A Study in Negro

8/8/2019 A Study in Negro

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THE MUCKRAKERS' ATTITUDE TOWARD THE NEGRO;A STUDY IN BENIGHTED NEGLECT

byDavid P. Aldstadt

As the twentieth cen tury dawned in America, progressive reforms were being institutedin many large cities and a number of Western and M idw estern states. Ab out this time thereappeared a group of writers w ho aided th e Progressives in their attempts to make th e publicaware of its problem s and its power to do som ethi ng about them. These "Muckrakers" wereinvaluable to the Progressives because their writing, published in widely read magazines an dnewspapers , helped to focus public attention on the more flagrant social evils of the day .

There was, however , on e par t icular segment of the social order which w as largelyoverlooked by the Progressives. They ignored the problem of race and the social and politicallimitations which were put upon the Negro in American society. The basic problem herevas th e fact tha t m a n y Progressives were Southerners w ho s imply refused to recognize th eNegro as anyth ing but a second class citizen. That they failed to take up the cause of theNegro is not necessar i ly a condemna t ion of the Progressives. They we re, after all, productsof their age - an age that accepted w ithou t question the basic inferiori ty of the Negro an ddoubted his abil ity to operate as an intelligent citizen in a democratic society.

The Muckrakers, too, gave little attention to the problem of race bu t did , at least,recognize that it existed. As such, they provided one of the few vehicles fo r br inging a t ten-tion to the exis tence of one of the biggest problems of Amer ican democracy .

At the end of the Civi l War the Negro num bered around four million . By 1900 hehad doubled his num ber s. W hat is more, he had begun to move into the city and to competewith th e poorer whi tes and the i ncoming immigran ts in the labor market . A s a result of this,Southern attitudes on racism found ready acceptance among many of the Northern laboringclasses with th e result that th e Negro w as excluded from m u c h of the Progressive legislationof the era . As C. Va nn Woodward points out in h is Strange Career of Jim Crow, the Negro,


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by 1900, had actually regressed from th e s tandpo in t of attaining social and political rightssince th e Civil War.1 A n attitude had grown up that segregation of the Negro and hispolit ical d i s f r a n c h i s e m e n t was a natural state of affairs and to try to change this state ofaffairs w as, practic ally speaking, impossible in fact, a defiance of natural law. WilliamGraham Sumner ' s d ictum th t "s t a t eways do no t make fo lkways" became th e rationale fo rthose who would oppose leg islat ion favorable to the Negro. That the Negro had not alwaysbeen d isfranchised or strictly segregated and tha t there were, in fact, "forgotten alternatives"to the Negro problem is poin ted out by Woodward, but the fact rem ain ed that these alterna-tives were, indeed, forgot ten an d Sumner ' s d i c tum fully accepted. The situation in 1900,then , was one of "capi tu lat ion to racism" on the par t of just about every element of society.2Northern l iberals, desi rous of polit ical union with Southern liberals, abandoned their tradi-t ional stand against Southern racism and the N o r t h and the South were reunited polit icallyat th e expense of the Negro. Am eric an imperial ism also len t it s effects to the crumbling re -sistance to rac i sm. "A s America shouldered th e Whi te Man ' s Burden sh e took up at thesame t ime ma ny Southern at t i tudes on the subject of race."3 At the same t ime, whateverin ternal resistance to racism that there was wi thin the South was crumbling as the contest be-tween conservativies an d liberals took on an increasingly racist character. Populism, adoctr ine which had orig inal ly been non-racial in n ature , developed racist tenden cies when itbecame obvious that it could not control th e Negro vote.

The r esult of the above was a type of permi ssion to hate wh ich fo un d its rationale inSumner's statement. A s Woodward says , "it was the contention of Sumner's classic Folk-ways . . . that ' legislation cannot make mores' an d tha t ' s ta teways cannot change folkways' .Sumner described these 'folkways' as ' un i form, un iversal in the group, imperative, an d invari-able. ' Perhaps i t was not h is in ten t ion , bu t Sumner ' s teachings len t credence to the existenceof a primieval rock of human nature upon which the waves of leg islat ion beat in vain."4

Ironically, the racists in institutin g the Jim C row law s of the period were, in a sense,successful in doing jus t what Sumner said could not be done change fo lkways by state-w ays. They w ere able to give the prestige of the law to the fact that the Negro w as inferiorand gave segregationists a legal excuse for their actions.

