W. E. B. Dubois. He didn't become famous because everything was prefect at the beginning of the prior century.
I knew as soon as the violence in Chartlottesville, Virginia hit the news that in a few days we'd have overwrought op eds by people like Catherine Rampell, to be followed by overwrought op eds from those on the opposite side of the isle.
Rampell's articles are far from the worst on this topic, but they sort of symbolize the problem here. She's a whopping ten years out of Princeton, where she was a legacy graduate, and therefore has enough life experience to write about, well. . . pretty much nothing at all. Indeed, you can find one of her really early articles from near the point at which she graduated defending her status as. . . a legacy student. I could go on, but it would be well off the topic, so will abstain for the time being.
Now, that sounds snotty but Rampell comes across like a snot. Much of the rest of the writing on this topic on the op-ed pages comes across as massively un-informed as to history.
Almost as ignorant are the comments by one poster on Reddit's 100 Years Ago Today Subreddit who thought that pretty much everything was better a century ago, no matter what it was. Diet, health, living conditions in every fashion. . . you name it. This came after a series of posts one day about terrible things happening during World War One.
World War One sucked. There's no putting a cheery face on World War One.
Dead horses from air raid, World War One. Okay, there's a lot about a century ago that fascinates me and that I even think might have been better than currently. . . but you can't look at this and say "oh look. . . a century ago the ponies had time to sleep!" No, you cannot.
Two sides of the same coin. One with a "it's a terrible grim present" and the other with "it was a really rosy past" side.
I've written on both topics here, but setting aside the topic
just of race for this post, and putting it into the main focus of the blog, the world of the early 20th Century, we get a much different picture. On race and how things were, and are, the question is this. Where do we start?
Well, before I really start, I'll start with this. I'll concede that I do find some aspects of the past, indeed, quite a few of them, to be more appealing than the present in all sorts of ways. I think we've endured a real loss of standards that really mean something over the past fifty or so years. It think the Western World in general has become a lot more superficial. I think our technology is rapidly overcoming us and we soon will not be able to handle it, assuming we can now. I think the focus of economic activity since the 1970s has gone from personal and family centric in general (but not universally) to pure wealth acquisition. I lament a world in which the average man can no longer enter the most basic of pursuits, agriculture, and one in which working in a cubicle or glass and steel office are becoming the norm. I'm distressed by the fantasy of sex obsessed moderns that they are defined by their gender and can define their gender.
So I'll acknowledge that impulse, looking back romantically on the past, and I don't think it completely in error.
And I do feel we have a race problem we need to address. So, I'm not denying that.
But here's an area where our contemporaries don't seem to be remembering the past accurately, or grasping the present correctly.
So, let's dig in, and lets start with race.
Things were a lot worse, in regard to race, a century ago. Indeed, things were a lot worse fifty years ago. That doesn't mean things are perfect now, but it does mean that things have tremendously improved.
Indeed, as I noted in my post of the other day, the mere fact that there are actually towns in Virginia, albeit ones that are apparently sort of islands in the general view of the state, taking down Confederate monuments, irrespective of whether they should or not, is stunning evidence of the degree to which things have really changed. Monuments of that type were going up in 1917 all over the South. Some went up as late as the 1960s. In my own lifetime.
It's as if the Civil War has actually finally ended, in a way.
That might sound like a bit much, but consider this. Between 1860 and 1865 this nation fought the worst war in its history over slavery. The country went into the war over a single issue; was enslaving blacks because they were black, or even partially black, a morally acceptable thing to do? Starting as far back as the waning days of the Colonial era an increasing number of Americans said no. The United States Supreme Court, which rightly gets dope slapped for its decision in the Dred Scott case (1857), had earlier declared it
abhorrent to the Natural Law in The Antelope in 1825. But the American South, including of course Virginia, clung to slavery as the planter economy switched from tobacco to cotton. Ironically, in this regards, tobacco would have been a "healthier" crop for Americans as it was less labor intensive and the general late 18th Century belief is that cultivating it would continue on as slavery passed out of existence. Cotton changed all of that.
