Today’s progressives should consider the sobering history of Woodrow Wilson’s segregation policy.
One
hundred years ago today, Woodrow Wilson brought Jim Crow to the North.
He had been inaugurated on March 4, 1913. At a cabinet meeting on April
11, his postmaster general, Albert S. Burleson, suggested that the new
administration segregate the railway mail service; and treasury
secretary William G. McAdoo, who would soon become Wilson’s son-in-law,
chimed in to signal his support. Wilson followed their lead. He had made
a bid for the African-American vote in 1912, and he had attracted the
support of figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, but, as he put it at the
meeting, he had made “no promises in particular to Negroes, except to do
them justice.” Burleson’s proposal he welcomed, but he wanted “the
matter adjusted in a way to make the least friction.”
Today, self-styled progressives are wont, with considerable
abandon, to label as racists those who object to their attempts at
social engineering. They would do well to rein in their rhetorical
excesses and curb their enthusiasm for the administrative state — for
the Progressives of yesteryear, on whom they model themselves, really
were racists in the precise and proper sense of the term, and in
formulating public policy they were true to their principles.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ordinary Americans may
generally have been in the grips of ethnic prejudice of one sort or
another. The Progressives of that time were not, however, ordinary men,
and they knew it. Like their successors today, they dominated America’s
universities. With some justification, they thought of themselves as an
intellectual elite; and, with rare exceptions, they enthusiastically
embraced eugenics and racial theory. That the inchoate racial prejudices
of their contemporaries were grounded in fact they took to be a truth
taught by science; and, being devotees of rational administration to the
exclusion of all other concerns, they insisted that public policy
conform to the dictates of the new racial science.
Wilson, our first professorial president, was a case in point. He was
the very model of a modern Progressive, and he was recognized as such.
He prided himself on having pioneered the new science of rational
administration, and he shared the conviction, dominant among his
brethren, that African-Americans were racially inferior to whites. With
the dictates of Social Darwinism and the eugenics movement in mind, in
1907, he campaigned in Indiana for the compulsory sterilization of
criminals and the mentally retarded; and in 1911, while governor of New
Jersey, he proudly signed into law just such a bill.
Prior to the segregation of the civil service in 1913, appointments
had been made solely on merit as indicated by the candidate’s
performance on the civil-service examination. Thereafter, racial
discrimination became the norm. Photographs came to be required at the
time of application, and African-Americans knew they would not be hired.
The existing work force was segregated. Many African-Americans were
dismissed. In the postal service, others were transferred to the
dead-letter office, where they had no contact with the general public.
Those who continued to work in municipal post offices labored behind
screens — out of sight and out of mind. When the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Independent
Political League objected to the new policy, Wilson — a Presbyterian
elder who was nothing if not high-minded — vigorously defended it,
arguing that segregation was in the interest of African-Americans. For
35 years, segregation in the civil service would be public policy. It
was only after Adolf Hitler gave eugenics and “scientific racism” a bad
name that segregation came to seem objectionable.
If Wilson’s new policy encountered little opposition, it was because a
change of sentiment had taken place. Jim Crow had not been the norm
before 1890, even in the deep South. As C. Vann Woodward noted nearly 60
years ago, in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, it became the
norm there only when it received sanction from the racist Progressives
in the North. Their influence was profound and pervasive. In 1900, E. L.
Godkin, founder and longtime editor of The Nation, saw the
handwriting on the wall. In the pages of that journal, he lamented that
“the Declaration of Independence no longer arouses enthusiasm; it is an
embarrassing instrument which requires to be explained away. The
Constitution is said to be ‘outgrown.’” Those who once “boasted that it
had secured for the negro the rights of humanity and citizenship” now
listen “in silence to the proclamation of white supremacy” and make “no
protest against the nullifications of the Fifteenth Amendment.”
Wilson championed the trend identified by Godkin. In his
presidential campaign in 1912, he told his compatriots, “We are in the
presence of a new organization of society.” Our time marks “a new social
stage, a new era of human relationships, a new stage-setting for the
drama of life,” and “the old political formulas do not fit the present
problems: they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age.”
What Thomas Jefferson had once taught is now, he contended, utterly out
of date. It is “what we used to think in the old-fashioned days when
life was very simple.”
Above all, Wilson wanted to persuade his compatriots to get “beyond
the Declaration of Independence.” That document “did not mention the
questions of our day,” he told his countrymen. “It is of no consequence
to us.” He regarded it as “an eminently practical document, meant for
the use of practical men; not a thesis for philosophers, but a whip for
tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action.” For the
rights of individuals celebrated in that document and for the limits on
the scope of government implicit in its celebration of those particular
rights, he had no use. They were, he recognized, an obstacle to rational
administration of the very sort exemplified by his subsequent
segregation of the civil service.
For similar reasons, Wilson was hostile to the constitutional
provisions intended as a guarantee of limited government. The separation
of powers, the balances and checks, and the distribution of authority
between nation and state distinguishing the American constitution he
regarded as an obstacle to the formation and pursuit of rational public
policy. “Government” he considered “not a machine, but a living
thing . . . accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.” Nothing of that sort
could, he believed, “have its organs offset against each other, as
checks, and live.” Its health was “dependent upon” the “quick
co-operation” of these organs, “their ready response to the commands of
instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose.” Wilson
was the first to call for there to be a “living” political constitution
“Darwinian in structure and in practice.” To this end, in running for
the presidency he openly sought “permission — in an era in which
‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word — to interpret the
Constitution according to Darwinian principle.”
Today’s progressives eschew Social Darwinism and the
pseudo-scientific racism espoused by their intellectual forebears, and
they oppose racial segregation and the sterilization of criminals and
the mentally retarded. But they are no less confident of their own
righteousness than were the Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, and they have no more respect for the rights espoused in the
Declaration of Independence, for limited government, and for
constitutional forms than did their predecessors. On this day, the
hundredth anniversary of Wilson’s segregation of the civil service, they
ought to reflect on the terrible damage apt to be done by an unlimited
government disdainful of the natural rights of man and dedicated to
rational administration as envisaged by fallible men.
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Progressivism, Eugenics, and the Jewish Butcher of Buchenwald
'Being A Progressive Means Never Having To Admit That Your Were Wrong or Saying You're Sorry.'
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