These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  Harlan was not attempting to protest discrimination against Chinese immigrants. Instead, he was pointing out the absurdity of a set of laws that grant more rights to noncitizens than to citizens. What all these laws had in common, Harlan argued, was that they were based on race. And yet a war had been fought and won to establish that laws in the United States could not be based on race; nor could citizenship be restricted by race. The court’s opinion in Plessy, Harlan warned, was so dreadfully in error as to constitutional principles that “the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.”128 This prediction proved true.

  “How does it feel to be a problem?” W. E. B. Du Bois asked, the year after Plessy v. Ferguson established the doctrine of separate but equal. “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”129

  A citizen, a person, a people. Four centuries had passed since continents, separated by oceans, had met again. A century had passed since Jefferson had declared all men equal. Three decades had passed since the Fourteenth Amendment had declared all persons born or naturalized in the United States to be citizens. And now the Supreme Court ruled that those who would set aside equality in favor of separation had not violated the nation’s founding truths. In one of the most wrenching tragedies in American history—a chronicle not lacking for tragedy—the Confederacy had lost the war, but it had won the peace.

  Ten

  EFFICIENCY AND THE MASSES

  The 120-acre Ford Motor plant in Highland Park, Michigan, opened in 1910, the largest manufacturing site in the world.

  WALTER LIPPMANN WORE A THREE-PIECE PINSTRIPE suit the way a tiger wears his skin, but the clue to his acuity came in the raised eyebrows, as pointed as the tip of an arrow. Educated at Harvard, where he studied with William James and George Santayana, he’d seemed destined for a distinguished if quiet career as a professor of philosophy, or maybe history, when he decided, instead, to become a reporter, the sort of man who tucked his pencil into his hat band, except that he wasn’t exactly that kind of reporter: he invented another kind, the learned political commentator. “To read, if not to comprehend, Lippmann was suddenly the thing to do,” wrote one much-wounded rival.

  By 1914, when Lippmann was twenty-five, he’d already written two piercing books about American politics and helped launch the New Republic. He was heavyset and silent; his friends called him Buddha. He lived with a who’s who of other young liberals in a narrow three-story red brick row house on Nineteenth Street in Washington that visitors, including Herbert Hoover, who once ate an unlit cigar there over dinner, named the House of Truth. Theodore Roosevelt called Lippmann the “most brilliant young man of his age in all the United States,” which was but small comfort to older men, who found their ideas unraveled by Lippmann, like yarn in the clutches of a kitten. How did a man so young write with such authority, matched by so wide an appeal? Oliver Wendell Holmes said Lippmann’s pieces were like flypaper: “If I touch it, I am stuck till I finish it.”1

  In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, when Lippmann came of age, industrialism brought great, glittering wealth to a few, prosperity to the nation, cheaper goods to the middle class, and misery and want to the many. The many now numbering more than ever before, talk of “the people” yielded to talk of “the masses,” the swelling ranks of the poor, haggard and hungry. Like many Americans of his generation, Lippmann started out as a socialist, when even mentioning the masses hinted at socialism; The Masses was the name of a socialist monthly, published in New York, and, especially after the Russian Revolution of 1917, which brought the Bolshevists to power (“bol’shinstvo” means “the majority”), “the masses” sounded decidedly Red. But Lippmann soon began to write about the masses as “the bewildered herd,” unthinking and instinctual, and as dangerous as an impending stampede. For Lippmann, and for an entire generation of intellectuals, politicians, journalists, and bureaucrats who styled themselves Progressives—the term dates to 1910—the masses posed a threat to American democracy. After the First World War, Progressives refashioned their aims and took to calling themselves “liberals.”2

  Only someone with so great a faith in the masses as Lippmann had when he started out could have ended up with so little. This change was wrought in the upheaval of the age. In the years following the realigning election of 1896, everything seemed, suddenly, bigger than before, more crowded, and more anonymous: looming and teeming. Even buildings were bigger: big office buildings, big factories, big mansions, big museums. Quantification became the only measure of value: how big, how much, how many. There were big businesses: big banks, big railroads, Big Oil. U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation, was formed in 1901 by consolidating more than two hundred companies in the iron and steel businesses. To fight monopolies, protect the people, and conserve the land, the federal government grew bigger, too; dozens of new federal agencies were founded in this era, from the National Bureau of Standards (1901) to the Forest Service (1905), the Coast Guard (1915), and the Bureau of Efficiency (1916), the last designed to handle the problem of bigness by the twin arts of organization and acceleration, a bureau of bureaus.