Agitation in the North against th e Southern t reatment of the Negro brought forth aSouthern rat ional izat ion of its posi t ion which w as accepted by m u c h of the nat ion as a whole.Ci t i ng Northern lynchings and the t reatment of Negro laborers as examples, they held that


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the Negro w as actually better off in the South because they, th e Southerners, understood th eNegro. The Negro w as uniquely th e Southerner's problem he had l ived with th e Negroall hi s life and he knew how he thought an d acted. This argument w as cogently presented inmany magazines and newspapers of the time. Perhaps the most prestigious and well writtenarguments appeared in an article written by Thomas Nelson Page, a Southern author an dlater Woodrow Wilson's ambassador to Italy, for McClure's Magazine.5 Page's article waswri t ten at the request of S.S. McC lure w ho, because h e was concerned abo ut the race prob-lem, was seeking to generate-interest in i t by g ivin g it as mu ch publicity as possible. Slavery,said Page, had been good for the Negro, "indeed, this very period of slavery in America hadgiven to him the only semblance of civilization which the Negro race possessed since the dawnof history . ... It left him a trained laborer and i n good physical condi t ion ." When th ew ar ended, "scarcely an adu lt w as not a trained laborer or a skilled artisan." 0 W h a t w a smore, the South had faithfully applied itself to giv ing the "Negroes all the opportunitiesnecessary for a ttaining an education", and the result w as simply that the Negro had used hisopportunity to "oppose th e white race."7 Page divided Negroes into three classes. The firstclass consisted of the educated Negro, a type usually "quite disreputable" and concerned withmak ing trouble. This proved the futility of givin g him an education . The second class wasth e "sensible" types the ones without education but trained in slavery and therefore the"backbone" of the race. The third class was the totally ign ora nt Negroes. These made upth e largest part of the race and were people w ith whom one could not reason.

The Negro, said Page, had accomplished little s ince em anc ipa t ion an d w h a t he had ac-complished had been done for him by w hi te men in the South. The N egro had, in fact ,regressed since emancipation an d segregation was, therefore, th e result of failure on the par tof th e Negro to hold hi s ow n. Page ended his article with a quote f rom Wil l i am Hann iba lThomas, which, said Page, was al l the more valid because Thomas himself was a Negro:"All w ho know th e Negro recognize, however, that th e chief an d overpower ing c lemen t in hismake-up is an imperious sexual impulse ." In summ ary, Page averred that w hat he hadwritten were the v iews of "people who know and understan d the Negro."8

Prevailing att i tudes and growing legal l imi ta t ions combined to make the Negro'ssituation at the turn of the century the worst i t had been since em anc ipatio n. Ignored byth e important polit ical parties, including th e Progressives, an d victim of a feeling which heldthat i t was hopeless an d even dangerous to try and help th e Negro, he had few champions .


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Negro self-help attempts such as Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise, the.UrbanLeague, and the NAACP only served to point out the fact that the solution to the Negroproblem needed the help of concerned whites. But this w as slow in coming an d those con-cerned, tho ugh sincere, w ere limited by their ow n prejudices . This w as very much the caseinsofar as the Muckrakers were concerned.

Nevertheless, it is not surprising that when S.S. McClure began hi s magazine, th eNegro would receive some attention. _In 1904, McC lure comm issioned Carl Schurz to writean article stating the case for the Negro. This article had the desired effect of elicitingresponse in m a n y of the leading magazines of the day including the one by Page." Thearticle demolished th e a rgument tha t th e Nor therner had no r ight to discuss th e "peculiar prob-lem" of the South: "Un dou btedly there are in the South men who u nde rstand their neigh-bors' interests best; bu t there are others who do not understand those interests at all, an d whoseopinions in several important historic instances have overruled the opinions of those whodid."10 He goes on to show by statistics that the Ne gro, contrary to prejudiced opinion s thenpopular , would in fact work without compuls ion if given th e chance. I t was true that alarge portion of the Negro population w as ignoran t , but it was also true that many votingwhites were just as ignorant . His solution to this problem would be to give the Negro abetter educat ion. T o those w ho argued that edu cat io n made th e Negro unfit fo r work and at rouble-maker, he provided statistics to show w h a t th e educated Negro had accomplished.

Schurz agreed that giving th e ballot to the Negro willy-nil ly had been a mistake an dthat this should have been done gradually. B ut, taking th e vote away f rom him at this stagew as uncon st i tut ional , immo ral , and dangerous to the working of a proper democracy. Hispoints were well argued but it is significant to note that this article, considered to be the mostprogressive t rea tment of the Negro at tha t t ime, made no case fo r social equality. In conclu-s ion, Schurz allowed that th e Negro w as p r o b a b l y intel lectually inferior to the whi te m a n :"They will also be able to show tha t , even supposing th e average negro not to be able to reachthe level of the average white man, the negro m ay reach a much higher level than he now oc-cupies, an d tha t , for his own good as well as the good of society, he should be brought upto as high a level as he can reach."11

Throughout th e per iod, McClure's con t inued to give limited attention to the Negroproblem. Perhaps the most sensational treatmsnt was two articles on lynching by Ray Stan-nard Baker.1- This Muckraker was so affected by what he found that he became the most

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prominent wri ter on the racial problem.Baker's lynching articles typified Muckraking treatment an d philosophy. They felt

that, in most cases, a simple but in-depth factual account served th e best purpose in callingattention to social problems. They liked to let the facts speak fo r themselves. According-ly , fo r instance, McClure's gave equal time to Schurz an d Page while offering little editorialcom men t. Baker's articles w ere in line w ith this approach. He simply wrote wh at he sawan d heard , g iv ing graphic an d detailed accounts of the lynch ing of Negroes while pointingout the fai lure of the law to prevent th e crime from occuring and i ts inept i tude in dea l ing w i thth e lynch mobs. Typical ly , Bakers art icles deal t wi th lynching in both th e North and theSouth.

The articles dealing with th e racial problem in McClure's w e r e not numerous an dthere was little offered in the w ay of analysis or solutio ns. Indeed, from 1904 to 1915,there were only the articles by Schurz, Page and Baker p lus one by Wil l iam Archer whogave anything but an enlightened treatment of the issue.13 Archer, a Southerner, offered ye tanother Southern analysis to the treatment of the Negro. It is in teres t ing to note that thereappeared no refutation of his arguments on the pages of the leadi ng M uckrakin g journal. Allof th e tradi tional ph obias an d prejudices were included in the article with primary emphasison th e Negro's sexual drives . Archer argued again st th e Atlanta Compromise on the basisthat , "if the Atlanta Compromise w ere possible in every w ay , it w o u l d be impossible on theside of sex. For two races to dwell side by side in la rge numbers , and to be prohibitedfrom coming together in legal marriage, is u n w h o l e so m e an d demora l i z ing to both."14 Thiscomment , taken out of context, sounds like an a r g u m e n t agains t segregat ion , if Archer ha dbeen a mo ralist . He goes further, how ever, and argues tha t in termarr iage could not be per-mitted because of the "essential an d innate inferiority of the negro." Also, th e Negro had alo w moral standard an d thus Southern manhood would be sorely tempted.35

Though the McClure's articles prom pted a num ber of replies in the magazin es of theday, i t is somewhat of a gauge of the relative importance which "enlightened" Americans as -signed to the problems of the Negro that this most famous of al l Muckraking magazines de-voted so little space to it. There sim ply were other, more pressing, issues at the t ime. Therew as no refutation tha t the Negro was physiologically, mentaly, or socially inferior to thewhite. The Negro should have polit ical equality in a democracy and he should be protectedfrom i n h u m a n e t reatment , but further than this the M uckrake r d id not go . There was no

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really deep assessment of the evils of social inferiority. It is, therefore, little wonder that ac-compl ishment w as small when on the one hand i t was argued that th e Negro should be givenequal political rights, and on the other agreed that he was an inferior being. I t was simplytoo easy then to argue that a properly run democracy could not allow itself to be hamperedby a section of the electorate which le t itself be dictated by passion rather than intell igence.To allow th e Negro political equality w as dangerous. That th e Muckraker defended the firstargument but admitted to the second was not so m u c h a c om m e n t on his shortsightedness asproof that he was a pr oduc t of his age.

