Wilson

by A. Scott Berg

  Wilson saw no signs that the country was ready for that. Localized racial violence had become commonplace in the South, and now disturbances moved north, as blacks were taking jobs held formerly by whites. The old bugaboos of black men preying upon white women and black women seducing white men played into people’s fears. Such had been the talk for months in East St. Louis, Illinois. After a few isolated incidents of brutality, the city conflagrated into what came to be called a “race riot.” In truth, it was a pogrom.

  On July 2, 1917, a phalanx of whites marched down a thoroughfare of the city and waited at a main intersection. As black people appeared, the mob attacked, pointlessly and relentlessly shooting, clubbing, stoning, and stomping people to death; they set fire to two hundred homes in the African American neighborhood; they dumped bodies into the Cahokia Creek. State troopers and the Illinois National Guard came to quell the melee, but witnesses saw men in uniform turn on the black victims as well. During two days of chaos, thousands of blacks took flight; and though officials tallied thirty-nine deaths, anti-lynching activist and journalist Ida B. Wells figured 150 people died. Governor Arthur Capper of Kansas wrote President Wilson not only to convey his outrage at the savagery but also to condemn the “damning effects of liquor,” which had evidently fueled the massacre.

  William English Walling—a wealthy, Harvard-educated grandson of Kentucky slave-owners, who cofounded the NAACP—wrote the White House, declaring the “unchecked savagery” in East St. Louis the worst since the Civil War. “There is no oversupply of labor anywhere in America today,” Walling wired, “massacre clearly due to effort of the anti-Negro element of the South to check exodus of colored labor which promised to force south to suspend the reign of terror which has ruled there for half a century and to give negroes better pay and to treat them like human beings.” Walling added, “There should be an immediate Presidential proclamation that in the present military exigency the full military power of the nation will be used in defense of the lives and liberty of our colored fellow citizens.”

  Wilson called upon Attorney General Gregory to get to the bottom of “these disgraceful outrages.” But, as Wilson soon wrote the Republican Congressman in St. Louis, Missouri, the federal attorneys and agents investigating the case required violations of federal statutes in order to act. “Up to this time,” he admitted sadly, “I am bound in candor to say that no facts have been presented to us which would justify federal action.” The President seemed as surprised as he was appalled that such a “tragical matter” should have been possible. As protesters across the country took to the streets and petitions seeking action arrived at the White House, Wilson offered little more than assurances that this local matter was being investigated. Of greater concern was the global war and the national conscription of an Army which he believed was clearly not ready for integration.

  Secretary of War Baker wrote the President in August “that this is not the time to raise the race issue,” for it was now his intention “to preserve the custom of the Army, which has been to organize colored people into separate organizations.” Necessity would dictate that some colored men would train in Southern camps with white soldiers. Racist South Carolina Governor Coleman Livingston Blease insisted that he did not wish Negro troops to be stationed in his state; Congressman Lever feared the worst should such integration be forced upon his district—as did the President. Late that July, the 3rd Battalion of the 24th Infantry Regiment—654 black enlisted men serving under eight white officers—was sent to Houston; from the moment of their arrival, the black soldiers had clashed with white civilians. On August 23, some black troops mutinied, breaking into the arsenal and procuring guns, which they used indiscriminately as they rampaged through town. Fifteen people were killed and twelve others assaulted. Congressman Joe Eagle telegraphed the President to say that this behavior “conclusively proves tragic blunder committed in ordering negro troops to Southern camps. Besides this tragedy the presence of negro troops here has largely demoralized local negro feeling and conduct. Unless all these negro troops are sent away quickly my opinion that last night’s tragedy is but a prelude to a tragedy upon enormous scale.” Race riots flared from Philadelphia to Chicago. In Estill Springs, Tennessee, a Negro charged with murder was tortured with red-hot irons, then doused in oil and burned to death before a crowd of men, women, and children. Lynchings across the South became epidemic, and the sight of black bodies swinging from trees was common.

  In February 1918, civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson led a small delegation of ministers from the New York branch of the NAACP to the White House for an audience with the President. It was one of the few important congregations of black leaders to visit the White House since Wilson’s dismissal of William Monroe Trotter in 1914. Johnson’s mission on this day was specific, though it carried a broad message. In the immediate aftermath of the Houston race riot, a court-martial had sentenced thirteen men to death; and the condemned were hanged in pre-dawn darkness, without review. A subsequent court-martial sentenced another sixteen soldiers to death, but that verdict came just days after a new policy from the War Department declared a suspension of military death sentences without Presidential review. And so the NAACP delegation arrived with a petition with 1,200 signatures requesting clemency for those Negro soldiers facing the gallows. Johnson stood as he read the document, which spoke, he claimed, for the “great mass of the Negro population of the United States,” the twelve million patriotic Negroes, many of whom wanted nothing more than to express their loyalty through military service. It detailed the “long series of humiliating and harassing incidents” that had sparked the riots, all part of an ingrained anti-Negro culture that was becoming increasingly institutionalized inside the American military as it had long been in Southern communities.

