negroes at the bottom.

In short, society instinctively reverted to its old human relationships.

I once saw a man shot through the body in a street riot.

Mortally wounded, he stumbled and rolled over in the dust, but sprung up again as though uninjured and ran a hundred yards before he finally fell dead.

Thus the Old South, though mortally wounded, sprung up and ran again.

_The Struggle in South Carolina_ The political reactions after Reconstruction varied, of course, in the different states, being most violent in states like South Carolina, where the old aristocratic regime was most firmly entrenched, and least violent in North Carolina, which has always been the most democratic of Southern states.

In South Carolina then, for example, the aristocrats in 1875 returned to political supremacy.

General Wade Hampton, who represented all that was highest in the old regime, became governor of the state.

A similar tendency developed, of course, in the other Southern states, and a notable group of statesmen (and they _were_ statesmen) appeared in politics--Hill and Gordon of Georgia, Lamar and George of Mississippi, Butler of South Carolina, Morgan of Alabama, all aristocrats of the old school.

Apparently the ancient order was restored; apparently the wounded man ran as well as ever.

But the Old South, after all, had received its mortal wound.

There _had_ been a revolution; society _had_ been overturned.

The institution on which it had reared its ancient splendour was gone: for the aristocrat no longer enjoyed the special privilege, the enormous economic advantage of _owning_ his labourers.

He was reduced to an economic equality with other white men, and even with the Negro, either of whom could _hire_ labour as easily and cheaply as he could.

And the baronial plantation which had been the mark of his grandeur before the war was now the millstone of his doom.

Special privilege, always the bulwark of aristocracy, being thus removed, the germ of democracy began to work among the poor whites.

The disappearance of competitive slave labour made them unexpectedly prosperous; it secured a more equable division of wealth.

With prosperity came more book-reading, more schooling, a greater _feeling_ of independence.

And this feeling animated the poor white with a new sense of freedom and power.

Enter now, when the time was fully ripe for a leader, the rude man of the people.

How often he appears in the pages of history, the sure product of revolutions, bursting upward like some devastating force, not at all silken-handed or subtle-minded, but crude, virile, direct, truthful.

_Tillman, the Prophet_ So Tillman came in South Carolina.

I can see him as he rode to the farmers' fairs and court days in the middle eighties, a sallow-faced, shaggy-haired man with one gleaming, restless, angry eye.

He had been long preparing in silence for his task--struggling upward in the poverty-stricken days of the war and through the Reconstruction, without schooling, or chance of schooling, but endowed with a virile-mindedness which fed eagerly upon certain fermentative books of an inherited library.

Lying on his back in the evening on the porch of his farmhouse, he read Carlyle's "French Revolution" and Gibbon's "Rome."

He had in him, indeed, the veritable spirit of the revolutionist: in the days of the Patrollers, he, too, had ridden and hunted Negroes.

He had seen the aristocracy come again into power; he had heard the whisperings of discontent among the poor whites.

And at fairs and on court days in the eighties I hear him screaming his speeches of defiance, raucous, immoderate, denouncing all gentlemen, denouncing government by gentlemen, demanding that government be restored to the "plain people!"

On one of the transparencies of those days he himself had printed the words (strange reminder of the Commune!

): "Awake!

arise!

or be forever fallen."

He spoke not only to the farmers, but he flung defiance at the aristocrats in the heart of the aristocracy.

At Charleston, one of the proudest of Southern cities, he said: "Men of Charleston, I have always heard that you were the most self-idolatrous people that ever lived; but I want to say to you that the sun does not rise in the Cooper and set in the Ashley.

It shines all over the state....

If the tales that have been told me or the reports which have come to me are one-tenth true, you are the most arrant set of cowards God ever made."

And everywhere he went he closed his speeches with this appeal: "Organise, organise, organise.

With organisation you will become free once more.

Without it, you will remain slaves."

Once, upon an historic occasion on the floor of the United States Senate, Tillman paused in the heat of a debate to explain (not to excuse) his fiery utterances.

"I am a rude man," he said, "and don't care."

That is Tillman.

They tried to keep him and his followers out of the political conventions; but he would not be kept out, nor kept down.

Years later he himself expressed the spirit of revolt in the United States Senate.

Zach McGhee tells how he had been making one of his fierce attacks, an ebullition in general against things as they are.

A senator arose to snuff him out in the genial senatorial way.

"I would like to ask, Mr. President, what is before the Senate?"

"_I_ am before the Senate," screamed Tillman.

In 1890 Tillman was elected governor of South Carolina: the poor white, at last, was in power.

The same change was going on all over the South.

In Mississippi the rise of the people (no longer poor) was represented by Vardaman, in Arkansas by Jeff Davis, and Georgia and Alabama have experienced the same overturn in a more complicated form.

It has become a matter of pride to many of the new leaders of the "plain people" that they do not belong to the "old families" or to the "aristocracy."

Governor Comer told me that he was a "doodle-blower"--a name applied to the poor white dwellers on the sand hills of Alabama.