In spite of what latter day apologist have attempted to maintain about it, American slavery is almost (but not quite) unique in some ways in that it was race based, and based on nothing else. Slavery, as latter day apologist like to point out, has been practiced by many cultures (and still is by some) but not in this fashion. Generally slavery has been the result of war and economics, with economic slavery and POW status being by far the most common forms. Islamic cultures, it is often noted, have practiced it extensively as well and often on the basis of religion, i.e., Muslims are not supposed to hold other Muslims as slaves, so there's a bit of an analogy there, and its important to note that Muslims were heavily involved in the slave trade that lead to slaves being sent to North America. Islamic slavery is also a bit unique here, and also uniquely abhorrent, in that it not only include a labor component, ie., slaves as laborers, but sex slaves were a very large aspect of it and constituted its own market, for which raids as far as the coast of Ireland were conducted.
North American slavery, however, was all economic and all race based. Unlike Islamic slavery there was no exception for members of the same faith. Contrary to what some believe, moreover, not all slaves brought to North America were Muslims or Animist, so the old "we're bringing them to a Christian nation" excuse doesn't even universally work. Some slaves that were brought in from southern Africa were practicing Catholics when they were sold to European slavers and therefore were already Christians before they ever showed up.
No, race alone was the criteria for slavery.
That's particularly vile in some fashion as in order to keep a slave in the first instance there always has to be some sort of excuse. In classical societies economic realities not only provided the excuse but actually provided the real basis. In the ancient forms of some languages, such as ancient Greek, the word for "slave" and "servant" are the same word, reflecting that. This is how you get examples like Saints Perpetua and Felicity, with one being a noble woman and the other being a slave, going to their martyrdom together. In purely economic slavery, some slaves were basically in the class of low paid people today, which doesn't mean that slavery at the time was universally nice by any means. It does mean, however, that American slavery is distinctly different. Roman and Greek slaves were a disadvantaged class due to their economics, in many instances (if not POWS) and could hope tho work their way out of it and join regular society. African American slaves could sometimes buy their freedom, but there was no way that they were going to join regular American society. Even if they became wealthy as free people, which on rare occasion they did, they weren't going to achieve that status.
Given this, slavery in North American had to be rationalized in a completely different and highly false fashion. In the ancient world, and slavery had fallen out of existence in European cultures with the spread of Christianity and a slow increase in societal wealth by the 11th Century, slavery could be justified by the fact that the only alternative for the really poor was to beg (truly, some people got by that way) or to die. Being a slave for economic reason was better than that. For prisoners of war, or other prisoners, it was better than simply being killed, which was often the only other alternative. Those options weren't great, but they were, and they reflected the times to a large degree. They didn't reflect any of the times during which slavery was legal in North America.
In terms of North American slavery the real basis of it was simply that forced labor was cheaper than hired labor. Slave holders came to believe, and fairly rapidly, that the economy would collapse without slavery, but the reintroduction of slaver into European societies, in North America, (and it was a reintroduction) was purely economic. It could not be justified that way, however, as a person can't rationally say that this is just cheaper than the alternatives and have that suffice as an explanation, or certainly they shouldn't do that. In a Christian society they clearly cannot do that. So it was explained away purely on the thesis that blacks were inferior, indeed barely human, and therefore slavery was their lot.
A lot was done to attempt to justify that. Some, indeed quite a few, made recourse from the Bible but in a very poorly thought out way. The Bible, in spite of what some critics will say even now, does not sanction slavery but rather limits a slave holders conduct in regard to slaves. This is something that tends to be wholly lost on various readers of the Bible, particularly sections of the Old Testament. Simply because somebody was referenced as being a slave doesn't mean that, ipso facto, slavery was a good thing. Indeed, while not quite exactly on point, its sometimes noted that the Old Testament references men taking the widows of defeated combatants as involuntary brides, and therefore, the argument is made, that was sanctioned by the Old Testament. No, what's noted is that this was in fact done by the Jews who are the admonished that, if they do it, to treat the widow decently, allow her to morn for her dead husband, etc. Slavery is treated much the same way. And of course, in ancient societies, as we've noted, slavery was going to exist.*
The reason that this matters is that North American slavery came to a state quite early on where it was simply reduced to race. Slaves were black, and therefore their black status made them slaves. As that is an inarticulate argument at best, it had to be excused in another fashion, which ultimately and quickly came to be that blacks were naturally inferior humans.
