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JIM CROW and the WILSON ADMINISTRATION

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO

Chapter One

[T]he flavor and the color of things in Washington are Southern ... you feel it in the air, you note it in the changed and changing ways of business. -Judson C. Welliver, shortly after Wilson's inauguration

"The grandest Democratic victory since the war," declared the Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch in rapturous delight the morning after Woodrow Wilson was "swept into office on [the] crest of a great popular wave." That Wednesday morning, November 6, 1912, was undoubtedly unlike any other America had seen for over half a century. The nation awoke that day to find that the first southerner since Abraham Lincoln and the first Democrat since Grover Cleveland had been elected president of the United States. This time, however, there was a feeling of jubilant victory all over the South instead of the dread and whispers of war that had followed Lincoln's election in 1860; and a southern Democrat was about to enter the White House rather than a northern Democrat, as Cleveland was in 1885 and 1893.

Butwhite southerners were not the only ones hailing the new chief. Many African Americans, particularly those groups and individuals from the North who vociferously advocated black equality, celebrated Wilson's victory as the dawn of a new era of race relations in America. The National Independent Political League (NIPL), whose "mission" was the "political emancipation of the colored man of America" and which had enthusiastically campaigned on his behalf, sent the new president-elect a congratulatory telegram on his triumphant election. Seldom if ever had a presidential candidate attracted the patronage of such divergent groups-in this case white southerners and northern black radicals-with utterly conflicting belief systems and so diametrically opposed to each other down to their core that to satisfy either group politically as far as the race issue was concerned would mean deeply offending the convictions of one or crushing the aspirations of the other.

The spoils, however, along with most everything else, would go to the white South. Woodrow Wilson, a native-born Virginian who had spent his formative years in Georgia and South Carolina, won the election with just a little more than 42 percent of the popular vote yet with an overwhelming 435 electoral votes. With most of the eastern states going to Wilson, including Massachusetts and New York, it was the former Confederacy that united the most strongly behind its native son. Democrats carried the "solid South" as every state below the Mason-Dixon line threw its support to Wilson, and to say that he received clear majorities in these states would be an understatement. Incredibly, the number of votes cast for Wilson in every southern state surpassed the combined totals in each of those states for the Bull Moose Teddy Roosevelt and the Republican William Howard Taft.

The 1912 election gave the Democrats control not only of the presidency but of Congress as well. They now had a crushing majority of 164 in the House of Representatives and a majority of 7 in the Senate, with southern Democrats accounting for two-fifths of the members in the former and more than half in the latter. Furthermore, twelve of the fourteen Senate committees would soon be chaired by southerners, as would eleven of thirteen in the House. The counsel from these southern leaders in Congress, not to mention the influence of a strongly southern cabinet, would guide the president for the most part. "Southern influence had been decisive in nominating Wilson and directing his campaign," explained Arthur Link in noting the changing of the guard, "and southerners would soon be given the same share in formulating national policies that their grandfathers once enjoyed." A major shift in geographic control of the federal government had taken place.

BLACKS AND THE CIVIL SERVICE IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

Almost three decades earlier, on January 16, 1883, President Chester Arthur had signed the Civil Service Act, thereby creating the Civil Service Commission. This act set in motion the gradual process by which most nonappointive federal positions would require competitive examinations designed to take into account only test performance in determining eligibility for filling federal job vacancies.

The Civil Service Act opened the doors of advancement to many African Americans who were held back elsewhere because of their color. Although it would take several decades for the thousands of federal jobs to be phased into the Civil Service, the benefits of the act for African Americans were almost immediate. During the first six years after the act was signed, the number of black federal government workers increased from 620 to 2,393. The Eighth Report of the Civil Service Commission declared, "It is impossible to overestimate the boon to these colored men and women of being given the chance to enter the Government service on their own merits in fair competition with white and colored alike." Around the same time, one newspaper claimed that "seventy-five per cent more Afro-Americans have been given clerkships in the Departments in Washington and in the civil service generally through the operation of the Civil Service Law than were ever given to that class before." By 1912, excluding the 8,000 black military personnel, roughly 12,000 African Americans were employed by the federal government with civil service status, and they were receiving more than $8.2 million annually in salaries. Although the number of black federal appointments to such positions in the diplomatic and consular services, for example, had already been in a steady decline, the relatively color-blind civil service examination still provided the greatest opportunity for black advancement in a Jim Crow world.

Shortly after Wilson was inaugurated as president, the Washington Post, after printing the names of the hordes of federal office seekers, raised this question: "How is the Negro citizenship going to fare under the Democratic Administration?" The new administration soon answered that question in regard to its black federal employees as Jim Crow was introduced or increased in federal departments in Washington and throughout the South. The largest amount of Jim Crow was concentrated in the Treasury and Post Office departments where by far the largest numbers of African Americans worked. Here they were grouped together on jobs by race, partitioned off from whites in rooms where the two races had previously worked together, assigned the least desirable jobs, and forced to use separate toilets and lunch tables, inferior work spaces, and unsanitary makeshift dining rooms. In some cases African Americans were downgraded or dismissed/terminated from their positions.

Federal Jim Crow had appeared as early as Theodore Roosevelt's second term but lacked the intensity and tacit approval of leaders in the executive departments-including the chief executive-along with the organized white support that marked the Wilson years. Thus, although federal employment practices had never been entirely free of racial discrimination, Jim Crow in the federal departments was greatly expanded with more consistency during the Wilson administration and now seemed like an official policy backed by the federal government. Prior to this, with the exception of sporadic attempts to segregate black and white workers, the civil service had been relatively free of the overt and systematic racial discrimination so prevalent almost everywhere else. Black federal government employees themselves believed the "merit system transcended race prejudice," and with good reason. It was here that they had the best opportunities, hardly imaginable before the Civil Service Act, for equal access to economic advancement and professional development. Yet the color line, so ubiquitous in political and social life, was now threatening to halt the progress made by men and women irrespective of color within the federal government. Moreover, such a policy ironically contrasted starkly with the Progressive belief in unrestricted freedom to prove one's merit (although, as we shall see, most southern leaders considered Jim Crow not only a progressive policy but by far the most important reform cause of the day).

The Wilson administration also bode ill for the future of federal employment practices in regard to African Americans. By 1914, the civil service required all applicants to submit photographs with their applications for federal jobs. With southern sentiment now prevailing in federal departments, many feared this policy was instituted as an easy way to identify and purge black applicants regardless of their test scores.

Although black federal appointments had been steadily declining for over a decade, Wilson, caring little about rewarding black Democrats for their patronage during the election, removed the majority of black officeholders from positions they had traditionally held-such as minister to Haiti and register of the Treasury-and replaced them with whites. Of the thirty-one highest appointments held by African Americans when Wilson was elected president in 1912, four years later only one black Democrat and one black Republican had been appointed by his administration and confirmed by the Senate, and eight black Republicans had been held over from the Taft administration in offices that, with one exception, were basically obscure consulates. Even these latter positions had all but disappeared by the end of Wilson's second administration, as only three black appointees could be counted among the hundreds of Americans in the U.S. consular service.

The consensus among most southern Democrats had long been that African Americans should be segregated from whites and denied access to the ballot. Although John Cell and others offer half-convincing arguments that disfranchisement was directed just as much, if not more, toward poor whites as at blacks in the South, proportionally African Americans overwhelmingly bore the brunt of the systematic efforts to restrict suffrage beginning in the late nineteenth century. Here there can be no comparison, as the real and potential black vote in the South was all but wiped out. "The purpose of the Mississippi Constitutional Convention," reminded James Vardaman regarding the efforts of the first southern state to restrict suffrage, "was to eliminate the nigger-not the ignorant but the nigger." Other leading southern politicians of the day also openly touted their desire-and worked diligently-to implement various schemes, mostly illegal and unethical, for totally excluding African Americans "without disfranchising a single white man." Moreover, no overt de facto or de jure segregation, not to mention violence, was aimed at poor whites as there was at African Americans.

As is well-known, there had been a growing movement in the South since the end of Reconstruction-swelling to a massive tide of legal proscriptions during the first decade of the twentieth century-to impose severe restrictions on African Americans in regard to the ballot, education, transportation, public places, residential areas, and employment. These restrictions were often reinforced by the threat of violent penalties in what amounted to physical and psychological terrorism for those who dared cross the line. "The extremes to which caste penalties and separation were carried out in parts of the South," said C. Vann Woodward, the often-quoted sage of American de jure racial segregation, "could hardly find a counterpart short of the latitudes of India and South Africa."

