To be sure, these words of Wilson were noble in themselves. They echoed those of Abraham Lincoln’s own Gettysburg Address – shortly to be inscribed in stone in a grand memorial in Washington, the design and location of which was formally approved that year. Lincoln himself had not explicitly spoken of slavery in his more famous speech – he had alluded to it through his reaffirmation of ‘the proposition that all men are created equal’. But then Lincoln was speaking in 1863 in the midst of a Civil War, the deeper origins of which were understood by any listener. From Wilson’s speech alone, it would have been impossible to have divined why men fought at Gettysburg – only that they did, and that the matter was now settled.
But it was not. In Washington it was about to get worse. Wilson had long found the issue of race an embarrassment. Like many liberal-minded men and women he saw it as secondary to the growth of the nation, to be worked out over the course of time, as what was seen as the lower level of civilisation of the black population was slowly and steadily improved. Some African-American leaders advocated a similarly gradualist approach, including Booker T. Washington, the former slave, now head of the Tuskegee Institute.30 The belief that ‘white’ civilisation was more advanced than that of other peoples was hardly an exclusively American trait – indeed it was a commonplace shared around the world, far beyond the countries and peoples to which it accorded such imperial privileges.
Ellen Axson Wilson’s commitment to cleaning up Washington’s alleys showed a certain sense of responsibility towards less fortunate sections of the city’s population – though perhaps more in the tradition of charitable almsgiving than in the nature of a fiery protest against injustice. Wilson, like his wife, expressed basic sympathy with the plight of the black population. But he was never prepared to stick his neck out even one inch in a cause he felt best taken care of by the passage of time. Booker T. Washington was invited to Wilson’s installation as president of Princeton in 1902, but he could not be housed with the faculty, as were the other guests, nor could he attend the official dinners. When Wilson received an enquiry as to the possibility of an African-American studying at the university, he responded that: ‘while there is nothing in the law of the University to prevent a negro’s entering, the whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no negro has ever applied for admission, and … [it] seems unlikely that the question will ever assume a practical form’.31 It was not until 1947 that Princeton had its first black graduate.
Despite this, black political leaders had supported Wilson for the presidency in 1912, breaking with the tradition of support for the Republicans, the party of Lincoln, the party which had campaigned to end slavery in the Southern states, even to the point of Civil War. During the campaign Wilson told an influential bishop of the African Methodist Church that they [African-Americans] could count on him for ‘fair dealing’, saying that ‘my earnest wish [is] to see justice done them in every matter, and not merely grudging justice, but justice executed with liberality and cordial good feeling’.32 He said he would speak out against lynching – America’s parallel to the pogroms of Russia – though he qualified this by saying that he did not have the constitutional power to actually intervene to stop it. It was widely thought that Wilson’s Presbyterianism would make him a stalwart defender of black interests in the White House. ‘We sincerely believe’, wrote an editorialist at Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People founded by W. E. B. Dubois:
that even in the face of promises disconcertingly vague, and in the face of the solid caste-ridden South, it is better to elect Woodrow Wilson President of the United States and prove once for all if the Democratic party dares to be Democratic when it comes to black men.33
They were soon disappointed. In August of that year, the president of the United Colored Democracy of New York, Robert N. Wood, wrote a letter to Wilson. ‘In order to voice the feeling and thought of the ten million persons of Negro blood who justly aspire to the maintenance of their privileges as citizens in this great democracy’, he began, ‘I am reluctantly compelled to express to you a respectful, but none the less earnest, protest at the course your administration is pursuing with regard to the status of the colored people of this country’.34 He accepted that Wilson had been busy with affairs of state. Yet he endeavoured to make the president aware of a campaign to reduce African-Americans to a state of ‘serfdom’, led by reactionary elements in the Democratic Party, now the majority party in both houses of Congress and amply represented around Wilson’s own Cabinet table. It had been hard to persuade black voters to abandon their ‘superstitious reverence for the Republican Party’. It was galling that, despite this, a country ‘so rich in opportunity to the most degraded refuse of Europe’ was now turning its back on opportunity for black American citizens.
The issue here was not the countless evils perpetrated in the name of racial peace in Southern states under so-called Jim Crow laws, beyond the reach of the constitutionally limited federal government. The issue here was one of segregation within the federal government, in Washington, under Wilson’s nose and amply within his power to rectify. Departments of government under the authority of Southern Democrat cabinet members had begun to segregate their offices, reversing a half-century of integration. ‘We resent it’, wrote Wood, ‘not at all because we are particularly anxious to eat in the same room or use the same soap and towels that white people use’. But rather because:
… we see in the separation of the races in the matter of soup and soap the beginning of a movement to deprive the colored man entirely of soup and soap, to eliminate him wholly from the Civil Service of the United States.35
Wilson’s Chief of Staff, Joseph Patrick Tumulty, attached a note to the letter recommending that the President read it in its entirety. Perhaps he did. But whether or not he found the time to read the letter, he did not muster the energy to respond to it.