As an argument, that's absurd. Indeed, as we've dealt with elsewhere and will a bit here, skin color has absolutely nothing to do with culture or ethnicity. Africans brought over as slaves were members of other cultures, and some of them members of Christian cultures at that (although those who were, were uniformly Catholics being imported into an overwhelmingly Protestant land). But in very short order, with a generation or so, black slaves were American in culture, if part of an obvious subculture due to their status. Even today this development continues to pollute American logic as the overwhelming majority of Americans equate culture with skin color when, in fact, it has nothing to to with it.**
The logic of this, that Africans were somehow less human than Europeans, was failing by the late 18th Century and had failed by the mid 19th. By that time, however, the "peculiar institution" was heavily entrenched in Southern economics. Ironically, by that time as well, the end of the legal importation of slaves meant that Southern slaves were fully American in culture and increasingly so, with elements of their subculture having been incorporated into the lower class white culture of the South. They were uniformly Christian, if not the same variants in all cases as their masters.***, ^
As noted above this view of blacks was failing in North America by the first half of the 19th Century at least to the extent that in the North slavery came to an end. In the South, as noted, it did not until 1865.
Individuals like Frederick Douglass were making it rapidly impossible to really regard blacks as anything less than whites by the 1850s. This would not mean that everyone's attitudes would change over night and they still have not, amazingly enough, for some even now.
But when it came to an end the attitudes and views that had allowed it to exist did not. These views were of course by far the most pronounced in the South but even in the North, where slavery had been abolished voluntarily, prejudicial attitudes that had allowed it to exist at one time did not disappear overnight. A real effort, however, was made to fully equalize the legal and even the social status of blacks right after the Civil War and it was at first successful. Unfortunately the assassination of Abraham Lincoln likely weakened it. Imagined today as a figure who simply wanted to bring the rebel South back into the Union with a warm embrace, in reality Lincoln would have likely been far more likely to support Radical Reconstruction than his successor, Andrew Johnson. Johnson, who if he had been free to act upon his own views, in his own mind, would likely have taken a radical approach, but much like Lyndon B. Johnson a century later, he imagined himself constrained by views that he imagined his predecessor to hold. It's hard to imagine Lincoln, whose views had evolved a great deal in five years, botching Reconstruction as badly as Johnson did.
Freed slaves with teachers, 1862. During and after the Civil War, as long as Reconstruction continued on, there were real efforts, and some with real success, aimed at helping emancipated slaves receive the education they'd been lacking. The Freedman's Bureau undertook this during Reconstruction as a matter of Federal policy. American blacks never did get what they were hoping for, and what Radical Republicans would have caused to occur, which was land redistribution. The dream of "40 acres and a mule" would have converted them into yeomen and have given them economic independence.
In spite of this, freed slaves in the South generally did quite will in spite of the challenges they had to face until the protection of the Federal Government was prematurely withdrawn in 1876. After that, the same class that had held slaves only recently went back into power in the South and not surprising blacks lost the progress they had made over the next twenty years. As we've already seen, starting in the 1890s these forces began to reinterpret the very nature of the Civil War itself and to erect monuments to men who had lead half the nation's territory into a war for slavery.
This takes us to the era this blog focuses on. In the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s, blacks were second class citizens in the American South and disadvantaged everywhere else, but not in the same degree. In the West prejudice and disadvantage was at its lowest. Indeed, in Wyoming blacks were serving on capitol murder juries by the early 20th Century, something that would have been regarded as abhorrent in the South. The jury that convicted Tom Horn, for example, included a black juror. Some blacks in Western towns and cities were successful politically and quite a few were successful in business in the greater white world. Stories like this were less common in the North and of course would have been nearly impossible in the South. This isn't to suggest that things were prefect as that simply would not have been true.
So, in terms of where we were, when we look back a century, to 1917, we are looking at a highly segregated America in which blacks were second class citizens of varying degrees throughout the nation. That is partially symbolized by the fact that the Army the nation was putting together was segregated. Black solders served in their own units, not in integrated ones. But perhaps the fact that progress was around the corner is also symbolized by the fact that, unlike World War Two, some of those units had black officers.
Before we move on we should note that the situation generally regarding "race", or more accurately ethnicity was worse, sometimes much worse, in the early 20th Century than it is now in every way.
