These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  Judge magazine in 1896 pictured William Jennings Bryan bearing his cross of gold, wielding a crown of thorns, and standing on an open Bible while a follower, behind him, waves a flag that reads “Anarchy.” As he closed, hollering to a crowd more than twenty thousand strong, he placed upon his head an imaginary crown of thorns: “We will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.” He stretched his arms wide and bowed his head. “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” And then he shut his eyes and fell as still as death.

  “My God! My God! My God!” the crowd began to chant.104 They took off their hats and threw them up in the air. Those who didn’t have hats took off their coats and threw them instead. Anyone who had an umbrella opened it. “Under the spell of the gifted blatherskite from Nebraska,” a reporter for the New York Times wrote, “the convention went into spasms of enthusiasm.”105

  Bryan, the gifted blatherskite, was much mocked, especially in the big cities of the East, by newspapers favorable to business interests. The Times ran the headline, “The Silver Fanatics Are Invincible: Wild, Raging, Irresistible Mob Which Nothing Can Turn from Its Abominable Foolishness.” Even Joseph Pulitzer’s far more man-of-the-people World refused to endorse Bryan. Populists, meanwhile, feared that fusion would destroy their movement. “We will not crucify the People’s Party on the cross of Democracy!” said one delegate from Texas.106

  But, in the end, the People’s Party threw its support behind Bryan, mounting no candidate of its own. Even Mary Lease gave him her grudging endorsement. At the People’s Party convention in St. Louis, she seconded his nomination. And socialists supported him. Eugene Debs, the Indiana-born labor organizer and later the head of the Socialist Party, wrote to Bryan, “You are at this hour the hope of the Republic.”107

  Bryan ran against Republican former Ohio governor William McKinley, who represented the interests of businessmen and ran armed with a war chest of donations made by banks and corporations terrified of the possibility of a Bryan presidency. Ballot reform, far from keeping money out of elections, had ushered more money into elections, along with a new political style: using piles of money to sell a candidate’s personality, borrowing from the methods of business by using mass advertising and education, slogans and billboards. McKinley ran a new-style campaign; Bryan ran an old-style campaign. Bryan barnstormed all over the country: he gave some six hundred speeches to five million people in twenty-seven states and traveled nearly twenty thousand miles. But McKinley’s campaign coffers were fuller: Republicans spent $7 million; Democrats, $300,000. John D. Rockefeller alone provided the GOP with a quarter of a million dollars. McKinley’s campaign manager, Cleveland businessman Mark Hanna, was nearly buried in donations from fellow businessmen. He used that money to print 120 million pieces of campaign literature. He hired fourteen hundred speakers to stump for McKinley; dubbing the populists Popocrats, they agitated voters to a state of panic.108 As Mary Lease liked to say, money elected McKinley. Lease, disgusted by the election, left populism behind in favor of journalism: Pulitzer hired her as a reporter.109

  On Election Day, nine out of ten American voters cast secret, government-printed ballots. McKinley won, with 271 electoral votes, to Bryan’s 176. Black men hardly voted, women and Chinese Americans not at all. But for the first time in decades, no one was killed at the polls. Bryan and his wife collected clippings and published a scrapbook. They called it The First Battle.

  IV.

  IN 1892, Americans marked the anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic by hosting the largest-ever world’s fair, the Columbian Exposition, on six hundred acres of fairgrounds in Chicago, in more than two hundred buildings containing thousands of exhibits, pavilions representing forty-six nations, and, not least, the first Ferris wheel. Among the fair’s hundreds of public lecturers stood two men who proposed to consider the course of American history from the vantage of the last years of the tumultuous nineteenth century. Frederick Jackson Turner, thirty-one, a dashing young historian with a mustache and a bow tie, wanted to explain the rise of American democracy, a triumph and a beacon. Frederick Douglass, seventy-five, an aging statesman, his hair a cloud of white, proposed to explain the rise of Jim Crow, a descent into a dark night.