Governor Swanson of Virginia is proud of the fact that he is the first governor of the state wholly educated in the public schools and colleges.

Call these men demagogues if you will, and some of them certainly are open to the charge of appealing to the prejudices and passions of the people, they yet represent a genuine movement for a more democratic government in the South.

The old aristocrats gibe at the new leaders even to the point of bitter hatred (in South Carolina at least one murder has grown out of the hostility of the factions); they see (how acutely!

) the blunders of untrained administrators, their pride in their states is rubbed blood-raw by the unblushing crudities of the Tillmans, the Vardamans, the Jeff Davises.

Go South and talk with any of these men of the ancient order and you will come away feeling that conditions in the South are without hope.

_"High Men" of the Old South_ And those old aristocrats had their virtues.

One loves to hear the names still applied at Richmond, Montgomery, Macon, and Charleston to the men of the old type, by other men of the old type.

How often I have heard the terms a "high man," an "incorruptible man."

Beautiful names!

For there was a personal honour, a personal devotion to public duties among many of these ante-bellum slave-owners that made them indeed "high men."

When they were in power their reign was usually skilful and honest: the reign of a beneficent oligarchy.

But it was selfish: it reigned for itself--with nine-tenths of the people serfs or slaves.

Its luxuries, its culture, its gentleness, like that of all aristocracies, was enjoyed at the fearful cost of poverty, ignorance, and slavery of millions of human beings.

It had no sympathy, therefore it perished from off the earth.

The new men of the Tillman type made glaring, even violent mistakes, but for the most part honest mistakes; they saw clearly what they wanted: they wanted more power in the hands of the people, more democracy, and they went crudely at the work of getting it.

In spite of the bitterness against Vardaman among some of the best people of Mississippi I heard no one accuse him of corruption in any department of his administration.

On the whole, they said he had directed the business of the state with judgment.

And Tillman, in spite of the dire predictions of the aristocrats, did not ruin the state.

Quite to the contrary, he performed a notable service in extending popular education, establishing an agricultural college, regulating the liquor traffic (even though the system he established has since degenerated).

Never before, indeed, has South Carolina, and the South generally, been more prosperous than it has since these men went into power, never has wealth increased so rapidly, never has education been so general nor the percentage of illiteracy so low.

The "highest citizen" may not be so high (if it can be called high) in luxury and culture as he was before the war, but the average citizen is decidedly higher.

Having thus acquired a proper historical perspective, we may now consider the part which the Negro has played in the politics of the South.

Where does _he_ come in?

_Where the Negro Comes In_ Though it may seem a sweeping generalisation, it is none the less literally true that up to the present time the Negro's real influence in politics in the South has been almost negligible.

He has been an _issue_, but not an _actor_ in politics.

In the ante-bellum slavery agitation no Negroes appeared; they were an inert lump of humanity possessing no power of inner direction; the leaders on both sides were white men.

The Negroes did not even follow poor old John Brown.

And since the war, as I have shown, the struggle has been between the aristocrats and the poor whites.

They have talked _about_ the Negro, but they have not let _him_ talk.

Even in Reconstruction times, and I am not forgetting exceptional Negroes like Bruce, Revels, Pinchback, and others, the Negro was in politics by virtue of the power of the North.

As a class, the Negroes were not self-directed but used by Northern carpetbaggers and political Southerners who took most of the offices and nearly all of the stealings.

In short, the Negro in times past has never been in politics in the South in any positive sense.

And that is not in the least surprising.

Coming out of slavery, the Negro had no power of intelligent self-direction, practically no leaders who knew anything.

He was still a slave in everything except name, and slaves have never yet ruled, or helped rule.

The XV Amendment to the Constitution could not really enfranchise the Negro slaves.

Men must enfranchise themselves.

And this political equality by decree, not by growth and development, caused many of the woes of Reconstruction.

Two distinct impulses mark the effort of the South to disfranchise the Negro.

The first was the blind revolt of Reconstruction times, in which force and fraud were frankly and openly applied.

The effort to eliminate the Negro brought the white people together in one dominant party and the "Solid South" was born.

For years this method sufficed; but in the meantime the Negro was getting a little education, acquiring self-consciousness, and developing leaders of more or less ability.

It became necessary, therefore, both because the Negro was becoming more restive, less easily controlled by force, and because the awakening white man disliked and feared the basis of fraud on which his elections rested, to establish legal sanction for disfranchisement, to define the political status of the Negro by law.

Now, the truth is that the mass of Southerners have _never believed that the Negro has or should have any political rights_.

The South as a whole does not now approve and never has approved of the voting Negro.

A few Negroes vote everywhere, "but not enough," as a Southerner said to me, "to do any hurt."

The South, then, has been placed in the position of _providing by law for something that it did not really believe in_.

[Illustration: COLONEL JAMES LEWIS United States Receiver at New Orleans] [Illustration: W. T.