Irish Americans were just coming out of an era when they were regarded as a separate "race". World War One would complete that process, almost, but it would not be until the early 1960s that Irish American Catholics really entered the American mainstream. Irish immigrants to the United States were regarded nearly as poorly as blacks in most of the US, although they always enjoyed the rights of white residents, up until the Mexican War when that began to change. The Civil War changed it enormously and for the first time in American history made it unpopular, in some regions of the country, to openly disdain the Irish for their religion. World War One more or less completed the process although the incorporation into large elements of working class American society was achieving that as well. It would take another war, World War Two, to open the doors to Catholics in general to higher education on a wide scale and Irish Americans would really exit the Catholic Ghetto with finality only in the early 60s. By that time their place was being taken by Puerto Ricans, another Catholic immigrant class.
Wars have had a strange impact on assimilation and acceptance of ethnicities and this is certainly the case for the Irish. The "Fighting 69th" remains to this day very strongly associated with the Irish in New York and seemingly nearly completed the beginning of their full integration into American society.
Italian Americans were very much their own "race" at this time, the early 20th Century, as well and would be up through World War Two when, like the Irish, they'd emerge out the back side into fuller participation in the American nation and no longer be regarded as another. Hampered still by a reputation for crime, something that afflicts every underclass poor culture, that would linger on through the 1930s, they were helped in this era by American fascination with the Italian front during the Great War, where it seemed the Italians were putting up a valiant fight against Austro Hungary. In part, they struggled in this era more than the Irish simply because they were more recent arrivals.
Another Catholic group, Hispanics, started to be the focus of bias for the first time during this era, although it would really increase after the Great War. Hispanics in the United States, up until 1910, were mostly found in populations that had been present in the areas where they were located at the time the United States acquired them. Never subject to the same sort of prejudice that blacks or Indians were, or even the Irish, they were seen as a static population into which the larger American culture was moving. In some areas, but certainly not all, they were surprisingly well incorporated. The Mexican Revolution, however, brought in groups of refugees and real bias against Hispanics in a distinct way really started to commence. It really peaked during the Great Depression when Hispanics were subject to a repatriation effort which sent somewhere from 500,000 to 2,000,000 into Mexico, 60% of whom were native born Americans. That stands as a pretty stunning example of a uniquely prejudicial action, to say the least.
Mexican refugees crossing into the United States in 1915. There was not a lot of prejudice against Hispanics in the United States until the Mexican Revolution, which brought Mexican refugees into the country in notable numbers. Indeed, the border between the US and Mexico had been basically open up until that time. Starting with the Mexican Revolution border controls were established and the flow across the border was regulated.
We have not touched on Asian Americans either, at this point, although their interaction with prejudice has shown up from time to time in prior posts. Their story is fairly well known, at least in regards to Japanese immigrants. Both Chinese and Japanese immigrants, who originally were located principally in the far western United States and heavily concentrated into the regions in which they migrated, were seen as very foreign early on and subject to immigration quotas. A long running fear was that they constituted a "yellow peril". The Chinese seem to have been subject to the greatest degree of their prejudice in the late 19th Century, with the Japanese in the first half of the 20th Century. Indeed, it was constantly feared that the Japanese immigrants were combining with various foreign elements to wage war on the United States, with fears running the range from the Mexicans to the Germans. Prejudice against them, logically enough, peaked out during World War Two, which is after the period that we're focusing on.
Populations of Middle Eastern and Russian Jews came under particular stress due to World War One due to the Russian Revolution and the war in the Middle East. Efforts were made in the US, often by Jewish communities that were receiving an increased influx of refugee immigrants, to address their plight.
The same could be said for Jewish Americans except that their religion guaranteed that they were held in greater suspicion and they seem to be uniquely subject to a particular brand of prejudice that pursues them everywhere. All of these groups would be targeted by the what are now termed "white nationalist" groups and they were all specific targets of the Klu Klux Klan.
KKK cartoon emphasizing its support for Prohibition. The KKK was anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, and anti booze in the first half of the 20th Century. It was also an entity that operated pretty darned openly and had social acceptance in much of the country. It would peak in terms of national membership sometime after World War One.
