Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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88
in other words, had not compromised, had not submitted, had not been silent.
But Douglass had been dead eight years by the time DuBois published The
Souls
of Black Folk, years during which Washington advocated “a gospel of
Work and Money” that “almost completely . . . overshadow[ed] the higher
aims of life”; Washington, DuBois thundered, had practically accepted “the
alleged inferiority of the Negro races.”
W
hat was DuBois’s solution? “By every civilized and peaceful method we
must strive,” he wrote, “for the rights which the world accords to men, cling-
ing
unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would
fain forget: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”
11
These
rights were not forthcoming, however, so in 1909 DuBois, along with white
and black allies, formed the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), a progressive organization if ever there was one.
The NAACP funded legal cases; provided education, guidance, and resources
to black people in need; and advocated for government intervention on behalf
of those same needy people. In the late 1930s, writing columns for The Crisis,
the
official publication of the NAACP, DuBois was still petitioning Congress
to pass antilynching laws, but more than twenty years of petitions lay strangled
on the floor of the Senate by southern lawmakers. DuBois was not the only
one shaking his fist in the air at the spectacle of dangling black men.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett did not have a Harvard PhD like DuBois, nor did she
get invited to dinner at the White House like Booker T. Washington, nor did
she receive millions of dollars in donations from the likes of banker Andrew
J. Carnegie and Madam C.J. Walker, as Washington’s Tuskegee Institute did.
As it turned out, Ida Wells did not need other people’s money to make a stand:
she had teeth and a typewriter. Born a slave in 1862 in Mississippi, Ida Wells
took a teaching job at the age of sixteen after losing her parents to yellow fever.
By 1884, she was living in Memphis, Tennessee, with her aunt and younger
siblings, providing what she could for them. One day, as she was traveling in
a railroad car set aside for women, the conductor came through and told her to
move on to a “smoker” car set aside for blacks, right behind the locomotive.
Protesting this further segregation, Wells refused to budge. The conductor
grabbed her, so she resorted to nature’s natural defense and sank her teeth
into his hand. He went to get a baggage handler to help. They dragged her off
the train, and men and women on board clapped in approval.
I
da Wells pursued a lawsuit against the railroad under the 1875 Civil Rights
Act, which forbade segregation in public conveyances like railroads. She could
remember, years later, a newspaper headline that snidely greeted official word
of her initial success against the railroad: “DARKY DAMSEL GETS DAM-
89
A PALETTE OF PROGRESSIVES
AGES.”
12
Later the state supreme court overturned the local court’s ruling. So
Ida Wells turned to journalism. First she wrote about her own experiences, and
then she began investigating other people’s stories. Tragedy gave her work a
focus: in 1892, three friends were lynched, three black grocers whose store
was attacked by neighboring white grocers enraged by the competition from
black men. Her friends—Henry, Thomas, and Calvin—fought back, injuring
a few of the attackers. Custom in the South, however, made the injuring of a
white man by a black man a crime, no matter that it happened in self-defense.
The three black grocers were in jail, awaiting trial, when a lynch mob broke
in and killed them. Ida Wells wrote the story. As the months passed, she
investigated further and concluded that racialized sexuality led to lynching:
white men viewed black men as sexual predators prowling after the magnolia
scent of virtuous white women, but the truth was that white women were
inviting black men to have sex. In Wells’s words, “White men lynch the of-
fending
Afro-American, not because he is a despoiler of virtue, but because
he succumbs to the smiles of white women.”
13
White men from Memphis,
maddened by Wells’s accusations, destroyed her offices and equipment, so
she moved to a region somewhat more accepting of her revelations: the North,
and ultimately Chicago.
H
ow was a single, essentially broke, young black woman supposed to make
her way in the world, particularly after the taboo-breaking thesis of her story
about lynching in Memphis and elsewhere? Networks existed to give her
shelter: networks of church, race, women, and career. The African Methodist
Episcopal (AME) Church had become a nationwide force for black cultural
and spiritual life. In fact, the pastor of the Memphis AME church had been
an early supporter of Wells’s writing. Now AME sisters in New York City
took Ida Wells into their homes. At the same time, she was a member of the
Negro Press Association, another organization that could provide contacts
for shelter and, at least as important, work. She toured the Northeast, sharing
her insights by writing and lecturing; and she made two trips to England and
Scotland, where she helped found an antilynching committee. This was the
flowering of Wells as progressive reformer.
