What Democracy Means To Liberals
2015-11-15 17:25:11 UTC
The Progressive movement swept America from roughly the early
1890s through the early 1920s, producing a broad popular
consensus that government should be the primary agent of social
change. To that end, legions of idealistic young crusaders,
operating at the local, state, and federal levels, seized and
wielded sweeping new powers and enacted a mountain of new
legislation, including minimum wage and maximum hour laws,
antitrust statutes, restrictions on the sale and consumption of
alcohol, appropriations for hundreds of miles of roads and
highways, assistance to new immigrants and the poor, womens
suffrage, and electoral reform, among much else.
Today many on the liberal left would like to revive that
movement and its aura of social justice. Journalist Bill Moyers,
speaking at a conference sponsored by the left-wing Campaign for
Americas Future, described Progressivism as one of the
countrys great traditions. Progressives, he told the crowd,
exalted and extended the original American Revolution. They
spelled out new terms of partnership between the people and
their rulers. And they kindled a flame that lit some of the most
prosperous decades in modern history.
Yet the Progressive Era was also a time of vicious, state-
sponsored racism. In fact, from the standpoint of African-
American history, the Progressive Era qualifies as arguably the
single worst period since Emancipation. The wholesale
disfranchisement of Southern black voters occurred during these
years, as did the rise and triumph of Jim Crow. Furthermore, as
the Westminster College historian David W. Southern notes in his
recent book, The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction,
19001917, the very worst of itdisfranchisement, segregation,
race baiting, lynchingwent hand-in-hand with the most advanced
forms of southern progressivism. Racism was the norm, not the
exception, among the very crusaders romanticized by todays
activist left.
At the heart of Southerns flawed but useful study is a
deceptively simple question: How did reformers infused with
lofty ideals embrace such abominable bigotry? His answer begins
with the race-based pseudoscience that dominated educated
opinion at the turn of the 20th century. At college, Southern
notes, budding progressives not only read exposés of
capitalistic barons and attacks on laissez-faire economics by
muckraking journalists, they also read racist tracts that drew
on the latest anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology,
eugenics, and medical science.
Popular titles included Charles Carrolls The Negro a Beast
(1900) and R.W. Shufeldts The Negro, a Menace to American
Civilization (1907). One bestseller, Madison Grants The Passing
of the Great Race (1916), discussed the concept of race
suicide, the theory that inferior races were out-breeding their
betters. President Theodore Roosevelt was one of many
Progressives captivated by this notion: He opposed voting rights
for African-American men, which were guaranteed by the 15th
amendment, on the grounds that the black race was still in its
adolescence.
Such thinking, which emphasized expert opinion and advocated
sweeping governmental power, fit perfectly within the
Progressive worldview, which favored a large, active government
that engaged in technocratic, paternalistic planning. As for
reconciling white supremacy with egalitarian democracy, keep in
mind that when a racist Progressive championed the working
man, the common man, or the people, he typically prefixed
the silent adjective white.
For a good illustration, consider Carter Glass of Virginia.
Glass was a Progressive state and U.S. senator and, as chairman
of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, one of the major
architects of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. He was also an
enthusiastic supporter of his states massive effort to
disfranchise black voters. Discrimination! Why that is exactly
what we propose, he declared to one journalist. To remove
every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without
materially impairing the numerical strength of the white
electorate.
Then there was political scientist John R. Commons, an adviser
to the Progressive Wisconsin governor and senator Robert M.
LaFollette and a member of Theodore Roosevelts Immigration
Commission. Commons, the author of Races and Immigrants in
America (1907), criticized immigration on both protectionist
grounds (he believed immigrants depressed wages and weakened
labor unions) and racist ones (he wrote that the so-called
tropical races were indolent and fickle).
Woodrow Wilson, whose Progressive presidential legacy includes
the Federal Reserve System, a federal loan program for farmers,
and an eight-hour workday for railroad employees, segregated the
federal bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. I have recently spent
several days in Washington, the black leader Booker T.
Washington wrote during Wilsons first term, and I have never
seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at
the present time.
Perhaps the most notorious figure of the era was Benjamin
Pitchfork Tillman, a leading Southern Progressive and
inveterate white supremacist. As senator from South Carolina
from 1895 to 1918, Tillman stumped for Free Silver, the
economic panacea of the agrarian populist (and future secretary
of state) William Jennings Bryan, whom Tillman repeatedly
supported for president. Pitchfork Tillman favored such
Progressive staples as antitrust laws, railroad regulations, and
public education, but felt the latter was fit only for whites.
When you educate a negro, he brayed, you educate a candidate
for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.
Nor did African Americans always fare better among those
radicals situated entirely to the left of the Progressives.
Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, though personally
sympathetic to blacks, declared during his 1912 campaign for the
presidency, We have nothing special to offer the Negro. Other
leading radicals offered even less. Writing in the Socialist
Democratic Herald, Victor Berger, the leader of the partys
right wing, declared that there can be no doubt that the
negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower racethat the Caucasian
and even the Mongolian have the start on them in civilization by
many years. The celebrated left-wing novelist Jack London,
covering the 1908 heavyweight title bout between black
challenger Jack Johnson and white boxing champ Tommy Burns,
filled his New York Herald story with lurid ethnic caricatures
and incessant race baiting. Though he was a committed
socialist, observed Jack Johnson biographer Geoffrey C. Ward,
Londons solidarity with the working class did not extend to
black people.
As Southern thoroughly documents, these examples just begin to
scratch the surface. Progressivism was infested with the most
repugnant strains of racism. But was there something more,
something inherent in Progressivism itself that facilitated the
eras harsh treatment of blacks? According to Southern, who
repeatedly maintains that racism derailed the great promise of
Progressivism, the answer is no. The ideas of race and color
were powerful, controlling elements in progressive social and
political thinking, he argues. And this fixation on race
explains how democratic reform and racism went hand-in-hand.
That is surely correct, but is it the whole story? As the legal
scholar Richard Epstein has noted, the sad but simple truth is
that the Jim Crow resegregation of America depended on a
conception of constitutional law that gave property rights short
shrift, and showed broad deference to state action under the
police power. Progressivism itself, in other words, granted the
state vast new authority to manage all walks of American life
while at the same time weakening traditional checks on
government power, including property rights and liberty of
contract. Such a mixture was ripe for the racist abuse that
occurred.
Take the Supreme Courts notorious decision in Plessy v.
Ferguson (1896), a case that has rightly come to symbolize the
Souths Jim Crow regime. In Plessy, the Court considered a
Louisiana statute forbidding railroads from selling first-class
tickets to blacks, a clear violation of economic liberty. In its
71 ruling, the Court upheld segregation in public
accommodations so long as separate but equal facilities were
provided for each race, setting off an orgy of legislation
throughout the old Confederacy. South Carolina, for example,
segregated trains two years after Plessy. Streetcars followed in
1905, train depots and restaurants in 1906, textile plants in
191516, circuses in 1917, pool halls in 1924, and beaches in
1934.
No doubt many of those businesses would have excluded or
mistreated black customers whatever the law. But in a market
free from Jim Crow regulations, other businesses would have
welcomed blacks, or at least black dollars, forcing racist
enterprises to bear the full cost of excluding or mistreating
all those potential paying customers. (This was one of the chief
reasons the segregationists pushed for those laws in the first
place.) The state, in the eloquent words of the historian C.
Vann Woodward, granted free rein and the majesty of the law to
mass aggressions that might otherwise have been curbed, blunted,
or deflected.
Furthermore, this tangled web of regulations, ordinances, codes,
and controls was spun during the heyday of Progressivism,
precisely when such official actions were least likely to
receive any meaningful scrutiny. Southern, despite his otherwise
close attention to the many permutations of race and racism,
fails to recognize this major defect in the Progressive
worldview.