Indeed it's worth remembering that the era immediately surrounding the Great War saw a massive revival of fortunes for the KKK. The original KKK, which murdered and terrorized blacks immediately after the Civil War and which, in modern terms, was a terrorist organization seeking to preserve as much of the "peculiar institution" as it could had been fought by the Army during Reconstruction and, if not eliminated, greatly curtained. Following the withdrawal of the Army from the South in 1876 it lots its point as more blacks started to loose their rights and openly Confederate organizations, such as the Daughters of the Confederacy, could beat the Lost Cause drum and achieve the same goals. But in the early 20th Century it started to come back, and as blacks left the South, and as Catholics and Jewish immigrants filed the bigger cities and mining districts of the nation, it revived in what perhaps is an eerie precedent for what we are now seeing. It even managed to briefly receive acceptability in no small part due to favorable portrays of it, such as that by D. W. Griffith in
The Birth of A Nation or even, in closeted hinted at fashion, in
Gone With The Wind.
The subtitle should have declared Griffith's work to be 100% unadulterated trash based on a novel that constituted trash by Thomas Dixon. Unfortunately, it helped spur on recruitment for an organization that is based on hate and which, amazingly enough, is still with us today. It's amazing to think that what Griffith's poster does here would be very little different, in modern terms, if the horseman was a member of ISIL.
Standing distinct and apart in this era were American Indians. Amazing as it now seems full citizenship for all American Indians did not become the law until 1924 and even now Indians are not afforded full Constitutional protections while on Reservations, something that most Americans are wholly unaware of. American Indians are likely the most neglected of all of the nation's peoples and for many, but not all, the early 20th Century was one in which they were not even citizens in their own country.
Osage Indians with President Coolidge near the time at which they were granted full citizenship.
All this goes to show that, at least in some ways, the rosy view that some have of the early 20th Century doesn't work very well if race and ethnicity is considered. The country remained a WASP country in very real ways. Prejudice against people who were not of "Anglo Saxon" heritage could be openly maintained and was often openly celebrated. But that was changing even during the period we're considering.
And it has changed, which brings us to our next point.
Things have changed in numerous ways, some good, and some bad. But it cannot be denied that race and ethnicity no longer are the basis for discrimination the way they once were. They aren't at all for entire ethnicities. Very few claims of being held back due to ethnicity are credible now, although for at least those demographics with darker skin, Indians, Hispanics and blacks that does indeed sometimes remain the case. For many, however, membership in ethnicities which were once so disdained that people made an effort to hide it is now a point of pride.
Real prejudice of course remains, but nowhere do any group of Americans face the sort of bias they once did in many instances. Official interference with voting is not tolerated anywhere, in spite of claims to the contrary, and the real problem groups face is voter apathy. The "Black Vote" is no longer suppressed in the South but courted, ironically mostly by Democrats which once made a determined effort to keep blacks from voting.
In every fashion, prejudice based on ethnicity has declined enormously since World War Two. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was a huge success. Overall, the thing that holds any one ethnicity back at this point is retained prejudice by some people, location, and economics. All of these problems are daunting but none of them are of the nature of institutional prejudice that one officially operated to hold people back.
Not that they do not need to be worked on. When blacks complaint of being held back economically, they're citing real valid concerns. Moreover, when blacks, Hispanics and Indians complain of meeting with prejudice of a personal, or even closet, nature, they aren't making things up. Plenty of Americans continue to harbor prejudiced views about others simply based on the color of their skin, which is bizarre, but which still occurs.
When blacks claim they fear the police, they are not only citing a real concern, but a valid one. It's amazed me to read by some that this fear isn't valid. African Americans, and likely Hispanics, are much more likely to have a really dangerous encounter with a policeman than a white, or likely Asian, American even though the number of black policemen has dramatically increased in the United States since 1970.
What all of this leaves us with, in terms of the contemporary story, is that much of the handwringing and angst we currently see is misplaced or even misdirected. The old Civil Rights story informs the current era, but it cannot and should not direct it, as the problems are different. The challenge today is how to fully integrate the minority populations in the country into larger society and to overcome lingering irrational hatred against these groups. For the most part, in spite of what some might like to think, that is taking place in much the way it always has. Just as the press repeatedly reports that "white" Americans will make up less than half of the population at some point in the foreseeable future the growing demographic most responsible for that, Hispanic Americans, are becoming indistinguishable from whatever "white America" is. That's because the term "Hispanic" has about as much relevance as "Irish" or "Italian". At one time the Irish and Italians were not "white", and were their own "race", as they were not White Anglo Saxon Protestants. Now, for many who use those terms, to be Irish or Italian may mean nothing more than a claim to a certain culture's food. For others, who are more in tune with the reality of their cultural heritage, it may mean much more, but it doesn't mean that they are some special separate "race". That's rapidly becoming the case for Hispanics as well. A person can go to their local Catholic Parish and see immigrants who are from a different, albeit European" culture, but if you go to the local high school and see their kids. . . well that's not nearly as evident.