Lynching; sharecropping as the only option available to feed one’s family;
prison chain gangs made up almost entirely of black men convicted on minor
charges and forced to labor for years grading roads, building levees, picking
their former masters’ cotton; theft of the vote from most southern blacks;
and lack of the vote for most women in America: these were variations on an
oppressive theme. One oppression looked like another to Ida B. Wells, so she
joined efforts with fellow agitators and reformers. During 1893 she worked
with Frederick Douglass to publicize the exclusion of African-Americans
from free and open participation in the Chicago World’s Fair. (No wonder
AMERICAN STORIES
90
it was known as the “White City.”) By 1895, she had formed relationships
with Susan B. Anthony and Jane Addams, and she was present in 1909 at the
formation of the NAACP, where her association with DuBois set her at odds
with the softer-toned Booker T. Washington. Like DuBois, Wells demanded
justice and did not tolerate waiting if something could be done to hasten a
better world.
The
NAACP came out in favor of woman suffrage, another testament to
the shared interests and visions of the people who joined hands as often as
possible to make American equality more than a hollow phrase. Yet this rosy
portrait of white and black, rich and poor, northern and southern reformers
singing “hallelujah” together is only one scene from a larger progressive col-
lage.
Jane Addams was the founder of Hull House in Chicago, a sprawling
complex of buildings dedicated to educating immigrant families, especially
women, and offering needed child-care and health-care services. Addams
inherited her father’s small fortune and received generous donations from
American industrialists, much as Washington did at Tuskegee. Their labors
were acceptable to powerful white men. Ida Wells-Barnett (who hyphenated
her name when she got married to a Chicago newspaperman in 1895) never
had Addams’s success at soliciting donations, largely because men and women
rarely deemed her acceptable. After all, Wells-Barnett exposed the guarded
lie at the heart of Victorian morals: white women had sexual urges as real
as anyone else’s, and as varied. In her books and pamphlets, Wells-Barnett
provided incontrovertible evidence (often from interviews) that white women
in the North and South happily slept with black men.
Frances
Willard—merrily writing about the unbounded joys of bicycle
riding—presided over the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU),
composed mainly of middle-class and upper-class white women. In the mid-
1890s, the WCTU had a membership ten times the size of Susan B. Anthony’s
suffrage association. In other words, banning alcohol was more important to
more women at the turn of the century than was getting the vote for them-
selves.
Hatchet-wielding crazies like Carry Nation (who chopped up snazzy
bars and dive saloons throughout Kansas, and published a magazine titled
The Smasher’s Mail) might not receive the WCTU’s active endorsement, but
saloon-smashing and public embarrassment of bottle tippers met with more
encouragement than Wells-Barnett’s positively racy subject matter. In 1894,
the WCTU half-heartedly denounced lynching by resolving to oppose lynch-
ing
without actually passing the resolution. The white women of the WCTU
fundamentally could not see black men as both legally and sexually innocent.
Willard was aghast at Wells-Barnett’s imputation that white women were
lusting after black men: “It is my firm belief that in the statements made by
MISS WELLS concerning white women having taken the initiative in name-
91
A PALETTE OF PROGRESSIVES
less acts between the races, she has put an imputation upon half the white
race in this country that is unjust, and save in the rarest exceptional instances,
wholly without foundation.” In other words, white women did not sleep with
black men as far as Willard and the “most disinterested and observant leaders
of opinion” (whoever they were) were concerned.
14
Although both women
proudly waved the suffrage banner, race and social class kept them from
agreeing on the matter most central to Wells-Barnett. In 1895, Wells rebuked
“that great Christian body,” the WCTU, for opposing the “social amusement
of card playing, athletic sports and promiscuous dancing” and “the licensing
of saloons” while failing to adopt the antilynching resolution.
15
Actually,
Frances Willard did mean for the resolution to pass, but the southern delegates
had opposed it. Southern race sentiments prevented the WCTU from officially
condemning lynching just as they later did in Congress.
Congress
and enough states constitutionally prohibited alcohol produc-
tion
and distribution via the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919. And through
the Nineteenth Amendment women got the vote nationally in 1920. Though
the House of Representatives twice passed antilynching bills, Congress never
passed a federal law. Frances Willard’s white finger was closer to the pulse
of the nation than was Ida Wells-Barnett’s black finger, if only because there
were more white people than black.
