These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  Roosevelt, in an extraordinary campaign for direct democracy and social justice, hoped to wrest the Republican nomination from Taft partly by appealing to female voters, but mainly by availing himself of another Progressive reform: the direct primary. Progressive reformers, viewing nominating conventions as corrupt, had fought instead for state primaries, in which voters could choose their own presidential candidates. The first primary was held in 1899; the reform, led by Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette, gained strength in 1905. “Let the People Rule” became Roosevelt’s 1912 slogan. “The great fundamental issue now before the Republican Party and before our people can be stated briefly,” he said. “It is: Are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves? I believe they are. My opponents do not.” Thirteen states held primaries (all were nonbinding); Roosevelt won nine.62

  As with the secret ballot, primaries were part Progressive reform, part Jim Crow. Roosevelt needed to win them because, at the Republican National Convention, he had no real chance of winning black delegates. Because the Republican Party had virtually no white support in the South, the only southern delegates were black delegates, men who had been appointed to party offices by the Taft administration. Roosevelt tried in vain to wrest them from their support for the president. “I like the Negro race,” he said in a speech at an AME Church the day before the convention. But the next day the New York Times produced affidavits proving that Roosevelt’s campaign wasn’t so much trying to court black delegates as to bribe them. After Roosevelt lost the nomination to Taft, he formed the Progressive Party, whose convention refused to seat black delegates. “This is strictly a white man’s party,” said one of Roosevelt’s supporters, a leader of the so-called Lily Whites.63

  But the Progressive Party was not, in fact, strictly a white man’s party; it was also a white woman’s party. Roosevelt’s new party adopted a suffrage plank and Roosevelt promised to appoint Jane Addams to his cabinet.64 Addams gave the second nominating speech at the convention, after which she marched across the hall carrying a “Votes for Women” flag. Returning to her office, she found a telegram from a black newspaper editor that read: “Woman suffrage will be stained with Negro Blood unless women refuse all alliance with Roosevelt.”65

  Roosevelt’s 1912 campaign marked a turn in American politics by venturing the novel idea that a national presidential administration answers national public opinion without the mediation either of parties, or of representatives in Congress. The candidate, Roosevelt suggested, is more important than the party. Roosevelt also used film clips and mass advertising in a way that no candidate had done before, gathering a national following through the tools of modern publicity and bypassing the party system by reaching voters directly. That he failed to win the presidency did not diminish the influence of this new conception of the nature of American political and constitutional arrangements.66

  In the end, Roosevelt won 27 percent of the popular vote (more than any third-party candidate either before or since), but, having drawn most of those votes from Taft, Roosevelt’s campaign allowed Wilson to gain the White House, the first southern president elected since the Civil War. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, too, for the first time in decades. “Men’s hearts wait upon us,” Wilson said in his inaugural address, before the largest crowd ever gathered at an inauguration.67 Wilson, having earned the endorsement of William Jennings Bryan, rewarded him by naming him his secretary of state. At the inauguration, Bryan sat right behind Wilson, a measure of the distance populism had traveled from the prairies of Kansas and Nebraska.

  Few presidents have achieved so much so quickly as did Wilson, who delivered on an extraordinary number of his promised Progressive reforms. Learning from Roosevelt’s good relationship with the press while in the White House, Wilson, in his first month, invited more than a hundred reporters to his office, fielded questions, and announced that he intended to do this regularly: in his first ten months alone, he held sixty press conferences. The author of Congressional Government also kept the Sixty-Third Congress in session for eighteen months straight, longer than Congress had ever met before. Congress obliged by lowering the tariff; reforming banking and currency laws; abolishing child labor; and passing a new antitrust act, the first eight-hour work-day legislation and the first federal aid to farmers.

  Among Wilson’s hardest fights was his nomination of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, one of the most controversial in the court’s history, not because Brandeis was the first Jew appointed to the court, though that was controversial in some quarters, but because Brandeis was a dogged opponent of plutocrats. Beyond the cases he’d argued, Brandeis had become something of a muckraker, publishing an indictment of the plutocracy, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It, parts of which sounded as though they could have been written by the likes of Mary E. Lease. “The power and the growth of power of our financial oligarchs comes from wielding the savings and quick capital of others,” he wrote. “The fetters which bind the people are forged from the people’s own gold.” He pointed out that J. P. Morgan and the First National and National City Bank together held “341 directorships in 112 corporations having aggregate resources or capitalization of $22,245,000,000,” a sum that is “more than three times the assessed value of all the real estate in the City of New York” and “more than the assessed value of all the property in the twenty-two states, north and south, lying west of the Mississippi River.” During the Judiciary Committee debates over Brandeis’s nomination, one senator remarked, “The real crime of which this man is guilty is that he has exposed the iniquities of men in high places in our financial system.”68