  Turner, born in Wisconsin in 1861, was one of the first Americans to receive a doctorate in history. At the exposition, he delivered his remarks before the American Historical Association, an organization that had been founded in 1884 and incorporated by an act of Congress in 1889 “for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical manuscripts and for kindred purposes in the interest of American history and of history in America.”110 History and journalism became professions at the same time and, like journalists, historians borrowed from the emerging social sciences, relying on quantitative analysis to understand how change happens. Where George Bancroft, in his History of the United States, had looked for explanations in the hand of providence, Frederick Jackson Turner looked to the census. The difference between Turner’s methods and Bancroft’s signaled a profound shift in the organization of knowledge, one that would have lasting consequences for the relationship between the people and the state and for civil society itself. Like Darwinism, the rise of the social sciences involved the abdication of other ways of knowing, and, indirectly, contributed to the rise of fundamentalism. Across newly defined academic disciplines, scholars abandoned the idea of mystery—the idea that there are things known only by God—in favor of the claim to objectivity, a development sometimes called “the disenchantment of the world.”111 When universities grew more secular, religious instruction became confined to divinity schools and theological seminaries. But in the 1880s and 1890s, those schools were dominated by liberal theologians like the Congregationalist Washington Gladden—men who were modernists. Gladden devised what came to be called the New Theology, accepting evolution as consistent with a living Christian faith and understanding its discovery as part of humanity’s journey toward the Kingdom of God. A theologian at the University of Chicago’s divinity school defined modernism as “the use of scientific, historical, and social methods in understanding and applying evangelical Christianity to the needs of living persons.”112 Increasingly, this is exactly what evangelicals who eventually identified themselves as fundamentalists found objectionable.113 Their leader was William Jennings Bryan, who would earn the nickname “Mr. Fundamentalist.”

  Modernism shaped faith, and it shaped history. Turner titled his lecture “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” and in it he attempted to account for the sweep of history over four centuries. Influenced by both Jefferson and Darwin, Turner saw the American frontier as the site of political evolution, beginning with the “savages” of a “wilderness,” proceeding to the arrival of European traders, and continuing through various forms of settlement, through the establishment of cities and factories, “the evolution of each into a higher stage,” and culminating in the final stage of civilization: capitalism and democracy.114

  Turner proposed this thesis at an exposition whose exhibits included some four hundred Native Americans on display in what amounted to human zoos. Turner derived his ideas about evolution from the same early anthropological work that shaped those exhibits. But he based his analysis of the frontier on a quantitative analysis of the findings of the 1890 census, the tool with which the state counted the people, a census that had been tallied in record-breaking time. The 1880 census had taken eight years to tabulate. But in 1890, the Census Bureau’s Herman Hollerith, an engineer from Buffalo, New York, who’d taught mechanical engineering at MIT, introduced a reform that allowed for the census to be tallied in just a year. Inspired by the punching of railway tickets done by conductors to identify passengers by sex, height, and hair color, Hollerith made punch cards that could automatically tabulate all of the traits surveyed by census takers: the characteristics of citizens. Hollerith fed
punch cards of twelve rows and twenty columns into a tabulating machine he’d designed. In 1896, he founded the Tabulating Machine Company, which would eventually merge with a number of others to become a firm called International Business Machines, better known as IBM.115

  In “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner used Hollerith’s figures to calculate population densities across the country and, from them, to argue that there was no longer any discernible line between settled and unsettled parts of the continent. He argued that the frontier, which he described as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” had been opened in 1492 and closed four centuries later but, while it lasted, in that meeting place, American democracy had been forged: “American democracy is fundamentally the outcome of the experiences of the American people in dealing with the West,” by which he meant the experience of European immigrants to the United States in defeating its native peoples, taking possession of their homelands, and erecting there a civilization of their own. This, for Turner, was the story of America and the lesson of American history: evolution.116

  Frederick Douglass, more than twice Frederick Jackson Turner’s age, was scheduled to deliver his own lecture on August 25, 1893, the fair’s designated “Colored People’s Day.” The Columbian Exposition was segregated, not by Jim Crow laws, which didn’t extend to Illinois, but by racial convention, which did. Even the guards were all white; only the janitors were black. Douglass, who, as the former U.S. ambassador to Haiti, had represented the nation of Haiti at the Haitian pavilion, was the only eminent African American with a role at the fair, whose program had been planned by a board of 208 commissioners, all white.117 There were, however, black people at the fair: on display. In the Hall of Agriculture, old men and women, former slaves, sold miniature bales of cotton, souvenirs, while, in a series of exhibits intended to display the Turnerian progress of humankind from savagery to civilization, black Americans were posed in a fake African village. “As if to shame the Negro,” Douglass wrote, they “exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage.”118

  Douglass had planned to deliver a lecture titled “The Race Problem in America.” But Ida B. Wells, a thirty-one-year-old black woman with wide-set eyes and her hair piled on top of her head like a Gibson girl, went to see Douglass at the fair to try to convince him not to deliver the address and instead to boycott Colored People’s Day, a travesty that Wells dubbed “Tambo and Bones ‘Negro Day.’”119

  The daughter of former slaves, Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. In 1883, while working as a schoolteacher, she’d been asked to leave the “ladies’ car” of a train and move to the car for blacks. She refused, took her case to court, and began writing for black newspapers. In 1892, after three black men who’d opened a People’s Grocery were lynched, she began writing about “the threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women.” Fierce and fearless, Wells urged black militancy and armed resistance against lynching and against Jim Crow. She recommended a Winchester rifle. “The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs,” Wells wrote, “the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.” When Wells founded her own newspaper in Memphis, she called it Free Speech, carrying on the long tradition of making free speech the centerpiece of the struggle for racial justice. After a white mob burned the offices of Free Speech to the ground, she moved to New York, where she published under the pen name Exiled. In 1887, she was elected secretary of the black-run National Press Association. In 1892, when she published her first book, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, Douglass wrote a testimonial, saying that his own voice was feeble by comparison.120