  “Mass” came to mean anything that involved a giant and possibly terrifying quantity, on a scale so great that it overwhelmed existing arrangements—including democracy. “Mass production” was coined in the 1890s, when factories got bigger and faster, when the number of people who worked in them skyrocketed, and when the men who owned them got staggeringly rich. “Mass migration” dates to 1901, when nearly a million immigrants were entering the United States every year, “mass consumption” to 1905, “mass consciousness” to 1912. “Mass hysteria” had been defined by 1925 and “mass communication” by 1927, when the New York Times described the radio as “a system of mass communication with a mass audience.”3

  And the masses themselves? They formed a mass audience for mass communication and had a tendency, psychologists believed, to mass hysteria—the political stampede—posing a political problem unanticipated by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who believed that the size of the continent and the growth of its population would make the Republic stronger and its citizens more virtuous. They could not have imagined the vast economic inequality of the Gilded Age, its scale, its extravagance, and its agonies, and the challenge posed to the political order by millions of desperately poor men, women, and children, their opinions easily molded by the tools of mass persuasion.

  To meet that challenge in what came to be called the Progressive Era, activists, intellectuals, and politicians campaigned for and secured far-reaching reforms that included municipal, state, and federal legislation. Their most powerful weapon was the journalistic exposé. Their biggest obstacle was the courts, which they attempted to hurdle by way of constitutional amendments. Out of these campaigns came the federal income tax, the Federal Reserve Bank, the direct election of U.S. senators, presidential primaries, minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws, women’s suffrage, and Prohibition. Nearly all of these reforms had long been advocated for, in many cases first by William Jennings Bryan. Progressives’ biggest failure was also Bryan’s: their unwillingness to address, or even discuss, Jim Crow. Instead, they propped it up. And all of what Progressives accomplished in the management of mass democracy was vulnerable to the force that so worried the unrelenting Walter Lippmann: the malleability of public opinion, into mass delusion.

  I.

  PROGRESSIVISM HAD ROOTS in late nineteenth-century populism; Progressivism was the middle-class version: indoors, quiet, passionless. Populists raised hell; Progressives read pamphlets. Populists had argued that the federal government’s complicity in the consolidation of power in the hands of big banks, big railroads, and big businesses had betrayed both the nation’s founding principles and the will of
the people, and that the government itself was riddled with corruption. “The People’s Party is the protest of the plundered against the plunderers—of the victim against the robbers,” said one organizer at the founding of the People’s Party in 1892.4 “A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents and is rapidly taking possession of the world,” said another.5 Progressives championed the same causes as Populists, and took their side in railing against big business, but while Populists generally wanted less government, Progressives wanted more, seeking solutions in reform legislation and in the establishment of bureaucracies, especially government agencies.6

  Populists believed that the system was broken; Progressives believed that the government could fix it. Conservatives, who happened to dominate the Supreme Court, didn’t believe that there was anything to fix but believed that, if there was, the market would fix it. Notwithstanding conservatives’ influence in the judiciary, Progressivism spanned both parties. After 1896, when the Democratic Party convinced Bryan to run as a Democrat instead of as a Populist, Democrats boasted that they had successfully folded Populists into their party. In 1905, Governor Jeff Davis of Arkansas said, “In 1896, when we nominated the grandest and truest man the world ever knew—William Jennings Bryan—for President, we stole all the Populists hate; we stole their platform, we stole their candidate, we stole them out lock, stock, and barrel.” But Republicans were Progressives, too. “The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being,” Theodore Roosevelt said. And, as Woodrow Wilson himself admitted, “When I sit down and compare my views with those of a Progressive Republican I can’t see what the difference is.”7