A similar failure handicaps his treatment of one of the eras
rare victories for African Americans. In Buchanan v. Warley
(1917), the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a Louisville
ordinance segregating residential housing blocks by race. The
case involved a voluntary contract between a white seller and a
black buyer for a housing lot located in a majority-white
neighborhood. Under the law, the new black owner could not live
on the property he had just purchased.
Writing for the Court, Justice William Rufus Day held that this
attempt to prevent the alienation of the property in question to
a person of color is in direct violation of the fundamental law
enacted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution
preventing state interference with property rights except by due
process of law.
Yet Southern dismisses this rare and important victory as
hollow and incorrectly asserts that it was decided not on the
grounds of human rights, but on those of white property rights.
In fact, the judicial recognition of black rights stood at the
very center of the decision. Justice Days opinion clearly
states that the Fourteenth Amendment operate[s] to qualify and
entitle a colored man to acquire property without state
legislation discriminating against him solely because of color.
Nor should Southerns characterization of this victory as
hollow pass unchallenged. As the legal scholars David
Bernstein and Ilya Somin have argued, the Buchanan ruling played
a major though sadly underappreciated role in the burgeoning
fight for civil rights. Buchanan could not force whites to live
in the same neighborhood as blacks, Bernstein and Somin write,
but it did prevent cities from stifling black migration by
creating de jure and inflexible boundaries for black
neighborhoods, and may have prevented even more damaging
legislation. It is well worth noting, they continue, that the
South did not adopt South Africanstyle apartheid at this time,
despite widespread white support for such measures.
In addition, Buchanan was the first major Supreme Court victory
for the four-year-old National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, a huge boon for the organization that would
go on to win the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954),
overturning Plessy. W.E.B Du Bois, an NAACP founder and longtime
editor of its newsletter, The Crisis, gave Buchanan credit for
the breaking of the backbone of segregation.
Despite these significant shortcomings, The Progressive Era and
Race deserves careful attention. The Progressive movement
unleashed, aided, and abetted some of the most destructive
forces in 20th-century America. The better we understand this
history, the less likely we are to repeat it.
http://reason.com/archives/2006/05/05/when-bigots-become-
reformers/1
1890s through the early 1920s, producing a broad popular
consensus that government should be the primary agent of social
change. To that end, legions of idealistic young crusaders,
operating at the local, state, and federal levels, seized and
wielded sweeping new powers and enacted a mountain of new
legislation, including minimum wage and maximum hour laws,
antitrust statutes, restrictions on the sale and consumption of
alcohol, appropriations for hundreds of miles of roads and
highways, assistance to new immigrants and the poor, womens
suffrage, and electoral reform, among much else.
Today many on the liberal left would like to revive that
movement and its aura of social justice. Journalist Bill Moyers,
speaking at a conference sponsored by the left-wing Campaign for
Americas Future, described Progressivism as one of the
countrys great traditions. Progressives, he told the crowd,
exalted and extended the original American Revolution. They
spelled out new terms of partnership between the people and
their rulers. And they kindled a flame that lit some of the most
prosperous decades in modern history.
Yet the Progressive Era was also a time of vicious, state-
sponsored racism. In fact, from the standpoint of African-
American history, the Progressive Era qualifies as arguably the
single worst period since Emancipation. The wholesale
disfranchisement of Southern black voters occurred during these
years, as did the rise and triumph of Jim Crow. Furthermore, as
the Westminster College historian David W. Southern notes in his
recent book, The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction,
19001917, the very worst of itdisfranchisement, segregation,
race baiting, lynchingwent hand-in-hand with the most advanced
forms of southern progressivism. Racism was the norm, not the
exception, among the very crusaders romanticized by todays
activist left.
At the heart of Southerns flawed but useful study is a
deceptively simple question: How did reformers infused with
lofty ideals embrace such abominable bigotry? His answer begins
with the race-based pseudoscience that dominated educated
opinion at the turn of the 20th century. At college, Southern
notes, budding progressives not only read exposés of
capitalistic barons and attacks on laissez-faire economics by
muckraking journalists, they also read racist tracts that drew
on the latest anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology,
eugenics, and medical science.