Birth Contr
ol and Conservation: Margaret Sanger and
Giff
ord Pinchot
As far back as the 1860s, some Americans had decided that sexual literature,
pictures, and chitchat had become far too free. Anthony Comstock, a United
States Post Office inspector from 1873–1915, was a New York evangelical
who believed that pictures of nude people were the devil’s tools that could
turn a person’s “thoughts away from God and undermine all aspirations for
holy things.” In 1873 Comstock inspired the passage of the Comstock Act,
federal legislation aimed at prohibiting the dissemination of any “obscene [or]
lewd” information through the mail system or across state lines—including
pamphlets pertaining to what would later be called “birth control” education.
Comstock and his congressional supporters wanted to legislate one moral vi-
sion
dependent on their sense of the word “obscene,” a concept notoriously
difficult to define. They condemned not just pornography but contraceptives:
the only acceptable means of birth control was to abstain from intercourse.
Comstock classified contraceptives as illicit and any discussion of them as
“pornographic.” He thought advertisements for douches, sponges, and con-
doms
might “arouse in young and inexperienced minds, lewd or libidinous
thoughts.” The purpose of sex was to make babies, not to have fun. Residents
AMERICAN STORIES
92
of New England states were more in line with Comstock’s thinking than resi-
dents of any other region. In Connecticut, all contraceptives were banned, and
their use was made a felony. Altogether, twenty-four states passed regulations
similar to the Comstock Act. Laws were one thing, however, and behavior
another. Most Americans were neither as patient nor as restrained as Comstock,
who told a reporter from Harper’s Ma
gazine in 1915 that people who did not
use “self-control” were choosing to “sink to the level of the beasts.”
16
At the same time the progressive but decorous reformer Jane Addams was
busy in Chicago following annoyed trash collectors to make sure they actually
collected the trash; compiling statistics about the city’s crime and poverty; and
trying to oust the corrupt (if sometimes helpful) ward boss and city alderman,
Johnny Powers, who gave out thousands of turkeys to ward residents with
money he had pocketed from city transit fares that were twice as high in his
ward as the average fare anywhere else in Chicago, the progressive Margaret
Sanger was busy in New York City handing out information on birth control.
Sanger was Anthony Comstock’s nightmare.
By no means did people in the United States agree about the proper way
to better society. Anthony Comstock believed he was safeguarding all people,
and young people in particular, from falling into debauched lives. His Society
for the Suppression of Vice had the ear of government, and much like Jane
Addams in Chicago, who sought to enlist legislators in her causes, Comstock
worked with lawmakers to enact his programs for “moral” control, which he
could then police through his job with the Postal Service. Margaret Sanger
fundamentally disagreed with Comstock. Born in 1879 in Corning, New York,
she became a nurse, moved to Manhattan, and married a free-spirited but
failed artist. Sanger immersed herself in the liberal experimentation of New
York’s Greenwich Village, not a tame place even 100 years ago. She sipped
absinthe with avant-garde writers, but she also worked daily as a nurse with
mothers burdened by too many children and too little access to the knowledge
that could improve their lives.
The
wealthy could afford to have many children. Theodore Roosevelt had
six, and they were sent to Groton and Harvard, schools whose annual tuition
exceeded what most working people made in a year. The poor women that
Sanger visited in their dank apartments often resorted to self-induced abor-
tions
or abortions typically performed in unsanitary conditions by operators
lacking proper training. The results were frequently deadly, and Sanger
argued that these women needed access to useful information about “birth
control,” a phrase that she coined. Sanger’s own mother had died at fifty after
having eleven children and seven miscarriages, and Sanger was certain that
too many children and too many pregnancies had ruined her mother’s health
and shortened her life.
93
A PALETTE OF PROGRESSIVES
Sanger’s patients invigorated her commitment to social justice. In 1913,
as a regular columnist for a socialist-inclined newspaper, she wrote an article
on venereal disease, and post office inspector Anthony Comstock banned her
column with a wave of his imperious pen. She responded by publishing an
article titled “What Every Girl Should Know. Nothing; by Order of the U.S.
Post Office.”
17
His was the power of the law enraged by a caustic strain of the
self-righteous; hers was the power of the martyr. Margaret Sanger continued
to write about birth control options, and in 1915 she was indicted on charges
(later dropped) of having violated the Comstock laws by sending contraceptive
diaphragms through the mail. She escaped briefly to Europe, and while she
was gone, her husband, William Sanger, was arrested for passing out copies
of one of her birth control pamphlets. Upon her return, Bill was sentenced
to thirty days in jail by a judge who said, “Your crime is not only a violation
of the laws of man, but of the law of God as well, in your scheme to prevent
motherhood,” a ruling obviously not free of bias, nor reassuring in its concrete
mixture of church and state.
