Following the Color Line Part 39

I have before me a book recently published by a Bible house (of all places!) in St. Louis and widely circulated in the South. It is ent.i.tled "Is the Negro a Beast?" and it goes on to prove by Biblical quotation that he has no soul! Being a beast, it becomes a small matter to kill him.

One also hears the argument now, as in slavery times, of the divine right of the white man to rule the Negro. "G.o.d intended the white man to rule,"

says Vardaman, "and the Negro to be a humble servant." And finally there is the frank argument of physical force; that the white man, being strong, will and must rule the Negro.

Hoke Smith to-day is supporting much the same position that Robert Toombs held before the war. Of course Hoke Smith has receded from the belief in the chattel slavery of the Negro for which Toombs contended; but in many other respects he evidently believes that the Negro should be reduced (as Ex-Congressman Fleming of Georgia says in the quotation given above) "to slavery in many of its substantial forms." In order to validate its position and keep its place (and make the Negro keep his) the white aristocracy has been forced to defend the doctrine of all monarchies and aristocracies--the inequality of men in all respects. Hoke Smith states the fundamental a.s.sumption thus plainly in his address (June 9, 1906):

"I believe the wise course is to plant ourselves squarely upon the proposition in Georgia that the Negro is in no respect the equal of the white man, and that he cannot in the future in this state occupy a position of equality."

_Both the South and the North Undemocratic_

Thus I have attempted to present the political situation in the South and the reasoning which underlies it. It possesses a large significance for the entire country.

Here is the fact: the war and the emanc.i.p.ation proclamation did not make the South completely democratic; it merely cut away one bulwark of aristocracy--slavery. The South is still dominated by the aristocratic idea, and more or less frankly so. The South has admitted only grudgingly, and not yet fully, the "poor white" man to democratic political fellowship. There are, as I have shown, hundreds of thousands of disfranchised white Americans in the South. Moreover many white leaders look askance on the new Italian immigrants, though they, too, are white men. The extreme point of view in regard to the foreigner was expressed in a speech by the Hon. Jeff Truly, candidate for governor of Mississippi, at Magnolia in that state on March 18, 1907:

"I am opposed to any inferior race. The Italian immigration scheme does not settle the labour question; Italians are a threat and a danger to our racial, industrial, and commercial supremacy. Mississippi needs no such immigration. Leave your lands to your own children. As governor of the state, I promise that not one dollar of the state shall be spent for the immigration of any such."

As for the Negro, of course, the South has never believed in a democracy which really includes him.

But neither does the North. When we get right down to it, the controlling white men in the North do not believe in an inclusive democracy much more than the South. I have talked with many Northerners who go South, and it is astonishing to see how quickly most of them adopt the Southern point of view. For it is the doctrine which many of them, down in their hearts, really believe.

In reality the North also has an aristocratic government, an oligarchy based upon wealth and property, which dominates politics and governs the country more or less completely. Roosevelt has been fighting some of the more boisterous aspects of the rule of this oligarchy--and has showed the country how powerful it is!

_The Underman Fighting All Over the World_

It is curious, indeed, when one's attention is awakened to the facts, how strong the parallel is between the South and the North. I mean here a parallel not in laws or even in customs, but in spirit, in the living reality which lies down deep under inst.i.tutions, which is, after all, the only thing that really counts.

The cause of all the trouble in the North is similar to what it is in the South: the underman will not keep his place. He is restless, ambitious, he wants civil, political, and industrial equality. Thus we see the growth of labour organisations, and the spread of populists and socialists, who demand new rights and a greater share in the products of labour. They will not, as Hoke Smith says of the Negroes, "content themselves with the place of inferiority." The essential feature of the history of the last five years in this country, and it will go down in history as the beginning of great things, has been the vague, crudely powerful effort of the underman (half his strength wasted because he is blind) to limit in some degree the power of this moneyed aristocracy. Such is the meaning of the demand for trust and railroad legislation, such the significance of the insurance investigation, such the effort to curb the power of men like Rockefeller, Harriman, Morgan.

So the North, in spirit, also disfranchises its lower cla.s.s. It does it by the purchase at elections in one form or another of its "poor whites" and its Negroes. What else is the meaning of Tammany Hall and the boss and machine system in other cities? Tammany Hall is our method of disfranchis.e.m.e.nt: it is our cunning machine for nullifying the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. While the South is disfranchising by legislation, the North is doing it by cash.

_The Question We Are Coming To_

I have spoken of the lack of free speech in the South; but that is not peculiar to the South. Though there is undoubtedly a far greater intellectual freedom to-day in the North than in the South, yet the North has disciplined more than one professor for his utterances on the trust or railroad questions. South or North, it is dangerous to attack the entrenched privilege of those in control.

We criticise the frankness of Vardaman in advocating different standards of justice for white men and Negroes, but do we not have the same custom in the North? How extremely difficult it is sometimes to get a rich criminal into jail in the North!