Popular titles included Charles Carrolls The Negro a Beast
(1900) and R.W. Shufeldts The Negro, a Menace to American
Civilization (1907). One bestseller, Madison Grants The Passing
of the Great Race (1916), discussed the concept of race
suicide, the theory that inferior races were out-breeding their
betters. President Theodore Roosevelt was one of many
Progressives captivated by this notion: He opposed voting rights
for African-American men, which were guaranteed by the 15th
amendment, on the grounds that the black race was still in its
adolescence.
Such thinking, which emphasized expert opinion and advocated
sweeping governmental power, fit perfectly within the
Progressive worldview, which favored a large, active government
that engaged in technocratic, paternalistic planning. As for
reconciling white supremacy with egalitarian democracy, keep in
mind that when a racist Progressive championed the working
man, the common man, or the people, he typically prefixed
the silent adjective white.
For a good illustration, consider Carter Glass of Virginia.
Glass was a Progressive state and U.S. senator and, as chairman
of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, one of the major
architects of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. He was also an
enthusiastic supporter of his states massive effort to
disfranchise black voters. Discrimination! Why that is exactly
what we propose, he declared to one journalist. To remove
every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without
materially impairing the numerical strength of the white
electorate.
Then there was political scientist John R. Commons, an adviser
to the Progressive Wisconsin governor and senator Robert M.
LaFollette and a member of Theodore Roosevelts Immigration
Commission. Commons, the author of Races and Immigrants in
America (1907), criticized immigration on both protectionist
grounds (he believed immigrants depressed wages and weakened
labor unions) and racist ones (he wrote that the so-called
tropical races were indolent and fickle).
Woodrow Wilson, whose Progressive presidential legacy includes
the Federal Reserve System, a federal loan program for farmers,
and an eight-hour workday for railroad employees, segregated the
federal bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. I have recently spent
several days in Washington, the black leader Booker T.
Washington wrote during Wilsons first term, and I have never
seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at
the present time.
Perhaps the most notorious figure of the era was Benjamin
Pitchfork Tillman, a leading Southern Progressive and
inveterate white supremacist. As senator from South Carolina
from 1895 to 1918, Tillman stumped for Free Silver, the
economic panacea of the agrarian populist (and future secretary
of state) William Jennings Bryan, whom Tillman repeatedly
supported for president. Pitchfork Tillman favored such
Progressive staples as antitrust laws, railroad regulations, and
public education, but felt the latter was fit only for whites.
When you educate a negro, he brayed, you educate a candidate
for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.
Nor did African Americans always fare better among those
radicals situated entirely to the left of the Progressives.
Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, though personally
sympathetic to blacks, declared during his 1912 campaign for the
presidency, We have nothing special to offer the Negro. Other
leading radicals offered even less. Writing in the Socialist
Democratic Herald, Victor Berger, the leader of the partys
right wing, declared that there can be no doubt that the
negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower racethat the Caucasian
and even the Mongolian have the start on them in civilization by
many years. The celebrated left-wing novelist Jack London,
covering the 1908 heavyweight title bout between black
challenger Jack Johnson and white boxing champ Tommy Burns,
filled his New York Herald story with lurid ethnic caricatures
and incessant race baiting. Though he was a committed
socialist, observed Jack Johnson biographer Geoffrey C. Ward,
Londons solidarity with the working class did not extend to
black people.
As Southern thoroughly documents, these examples just begin to
scratch the surface. Progressivism was infested with the most
repugnant strains of racism. But was there something more,
something inherent in Progressivism itself that facilitated the
eras harsh treatment of blacks? According to Southern, who
repeatedly maintains that racism derailed the great promise of
Progressivism, the answer is no. The ideas of race and color
were powerful, controlling elements in progressive social and
political thinking, he argues. And this fixation on race
explains how democratic reform and racism went hand-in-hand.