Giv ing fa r more space an d attention to the Negro problem than McClure's was amagazine called the Independent. This magazine, l ike McClure's, gave space to both sidesof th e questions an d here one can find well-argued reasons as to why the Negro was theSoutherner 's problem and why the Negro deserved no better than he got.10 On the otherh a n d , Booker T. Washington was a regula r cont r ibutor to the magaz ine , and in a num be rof articles m a de a case for the fact tha t th e Negro, if given the chance, w as able an d willingto help h imself .17 There was, however, no mention of political or social rights in his articles.There w as also a series of articles dealing with th e Negro's situation in various Northerncities such as Cincinnati , Syracuse, and Cleveland. Here, the main point dr iven home wastha t de facto segregation was as much a fact in the North as in the South.18 This "look toyour ow n nest" attitude w as another argument which typified th e Muckrakers' treatment ofthe Negro. They were always very careful to po in t out the universality of the problem an dth e fact tha t th e North had no r ight to take a hol ier than thou attitude toward th e South wherethe Negro w as concerned. This, of course, w as quite true but it inadvertently strengthenedthe Southern a rgument that it was the Southerner w ho really understood th e Negro and hisproblems and that hi s t rea tment of the Negro w as better because of it.

The editorial staff of The Independent gave m or e c om m e n t to the racial situation thanthat of any Mu ckraki ng magaz in e . Hardly an issue appeared during this period which didnot deal with some aspect of race. There were editorials deal ing with pay for Negro teachers,Negro convict labor, lynching an d dis f ranch isement . The editor of the magaz ine was one ofthe fe w whi te writers of the day who actually took a s tand on the fact t ha t th e Negro w asnot inferior to the w h i t e m a n : "Those who try to keep th e negro in subjection ar e ignorantof negroes and of hu m an nature . They believe negroes are natural ly inferior to white people.That ha s never been proved and is very doubtful . " 1 0 H e was , however , just as misguided as

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ma ny others on ano ther important poin t: "Negroes do not ask for social equality . W hat theyask for is simple equality of legal rights."-0

There was only one Muckraker of major importance who devoted a t tent ion to theNegro problem. A s indicated above, this was Ray Stann a rd Baker . Bes ides his articles fo rMcClure's, he wrote on the racial situation in The Independent, th e Arena, th e AmericanMagazine, and the Cosmopolitan. He is also responsible for the most complete and in-depthstudy of the Negro dur ing th is per iod in a series of articles for the American. These werelater published in book form?1

His ideas an d attitudes on he racial issue best sum up the ideas an d attitudes of theM uckra kers as a group. Perhap s his best article was one published in The Independent in1909. In the article, Ba ke r deals with his answer to, and refutation of, a decision of the U.S.Supreme Court upholding a decis ion of the Kentucky Supreme Court which forbade coedu-cation of whites an d blacks in Berea College. Th e decision of the Supreme Court, saidBaker , w as essentially a decision dealing with th e l imita t ion of democracy in America: "De-mocracy is not l a w , not customs, not institutions. Democracy is a spirit. And if that spiritdoes not prevail among our people, should we retain laws on the statute books which we donot intend to obey?" The North was no different from the South in this: "We have nostones to cast at the South. This is our problem too." Ba ker bel ieved that th e "SupremeCourt decision in the Berea College case ha s been attacked in some quarters, but does i t notrepresent the real views of the mass of American citizens?" He criticized Am ericans as hy-pocrites: "It is not the negro who is wrong, but the democracy. The final test of any de-mo cracy is its hum ble st citizen." Dem ocracy, said, Bak er, w as manifested in the spirit whichprevailed among it s citizens. He felt that whi te cit izens did not have to eat with th e Negronor marry daugh ter s to his sons. "W e cannot look fo r l a w s to accomplish what th e spiritback of them does not w a r r a n t . " The Americans needed a revival of the spirit of demo-cracy and this could be atta ined only by the old fashioned remedies of education an d pas-sionate preach ing of the "religion of service."22 A s such, of course. Baker was a disciple ofWilliam G r a h a m Su m n e r .