Southern members of Congress such as Pitchfork Ben Tillman of South Carolina, Hoke Smith of Georgia, James Vardaman of Mississippi, and a host of others had made the utter subjugation of blacks-and not poor whites-the cornerstone of their political platforms, overtly exploiting racial tensions in their appeals for votes and political power. As one racial reformer succinctly put it, they were "[p]olitical demagogues risen to eminence on the backs of the negro." The severity with which blacks were regularly vilified and dehumanized not only from the political pulpit but in the southern white press as well cannot be emphasized enough. During the 1912 campaign Josephus Daniels-in charge of the publicity bureau of the presidential campaign and Wilson's secretary of the navy-represented this mind-set, albeit mildly, when he wrote in his North Carolina newspaper that "the subjection of the negro, politically, and the separation of the negro, socially, are paramount to all other considerations in the South short of the preservation of the Republic itself." With Wilson's victory around the corner, such views would soon find a new and tangible outlet within federal departments at Washington and throughout the South.

BLACK CIVIL SERVICE EMPLOYEES BEFORE 1915

Black civil service employees considered themselves the same as any other civil service employee, whatever the race, and deserving of equal treatment and consideration. A majority had high school diplomas, and several were graduates not only of black colleges but also of top northern white universities and law schools. It was not uncommon for African Americans in the civil service to have impressive personal and professional credentials, and some had the highest scores on civil service examinations in the country.

Although no official average of scores based on race exists for this period, in part because the exam was conducted at least theoretically on a basis of racial anonymity, a few indicators and citations give an idea as to African Americans' progress in the civil service. On the eve of Woodrow Wilson's election, as mentioned, the total number of African Americans in the federal civil service was 12,000, an enormous increase from the 620 working there when President Arthur signed the Civil Service Act just under thirty years earlier. African Americans were working in practically all departments of the government, including in supervisory and managerial positions. These jobs ranged from skilled laborers and clerks to auditors and the assistant attorney general. Robert R. Jackson, a black assistant superintendent with the Postal Department from 1888 to 1902, for example, had nearly perfect scores on a series of promotional exams, with averages of 99.40, 98.12, and 98.32, respectively. And Louis Harper, an employee in the Railway Mail Service (RMS) and one of the founders of the National Alliance of Postal Employees-an organization founded in 1913 to represent black postal employees-had an average score of 99.90 on his exams. W.E.B. DuBois conducted a case study in 1914 of African Americans recently hired in the Railway Mail Service in St. Louis and concluded that of the "fifty-two colored clerks" training in that city,

[O]nly one has less than a high school education; fourteen have college degrees; twenty-one own or are buying real estate, and the average assessed value of these holdings is $2,700; thirty-two have families; all belong to civic organizations; one, Mr. William Humphries, has the best examination record in the United States, having to his credit twenty-one examinations of 100 percent each.

This case is not exceptional. It appears that black federal employees were, in general, either middle-class or potentially middle-class. The merit-based federal service, not to mention appointive offices, attracted the most educated African Americans as compared to whites, since opportunities for employment commensurate with blacks' educational attainment were severely limited in the segregated white private sector and the poverty-stricken black community. Within their communities black federal employees were often associated with the professional class and were involved in civic and church affairs. The steady income from federal employment enabled them to buy homes, educate their children, and make investments. And because of the perceived stability of federal employment, they could get easy credit and substantial loans. Also, many photographs of black federal employees taken in the early twentieth century, including the ones in DuBois's St. Louis study, show distinguished men and women fashionably dressed in middleclass attire.

I do not intend to overstate the success of African Americans in the civil service prior to the Wilson years or to paint a utopian picture. As a Washington Post article pointed out just before Wilson's inauguration, many blacks occupied the lowest positions there and were not promoted or given salary increases because of their color. Instances of discrimination had always existed-whether by sporadic attempts to segregate blacks in a department here and there, as Elliott Rudwick and August Meier have shown in their article "The Rise of Segregation in the Federal Bureaucracy, 1900-1930," or in the form of personal insults such as racial slurs, sneers, petty annoyances, and being rebuffed. Even in some cases where merit actually triumphed over severe racial prejudice in the Deep South-such as in Yazoo, Mississippi, where African Americans who scored higher on an examination were appointed as postal deliverers over whites with failing scores on the exam-angry local whites promised violent resistance if any blacks dared show up for work.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from JIM CROW and the WILSON ADMINISTRATION by NICHOLAS PATLER Copyright © 2004 by University Press of Colorado . Excerpted by permission.
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