Jim Crow, Nativism, and Racism

JIM CROW, NATIVISM, AND RACISM

Jim Crow Matures

By 1900 southern segregationists had completed much of their legislative agenda. Through legal devices such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and the grandfather clause (which denied suffrage to anyone whose grandfather had been ineligible to vote) voter rolls had been reduced, and the disfranchisement of blacks was virtually complete. The Supreme Court tacitly approved the creation of a separate society with its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the Louisiana law requiring "separate but equal" railroad facilities for blacks and whites. Starting around 1900, this notion of "separate but equal" was quickly applied to all facets of southern life, though never with any effort to make things equal. By 1915, for example, South Carolina was spending twelve times as much per capita for the education of white children as it did for black children. Throughout the South movie theaters, water fountains, hotels, restaurants, and swimming pools were segregated or declared off limits to blacks. Laws legislating this separation of the races, named Jim Crow laws, relegated blacks to an inferior status socially and to second-class status legally.

Southern Paradoxes

Southerners effectively used progressive arguments for their actions. Jim Crow laws were extreme examples of social-control legislation, laws in which the government dictated how citizens should act. To southern progressives the new election laws were a means of cleaning up a corrupt electorate. By preventing poor whites as well as blacks from voting, the poll tax and other laws restricting suffrage kept corrupt white politicians from obtaining their votes through bribery or intimidation. The all-white primaries furthered this aim as well. Use of the Australian secret ballot, which listed the candidates by name instead of by party, required the voter to be able to read in order to vote. It mattered little to progressives if illiterate voters happened to be blacks or poor whites, because this and other measures took power away from the hated political machines. Segregation would allow the reconciliation of a white society divided after the tumultuous, divisive populist campaigns of the 1890s, and, reformers argued, it would minimize contact with "deceptive" and "corrupting" Negroes. With blacks eliminated from the picture, such reformers believed, whites could join together to begin reforming and improving (white) society.

Northern Views

Racism was not restricted to the South during the Progressive Era. It was simply more blatantly displayed in the South than in the North. Race riots and lynchings, commonly associated with the South, occurred in the North as well—and riots with nearly the same frequency. In the North segregation came about more by custom, geography, and economics (de facto segregation) than by law (de jure segregation). Confronted with such intense repression and racism, blacks listened to the opposing arguments of the two leading black leaders, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. Washington, the "Wizard of Tuskegee," recommended that blacks temporarily acquiesce to the loss of their political rights and concentrate on improving their economic independence. Whites supported Washington's conciliatory, gradual approach. Du Bois, a Harvard-educated black intellectual, advocated immediate direct action to obtain civil rights and economic equality.

Roosevelt and the "Negro Problem."

President Roosevelt's "Negro policy" reflected the broader opinions of most national leaders of his time. Shortly after taking over the presidency in 1901, he invited his friend Booker T. Washington to an informal dinner at the White House to discuss southern patronage jobs. As a leader of the southern wing of the Republican Party, Washington held great influence over the rank-and-file membership, which was predominantly black. When news of the event hit southern newspapers, segregationists and critics widely denounced Roosevelt's invitation as "the most damnable outrage that has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States." The invitation was a personal gesture done for political reasons. Roosevelt, like so many others of his time, felt that "as a race and in the mass" African Americans were "altogether inferior to whites," not social and intellectual equals. Yet black Republicans remained politically important because of their voting strength in some states, and Roosevelt needed them if he was to be elected in 1904. After the visit, their political collaboration continued. The president never apologized for the invitation, but he never repeated the action or invited other blacks to the White House for dinner. His successor, William Howard Taft, wanted even less to do with African Americans and did virtually nothing during his four-year term to aid them.

The Brownsville Affair

As the 1904 election drew near, President Roosevelt publicly shifted his position on the "Negro problem" in an effort to court the southern white vote. After the election he became increasingly critical of African Americans who failed to take control of their own condition and improve their lot in life. At the same time he came to rely increasingly on white southern Democrats for advice on racial matters. The events of August 1906 demonstrated just how far he had shifted. Roosevelt received information on 15 August alleging that on the previous day black soldiers of the First Battalion of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, stationed at Brownsville, Texas, had shot up the town, killing one bartender and wounding a policeman. Roosevelt ordered an investigation, during which the twelve soldiers suspected of doing the shooting were at no time presumed innocent or provided with legal representation. The inquiry assumed the guilt of the men and simply sought to prove their involvement despite indications of their possible innocence. Investigators ignored contradictory testimony from eyewitnesses, and the available evidence did not support the official version. On 5 November 1906 Roosevelt issued orders that all the soldiers of the three affected companies be discharged and barred from holding any future governmental position. Among the 170 men discharged were six who had been awarded the Medal of Honor and some veterans of the Spanish-American War. A Congress disenchanted with Roosevelt launched an investigation into the affair in an effort to embarrass the president, keeping the incident in the news for the next two years, but they failed to overturn the finding.

Immigration Restriction

Immigration to the United States reached its zenith, 8.2 million people, between 1900 and 1909, with "new immigrants" from southern and eastern Europe outnumbering earlier immigrants from northern and western Europe by nearly three to one. The West Coast battled Asian immigrants, even though their total numbers did not exceed 172,000 for 1900-1909 or 300,000 over the thirty years between 1880 and 1909. Nevertheless, white American laborers felt threatened by the "yellow peril" and demanded appropriate action from their government. Chinese immigration was virtually nonexistent after passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers. In 1902 the Roosevelt administration supported measures that tightened the restrictions the Chinese already faced, a move that brought the president much popular support on the West Coast, especially in California. Nativists seeking to keep out more than just the Chinese proposed literacy tests for entry into the United States and sought to limit immigrant voting rights through similar measures. These measures failed, but they came before Congress many times during the next three decades. The president did support the Naturalization Act of 1907, which tightened procedures for becoming a U.S. citizen. The wording of the measure, supported by organized labor but opposed by big business, explicitly limited the number of unskilled laborers coming into the country. In the aftermath of the fight over this act, the president appointed the Dillingham Commission to probe the issue of immigration restriction as a national policy. Its report, issued in 1911, lent weight to the movement to restrict immigration.

The "Gentlemen's Agreement."

Unlike the Chinese, most of whom arrived in poverty, many Japanese came to America with sufficient funds to purchase farmland. Predictably, Americans viewed the immigrant Japanese much as they did their country of origin: as ambitious, aggressive, and a little too successful. Xenophobic nativists sounded the alarm. In 1905 they formed the Asiatic Exclusion League in San Francisco, and in 1906 they persuaded the city school board to restrict Japanese pupils to attendance at segregated Chinatown schools. The Japanese community attacked the racism of the California politicians and protested to the Japanese government to intervene on their behalf. (In 1906 only ninety-three of the twenty-five thousand students in San Francisco were Japanese.) The Japanese government pointed out the folly of segregation to President Roosevelt, who himself called the measure a "wicked absurdity." Hoping to avoid an embarrassing international incident that might to lead to war, Roosevelt pressured the school board into rescinding its directive. In return the Japanese government agreed to a Gentlemen's Agreement in 1907, by which it pledged to refuse exit visas to laborers wishing to immigrate to the United States and Hawaii. The anti-Japanese rioting in San Francisco on 20-21 May 1907 rekindled the flame and again created a war scare. The riots were put down by local officials, but they had international ramifications, including Roosevelt's decision to send the navy on a Pacific cruise.

Sources:

Alan Kraut, Huddled Masses: Immigrants in American Society, 1880—1921 (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1982);

Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1983).