A man with strong organizational skills was needed to coordinate the new collection of writers and speakers and night riders—to conduct the orchestra of militant white supremacy. That man, Daniels decided, was Furnifold Simmons. At first glance, Simmons was not an impressive man. He was small and homely, with downcast, slanted eyes, a weak chin, and prominent ears. He wore his hair parted down the middle, and his round face was sliced by a bristly mustache. “He might be any bookkeeper, any village banker, or sexton … One gains the impression of a small boy about to cry,” wrote the acerbic North Carolina author W. J. Cash.
But Simmons was politically nimble, tactically resolute, and a genius at organizing—“a compact dynamo of a man” one colleague called him. Even one of his fiercest critics conceded that he possessed “an extraordinarily shrewd mind.” Simmons could be ruthlessly effective and utterly humorless, but even those who disliked him personally were eager to accept the patronage jobs he doled out, particularly coveted positions such as postal clerk and rural letter carrier. To his constituents, Simmons was an attentive benefactor. He sent them flowering shrubs for their homes, fish to stock their ponds, and seeds for their gardens. This was the fuel that propelled what came to be known as the Simmons machine.
Simmons was born in 1853 on a hundred-slave plantation outside Pollocksville, North Carolina, just down the Trent River from New Bern. He came of age during Reconstruction, which shaped and hardened his dyspeptic views of Yankees, scalawags, and Negroes. He considered the Emancipation Proclamation a tragic miscalculation and the escape of slaves from plantations like the one his family owned the ruination of the South. He grew up with the same reductive view of race as Daniels.
“The present generation will never fully realize the terrible conditions which followed the [Civil] war, the horrors and debauchery that resulted from Negro domination and the drunkenness encouraged by the many open saloons,” Simmons wrote in his memoir. “The Negro was ignorant, brutal and violent. Occasionally whole families of whites were wiped out during the night. No white person went to bed without a gun in reach.”
Simmons’s father, a planter, sent his son to private academies and then to Wake Forest College and Trinity College. Simmons did not earn a law degree but instead studied law books on his own after graduation and passed the state bar exam two weeks shy of his twenty-first birthday. He began representing clients the same week.
Like Daniels, Simmons was able to pivot seamlessly from his chosen profession to state politics. In 1886, at age thirty-three, he launched his first campaign for Congress, against two black Republicans—a “yellow Negro” (meaning of mixed race) and a “black Negro,” as Simmons described them. Simmons was backed by his wealthy and politically connected father-in-law, Colonel L. W. Humphrey. The colonel also secretly paid the campaign expenses of the two competing black candidates, a scandalous act if it had become public. Humphrey wanted to keep both black men in the race to split the black vote. Simmons campaigned almost exclusively on racial fears, tropes, and animosities. He easily won the race.
When Simmons ran for reelection in 1888, he was again opposed by a black Republican— “a mulatto type,” Simmons called him. As a first-term congressman, Simmons had taken care to hand out patronage jobs to constituents of both races. He arranged for a post office to be established for blacks in the town of James City, and he pushed for construction and road projects that provided jobs to black laborers. But it wasn’t enough. He lost the election. “I did not obtain a vote from James City, not even that of the Negro postmaster,” he complained.
Four years later, Simmons won an internal Democratic Party election that launched him on a path to statewide power and influence. He was installed as the state party chairman, charged with keeping Democrats in power in the face of mass defections by Populist whites. Simmons was a sophisticated behind-the-scenes operator skilled in the dull details of retail politicking. He sent party workers out to canvass voters. He dispatched poll watchers to make sure Democratic supporters voted properly—and to hector opposition voters. He set up a speakers’ bureau that arranged speeches by party loyalists statewide. The Democrats coasted to victory.
Simmons’s reward was a federal patronage position—collector of internal revenue for the Eastern District of North Carolina. The assignment required him to resign as party chairman, but he remained active in Democratic politics. But without Simmons in charge of the party apparatus, Democrats lost the next two elections, and it became clear to party leaders that something had to be done about the black vote. Simmons, a master of race-baiting, was brought back as party chairman for the 1898 election. He had a plan. “Simmons made the Nigger his major theme,” the writer W. J. Cash observed.
After meeting with Daniels in New Bern in the spring of 1898, Simmons began to craft the party’s white supremacy message. The effort soon acquired a formal name proudly embraced by Democrats: the White Supremacy Campaign. Its ultimate goal was to evict blacks from office and intimidate black voters from going to the polls. But first, it was necessary not only to terrify black families but also to convince white men everywhere that merely voting in November was not enough. Whites had to be persuaded that free blacks posed an imminent threat to their privileged way of life. And they were told, every day, in newspapers and at campaign rallies next to cotton farms and tobacco fields, that the only way to eliminate that threat forever was for the good white men of Carolina to bring out their guns. A popular song, belted out at bonfire rallies by white men bearing Winchesters, contained the affirming verse: “Rise, ye sons of Carolina! Proud Caucasians, one and all.”
To launch the campaign, Simmons produced a two-hundred-page screed, the Democratic Party Hand Book. The booklet reflected Simmons’s ingrained belief that blacks were genetically doomed at birth as members of an inherently ignorant and incompetent race. It was distributed to thousands of white voters, with instructions to vote “the white man’s ticket.” Within its pages, Simmons distilled the Southern white man’s burden:
It is no fault of the negro that he is here, and he is not to be punished for being here; but this is a white man’s country and white men must control and govern it …
Under the benign rule of the Democratic Party during the long period it held unbroken power in North Carolina, the negro race enjoyed peace and quiet, and had the full protection of the laws … But there is one thing the Democrat Party has never done and never will do—and that is to set the negro up TO RULE OVER WHITE MEN …
Republican rule in the East means negro rule; and negro rule is a curse to both races …
It is useless to tell the people of Wilmington that there is no danger of negro domination, when they see the negro policemen every day parading the streets in uniform and swinging the “billy” … where you see the negro policemen and negro officers as thick as blackbirds.
The handbook was distributed statewide, intended for literate white men. But that left out nearly a quarter of the state’s white population, who could not read or write. Daniels found a solution in the artistic hand of a country boy from North Carolina’s Sampson County, Norman E. Jennett, known as “Sampson Huckleberry” for his small-town ways and the juicy berries grown in his native county.
As a child, Jennett had drawn pictures on chunks of wood and engraved them with a pocket knife. He first came to the attention of Daniels after winning a $10 prize in a newspaper cartoon contest. Shortly afterward, in 1895, Daniels hired Jennett at the News and Observer for $6 a week to serve as a mail clerk and part-time political cartoonist. During a statewide election campaign the following year, Daniels instructed Jennett to use his cartoons to lampoon his political rivals—Republicans, blacks, and wayward Populists. Jennett learned quickly and was soon promoted to full-time cartoonist. During the 1896 election, Daniels recalled: “We would decide together what particular Republican or Populist deserved to be hit over the head that day.”
After the election, Jennett went to New York, with Daniels’s help, to enroll in a cartoon
ist course at an art school. But in July 1898, Daniels urgently summoned Jennett back to Raleigh for the white supremacy campaign—with his salary paid by the Democratic Party, according to party chairman Simmons. With his skills sharpened, Jennett helped Democrats fan white outrage toward blacks and Republicans during the 1898 election. Blacks were particularly ripe for cartoon ridicule, given the antebellum tradition of minstrel shows, where whites performed as buffoonish Negro characters with thick lips, bulging eyes, and wild nappy hair. Jennett adopted the same caricatures but added a new element—the looming black beast rapist.
Daniels assured his young cartoonist that all he had to provide would be the drawings. Daniels would supply the content.
CHAPTER TEN
The Incubus
T HE SHERIFF in Pamlico County, not far from New Bern, was the type of white man Josephus Daniels considered a disgrace to his race. For one thing, Sheriff John Aldridge was a Populist who had become a Fusionist. But worse, in Daniels’s view, the sheriff was so eager to court black votes in the 1898 election that he permitted a black politician to live in his house and share his meals.
The sheriff had a young daughter, Bessie, described by Daniels’s News and Observer reporters as combining “the freshness and bloom of girlhood with the charm and grace of womanhood.” Bessie soon began to look upon her father’s black guest as “her protector,” according to the News and Observer.
But just as Daniels might have predicted, Bessie soon became pregnant—with the black politician’s child. Daniels did not blame the girl. He blamed her father, who, by placing a black man on equal social terms with whites, “was sealing even then his daughter’s doom—a doom worse than death, more disgraceful than the deepest disgrace,” the News and Observer wrote.
The scandal in Pamlico was first unearthed by a small local newspaper, but Daniels made certain that the lurid details were known to white voters across eastern North Carolina. In early 1898, the News and Observer published a series of accounts detailing the affair, presenting it as a cautionary tale. The articles warned of the risks of allowing black men to hold office and thus instilling in them the mistaken impression that they were equal to whites. Daniels concluded that this could only lead to the twin scourges of rape and race mixing, as poor Bessie had discovered.
POLITICAL MIXING WITH NEGROES MEANS MISCEGENATION ; THE AWFUL PRICE PAMLICO’S SHERIFF PAID FOR THE POLITICAL SUPPORT OF THE NEGRO VOTERS ; A WARNING THAT WHITE FATHERS SHOULD HEED , a headline in the News and Observer read. Daniels’s reporters underscored the point by reporting, without evidence, that Bessie had attempted to abort her bastard child but died from a “concentrated lye given her by her negro destroyer.”
Bessie’s tragic tale was a godsend for Daniels in his campaign to frighten whites into voting Democratic. The Bessie articles were among the early salvos he fired in a political propaganda campaign that gained momentum during the spring and summer of 1898. More than a century before sophisticated fake news attacks targeted social media websites, Daniels’s manipulation of white readers through phony or misleading newspaper stories was perhaps the most daring and effective disinformation campaign of the era. It reached a climax that fall in Wilmington—a special target for Daniels because of its majority black population. “A reign of terror was on” in the city, he warned.