  Much that was vital in Progressivism grew out of Protestantism, and especially out of a movement known as the Social Gospel, adopted by almost all theological liberals and by a large number of theological conservatives, too. The name dates to 1886, when a Congregationalist minister took to calling Henry George’s Progress and Poverty a social gospel. George had written much of the book with evangelical zeal, arguing that only a remedy for economic inequality could bring about “the culmination of Christianity—the City of God on earth, with its walls of jasper and its gates of pearl!” (More skeptical and less religious liberals had long since lost faith with George’s utopianism, Clarence Darrow shrewdly remarking, “The error I found in the philosophy of Henry George was its cocksureness, its simplicity, and the small value that it placed upon the selfish motives of men.”)8

  The Social Gospel movement was led by seminary professors—academic theologians who accepted the theory of evolution, seeing it as entirely consistent with the Bible and evidence of a divinely directed, purposeful universe; at the same time, they fiercely rejected the social Darwinism of writers like Herbert Spencer, the English natural scientist who coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” and used the theory of evolution to defend all manner of force, violence, and oppression. After witnessing a coal miners’ strike in Ohio in 1882, the Congregationalist Washington Gladden, a man never seen without his knee-length, double-breasted Prince Albert frock coat, argued that fighting inequality produced by industrialism was an obligation of Christians: “We must make men believe that Christianity has a right to rule this kingdom of industry, as well as all the other kingdoms of this world.”9

  Social Gospelers brought the zeal of abolitionism to the problem of industrialism. In 1895, Oberlin College held a conference called “The Causes and Proposed Remedies of Poverty.” In 1897, Topeka minister Charles Sheldon, who got to know his parish by living among his poorest parishioners—spending three weeks in a black ghetto—sold millions of copies of a novel, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?, about a minister and his congregation who wonder how Christ would address industrialism (their answer: with Progressive reform). In 1908, Methodists wrote a Social Creed and pledged to fight to end child labor and to promote a living wage. It was soon adopted by the thirty-three-member Federal Council of Churches, which proceeded to investigate a steelworkers’ strike in Bethlehem, ultimately taking the side of the strikers.10

  William Jennings Bryan, hero of the plains, was a Social Gospeler in everything but name.11 After losing the election in 1896, though, he threw off his cross of gold and dedicated himself to a new cause: the protest of American imperialism. Bryan saw imperialism as inconsistent with both Christianity and American democratic traditions. Other Progressives disagreed—Protestant missionaries in particular—seeing both Cuba and the Philippines as opportunities to gain new converts.

  The Spanish-American War, what boosters called a “splendid little war,” began in 1898. Cubans had been attempting to throw off Spanish rule since 1868, and Filipinos had been doing the same since 1896. Newspaper barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer came to side with the Cuban rebels, and, eyeing a rich opportunity to boost their newspapers’ circulation, they sent reporters and photographers not only to chronicle the conflict but, in Hearst’s case, to stir it up. Newspaper lore has it that when one of Hearst’s photographers cabled from Havana that war seemed unlikely, Hearst cabled back: “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” President McKinley sent a warship to Cuba as a precaution, but in February 1898 that ship, the USS Maine, blew up in Havana, killing 250 U.S. sailors. The cause of the explosion was unknown—and it would later be revealed to have been an accident—but both Hearst and Pulitzer published a cable from the captain of the battleship to the assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt, informing him that the disaster was no accident. (The cable was later revealed to be a fake.) Newspaper circulation soared; readers clamored for war. When Congress obliged by declaring war on Spain, Hearst fired rockets from the roof of the New York Journal’s building. Pulitzer came to regret his part in the rush to war, but not Hearst. On his lead newspaper’s front page, Hearst ran the headline HOW DO YOU LIKE THE JOURNAL’S WAR?12

  In 1898, newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer (left) and William Randolph Hearst (right) used the war to increase circulation. Thirty-nine-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, determined to see combat, resigned his position as assistant secretary of the navy, formed the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, charged up San Juan Hill, and came back a hero. Even Bryan, thirty-eight, enlisted. He formed a volunteer regiment from Nebraska, and went to Florida to prepare to fight, but was never sent into combat, McKinley having apparently made sure Bryan, his presidential rival, had no chance for glory.