  Wilson fought hard for Brandeis, and won, and Brandeis’s presence on the bench made all the difference to endurance of Progressive reform. But, like other Progressives, Wilson not only failed to offer any remedy for racial inequality; he endorsed it. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, he spoke on the battlefield at a reunion of more than fifty thousand Union and Confederate veterans. “A Reunion of whom?” asked the Washington Bee: black soldiers were not included. It was, instead, a reunion between whites in the North and the South, an agreement to remember the Civil War as a war over states’ rights, and to forget the cause of slavery. “We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten,” Wilson told the veterans at Gettysburg. A week later, his administration mandated separate bathrooms for blacks and whites working in the Treasury Department; soon he segregated the entire civil service, bringing Jim Crow to the nation’s capital.69

  “There may have been other Presidents who held the same sort of sentiments,” wrote the NAACP’s James Weldon Johnson, “but Mr. Wilson bears the discreditable distinction of being the first President of the United States, since Emancipation, who openly condoned and vindicated prejudice against the Negro.”70 Jim Crow thrived because, after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, reformers who had earlier fought for the cause of civil rights abandoned it for the sake of forging a reunion between the states and the federal government and between the North and the South. This wasn’t Wilson’s doing; this was the work of his generation, the work of the generation that came before him, and the work of the generation that would follow him, an abdication of struggle, an abandonment of justice.

  II.

  WAR BROKE OUT in Europe in July of 1914, war on a scale that had never been seen before, a war run by efficiency experts and waged with factory-made munitions, a war without limit or mercy. Machines slaughtered the masses. Europe fell to its knees. The United States rose to its feet. The Great War brought the United States into the world. It marked the end of Europe’s reign as the center of the Western world; that place, after the war, was held by the United States.71

  At the start, Americans only watched, numb, shocked to discover that the nineteenth-century’s great steam-powered ship of progress had carried its all-too-tru
sting passengers to the edge of an abyss. “The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara,” wrote Henry James.72 The scale of death in the American Civil War, so staggering at the time—750,000 dead, in four years of fighting—looked, by comparison, minuscule. Within the first eight weeks of the war alone, nearly 400,000 Germans were killed, wounded, sick, or missing. In 1916, over a matter of mere months, there were 800,000 military casualties in Verdun and 1.1 million at the Somme. But civilians were slaughtered, too. The Ottoman government massacred as many as 1.5 million Armenians. For the first time, war was waged by airplane, bombs dropped from a great height, as if by the gods themselves. Cathedrals were shelled, libraries bombed, hospitals blasted. Before the war was over, nearly 40 million people had been killed and another 20 million wounded.73

  What sane person could believe in progress in an age of mass slaughter? The Great War steered the course of American politics like a gale-force wind. The specter of slaughter undercut Progressivism, suppressed socialism, and produced anticolonialism. And, by illustrating the enduring wickedness of humanity and appearing to fulfill prophecies of apocalypse as a punishment for the moral travesty of modernism, the war fueled fundamentalism.

  Fundamentalists’ dissent from Protestantism had to do with the idea of truth, a dissent that would greatly influence the history of a nation whose creed rests on a very particular set of truths. Fundamentalism began with a rejection of Darwinism. Some of fundamentalism’s best-remembered preachers are southerners who moved west, like the Alabama-born Texas Baptist J. Frank Norris, six foot one and hard as oak. “I was born in the dark of the moon, in the dog-fennell season, just after a black cat had jumped upon a black coffin,” Norris liked to say. Ordained in 1897, Norris went on to rail against “that hell-born, Bible-destroying, deity-of-Christ-denying, German rationalism known as evolution.”74 But fundamentalism began among educated northern ministers. Influenced by Scottish commonsense philosophers, early fundamentalists like the Princeton Theological Seminary’s Charles Hodge maintained that the object of theology was to establish “the facts and principles of the Bible.” Darwinism, Hodge thought, would lead to atheism. He then declared the Bible “free from all error,” a position his son, A. A. Hodge, also a professor at Princeton, carried further. (The younger Hodge insisted that it was the originals of the Scriptures that were free from error, not the copies; the originals do not survive. This distinction usually went unnoticed by his followers.)

  By insisting on the literal truth of the Bible, fundamentalists dared liberal theologians and Social Gospelers into a fight, especially after the publication, beginning in 1910, of a twelve-volume series of pamphlets called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. The purpose of a church is to convert people to Christ by teaching the actual, literal gospel, fundamentalists insisted, not by preaching good works and social justice. “Some people are trying to make a religion out of social service with Jesus Christ left out,” the revivalist and ex–baseball player Billy Sunday complained in 1912. “We’ve had enough of this godless social service nonsense.”75

  William Jennings Bryan, Mr. Fundamentalist, was not actually a fundamentalist. For one, he believed in the Social Gospel; for another, he does not appear ever to have owned a copy of The Fundamentals and, as a man unconcerned with theological matters, he hardly ever bothered defending the literal truth of the Bible. “Christ went about doing good” was the sum of Bryan’s theology. Bryan was confused for a fundamentalist because he led a drive to prohibit the teaching of evolution in the nation’s schools. But Bryan saw the campaign against evolution as another arm of his decades-long campaign against the plutocracy, telling a cartoonist, “You should represent me as using a double-barreled shotgun fixing one barrel at the elephant as he tries to enter the treasury and another at Darwinism—the monkey—as he tries to enter the schoolroom.”76

  Bryan’s difficulty was that he saw no difference between Darwinism and social Darwinism, but it was social Darwinism that he attacked, the brutality of a political philosophy that seemed to believe in nothing more than the survival of the fittest, or what Bryan called “the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill the weak.”77 How could a war without mercy not set this movement aflame? Germany was the enemy, the same Germany whose model of education had secularized American colleges and universities, which were now teaching eugenics, sometimes known as the science of human betterment, calling for the elimination from the human race of people deemed unfit to reproduce on the basis of their intelligence, criminality, or background.