  The presentation moved Wilson deeply. He asked for more facts about the immolation at Estill Springs—about which he had heard nothing—and he expressed dismay “that such a thing could have taken place in the United States.” The delegation pressed him to offer a public utterance against mob violence and lynching, but Wilson said that he did not think word from him would have any “special effect.” When the gentlemen from Harlem disagreed—stressing that “his word would have greater effect than the word of any other man in the world”—Wilson promised to “seek an opportunity” to say something.

  For more than half an hour, the President sat with the delegation. Johnson had seen Wilson before from a distance and found him an austere figure. Now, sitting only a few feet away, the President struck him as “very human. His head, no longer inclined forward, rested back easily, and the sternness of his face relaxed and, occasionally in a smile, became completely lost.” He asked questions about the Negro in America and even offered a few reminiscences of his boyhood in the South. After the meeting, Johnson confessed that he could not rid himself of “the conviction that at bottom there was something hypocritical about him.” But, he noted, “I came out . . . with my hostility toward Mr. Wilson greatly shaken.”

  The President made good on his word on July 26, 1918, when he found his “opportunity” and released a thoughtful statement, which he tied to the war effort. “I allude to the mob spirit,” he said, without pointing to a particular individual or region. “There have been many lynchings,” he added, “and every one of them has been a blow at the heart of ordered law and humane justice.” He declared such actions nothing less than un-American. “We are at this very moment fighting lawless passion,” Wilson stated, and lynchers only emulated Germany’s disgraceful example by disregarding the sacred obligations of the law. He said, unequivocally, “Every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives it any sort of countenance is no true son of this great Democracy, but its betrayer, and does more to discredit her by that single disloyalty to her standards of law and of right than the words of her statesmen or the sacrifices of her heroic boys in the trenches can do to make suffering peoples believe her to be th
eir savior.” He implored every Governor, law officer, and citizen to cooperate, “not passively merely, but actively and watchfully—to make an end of this disgraceful evil.”

  One month later, Wilson issued another race-related statement, this one based upon his review of the Houston riot cases, particularly those of the sixteen men facing the death penalty. He upheld six of the sentences—“because the persons involved were found guilty by plain evidence of having deliberately, under circumstances of shocking brutality, murdered designated and peaceably disposed civilians.” The rest he commuted to life imprisonment because the men were not shown to have caused any deaths, despite their engagement in riotous and mutinous behavior. Wilson did not stop there. He said, “I desire the clemency here ordered to be a recognition of the splendid loyalty of the race to which these soldiers belong and an inspiration to the people of that race to further zeal and service to the country of which they are citizens and for the liberties of which so many of them are now bravely bearing arms at the very front of great fields of battle.”

  Not even James Weldon Johnson had made a case for the innocence of the six men who would be hanged. He acknowledged that President Wilson maintained his policy of reviewing death sentences from the courts-martial, and he praised his anti-lynching statement. In the autobiography he wrote fifteen years later, Johnson granted that his earlier “estimate of Mr. Wilson was actually colored and twisted by prejudice.”

  Four hundred thousand black American soldiers served during the war—in segregated units. Some camps were integrated, but the black soldiers trained separately. Most of the black regiments sent overseas were service units, digging trenches and burying bodies—the “nasty side of army life”; but forty thousand engaged in actual combat. To ease racial tensions, the War Department created a Negro officer training camp, so that black soldiers could take orders from men their own color. Whenever Negro soldiers stepped beyond the boundaries of segregation, they faced indignities; but the numbers in which they enlisted suggested that they were eager to prove their worthiness as first-class citizens. As the Texas Grand Master of the separate-but-equal Prince Hall Freemasonry said, “We believe that our second emancipation will be the outcome of this war. If the world is to be made ‘safe for democracy,’ that will mean us also.” Even at a death rate more than twice that of the white American doughboy, the black soldier was willing to stake his life on the promise that noble service would free him from segregation and mob violence.

  Each pace forward incited efforts to push the Negro back. The war created enough circumstances in which the two races proved that they could coexist. But as 1918 drew the races into their closest contact ever, it also created the greatest repulsion. More lynchings than the nation had seen in a decade and a revitalized nationwide Ku Klux Klan lay just ahead. In addressing delegates from the National Race Congress at the White House on October 1, 1918, Wilson reminded the Negroes, “We all have to be patient with one another. Human nature doesn’t make giant strides in a single generation. . . . I have a very modest estimate of my own power to hasten the process, but you may be sure that everything that I can do will be accomplished.”

  It both encouraged and disheartened African Americans to see the President’s power at work when it came to challenging discrimination for another group—women, whose movement for suffrage began back in 1848 at a convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Even in the front lines of this surge for equality, division existed between those who supported the evolution of their cause by working within the system and the revolutionaries, who sought immediate change and were prepared to defy the law if it would help achieve it. Arguments over class and race within each division had impeded progress for two generations. For a few decades, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, headed by medical doctor Anna Howard Shaw and a former teacher, Carrie Chapman Catt, had made considerable headway. It was not enough for Alice Paul, a highly educated activist from Pennsylvania with legal training, who joined the more militant Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, which she transformed into the National Woman’s Party in 1916. Decades younger than the NAWSA leadership, she felt it was time to revolt.