That is surely correct, but is it the whole story? As the legal
scholar Richard Epstein has noted, the sad but simple truth is
that the Jim Crow resegregation of America depended on a
conception of constitutional law that gave property rights short
shrift, and showed broad deference to state action under the
police power. Progressivism itself, in other words, granted the
state vast new authority to manage all walks of American life
while at the same time weakening traditional checks on
government power, including property rights and liberty of
contract. Such a mixture was ripe for the racist abuse that
occurred.
Take the Supreme Courts notorious decision in Plessy v.
Ferguson (1896), a case that has rightly come to symbolize the
Souths Jim Crow regime. In Plessy, the Court considered a
Louisiana statute forbidding railroads from selling first-class
tickets to blacks, a clear violation of economic liberty. In its
71 ruling, the Court upheld segregation in public
accommodations so long as separate but equal facilities were
provided for each race, setting off an orgy of legislation
throughout the old Confederacy. South Carolina, for example,
segregated trains two years after Plessy. Streetcars followed in
1905, train depots and restaurants in 1906, textile plants in
191516, circuses in 1917, pool halls in 1924, and beaches in
1934.
No doubt many of those businesses would have excluded or
mistreated black customers whatever the law. But in a market
free from Jim Crow regulations, other businesses would have
welcomed blacks, or at least black dollars, forcing racist
enterprises to bear the full cost of excluding or mistreating
all those potential paying customers. (This was one of the chief
reasons the segregationists pushed for those laws in the first
place.) The state, in the eloquent words of the historian C.
Vann Woodward, granted free rein and the majesty of the law to
mass aggressions that might otherwise have been curbed, blunted,
or deflected.
Furthermore, this tangled web of regulations, ordinances, codes,
and controls was spun during the heyday of Progressivism,
precisely when such official actions were least likely to
receive any meaningful scrutiny. Southern, despite his otherwise
close attention to the many permutations of race and racism,
fails to recognize this major defect in the Progressive
worldview.
A similar failure handicaps his treatment of one of the eras
rare victories for African Americans. In Buchanan v. Warley
(1917), the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a Louisville
ordinance segregating residential housing blocks by race. The
case involved a voluntary contract between a white seller and a
black buyer for a housing lot located in a majority-white
neighborhood. Under the law, the new black owner could not live
on the property he had just purchased.
Writing for the Court, Justice William Rufus Day held that this
attempt to prevent the alienation of the property in question to
a person of color is in direct violation of the fundamental law
enacted in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution
preventing state interference with property rights except by due
process of law.
Yet Southern dismisses this rare and important victory as
hollow and incorrectly asserts that it was decided not on the
grounds of human rights, but on those of white property rights.
In fact, the judicial recognition of black rights stood at the
very center of the decision. Justice Days opinion clearly
states that the Fourteenth Amendment operate[s] to qualify and
entitle a colored man to acquire property without state
legislation discriminating against him solely because of color.
Nor should Southerns characterization of this victory as
hollow pass unchallenged. As the legal scholars David
Bernstein and Ilya Somin have argued, the Buchanan ruling played
a major though sadly underappreciated role in the burgeoning
fight for civil rights. Buchanan could not force whites to live
in the same neighborhood as blacks, Bernstein and Somin write,
but it did prevent cities from stifling black migration by
creating de jure and inflexible boundaries for black
neighborhoods, and may have prevented even more damaging
legislation. It is well worth noting, they continue, that the
South did not adopt South Africanstyle apartheid at this time,
despite widespread white support for such measures.
In addition, Buchanan was the first major Supreme Court victory
for the four-year-old National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, a huge boon for the organization that would
go on to win the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954),
overturning Plessy. W.E.B Du Bois, an NAACP founder and longtime
editor of its newsletter, The Crisis, gave Buchanan credit for
the breaking of the backbone of segregation.
Despite these significant shortcomings, The Progressive Era and
Race deserves careful attention. The Progressive movement
unleashed, aided, and abetted some of the most destructive
forces in 20th-century America. The better we understand this
history, the less likely we are to repeat it.
http://reason.com/archives/2006/05/05/when-bigots-become-
reformers/1