18
During the trial, Anthony Comstock caught a
cold that turned into pneumonia and killed him shortly afterward. Margaret
Sanger went on to open the country’s first birth control clinic, in 1916, for
which she was arrested. In 1921 she founded the American Birth Control
Clinic, the origin of Planned Parenthood. She advocated for a birth control
pill and for population control because she worried that the earth would not
be able to support the unchecked growth of humanity.
Incidentally, the legislators of North Carolina were also worried about
population expansion, so in 1937, they passed the nation’s first state-funded
program for dispensing contraceptives. “Ironically,” as historian Sarah Jane
Deutsch puts it, “North Carolina’s reasoning was not that birth control was a
human right but that birth control would reduce the black population.”
19
The examples of Jane Addams, Margaret Sanger, and many thousands of
other women show that feminism was a progressive cause. Another progres-
sive
cause was conservation. President Theodore Roosevelt loved the wild
and realized that nature must be conserved if the planet and its inhabitants
were to survive.
T
wo advisers, John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, urged Roosevelt to set aside
millions of acres in federal lands as national forests and reserves. But Muir and
Pinchot differed as to goals and souls. Muir was a gifted writer who thought
land should be set aside and “preserved” for its own value, its own inherent
and sublime beauty. He spent years living in the California forests now part
of Yosemite National Park. Roosevelt spent a few splendid days hiking and
camping with Muir; the two shared a kindred spirit when it came to the draw
of forests and mountains. But Roosevelt was a president of forests and of
people, and his was a vision of active citizens and active business. Where
AMERICAN STORIES
94
Muir urged making federal lands wholly unavailable to loggers, miners,
and recreationists, Gifford Pinchot suggested “conservation” as an alterna-
tive—which
has become the basis of U.S. Forest Service doctrine and policy.
Pinchot had the same Harvard background as Roosevelt, and though Pinchot
was a zealot for his cause, his was a zealotry that Roosevelt could support
politically. The logging and mining industries wanted open access to trees
and minerals, and their representatives complained that restrictions on access
would hurt their business. Although the number one cause of loss of jobs in
the logging, lumber, and mining industries was (and remains) new technolo-
g
ies, these extractive industries convinced themselves and their constituencies
that environmental regulations were a problem. Roosevelt’s answer was to
place Gifford Pinchot as the head of the newly created Forest Service and to
give him vast control over an additional 16 million acres that Roosevelt set
aside as federal reserves during a ten-day spurt of environmental activism. In
late February 1907, Congress passed a law, set to go into effect within days,
that would prevent a president from unilaterally creating new federal land
reserves in six northwestern states. In what many considered a dubious move,
right before signing the new law into effect on March 4, Roosevelt put those
chunks of land—together bigger than many eastern states—out of reach of
loggers and miners. Then Pinchot sent his forest rangers, a job he created,
out to police the trees.
T
he lofty goals of progressives—saving trees, saving women from unending
labors, saving women from forced prostitution, keeping corporations from
forming monopolies, ensuring the safety of food and drugs—enjoyed a heyday
not to be savored again until the 1960s. Progressivism as a union of reformers
with government might have failed eventually, but international events came
crashing into the reformers’ party in the first two decades of the new century.
Worldwide war wrecked just about everything good.
Lines in the Water
From February 1899 until 1902, the United States fought a brutal war against
the forces of Emilio Aguinaldo’s Philippine government, which had adopted
the hit-and-run guerrilla tactics previously used by the Cubans against the
Spanish. In response, the United States rounded up civilians and placed them
in concentration camps, much as the Spanish had done in Cuba—ironically,
one of the original reasons the United States had gone to war against Spain.
Roosevelt approved of the U.S. militarism in the Philippines, having said in
1899 that the United States should “keep the islands and . . . establish therein
a stable and orderly government, so that one more fair spot of the world’s
surface shall have been snatched from the forces of darkness.” Never mind
95
A PALETTE OF PROGRESSIVES
the Filipinos’ government or their constitution. Roosevelt believed “it is only
the warlike power of a civilized people that can give peace to the world.”
20
One method used by U.S. troops to gain information about Filipino troops
was to force captives to drink gallons of water, which they would then vomit
up—euphemistically referred to as the “water cure.” When the war in the
Philippines ended in July 1902, nearly one year after Roosevelt’s time as
president had begun, 4,200 U.S. soldiers were dead, along with at least 20,000
Filipino soldiers. About 200,000 Filipino civilians had died, some gunned
down by U.S. troops, many others the casualties of the concentration camps
and resultant epidemics of cholera that camp living encouraged.