VERNON Register of the United States Treasury Photograph by G. V.

Buck] [Illustration: RALPH W. TYLER An auditor of the Government at Washington] It was prophesied that when the Negro was disfranchised by law and "eliminated from politics" the South would immediately stop discussing the Negro question and divide politically along new lines.

But this has not happened.

Though disfranchisement laws have been in force in Mississippi for years there is less division in the white party of that state than ever before.

Why is this so?

Because the Negro, through gradual education and the acquisition of property, is becoming more and more a real as well as a potential factor in politics.

For he is just beginning to be _really_ free.

And the South has not yet decided how to deal with a Negro who owns property and is self-respecting and intelligent and who demands rights.

The South is suspicious of this new Negro: it dreads him; and the politicians in power are quick to play upon this sentiment in order that the South may remain solid and the present political leadership remain undisturbed.

For the South, however much it may talk of the ignorant masses of Negroes, does not really fear them; it wants to keep them, and keep them ignorant.

It loves the ignorant, submissive old Negroes, the "mammies" and "uncles";

it wants Negroes who, as one Southerner put it to me, "will do the dirty work and not fuss about it."

It wants Negroes who are really inferior and who _feel_ inferior.

The Negro that the South fears and dislikes is the educated, property-owning Negro who is beginning to demand rights, to take his place among men as a citizen.

This is not an unsupported statement of mine, but has been expressed over and over again by speakers and writers in every part of the South.

I have before me a letter from Charles P. Lane, editor of the Huntsville (Alabama) _Daily Tribune_, written to Governor Comer.

It was published in the Atlanta _Constitution_.

The writer is arguing that the Negro disfranchisement laws in Alabama are too lenient, that they permit too many Negroes to vote.

He says: We thought then (in 1901, when the new Alabama Constitution disfranchising the Negro was under discussion), as we do now, that the menace to peace, the danger to society and white supremacy was not in the illiterate Negro, but in the upper branches of Negro society, the educated, the man who, after ascertaining his political rights, forced the way to assert them.

He continues: We, the Southern people, entertain no prejudice toward the ignorant per se inoffensive Negro.

It is because we know him and for him we entertain a compassion.

But our blood boils when the educated Negro asserts himself politically.

We regard each assertion as an unfriendly encroachment upon our native superior rights, and a dare-devil menace to our control of the affairs of the state.

In this are we not speaking the truth?

Does not every Southern Caucasian "to the manor born" bear witness to this version?

Hence we present that the way to dampen racial prejudice, avert the impending horrors, is to emasculate the Negro politically by repealing the XV Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.

I use this statement of Mr. Lane's not because it represents the broadest and freest thought in the South, for it does not, but because it undoubtedly states frankly and clearly the point of view of the _majority_ of Southern people.

It is the point of view which, talked all over Georgia last year, helped to elect Hoke Smith governor of the state, as it has elected other governors.

Hoke Smith's argument was essentially this: _Hoke Smith's Views_ The uneducated Negro is a good Negro; "he is contented to occupy the natural status of his race, the position of inferiority."

The educated and intelligent Negro, who wants to vote, is a disturbing and threatening influence.

We don't want him down here; let him go North.

This feeling regarding the educated Negro, who, as Mr. Lane says, "ascertains his rights and forces his way to assert them," is the basic fact in Southern politics.

It is what keeps the white people welded together in a single party; it is what sternly checks revolts and discourages independence.

Keeping this fact in mind, let us look more intimately into Southern conditions.

Following ordinary usage I have spoken of the Solid South.

As a matter of fact the South is not solid, nor is there a single party.

The very existence of one strong party presupposes another, potentially as strong.

In the South to-day there are, as inevitably as human nature, two parties and two political points of view.

And one is aristocratic and the other is democratic.

It is noteworthy in the pages of history that parties which were once democratic become in time aristocratic.

We are accustomed for example, to look back upon Magna Charta as a mighty instrument of democracy; which it was; but it was not democracy according to our understanding of the word.

It merely substituted a baronial oligarchy for the divine-right rule of one man, King John.

It did not touch the downtrodden slaves, serfs and peasants of England.

And yet that struggle of the barons was of profound moment in history, for it started the spirit of democracy on its way downward, it was the seed from which sprung English constitutionalism, which finally flowered in the American republic.

Tillman, as I have shown, wrung democracy from the old slave-owning oligarchy.

He conquered: he established a democracy in South Carolina which included poor whites as well as aristocrats.

But Tillman in his fiery pleas for the rights of men no more considered the Negro than the old barons considered the serfs of their day in the struggle against King John.

It was and is incomprehensible to him that the Negro "has any rights which the white man is bound to respect."

In short we have in the South the familiar and ancient division of social forces, but instead of two white parties, we now see a white aristocratic party, which seeks to control the government, monopolise learning, and supervise the division of labour and the products of labour, struggling with a democratic party consisting of a few white and many coloured people, which clamours for a part in the government.

That, in plain words, is the true situation in the South to-day.