  For years Wilson had endorsed women’s suffrage and received its proponents in the White House, even when they disagreed with his approach. He admired Dr. Shaw and Mrs. Catt, but as this inveterate drafter of constitutions told a delegation seeking his support for an equal suffrage amendment in January 1915, “I . . . am tied to a conviction, which I have had all my life, that changes of this sort ought to be brought about state by state.”

  To many, Wilson was hiding behind states’ rights. A year later, he tried convincing another suffrage delegation otherwise, as he remained committed to pushing New Jersey to adopt a state amendment. “It may move like a glacier,” Wilson told two hundred members of the Congressional Union at the Waldorf-Astoria, “but when it does move, its effects are permanent.” After Wilson had spoken, an emboldened Mary Ritter Beard, wife of Columbia University historian Charles A. Beard, asked the President whether the Clayton Anti-Trust Act had been enacted state by state. “I do not care to discuss that,” an annoyed President said, and the meeting came to an end, with visible disappointment. Even his unmarried daughter, Margaret, who could always appeal to his sense of reason, steadily urged him to back a federal amendment, and she pressured Colonel House as well.

  The battle lines in the matter of women’s suffrage were drawn more between generations than genders, as the issue was not yet of imperative concern to the American public. Not even Progressives and, more important, women themselves were of one mind on the subject. The issue was not just about voting, or even keeping women in their place; many enlightened people considered it the beginning of a breakdown in traditional family values. Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “Women do not really need the suffrage,” though he did not think “they would do any harm with it.” His two sisters opposed it; his younger wife supported it, mildly. Wilson was still unable to envisage a world in which women might play a strong political role. “Suffrage for women,” he said one morning when his old friend Nancy Saunders Toy was staying at the White House, “will make absolutely no change in politics—it is the home that will be disastrously affected. Somebody has to make the home and who is going to do it if the women don’t?” But, valuing people of intelligence exercising their democratic rights, Wilson strongly favored their enfranchisement; and, as he had promised, he applied personal and party pressure on each state legislature as it considered this question.

  Growing numbers of disgruntled women continued to coerce the White House. For several months before Wilson’s second inauguration, Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party protested outside the Executive Mansion—several hundred “silent sentinels” every day, standing at the north gates, carrying banners. “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” was a favorite slogan; “Kaiser Wilson” was another. They reported at ten o’clock and remained until 4:30. Sometimes they chained themselves to the White House fence. Believing the angry protesters would thrive on opposition, the Administration instructed the police to take no action against them, thus limiting their press coverage.

  On the first extremely cold day of their protests, the President sent Ike Hoover outside with a message for the dissidents. Just as they expected to be shooed from the vicinity, Hoover invited them all inside to the lower corridor of the White House, where the President specifically asked that they be served hot tea or coffee. “Excuse me, Mr. President,” Hoover reported a moment later, “but they indignantly refused.” Wilson asked that a servant carry hot bricks to the White House gates to provide warmth, a courtesy they accepted through the winter.

  Although the passion of the suffragists moved him, in May 1917, Wilson wrote Mrs. Catt that he felt the time was inopportune for women to press their claim, as the Congress was consumed with the conduct of the war. The President continued his own efforts—lobbying state legislatures and urging the
formation of a House committee to promote a Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which had been defeated in that chamber three years earlier. When a mission of Russian diplomats arrived at the White House in June, a boldly stenciled ten-foot-wide banner greeted them, declaring: “We, the women of America, tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million American women are denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the chief opponent of their national enfranchisement.” Many women in the crowd expressed outrage that the protesters unfairly chose to speak for them; some cried “Treason!” Several men ripped the banner to pieces. Upon the President’s orders, neither the police nor the Secret Service took any action other than maintaining order. Dr. Shaw of NAWSA said this sort of agitation only injured the suffrage cause; even sympathizers in Congress condemned the action. Alice Paul announced to the press, “We have ordered another banner with the same wording, and we intend to show it in the same place.” The President wrote of the fracas to his daughter Jessie, “They certainly seem bent upon making their cause as obnoxious as possible.”

  On Bastille Day, Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party took a different approach. It assembled sixteen socially prominent women—including the daughters and wives of distinguished Americans—to march quietly to the front gates of the White House. Carrying banners exclaiming “LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY,” they refused to move on and waited to be arrested. It was an entirely peaceful demonstration, as courteous as a cotillion. An officer approached each woman, removed his hat, bowed, and advised her of the law she was breaking, before placing each of them under arrest. Even the crowd of thousands who turned out regularly to menace the protesters, watched in silence except for their quiet applause. Three days later a judge found the suffragists guilty of unlawful assembly and sentenced each to a twenty-five-dollar fine or sixty days in the District of Columbia workhouse in Occoquan, Virginia. They chose Occoquan.