In short, we are coming again face to face in this country with the same tremendous (even revolutionary) question which presents itself in every crisis of the world's history:

"What is democracy? What does democracy include? Does democracy really include Negroes as well as white men? Does it include Russian Jews, Italians, j.a.panese? Does it include Rockefeller and the Slavonian street-sweeper? And Tillman and the Negro farmhand?"

CHAPTER XIII

THE NEW SOUTHERN STATESMANSHIP

"Democracy is the progress of all through all, under the leadership of the best and the wisest."--_Mazzini._

In former chapters I have had much to tell that was unpleasant and perhaps discouraging; but it had to be told, for it is there, and must be honestly met and reckoned with.

But the chief pleasure of the present task has been the opportunity it has given me to meet the working idealists of the South, and to see the courageous and unselfish way in which they are meeting the obstacles which confront them. If any man would brighten his faith in human nature, if he would attain a deeper and truer grasp upon the best things of life, let him attend one of the educational rallies of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, or Texas, and hear the talks of Dr. S. C. Mitch.e.l.l, President Alderman, J. Y. Joyner, P. P. Claxton, Chancellor Barrow, President Houston, and others; or let him spend a few days at Hampton with Dr. Frissell, or at Tuskegee with Dr. Washington, or at Calhoun with Miss Thorne. Coming away from a meeting one night at Tuskegee after there had been speaking in the chapel by both white and coloured men, I could not help saying to myself:

"The Negro problem is not unsolvable; it is being solved, here and now, as fast as any human problem can be solved."

Men may be found straining their vision to see some distant and complex solution to the question (have we not heard talk of deportation, extermination, amalgamation, segregation, and the like?) when the real solution is under their very eyes, going forward naturally and simply.

It is this quiet, constructive movement among the white people in the South which I wish to consider here.

In a former chapter I showed how the Negroes of the country are divided into two parties or points of view, the greater led by Booker T.

Washington, the lesser by W. E. B. DuBois. Washington's party is the party of the opportunist and optimist, which deals with the world as it is: it is a constructive, practical, cheerful party. It emphasises duties rather than rights. Dr. DuBois's party, on the other hand, represents the critical point of view. It is idealistic and pessimistic: a party of agitation, emphasising rights rather than duties.

But these two points of view are by no means peculiar to Negroes: they divide all human thought; and the action and reaction between them is the mode of human progress.

_Division of White Leadership in the South_

White leadership in the South, then, is divided along similar lines with Negro leadership--a party of rights and a party of duties. But with this wide difference: among the Negroes as I showed, the party of agitation and criticism led by DuBois is far inferior both numerically and in influence to the party of opportunity and duties led by Washington. For the Negroes have been forced to concede the futility of trying to progress by political action and legislation, by rights specified but not earned.

Washington's preaching has been:

"Stop thinking about your rights and get down to work. Get yourself right and the world will be all right."

But among the white people of the South the party of agitation and the emphasis of rights rather than duties is still far in the ascendency. Led by such men as Tillman, Vardaman, Jeff Davis, Hoke Smith, and others, it controls, for the present, the policies of the entire South. It has much to say of the rights of the white man, very little about his duties. It is, indeed, doing for the whites by agitation and legislation (often a kind of force) exactly what Dr. DuBois would like to do for the Negro, if he could.

"Agitate, object, fight," say both Tillman and DuBois.

"Work," says Washington.

Now, the same logic of circ.u.mstances which produced Booker T. Washington and his significant movement among the Negroes has produced a group of new and highly able white leaders. These new leaders saw that agitation (while most necessary in its place) would not, after all, build up the South; they saw that although the sort of leader typified by Tillman and Vardaman was pa.s.sing laws and winning elections, he was not, after all, getting anywhere; that race feeling was growing more bitter, often to the injury of Southern prosperty; that progress is not built upon stump speeches. The answer to all this was plain enough.

"Let us stop talking, forget the race problem, and get to work. It does not matter where we take hold, but let us go to work."

And the doctrine of work in the South has become a great propaganda, almost, indeed, a pa.s.sion. It has found expression in a remarkable growth of industrial activities, cotton-mills, coal-mines, iron and steel industries; in new methods of farming; in spreading railroads. But more than all else, perhaps, it has developed a new enthusiasm for education, not only for education of the old cla.s.sical sort, but for industrial and agricultural education--the training of workers. All this, indeed, represents the rebound from years of agitation in which the Negro has been "cussed and discussed," as one Southerner put it to me, beyond the limit of endurance. Wherever I went in the South among the new industrial and educational leaders I found an active distaste for the discussion of the Negro problem. These men were too busy with fine new enterprises to be bothered with ancient and unprofitable issues.

_New Prescriptions for Solving the Negro Problem_

When I asked Professor Dillard of New Orleans how he thought the Negro question should be treated, he replied:

"With silence."

"My prescription," says President Alderman in his address on "Southern Idealism," "is 'silence and slow time,' faith in the South, and wise training for both white and black."

Edgar Gardner Murphy of Alabama, himself one of the new leaders, has thus outlined the position of the rising Southern leadership: