Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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A PALETTE OF PROGRESSIVES
79
5
A Palette of Progressives
W.E.B. DuBois (C.M. Battey/Getty Images)
AMERICAN STORIES
80
The “Full Dinner Pail” and the “Square Deal”:
Theodore Roosevelt as President
During his successful presidential campaign in 1900, William McKinley and
his vice presidential running mate, Theodore Roosevelt, assured the electorate
a “full dinner pail,” plenty of food to eat along with all the other trimmings
of prosperity. In 1904, voters elected Theodore Roosevelt president after he
offered them a “square deal,” a slogan less well defined than a table spread
with food, but seeming nevertheless to promise the sort of fairness and good-
governance upon which Roosevelt staked his reputation. How well did he
deliver?
In
1900 there were 8,000 automobiles registered in the United States. By
1910, there were 458,000 registered automobiles. The dragging farm prices of
the 1890s had rebounded, and the average wage earner saw about a 20 percent
increase in wages over that same time, up to about $600 annually. Electricity
continued to fan out from cities to suburbs, though most rural areas would
have to wait until the 1930s and 1940s for electric power. Starting in 1907,
well-funded government specialists trained to weed out diseased meats and
dangerous drugs began inspecting food and pharmaceuticals. During a 1902
strike for higher wages, the federal government supported Pennsylvania coal
miners. First in Wisconsin, and then elsewhere in the Midwest and West,
legislatures wrote new forms of direct political action into law—referendums,
initiatives, primaries, and recalls—giving voters the chance to vote on laws,
propose new laws, choose candidates for elective office, and yank politicians
out of office. And there was more fun to be had in America, too.
Bicycles by the millions whirred over brick roads and country lanes. In-
n
ovative diamond-shaped frames and improved tires provided the convenience
and comfort needed to get women riding, even in a skirt. Susan B. Anthony,
the famous suffragist also famous for her stick-in-the-mud seriousness, said
bicycles had “done a great deal to emancipate women. I stand and rejoice every
time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.”
1
The leader of the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union, Frances Willard—noted for her sparkling advocacy of
a dry country—got such a boost from bicycle riding that she promoted its
delights in an 1895 book, A Wheel Within a Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the
Bicycle. Willard was sure that if women catapulted themselves onto the backs
of bikes, they could also spin a proper campaign to attain full citizenship,
namely the right to vote. She remembered being imprisoned by apparel on her
sixteenth birthday, “the hampering long skirts . . . with their accompanying
corset and high heels; my hair was clubbed up with pins.” Dutiful to tradition,
Willard stayed “obedient to the limitations thus imposed” by stifling clothes
and inhibiting expectations, but almost four decades later, overwhelmed by
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A PALETTE OF PROGRESSIVES
overwork and grief for her mother’s death and needing “new worlds to conquer,
I determined that I would learn the bicycle.” What started out as an energizing
diversion soon became a means to convey her messages: “I also wanted to
help women to a wider world, for I hold that the more interests women and
men can have in common, in thought, word, and deed, the happier will it be
for the home. Besides, there was a special value to women in the conquest of
the bicycle by a woman in her fifty-third year.”
2
Besides inspiring women,
biking was a bonanza for industrialists, tinkerers, and retailers: Americans
purchased more than 10 million bicycles by 1900. And what better way to get
exercise than to pedal over to the nearest movie house? Tally’s Electric Theater
opened in 1902 in Los Angeles, the first building consecrated to movies and
movies alone, though the sixty-seven stately vaudeville buildings operating
in the nation by 1907 also showed movies—that ultimate freedom from care
and worry, if only for an hour or two. Americans were devising ways to make
themselves happy and rich at the same time.
It
would seem that Theodore Roosevelt at least presided over a “square
deal,” however much of it he may have been responsible for.
Not everyone in America had the chance to pedal the latest-model bicycle
or sink into the plush upholstery of a palatial vaudeville house. In particular,
European-Americans continued to shove African-Americans away from the
good jobs, the seven-gabled, oak-shaded neighborhoods, and the good fun
of this glittery, consumer-oriented, plentiful land of illusions. The Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Amendments guaranteed full civil rights to black people, and
the 1875 Civil Rights Act prevented any one individual from denying “the
full and equal enjoyment of any of the accommodations, advantages, facili-
ties,
and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters and
other places of public amusement” to any other citizen because of “race” or
“color.”
3
In 1883, however, the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 law, say-
ing that the regulation of individual behavior was a state matter. This ruling
left southern blacks at the mercy of white-controlled legislatures.
Then,
in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, the Supreme Court allowed
for a legally segregated America. An 1890 law in Louisiana stipulated that
railroad companies provide separate seating for whites and blacks—the only
exception allowing for black nurses tending to white babies. Homer Adolph
Plessy, a light-skinned mulatto with one-eighth African ancestry, donated
his body to test the law. In 1892, police summarily arrested Plessy for sitting
in the white seating, and his case made its way through the appeals system.
Eight Supreme Court justices ruled in favor of the Louisiana law, disagreeing
with the “assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the
colored race with a badge of inferiority.” The only dissenting justice was John
Marshall Harlan of Kentucky. Although a former slave owner, Harlan had no
AMERICAN STORIES
82
trouble understanding the Constitution. He called the Louisiana segregation
law “hostile to both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution of the United
States” and deliberately intended to create the “legal inferiority [of] a large
body of American citizens”—which is precisely what happened.
4
The lie of
“separate but equal” became many white Americans’ favored illusion.
In 1890, when Louisiana passed the law segregating railroad cars, there
were sixteen black legislators in that state. By 1910 there were none. What
had been discrimination in practice became discrimination by law as southern
schools, water fountains, hotels, hospitals, public bathrooms, restaurants,
parks, and every other conceivable public place became racially divided, usu-
a
lly with the black facilities inferior in construction and amenities. Separation
itself was often a worse sting, though the leaking tarpaper roofs and the bit-
ing
chill of winter in the windblown hovels that served as African-American
primary schools inflicted their own pain. State and local officials prevented
African-Americans from registering to vote by using poll taxes, monetary
fees that most poor people—white or black—simply could not afford. Of-
ficials
also used literacy tests, which allowed the white examiners to interpret
a written passage in such a way as to pass or fail anyone they chose. And
they implemented “grandfather clauses” that permitted an illiterate man to
vote only if his father or grandfather had been registered prior to 1867 (when
not a single black person could vote). In these ways—and through violent
intimidation—white southerners prevented most black southerners from vot-
ing.
The dinner pail was at best half full in black America.
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, many white women, casting
their lot with the suffering slaves, had struggled for the immediate end to
slavery. When slavery ended with the Thirteenth Amendment, these fighting
abolitionists (like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had organized the Seneca
Falls Convention in 1848) expected to receive their own full citizenship rights,
especially the vote. Instead, the proposed Fifteenth Amendment specifically
omitted women, giving the vote only to men. Feelings of fury and betrayal
seeped into Elizabeth Stanton and her ally Susan B. Anthony, and they cam-
paigned against passage of the amendment.
In
1865, sensing a national mood favorable to black suffrage but opposed
to woman suffrage, Stanton wrote, “The representative women of the nation
have done their uttermost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the
negro . . . it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside
and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first.”
5
Her old friend and ally, Fred-
erick Douglass, naturally took offense at the “Sambo” reference, and they
split ways. In 1895, five years after leading suffragists created the National
American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), they excluded African-
American women from the annual convention held in Atlanta. The difficulty
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A PALETTE OF PROGRESSIVES
of convincing people that women were suited to full citizenship turned many
white suffragists into pragmatists—if black women had to be excluded in
order to gain southern support, so be it.
The
remaining obstacles to female enfranchisement were many. Nearly
everyone felt that politics were corrupt and would corrupt women in turn. The
liquor industry’s brewers, distillers, saloon owners, and distributors rightly
feared that voting women would march to the ballot boxes and check “prohibi-
tion.”
Conservative women did not want to upset the traditional social order.
Many southerners assumed that any increase in the franchise would somehow
lead to a reversal of Jim Crow. Stanton, Anthony, and many of their white
suffragist sisters gave in to segregation in order to advocate for their primary
cause: getting the vote for themselves.
I
n 1908, when only four states—all in the West—had given women the vote,
President Roosevelt gave his opinion of enfranchising women. “Personally,”
he said to an Ohio member of NAWSA, “I believe in woman’s suffrage, but
I am not an enthusiastic advocate of it, because I do not regard it as a very
important matter.” He did not, however, think suffrage would “produce any of
the evils feared”—like siphoning women away from motherhood and into the
pigpen of politics. Roosevelt envisioned equality of spirit but not of action. “I
believe,” he wrote, “that man and woman should stand on an equality of right,
but I do not believe that equality of right means identity of functions.” There
were, in Roosevelt’s opinion, proper realms for women and men, and women
should be active at home because “the usefulness of woman is as the mother
of the family.”
6
Reality, however, had already antiquated his beliefs.
Argonia, Kansas, elected the nation’s first woman mayor, Susanna Salter,
in 1887. Seven years later, in 1894, voters elected three women to Colorado’s
state legislature. In 1902, women were more than 50 percent of the undergradu-
ate
students at the University of Chicago. All sorts of career fields opened
up to women: journalism, law, medicine, research, teaching, retail, clerical,
labor agitation, business ownership. Most middle-class working women quit
their jobs upon marriage, but poor women—white and black—generally had
to continue working, the average salary of the average husband being insuf-
ficient to support a family
.
Jane Addams, the pioneering social worker in Chicago who ran Hull House,
was America’s most respected reformer, and her star did not crash until she
spoke out as a pacifist during World War I. Unlike Addams, who never married,
Madam C.J. Walker—born Sarah Breedlove—knew family and fame. Born
to African-American sharecroppers, orphaned, early widowed, and remar-
ried,
Madam Walker concocted a scalp tonic that regenerated hair (or at least
cleaned the follicles well enough to let frustrated locks through to the light of
day). The lotion generated a fortune for her, and she toured the country setting
AMERICAN STORIES
84
up beauty schools and salons. During World War I, she raised bonds for the
war effort, keeping clear of Jane Addams’s descent into disrepute. Although
Madam Walker was an exception to the rule of impoverished black oppres-
sion,
she demonstrated the strength and will power of the socially damned.
As she put it, “I have built my own factory on my own ground.”
7
Neither
African-Americans nor women—and Madam Walker was both—passively
accepted the half-lives that white men offered as broken tokens of an elusive
American dream.
Defining “Pr
ogressivism”: Roosevelt and Robert La Follette
Historians usually dub the first fifteen years of the twentieth century “the
Progressive Era.” What does this phrase mean? In part it is historians’ ac-
ceptance
of a word, “progressive,” that certain politicians of the time applied
to themselves. Robert La Follette—congressman, then governor, and finally
senator from Wisconsin—called himself a “progressive” while, as governor,
he battled against others in Wisconsin who wanted to stymie his efforts to
make democracy direct. Ten years later, in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, in a bid
to regain his old job, formed a new political party, the Progressive, or “Bull
Moose,” Party. He had suffered through the presidency of his old friend Wil-
liam
Howard Taft—whom Roosevelt did not think had the mettle that a chief
executive needed. Now Roosevelt draped himself in a “progressive” aura. If
Teddy Roosevelt and Battling Bob La Follette were both “progressives,” did
they share more than the name? How did their behavior define the term?
Since the 1890s, farmers, including the Wisconsin dairy farmers who were
La Follette’s constituency, and small communities regularly complained about
the seemingly arbitrary prices set by railroad companies. Governor La Follette
took up their cause with the theatrical flourish expected from a former Shake-
spearean
actor (who as a young man decided he was too short for the stage).
La Follette enlisted the data-rich testimony of professors from the University
of Wisconsin. Academics had founded the new fields of sociology, economics,
and anthropology on a shared premise: human society could be understood
and improved. La Follette realized the credibility that trained scholars could
bring to his case, and his ploy worked: in 1905 the Wisconsin Railroad Com-
mission
got the authority to oversee railroads and to modify their rates. (Then
again, the professors from the university demonstrated in their reports that
the railroads were not as capricious as La Follette and his constituents had
argued. Academics were already hard at work upsetting everybody.)
As president, Roosevelt more than once relied on similar tactics: coercing
recalcitrant lawmakers into going along with his ideas in the threatened (and
sometimes revealed) face of evidence compiled by experts. When Sinclair
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A PALETTE OF PROGRESSIVES
Lewis’s book The Jungle was published in 1906, the public grabbed the first
25,000 hot copies and read them with dismay. The Chicago meatpacking
industry apparently had no standards other than to sell “everything but the
squeal.” And “everything” seemed to include rat poison, rat bodies, rat dung,
and any other fleshy matter that happened to end up in a meat grinder. Neither
the public nor Congress had been wholly unaware of the meatpackers’ lax
standards, but Sinclair’s imagery turned enough stomachs to throw the issue
directly into Congress’s lap. When certain legislators resisted passing laws
to better regulate conditions in the stockyards, slaughterhouses, and canning
factories, Roosevelt ordered a commission to immediately investigate and
produce a report. The report came in two parts, the first of which had fewer
disgusting details. Roosevelt released this to the newspapers and threatened
to release the second half, which could have scandalized anyone opposed to
new regulations. On January 1, 1907, the Meat Inspection Act passed, giving
$3 million more to fund the previously cash-poor meat inspectors. The Pure
Food and Drug Act, which established the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA), also became law. While Roosevelt had used La Follette’s tactics to
improve the safety of food and drugs, he resorted to backroom deal making to
convince oppositional congressman to strengthen the government’s oversight
of railroads. Roosevelt was as comfortable wielding the scientific lingo of
progressive reformers as he was chewing cigars with congressmen he may
not have liked but whose votes he needed.
B
elieving that corporate growth was inevitable and often beneficial, Roos-
e
velt was not opposed to big corporations as a rule, although he did think trusts
and mammoth companies ought to be regulated, particularly the railroads.
He shared this peeve with La Follette. Besides, Roosevelt wanted to court
southern voters into the Republican Party, and southern farmers yowled about
the railroads. So there was political capital to be won by lassoing companies
like the Southern Pacific. As it turned out, Roosevelt’s lasso could not really
restrain a railroad. In order to strengthen the Interstate Commerce Commission
(ICC) through the Hepburn Act of 1906, Roosevelt and his congressional al-
lies
had to agree to a disappointing proviso: federal courts could veto any rate
adjustments that the ICC made. That was politics at its most stereotyped—in
order to get anything done, so much water got added to laws that they leaked.
But still Roosevelt could present himself as having made progress with regard
to unfair shipping rates.
F
rom the politicians’ point of view, then, being a progressive meant adjust-
ing
the laws or creating new ones in such a way that government oversaw
business, economy, and labor with an eye toward fairness for all. Except for
the 4 to 6 percent of voters who voted for the Socialist Party ticket, most
Americans—including typical progressives—thought capitalism was a work-
AMERICAN STORIES
86
able arrangement, one that rewarded thrift, hard work, ingenuity, skill, and a
sprig of luck: all parts of the American character. Progressives might differ
in the extent of government involvement they sought (La Follette thought the
Hepburn Act was weak and not worth much), but they generally agreed on
establishing safeguards and basic rules of conduct in order to stabilize what
was obviously becoming the greatest economy ever known.