F
rom that point on, the U.S. Army and Navy were never to be at their small,
prewar levels. In order to maintain American “strategic” interests around the
globe, the U.S. military gained added numbers and added roles, including
repeated interventions in the Caribbean and Central America, sometimes to
depose governments not amenable to U.S. economic wishes, sometimes to
establish the kind of governance deemed acceptable by U.S. administrators.
For example, when the Cubans were freed of Spanish rule in 1898, they set
about writing a constitution. In 1901, U.S. negotiators coerced the Cubans
into implanting the Platt Amendment within their constitution. The Platt
Amendment gave the United States the right to militarily intervene in Cuba
“for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a govern-
ment
adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and
for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the treaty of
Paris on the United States.”
21
In 1906, the Liberal Party of Cuba went into
open revolt due to certain problems, including election fraud. When Roosevelt
threatened military action and sent U.S. troops, both Cuban parties submitted
to American arbitration, led by William Howard Taft, former head of the U.S.
provisional government in the Philippines and later Roosevelt’s successor in
the White House. The Platt Amendment remained in effect until 1934. Other
military interventions occurred in the Dominican Republic, in Nicaragua, and
in Haiti. Roosevelt’s biggest coup, however, took place in a narrow northern
strip of Colombia.
The
land strip was known as Panama, through which the French had tried
for ten years to dig a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific (at the loss of more
than 20,000 lives). Panama was a potential gold mine to any group capable of
funding and finishing the canal. In late 1903, the United States sent a naval
ship to support a coup led by a scheming Frenchman named Philippe-Jean
Bunau-Varilla. Local Panamanians declared their independence, which the
United States conveniently recognized within days. In exchange, Panama
granted the United States the rights to dig and indefinitely operate a canal.
Roosevelt considered this one of his greatest achievements, and he denied
AMERICAN STORIES
96
that the United States had done anything wrong with regard to Colombia.
The canal would permit rapid deployment of the U.S. Navy from ocean to
ocean, allowing the United States to keep the meddlesome Europeans out of
American matters—a policy dubbed the Roosevelt Corollary, an extension of
the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. The United States reaffirmed its pledge to keep
Europe out of the American continents, but events overseas would eventually
suck the United States into the European continent in a war that American
citizens strenuously wanted to avoid.
Notes
1. Susan B. Anthony, Lynn Sherr, ed., Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony
In Her Own Words (New York: Times Books, 1995), 277.
2. F
rances E. Willard, A Wheel Within A Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle
With Some Reflections by the Way (New York: F.H. Revell, 1895), 10–11, 73.
3. Statutes
at Large, “An act to protect all citizens in their civil and legal rights,”
Mach 1, 1875, 43rd Congress, 2nd Session, Volume 18, Part 3, p. 336, http://memory.
loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=022/llsl022.db&recNum=365.
4
. R
onald H. Bayor, ed., The Columbia Documentary History of Race and Ethnic-
ity in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 347, 351.
5. Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle, eds., The Concise History of Woman Suffrage
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 219.
6.
Joseph Bucklin Bishop, ed., Theodore Roosevelt and His Time Shown in His
Own Letters, (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), 2: 148.
7. A’Lelia Bundles, On
Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J.
Walker (New York: Scribner, 2001), 136.
8. Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (New York:
Doubleday, Page, 1902), 220–222.
9. W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: A.C. McClurg,
1903), 31.
10. W.E.B. DuBois, “The Talented Tenth,” from Booker T. Washington, ed., The
Ne
gro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative Negroes of To-day (New York:
James Pott, 1903), 29–34.
1
1. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 31, 35, 36, 42.
12.
Jinx Coleman Broussard, Giving a Voice to the Voiceless: Four Pioneering
Black Women Journalists (New York: Routledge, 2003), 33.
13. Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin, eds., Black Women in Nineteenth-
Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 255.
14.
Trudier Harris, ed., Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 227.
15. Harris, ed., Selected Works, 235.
16.
Mary Alden Hopkins, “Birth Control and Public Morals: An Interview with
Anthony Comstock,” Harper’s Weekly, May 22, 1915, 489–490.
17.
Gail Collins, America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and
Heroines (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 341.
97
A PALETTE OF PROGRESSIVES
18. Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Move-
ment in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 127.
19. Sarah Jane Deutsch, “From Ballots to Breadlines, 1920–1940,” in Nancy F.
Cott, ed., No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States (Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 452.
20.
Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (New York:
Century, 1902), 35–37.
21. Platt Amendment, www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=55&page
=transcript