A few days later, a widely published letter from three leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People stated the case unambiguously. ‘Never before has the Federal Government discriminated against its civilian employees on the ground of color’, it pointed out. Now, however:
It has set the colored people apart as if mere contact with them were contamination … To them is held out only the prospect of mere subordinate routine service without the stimulus of advancement to high office by merit, a right deemed inviolable for all white natives as for the children of the foreign born, of Italians, French and Russians, Jews and Christians who are now entering the Government service.36
Wilson evaded meeting black leaders on this subject. He reversed his commitment to set up a race commission to enquire into related issues. When directly challenged on race issues Wilson lost his cool, vigorously reproaching his accusers for their impertinence.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People persisted, setting up their own investigation, producing a report in September which was then forwarded to the White House.37 The examples of slights both petty and gross were numerous. In one, in the Treasury, a bookkeeper called Tyson was demoted, and moved. He told the investigation that ‘he had cried like a baby when he was moved not so much because of the reduction in work, but because he felt that taking him out of the room where he had sat for ten or more years with white people, including women, was a reflection on him personally’. But, at base, the motives of segregation were not personal, they were systematic, and both racist and economic:
Competition in work has been eliminated so far as the colored employees are concerned. It is only a question of time before the few colored people who are now so expert as to prevent their being segregated, will leave the government service, and their positions, of course, will be filled by white people …38
To those who argued that the separation of the races allowed for a smoother working of government and a better appreciation of the relative skills of different groups the report retorted that one ‘might as well test the
comparative ability of women and men by insisting that the former devote themselves exclusively to the three K’s [housework] and forbid their entry into any other fields of effort’.
Wilson’s high-mindedness, his passion for the ‘New Freedom’ and his willingness to take on vested interests – so evident in his championing of tariff reduction – did not apply within the corridors and office buildings of Washington. He prevaricated, he ignored, and he pointed to the prejudices of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate. Here, in its capital city, an older America reasserted itself.
NEW YORK
Metropolis
If, in 1913, Washington stood for the incomplete fulfilment of America’s past, New York stood as the ambiguous symbol of America’s future. To some, New York was America’s beacon to huddled masses of the world, making good on the promise inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. To others, New York’s immigrant population was a harbinger of America’s coming degeneracy, transplanting European vices into American soil.
For New Yorkers, the city could be viewed as the dynamo of American business. In 1913, it surpassed London to become the world’s busiest port; it was already America’s pre-eminent financial centre. New York’s wealth, therefore, could be interpreted as evidence of the city’s vitality and national utility – and as an assurance of future national prosperity. But for others, New York had come to represent everything that was wrong with the nation’s economic development, a city living off wealth created elsewhere, a machine for concentrating money and power into the hands of a cabal of Wall Street money men. As far as the rest of the world was concerned New York, for all intents and purposes, was America; as the British journalist W. T. Stead remarked, ‘the rest of the country is but the pedestal on which New York stands’.1
New York shared many of the ills of any other large and growing city of its times: social deprivation cheek by jowl with enormous wealth, crowded conditions for the city’s working population, inadequate housing. In all of these, New York excelled. Being the city’s mayor, one government official wrote, was ‘the largest administrative task entrusted to any municipal official in the world’.2 But New York’s corruption was in a class of its own.
Its government had become ‘a byword, a hissing and reproach’, with public contracts doled out and electors bought on the instructions of the city’s shadow government, the local Democratic Party machine, Tammany Hall.3 In 1913, the city temporarily shook off Tammany in a wave of reformist anger. After the previous mayor had died suddenly on a transatlantic steamer, probably from the lingering effects of an attempt on his life back in 1910, a young and inexperienced anti-Tammany candidate was elected. But many doubted whether New York’s turn towards reform – both political and social – would last. ‘On the Reformers’ side there is human nature as it ought to be’, wrote a cynical but astute observer, ‘on the side of Tammany there is human nature as it is’.4 In the final analysis, he remarked, Tammany was really the city’s way of rebelling against the inclination of Puritanical legislators at the level of New York state, sitting up in Albany, to dictate to their city brethren what they could and could not do:
The Tammany method, after all, is the most convenient and the easiest. To the proprietor of the saloon and the gambling den and the disorderly house Tammany simply says, ‘Pay me so much a month and I will protect you’. In the result, everyone is satisfied. The law remains on the statute book, a glowing testimonial to the ‘morality’ of New York; it is not put into action, so nobody feels its inconvenience; and Tammany grows rich on the proceeds of non enforcement.
In 1913, the state itself was embroiled in political scandal. Governor William Sulzer, a former Congressman, was successfully impeached for violations of electoral law in October 1913. (His true crime may have been to refuse to take instructions on appointments from Tammany.) But in the topsy-turvy world of New York politics he was elected to the New York State Assembly the following month.