A
person could be a progressive but not an elected official. Though the Con-
stitution
had created a representative republic rather than a direct democracy,
that did not mean that Americans were prevented from participating as they
saw fit. With the emergence of national magazines and newspapers, a citizen
could stoke the hot embers of public opinion just as surely from an editor’s
desk as from a governor’s. Ida Tarbell demonstrated the power of the citizen’s
pen in her running history of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil (which led
in 1911 to a “trust-busting” that separated Standard Oil into thirteen smaller
companies, one of which is known today as Exxon-Mobil). Other citizens
also used the press, along with their business and political contacts, to adjust
society. Jane Addams, Madam C.J. Walker, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B.
DuBois were all progressives, each in her or his own way, though not one of
them ever held elective office.
Different Paths to Progress: Booker T. Washington, W.E.B.
DuBois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Frances Willard
In 1895 at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia,
a handsome ex-slave named Booker T. Washington took the podium and
spoke a two-part harmony that led to his ascendancy as a premier spokes-
m
an for African-American rights. (However, not all African-descended
citizens of America recognized Washington’s leadership.) Under a southern
sun, Washington did his best to reassure a largely white audience in order
to gain their cooperation. Jim Crow was setting in, sometimes in the ugliest
ways imaginable. Many whites used lynching as a public tool and spectacle,
a kind of macabre sport. Audiences of white families numbering in the tens,
hundreds, and thousands (including children) would arrive at a prearranged
destination (often advertised by railroads) and participate in the hanging,
burning, mutilation, and butchering of black men. It was common for white
people to rush a tied-up black man, cut off his ears, cut off his nose, pour oil
onto the kindling underneath him, and cheer as he burned. Then they would
dig through the ashes for body-part souvenirs. Photos were taken. The pho-
tos
got turned into postcards. Between 1882 and 1901, at least 2,000 people
were lynched in the United States, 90 percent of them black and nearly all
in the South. Booker T. Washington knew his people’s plight, and he knew
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A PALETTE OF PROGRESSIVES
that white people were speeding up segregation, so he reached for an accom-
modation, a compromise.
At
the heart of Washington’s speech lay this thought: “In all things that are
purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all
things essential to mutual progress.” Blacks will accept social segregation in
return for jobs—that is what his speech boiled down to. It was folly to recruit
foreign immigrants to work in the South’s growing factories, Washington told
the whites in the audience, because there was already an eager, trustworthy
pool of available laborers—African-Americans. And it was folly, Washington
said to the black people in the audience, to expect to be elected mayor or made
president of a bank. “We shall prosper,” he said, “in proportion as we learn to
dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common
occupations of life.” Work in the fields, he told his black listeners. Work in
the factories, and for now, forget the loftier dreams: “No race can prosper till
it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we
permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”
8
This was a message
that white supremacists could accept. This was not a message that all black
people thought proper or fitting. W.E.B. DuBois labeled Washington’s speech
“the Atlanta Compromise,” a phrase that could be interpreted as compliment
or criticism—or both.
9
W.E.B. DuBois emerged as Washington’s leading African-American critic.
While Booker T. Washington was establishing the Tuskegee Institute in Ala-
bama,
the center of the cotton South, DuBois earned a PhD at Harvard (the
first African-American to do so) and set to work writing one essay or book
after another. At Tuskegee, Washington taught what were considered practi-
cal,
applicable skills like agricultural science and machining. Washington’s
educational efforts certainly had their successes: from 1900 to 1910, African-
American literacy improved by half, up to 70 percent. At nearby Atlanta Uni-
versity
, DuBois framed a theory of race advancement in which he proposed
that a “talented tenth” of African-Americans receive top-notch educations
and then lead the rest of the race to success and equality, even if they had to
do so without the cooperation of white people.
10
Both men wanted the same
thing for African-Americans, but at least in public they advocated separate
paths, and they used radically different language.
In DuBois’s 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, he called Booker T.
Washington’s methods a “programme of industrial education, conciliation of
the South, and submission and silence as to civil and political rights.” Protest-
ing
that “narrow” vision, DuBois favored instead the example of Frederick
Douglass, who had “bravely stood for the ideals of his early manhood,—
ultimate
assimilation through self-assertion, and no other terms.” Douglass,