Baker 's book, Following the Color Line, was a statem ent of the condition of the N egroin A m e r i c a n life in w h i c h he reiterated in his conc lus ions essentially th e same as discussedabove. We have the Negro w ith us , said Baker , inferior or n ot. Socially he may rem ainsegregated, politically he cannot, if our democracy is to survive.

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Our present day society has come to the realization that the Negro in our societywill never attain true political equality without an equal amount of social equality. We havealso come to realize that true gains over prejudice can only be obtained when laws are in-stituted to deal with them. This has been borne out by the fact that the Negro's very real gainsin the last ten years have come through the operation an d institution of intelligent legislationdealing with the problem.

In 1900 his w as not the case. It w as simply accepted that law s could not help tochange peoples' na tural prejudices. ^"Social equality, it was believed, was undesirable, not onlyfrom the standpoint of the white man, but the Negro as well. As a result of this prevailingbelief, whatever w as done for the Negro and the problem of race in American society ha dto do with ma kin g the Negro politically equal. The N A A C P is a good example of this con-cept. As men of their time, the Muckrakers followed this line of reasoning. They couldnot be expected to have foresight beyond the limitations of p revai ling attitudes and acceptedtruth. We of a later age know that political equality is a sham if social equality is notachieved. But we have the advantage of a generation of racial strife to teach us this lesson.The Muc krake r was not concerned abo ut the Negro as a person, but about the limitations ofthis constitutional rights as detrimental to democratic society. As such he never really came togrips with th e essential problem.

An othe r poin t to be mad e regarding the Mu ckrak ers' treatme nt of the Negro is thathis concern is a bit overrated by historians.23 Race was of little concern in this period.There w ere other groups and issues which de ma nd ed and received attention . In conclusionon e could sa y that th e accomplishments of the Muckrakers on behalf of the Negro were pro-portionate to the effort extended.

REFERENCES

1. C. Vann Woodward , The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford Univers i tyPress, 1957) .

2. Ibid.3. Ibid., p. 54 .4. Ibid., p. 88 .5. Thomas Nelson Page, "The Negro: The Southerner 's Problem," McClure's Magazine,

X X I I I (M ay , 1905) , pp. 96-102.14


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6. Ibid., p. 96.7. Ibid., p. 97.8. /foid., p. 102.9. Carl Schurz, "Can the South Solve the Negro Question?" Ibid., XXII (January, 1904),

259-275.10 . Ibid., p. 268.11. Ibid., p. 274.12 . Ray Sta nn ard Baker,-"Lynching in the South," ibid., XXIV (January, 1905) , 299-314, an d "Lynching in the North," ibid., (February, 1950), 422-430.13. William Archer, "Black an d White in the South," ibid., XXXIII (January, 1909),

324-338.14. Ibid., p. 330.15 . Ibid., p. 332.16. See especially, Furn ifold M. Simmon s, "The Political Future of the Southern Negro,"

Th Independent, LX (October, 1906), 1521-1526.17. See Booker T. Washington articles in ibid., Vols. LIX, LX, LXII.18. See Frank W. Quillan articles in ibid., Vol. LXVIII .19 . Ed itoria l, "The Negro Question and its Solution," The Independent, LXXV II (Nov-

ember, 1909), 396.20 . Ibid.21. Ray Stannard Baker, Following th e Color Line (New Y ork: Doubleday, Page an d Com-

pany, 1908) .22. Ray Stannard Baker, "The Negro in a Democracy," The Independent, LXVII (Septem-

ber, 1909), 584-588.tioch Press,

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A Study in Negro