The widely publicised political corruption of New York was perceived as being strongly linked to the city’s moral corruption. The sins of New York’s poor were traditional and well established: prostitution, gambling and petty crime. A 1913 report sponsored by John D. Rockefeller Jr estimated that there were 15,000 prostitutes in New York City, many of them managed by immigrant networks. Others put the number twice as high. Lyman Beecher Stowe, grandson of the famous abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, asserted that the police themselves were compromised by corruption ‘almost entirely from their contact with gambling, liquor-selling and prostitution’.5 The city thus created the conditions for its continuing immorality.
The failings of the well-off were more subtle, but no less real from the perspective of the small-town or upstate observer, and perhaps more worrying for the country’s long-term health: a tendency to have things done for you rather than doing them yourself, a tendency to love of money, a tendency to selfishness. A Manhattan doctor, John H. Girdner, diagnosed ‘Newyorkitis’ as a communicable condition affecting a large portion of his fellow New Yorkers. In extreme cases, he wrote, ‘the gray matter of the brain is never used to think with, except when the patient is engaged in getting money, or gratifying some physical appetite’.6 As America became more citified, observers worried, was it to become more dandified, more greedy and more individualistic – more like New York?
The sins of the rich were the most sophisticated, and perhaps most strongly linked to the image of New York as a city of unearned privilege: the new depravities of excessive wealth. The New York Times’ unfavourable review of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Metropolis mocked the book’s portrayal of the city’s upper classes as an absurd ‘debauch of interior decorations, orchids, bathtubs, and other wicked features of Babylonian luxury’ – but accepted that Sinclair would readily find an audience willing to believe them.7
All of these images – New York as the apex of American capitalism, New York as the new Babylon – sprang from a period of prodigious demographic, physical and economic growth. A few decades previously the city had been made up of five or six-storey buildings concentrated on lower Manhattan, bounded by the Hudson on one side and the East River on the other. Farm animals were only legally banned from the streets of Manhattan in 1867.8 The city then sprawled over the waters that surrounded Manhattan Island, reaching into its neighbours’ backyards with a series of mile-long bridges and, in 1910, a tunnel under the Hudson. In 1898, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island were annexed to the behemoth across the water. Only Jersey City preserved its independence.
New York was not just the nexus of American trade and finance, however. It was a large industrial city in its own right. Midtown Manhattan remained a centre of garment making, with its immigrant workforce squeezed into tenement blocks along the city’s edge while wealthier residents migrated up Fifth Avenue towards the open spaces of Central Park. Heavier industries – refineries, shipyards and railway repair yards – were kept at a safer distance, in Brooklyn, the Bronx and on Staten Island. Not content with setting the pace of the country’s economic life, New York dictated the nation’s taste in culture – both high and low. The city boasted 900 cinemas, several aspirationally named ‘opera’ houses (including a brand new one in the Bronx) and over one hundred theatres, always ready for a ‘new producer willing to gamble on a lucky hit’.9 Or take the hit for an expensive flop. ‘What New York doesn’t happen to care for’, one observer noted, ‘remains in the city for a quiet little burial near Forty-second street’. The city vibrated with the nervous energy of a true metropolis. It impressed itself violently upon the consciousness of all those who visited – and many who did not.
In 1913, the best-travelled man of the age, French writer Pierre Loti, described his arrival in the city in terms of sensory overload. Like travellers before and since, he marvelled at the combination of naivety and clumsy intrusiveness that greeted him on the arrivals form at US Customs and Immigration: ‘Are you an anarchist? Are you a polygamist? Are you an idiot? Have you ever shown signs o
f mental alienation?’10 Once past the meaty guardians of the republic’s sanctity he found himself caught up in a symphony of movement, noise, colour, and commercialism.
‘This mish-mash of all the races’, as Loti put it, ‘Japanese, Chinese with European haircuts, Greeks, Levantines, Scandinavians with pale hair’. Like his compatriot Constant in Washington, Loti commented on the elegance and beauty of the women – ‘as long as they are not too crudely displayed under electric lights, which give them the pallor of corpses’. He saw ‘opulent shops, with long shelves behind the glass, as long as our boulevards’. He wondered at the sovereignty of electricity across the city, ‘one thousand times more aggressive than at home’. But it was electricity that made New York possible – air conditioning keeping larger and larger buildings cool in the summer, electric lighting illuminating corners darkened by the massiveness of the buildings surrounding them. New York, Loti said, ‘seems to vibrate and crackle under the influence of these countless currents, radiating strength and light – one is oneself electrified, and left quivering by it’. Under the elevated railway at West Broadway was nothing but noise: ‘monstrously-sized train carriages, packed with people, running vertiginously above one’s head, without pause, sparks flying’. ‘Returning from here’, Loti sighed, ‘Paris is going to seem like a nice old-fashioned little place’.11
Above all, Loti was fascinated by the large electrically lit advertisements all over the city, complementing the electric bulletin board on Times Square that had been put up the previous year:
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