Slavery by Another Name (49 page)

and racial purity. Thousands of Civil War soldiers who had been

introduced to bat le in a moral y complex war of racial liberation

were later immersed on the Great Plains in the simple absolutism

of the pure, racial y motivated violence that would haunt the

twentieth century.

Popular American culture embraced the western con icts as

proof of white superiority—spawning hundreds of novels and short

stories that extol ed the extermination of Indian populations as the

inexorable march of white progress and eminent domain. Wil iam

"Bu alo Bil " Cody's Wild West Show became a pageant of white

supremacist rhetoric, drawing tens of mil ions of American and

European spectators in the 1880s and 1890s.

A whole new genre of ction extol ing the antebel um South and

an idealized view of slavery became immensely popular. Joel

Chandler Harris's books l ed with stories of contented slaves and

kindly masters— rst serialized in the Atlanta Constitution—sold in

enormous volumes in the North. The most sensational book in al

regions of the country remained The Leopard's Spots, a southern

romance by a former preacher named Thomas Dixon Jr.

Published in New York by Doubleday Page & Co. the previous

year, the novel was built around the quest of Confederate colonel

Charles Gas-ton to at ain love and glory as he swept away black

political participation in Reconstruction-era North Carolina.

Underscoring his repudiation of past depictions of cruel antebel um

slavery, Dixon co-opted for his characters many of the names of the

slavery, Dixon co-opted for his characters many of the names of the

infamous Simon Legree and other key gures in Harriet Beecher

Stowe's prewar abolitionist bible, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Yet in Dixon's

rendering, the brutal southern slave masters were kindly; former

slaves risen to power in Reconstruction were a gruesome plague

upon whites and themselves. Late in the novel, Gaston gives his

own blood for a transfusion to a girl raped by a black man. After

her death, a relief from a life marked as despoiled, the father

refuses to have his daughter placed in a grave dug by a black man.

Confederate veterans at the funeral ral y to dig a new one.

In the novel, a black man accused of the crime is tied to a pine

tree, doused with oil, and burned to death. Dixon writes of Gaston

pondering how "the insolence of a class of young negro men was

becoming more and more intolerable."3 Gaston "was fast being

overwhelmed with the conviction that sooner or later we must

squarely face the fact that two such races, counting mil ions in

numbers, can not live together under a democracy…. Amalgamation

simply meant Africanisation. The big nostrils, at nose, massive

jaw, protruding lip and kinky hair wil register their animal marks

over the proudest intel ect and the rarest beauty of any other race.

The rule that had no exception was that one drop of Negro blood

makes a negro." The book's initial printing of fteen thousand was

immediately consumed. Soon more than a mil ion copies had been

purchased. Dixon instantly became one of the most widely read

writers of the first decades of the century.

Another best-sel ing novelist of the romanticized South, Thomas

Nelson Page, became one of the country's most in uential voices on

race relations. Asserting that blacks constituted the vast majority of

rapists and criminals in the United States, and that the

overwhelming preponderance of blacks remained "ignorant" and

"immoral," Page warned that the continued coexistence of the races

was likely impossible. "After 40 years in which money and care

have been given unstintedly to uplift them …the Negro race has not

advanced at al ," Page declared. Blacks are "a vast sluggish mass of

uncooled lava over a section of the country, burying some sections

and a ecting the whole. It is apparently harmless, but beneath its

and a ecting the whole. It is apparently harmless, but beneath its

surface smolder res which may at any time burst forth

unexpectedly and spread desolation."4

Few white Americans expressed disagreement. Southern whites

cheered news in April 1903 that the New York public school

system ordered the removal from its reading lists of Uncle Tom's

Cabin. Echoing Dixon, New York public school libraries

superintendent Cland G. Leland said Stowe's depiction of

antebel um slavery "does not belong to today but to an unhappy

period of our country's history, the memory of which it is not wel

to revive in our children."5

White Americans across the country were adopting a dramatical y

revised version of the racial strife of the nineteenth century—a

mythology in which the Civil War had su ciently ameliorated the

injuries of slavery to blacks and that during the ensuing decades

southern whites heaped assistance and opportunity upon former

slaves to no avail. The new version of events declared that African

Americans—being fundamental y inferior and incorrigible—were in

the new century a burden on the nation rather than victims of its

past.6

A widely disseminated treatise on blacks published in 1901

concluded that cohabitation in the same society by whites and free

blacks would forever be cursed by the immutably brutish aspects of

African character. "The chief and overpowering element in his

makeup is an imperious sexual impulse which, aroused at the

slightest incentive, sweeps aside al restraints in the pursuit of

physical gratification."7

The Montgomery Advertiser reported with obvious satisfaction on

a declaration of thanks issued by the "colored people of Richmond"