For blacks and Indians, however, the problems of economic disadvantage, and all that goes with that, is very much alive. The process that has worked for other immigrant groups is clearly not going to, or not going to very quickly, for some sections of these populations. Their history is too unique and as populations they are too burdened. That needs to be specially addressed. But when it is, addressing it in the fashion that some groups would, by co-opting the problem into the goals of some wider group's politics, or in co-opting it into a mushy imagined view of the problem, needs to be avoided. Getting these groups over the final bar of their disadvantage will not be easy. But, on the plus side, things have improved so much that we, at least, aren't in 1917 in regards to this, or even 1967.
Hope for the future. Racism is irrational. It's particularly irrational in the case of the longest running American examples. Black Americans are part of the original American demographic and are a lot more American than some of the folks who have recently been running around acting like neo Confederates.
We don't naturally hate each other. That's learned behavior and people should knock it off.
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*But even in those societies there were those who railed against it. Saint Augustine of Hippo regarded it as a product of the Fall and contrary to God's design for humans. In his era slavery was common.
**Indeed today many Africans are highly conservative Europeans in culture who are culturally oriented to a much more traditional European view of the world than many Europeans. Hispanics are completely European in culture even though many are of mixed ancestry, Spanish and Native American. Due to the legacy of slavery Americans have an exceedingly difficult time grasping this.
***In most of the South the Episcopal Church was the dominant church, reflecting that Southerners traced their ancestry to the English in higher percentages than other Americans then did. The Presbyterian Church had a strong representation in some areas, reflecting Scotch and Scotch-Irish immigration, which also interestingly gave rise to whiskey production in those regions. Irish immigration had started to come in, in some areas, although it was nowhere nearly as prominent as it was in the North and the Irish were looked down upon in part because they were Catholic, and they tended to be regarded in t he South and the North as their own peculiar "race". In Louisiana, however, the Catholic church was strong and there were Catholic slaveholders.
Interestingly, in the Protestant regions of the South, which was most of it, the slaves were not members of the same Protestant faiths. Whites worshiped in in their own churches and slaves worshiped on their master's ground. Generally slaves made up, therefore, informal slave congregations served by black ministers, the birth of the black church. In Catholic regions however, black slaves were Catholic, something that contributes to an ongoing black Catholic population in those regions. Some imported slaves in the 18th Century were Catholic when they were brought in, as noted. Following emancipation, Catholic slaves remained Catholic, having already been incorporated into that faith. Protestant slaves, however, formed their own congregations and indeed denominations, to the surprise of whites who expected them to now join the local white congregations.
^Contrary to an image that's been popularized since the 1960s, African slaves were not Muslim at any point. It's become popular due to depiction of popular media and also due to religious movements within the African American population to imagine this, but it was not the case.
The reason for this is fairly simple. There were black Muslims in Africa, but the populations that contributed to the slave population in North America did not draw from those populations. Most African slaves would have been animists. Some where Christian. Muslims did participate significantly in the slave trade, including black Muslims and Arabs, but as slave traders, not as slaves. Indeed, Islam prohibits the reduction of free Muslims into slavery, so Arab slave trading was always geared towards non Muslim populations.
This does touch on the bizarre nature of the slave trade at this time which, like North American slavery, stands apart from the slavery of classical antiquity. In European antiquity raids for slaves, while they did occur, did not supply the bulk of slaves. Slave raiding was conducted by the Vikings, in their era, specifically for economic purposes and also by Arabs for the same purpose, in the early Medieval period. In the period we're looking at many of the slaves, perhaps most, were reduced to slavery due to warfare by competing tribal groups but a pronounced element of that was slave raiding by competing groups which then sold the slaves to slave brokers. Warfare for the purpose of supplying slaves became a feature of the slave trade.