  In 1893, when Wells went to see Douglass at the Chicago World’s Fair, they decided to go to lunch. Wells wanted to go to a restaurant across the street but wasn’t sure if they’d be served: only whites were allowed. “Come, let’s go there,” said Douglass. The waiters looked at them, astonished, until they recognized Douglass. Pressed by Wells, Douglass, who was more than willing to condemn the fair, agreed to provide an introductory essay to a pamphlet called The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the Columbian Exposition, in which he insisted that any true representation of the American nation had to be honest, and that, as much as he wished he could tell the story of America as a story of progress, the truth was different. From slavery to Jim Crow, the history of the United States, he argued, “involves the necessity of plain speaking of wrongs and outrages endured, and of rights withheld, and withheld in flagrant contradiction to boasted American Republican liberty and civilization.”121

  Ida B. Wells’s indictment of lynching was first published in 1892. Still, as hard as Wells tried to convince Douglass to boycott “Tambo and Bones ‘Negro Day,’” he decided to go ahead with his address.122 When the day came, he arrived to find the fair decked out with watermelons, and white hecklers waiting for him. With the careful, halting steps of an old man, he climbed to the stage. “Men talk of the Negro problem,” he began. “There is no Negro problem,” he said, his voice rising. “The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution.”123

  It was one of the last public speeches Frederick Douglass ever delivered—but not the very last. On September 3, 1894, an ailing Douglass made the journey from his home in Washington to speak in Manassas, Virginia, at the dedication of an industrial school for free black children—a school for learning how to build. “A ship at anchor, with halliards broken, sails mildewed, hull empty, her bottom covered with sea-weed and barnacles, meets no resistance,” Douglass said that day, turning the idea of a ship of state to the problem of Jim Crow. “But when she spread her canvas to the breeze and sets out on her voyage, turns prow to the open sea, the higher shall be her speed, the greater shall be her resistance. And so it is with the colored man.” He paused to allow his listeners to conjure the scene, and its meaning, of a people struggling against the sea. “My dear young friends,” Douglass closed. “Accept the inspiration of hope. Imitate the example of the brave mariner, who, amid clouds and darkness, amid hail, rain and storm bolts, battles his way against all that the sea opposes to his progress and you will reach the goal of your noble ambition in safety.”124

  Two years later, Douglass, seventy-seven, collapsed in the middle of an after-dinner conversation with his wife about the emancipation of women. He’d spent the day in suffrage meetings with Susan B. Anthony, one of his closest friends.125 He’d had a heart attack. At his funeral, attended by thousands of mourners, the minister took as his text, “Know ye not that there is a Prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?”126 Accept the inspiration of hope.

  MONTHS LATER, DOUGLASS’S challenge to the American people to live up to their own Constitution haunted the halls of the Supreme Court when the justices took up, once again, the matter of citizens, persons, and people. Homer Plessy, a shoemaker from New Orleans who looked white but who, under Louisiana’s race laws was technically black, had been arrested for violating an 1890 Jim Crow law mandating separate railway cars for blacks and whites. Plessy had contrived to get arrested in order to challenge the Louisiana law. John Ferguson, a judge in a lower court, had ruled against Plessy, and in 1896, the Supreme Court heard the appeal, Plessy v. Ferguson.

  By now, judicial review had come to be understood as the paramount power of the court, a power wielded by the state against the people as represented by their legislatures. In 1892, the president of the American Bar Association declared judicial review “the loftiest function and the most sacred duty of the judiciary—unique in the history of the world.”127

  In a 7–1 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling—and thereby made the landmark ruling that Jim Crow laws did not violate the Constitution—by arguing that separate accommodations were not necessarily unequal accommodations. The Fourteenth Amendment promised all citizens the equal protection of the law. The majority in Plessy v. Ferguson asserted that separation an
d equality were wholly separate ideas. “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” The resulting legal principle—that public accommodations could be “separate but equal”—would last for more than half a century.

  The sole dissenter, John Marshall Harlan, objecting to the establishment of separate classes of citizens, insisted that the achievement of the United States had been the establishment, by amendment, of a Constitution that was blind to race. “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” Harlan wrote, and it is therefore a plain violation of the Constitution “for a state to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race.” Consider the absurdities, contortions, and contradictions of Jim Crow laws and of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Harlan urged his colleagues. Under the terms of the Chinese Exclusion Act, immigrants from China could not become American citizens. But under the terms of Louisiana’s railway car law, “a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana . . . are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race.”