  Under the terms of the peace, Cuba became independent, but Spain ceded Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the United States, in exchange for $20 million. A U.S. occupation and American colonial rule were not what the people of the Philippines had in mind when they threw off Spanish rule. The Philippines declared its independence, and Filipino leader Emilio Aguinaldo formed a provisional constitutional government. McKinley refused to recognize it, and by 1899 U.S. troops had fired on Filipino nationalists. “I know that war has always produced great losses,” Aguinaldo said in an address to the Filipino people. “But I also know by experience how bitter is slavery.” Bryan resigned his commission to protest the annexation, joining a quickly formed and badly organized Anti-Imperialist League, whose supporters included Jane Addams, Andrew Carnegie, William James, and Mark Twain. Bryan, their best speaker, argued that the annexation of the Philippines betrayed the will of both the Filipino people and the American people. “The people have not voted for imperialism,” he said, “no national convention has declared for it; no Congress has passed upon it.”13

  From its start in 1899, the Philippine-American War was an unusually brutal war, with atrocities on both sides, including the slaughter of Filipino civilians. U.S. forces deployed on Filipinos a method of torture known as “water cure,” forcing a prisoner to drink a vast quantity of water; most of the victims died. Meanwhile, in Washington, in the debate over the annexation of the Philippines, Americans revisited unsettled questions about expansion that had rent the nation
during the War with Mexico and unsettled questions about citizenship that remained the unfinished business of Reconstruction. The debate also marked the limits of the Progressive vision: both sides in this debate availed themselves, at one time or another, of the rhetoric of white supremacy. Eight million people of color in the Pacific and the Caribbean, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico, were now part of the United States, a nation that already, in practice, denied the right to vote to millions of its own people because of the color of their skin.

  On the floor of the Senate, those who favored imperial rule over the Pacific island argued that the Filipinos were, by dint of race, unable to govern themselves. “How could they be?” asked Indiana Republican Albert J. Beveridge. “They are not of a self-governing race. They are Orientals.” But senators who argued against annexation pointed out that when the Confederacy had made this argument about blacks, the Union had fought a war and staged an occupation over its disagreement with that claim. “You are undertaking to annex and make a component part of this Government islands inhabited by ten millions of the colored race, one-half or more of whom are barbarians of the lowest type,” said Ben Tillman, a one-eyed South Carolina Democrat who’d boasted of having killed black men and expressed his support for lynch mobs. “It is to the injection into the body politic of the United States of that vitiated blood, that debased and ignorant people, that we object.” Tillman reminded Republicans that they had not so long ago freed slaves and then “forced on the white men of the South, at the point of the bayonet, the rule and domination of those ex-slaves. Why the difference? Why the change? Do you acknowledge that you were wrong in 1868?”14

  The relationship between Jim Crow and the war in the Philippines was not lost on black soldiers who served in the Pacific. An infantryman from Wisconsin reported that the war could have been avoided had white American soldiers not applied to the Filipinos “home treatment for colored peoples” and “cursed them as damned niggers.” Rienzi B. Lemus, of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, reported on the contrast between what he read in American newspapers and what he saw in the Philippines. “Every time we get a paper from there,” he wrote home to Richmond, Virginia, “we read where some poor Negro is lynched for supposed rape,” while in the Philippines, only when “there was no Negro in the vicinity to charge with the crime,” were two white soldiers sentenced to be shot for raping a Filipino woman.15