  Bryan wasn’t battling a chimera. American universities were indeed breeding eugenicists. Zoologist Charles Davenport was a professor at Harvard when he wrote Statistical Methods, with Special Reference to Biological Variation. In 1910, in Eugenics, he defined the field as “the science of human improvement by better breeding.” Biologist David Jordan was president of Stanford in 1906 when he headed a committee of the American Breeders’ Association (an organization founded by Davenport) whose purpose was to “investigate and report on heredity in the human race” and to document “the value of superior blood and the menace to society of the inferior.”78

  Nor was this academic research without consequence. Beginning in 1907, with Indiana, two-thirds of American states passed forced sterilization laws. In 1916, Madison Grant, the president of the Museum of Natural History in New York, who had degrees from Yale and Columbia, published The Passing of the Great Race; Or, the Racial Basis of European History, a “hereditary history” of the human race, in which he identified northern Europeans (the “blue-eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe” that he called the “Nordic race”) as genetically superior to southern Europeans (the “dark-haired, dark-eyed” people he called “the Alpine race”) and lamented the presence of “swarms of Jews” and “half-breeds.” In the United States, Grant argued, the Alpine race was overwhelming the Nordic race, threatening the American republic, since “democracy is fatal to progress when two races of unequal value live side by side.”79

  Progressives mocked fundamentalists as anti-intellectual. But fundamentalists were, of course, making an intellectual argument, if one that not many academics wanted to hear. In 1917, William B. Riley, who, like J. Frank Norris, had trained at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, published a book called The Menace of Modernism, whose attack on evolution included a broader attack on the predominance in public debate of liberal faculty housed at secular universities—and the silencing of conservative opinion. Conservatives, Riley pointed out, have “about as good a chance to be heard in a Turkish harem as to be invited to speak within the precincts of a modern State University.” In 1919, Riley helped bring six thousand people to the first meeting of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association. The horror of the war fueled the movement, convincing many evangelicals that the growing secularization of society was responsible for this grotesque parade of inhumanity: mass slaughter. “The new theology has led Germany into barbarism,” one fundamentalist argued in 1918, “and it will lead any nation into the same demoralization.”80

  Even as Americans reeled at the slaughter in Europe, the United States edged toward war. “There will be no war while I am Secretary of State,” Bryan had pledged when he joined Woodrow Wilson’s administration.81

  But in 1915 Bryan resigned, unable to halt the drift toward American entry into the war. Peace protests, mainly led by women, had begun just weeks after war broke out. At a Women’s Peace Parade in New York in the summer of 1914, fifteen thousand women marched, dressed in mourning. Meanwhile, women were also marching for suffrage, the two causes twining together, on the theory that if women could vote, they’d vote against sending their sons and husbands to war.

  In 1916, Wilson campaigned for reelection by pledging to keep the United States out of the war. The GOP nominated former Supreme Court justice Charles Evans Hughes, who took the opposing position. “A vote for Hughes is a vote for war,” explained
a senator from Oklahoma. “A vote for Wilson is a vote for peace.”82

  “If my re-election as President depends upon my getting into war, I don’t want to be President,” Wilson said privately. “He kept us out of war” became his campaign slogan, and when Theodore Roosevelt called that an “ignoble shirking of responsibility,” Wilson countered, “I am an American, but I do not believe that any of us loves a blustering nationality.”83

  Wilson had withheld support from female suffrage, but women who could vote tended to favor peace. Suffragist Alice Paul decided that women, spurned by both parties, needed a party of their own. The National Woman’s Party proceeded to parade through the streets of Denver with a donkey named Woodrow who carried a sign that read “It means freedom for women to vote against the party this donkey represents.” Paul did not prevail. In the end it was women voters who, by rallying behind the peace movement, gained Wilson a narrow victory: he won ten out of the twelve states where women could vote.84

  But as Wilson prepared for his second term, women fighting for equal rights dominated the news. In Brooklyn, Margaret Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne, also a nurse, had opened the first birth control clinic in the United States. Sanger argued that the vote was nothing compared to the importance of birth control, especially for poor women, a position that might have seemed to align with conservative eugenicists, but which did not, since they were opposed to feminism. Arrested for violating a New York penal code that prevented any discussion of contraception, Ethel Byrne was tried in January 1917; the story appeared in newspapers across the country. Her lawyer argued that the penal code was unconstitutional, insisting that it infringed on a woman’s right to the “pursuit of happiness.” Byrne was found guilty on January 8; in prison, she went on a hunger strike. Two days later, Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party began a suffrage vigil outside the White House, carrying signs reading “Mr. President How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty?”85