Daniels sent his best reporters to Wilmington “to detail the result of Negro control in the city.” He was particularly pleased with an August story about Wilmington that in his words “described the unbridled lawlessness and rule of incompetent officials and the failure of an ignorant and worthless police force to protect the people.” What he did not say was that much of the story was based on exaggerations or outright fabrications.
“We were never very careful about winnowing out the stories or running them down …,” Daniels wrote in a memoir years later. “In fact, the people on every side were at such a key of fighting and hate that the Democrats would believe almost any piece of rascality.” As a result, he noted, “The propaganda was having good effect and winning Populists.”
Daniels arranged for a hundred thousand free copies of the Wilmington article, reprinted in his weekly paper, the North Carolinian, to be distributed to voters whose names and addresses were supplied by the Democratic Party. He and Simmons continued the practice for other racially incendiary articles in the News and Observer. Daniels sold copies of his North Carolinian at cost to the Democratic Party. Simmons raised the money to pay for them, then made sure they were distributed to white voters.
The most sensational stories focused on what Daniels and other Democrats claimed was the black beast rapist. As a native of the South, Daniels understood implicitly the sexual insecurities of white Southern males. Already emasculated by Union troops who had occupied their towns, they risked further shame if black men were elevated to something approaching equality. A black man who could vote or hold public office was a man who might, by their logic, become a rival for the affections of white women.
Daniels worked to portray black men as sexually insatiable and, at the same time, weak willed and easily duped. Even in situations where a white woman was merely in the presence of a black man, the News and Observer found cause for alarm. In May, it published an article about a white woman who spotted a black man crossing her yard while she was using her outhouse. The woman screamed. The man fled. That was all. But the News and Observer headline suggested a narrow escape for the terrified woman: NO RAPE COMMITTED ; BUT A LADY BADLY FRIGHTENED BY A WORTHLESS NEGRO .
Daniels escalated trivial incidents into front-page outrages. All that was required was incidental contact between a white woman and a black man. Daniels noticed an item in the Wilmington Star about a fifteen-year-old white girl, the daughter of “an honest and respectable farmer”; she was purportedly approached by two black teenagers on her way home from Sunday school. The boys did not so much as “place their unholy hands on her person,” Daniels reported—but only because the girl screamed. That was the extent of the incident. But Daniels made sure the account dominated the front page of the News and Observer, under the headline MORE NEGRO SCOUNDRELISM . The article urged white men to “assert your manhood , go to the polls and help stamp out the last vestiges of Republican-Populist-Negro Fusion.”
In Daniels’s view, placing any black man in public office served only to further arouse his carnal desires. “One of the best known traits of the negro is his tendency to become ‘puffed up with a little, brief authority,’” Daniels added. It was a very short leap, he suggested, from authority to rape.
In a separate story about “incompetent negroes” holding public office, Daniels reported that “the prevalence of rape by brutal negroes upon helpless white women has brought about a reign of terror in rural districts.” He spread fears of an incubus, a winged demon who rapes sleeping women. AN INCUBUS MUST BE REMOVED , a newspaper in Furnifold Simmons’s hometown, New Bern, demanded.
In fact, there was nothing approaching a rape epidemic in eastern North Carolina; crime statistics from 1897 and 1898 show no increase in rapes or sexual assaults in the region. In New Hanover County, home to Wilmington, just one rape and one “seduction” were reported between July 1896 and July 1898. Years later, Daniels acknowledged that rapes of white women by black men were “few in number.”
To help pay for the white supremacy campaign, Simmons raised money from banks, railroads, lawyers, and manufacturers. The plan hatched by Daniels and Simmons in New Bern was carried out during frequent Democratic Party meetings in Daniels’s News and Observer office. Daniels presided, taking notes while fielding complaints from some politicians that they couldn’t read his handwriting. The main topic was, as Daniels explained, “the issue that unless the ignorant Negro could be eliminated from politics good government could not be attained.” Daniels worked until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. most nights, filling the news columns with the latest fabricated outrages and writing blistering editorials designed to arouse white voters to “fever heat,” he said. He b
oasted that his newspaper was “the militant voice of White Supremacy.” Other white newspapers joined in. In Wilmington, the Messenger reported that an elderly white man was knocked off his feet by two young black men. It was difficult for white victims of these and other outrages to identify the perpetrators, the Wilmington Morning Star complained, because “all coons look alike.”
The Charlotte Observer dispatched a reporter to Wilmington in the summer of 1898 to take the measure of local blacks. “The Negroes about the street of the town are saucy and overbearing,” he wrote. The Atlanta Constitution reported that blacks were plotting “a thoroughly Negro sovereign state” in North Carolina—“the refuge of their people in America.”
In Raleigh, Daniels used his newspaper to humiliate Daniel Russell, the Republican governor from Wilmington. Daniels considered Russell a fraud who courted black voters publicly but privately held them in contempt. He was certain that the governor believed, as Daniels himself did, that blacks were genetically inferior. In fact, in a letter written in 1888, Russell had described Southern blacks as “largely savages.” They were no more qualified to govern white men “than are their brethren in African swamps,” he wrote.
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