to a white education conference for al that it had done for African

Americans. While inviting at endees of the meeting to at end First

African Baptist Church while in the city, the declaration assured

whites, "The negroes of Richmond have always been able to live in

peace and harmony with the white race. The same kindly feeling

which coursed in the veins of the ‘mammy’ and body servant of

which coursed in the veins of the ‘mammy’ and body servant of

bygone days exists today"8 White southerners clung to any fragment

of such obeisance as demonstration that their racial conduct was a

corrective measure aimed at bringing African Americans back to

their natural posture toward whites—not an eruption of

supremacist venality.

A young white chambermaid at the English Hotel in Indianapolis,

Indiana, named Louise Hadley became a brief cause célèbre in May

1903, hailed in the North and the South, after she refused to make

up a bed that had been occupied by Booker T Washington. After

being red from her job, Hadley issued a public statement: "For a

white girl to clean up the rooms occupied by a negro … is a

disgrace," she wrote. "I have always felt that the negro was not far

above the brute." Commit ees formed in Georgia, Alabama, and

Texas raised several thousand dol ars in contributions to Hadley.

"We admire this young woman's discrimination and think she took

exactly the right action," beamed the Dadevil e Spot Cash.9

When Boston leaders publicly discussed a proposal to transport

large numbers of southern blacks to New England's declining farm

regions, southerners sput ered with skepticism. "We could wel

spare a few thousand ‘crap shooters’ and banjo pickers from the

South," one Alabama let er writer responded on the pages of the

Advertiser. "The only negroes who wil probably agree to go wil be

those with whom it would be a mercy not only for the whites, but

the negro of the South, to part," said the Chat anooga Times. "Since

the mulat o Crispus At ucks led the phlegmatic Bostonians in their

revolt against the British troops, dark skins have been popular up

there," sneered the Montgomery Advertiser. "Such a movement

might be good for the South. It would probably rid our section of a

good many negroes who are worse than useless here…It would give

those far-sighted philanthropists a chance to learn by actual contact

and experience something of the race problem about which they

prate so much." The Advertiser editorialized on the need for African

Americans to be "fixed" through hard labor.10

In the barely veiled racist invective of the day, the Columbus

In the barely veiled racist invective of the day, the Columbus

(Georgia) Enquirer-Sun said it doubted the movement would

amount to anything until watermelon season was over.11

The popular sentiments used to justify the violence appeared to

correspond with the work of a generation of American physicians

and scientists—in the North and the South—who busily translated

or mistranslated the elementary evolutionary principles outlined by

Darwin into crude explanations for why blacks should be returned

to a "mild form of slavery," as one delegate to a Virginia

constitutional convention phrased it. At a meeting of the state

medical association in Georgia, one physician presented a paper

that purported to document the close similarities between a long

list of black features—skin, mouth, lips, chin, hair, nose, nostrils,

ears, and navel—and those of the horse, cow, dog, and other

barnyard animals. From that claimed evidence, Dr. E. C. Ferguson

extrapolated that the "negro is monkey-like; has no sympathy for

his fel ow-man; has no regard for the truth, and when the truth

would answer his purpose the best, he wil lie. He is without

gratitude or appreciation of anything done for him; is a natural

born thief,—wil steal anything, no mat er how worthless. He has

no morals. Turpitude is his ideal of al that pertains to life. His

progeny are not provided for at home and are al owed to roam at

large without restraint, and seek subsistence as best they can,

growing up like any animal."12

The new science of anthropology embraced the notion that

quanti able characteristics of whites, blacks, and Indians—such as

brain size— demonstrated the clear physical and intel ectual

superiority of whites. In May 1903, as Warren Reese's Alabama

investigation got under way, the Atlantic Monthly magazine

published a long tract titled "The Mulat o Factor ," writ en by an

erudite planter in Greenvil e, Mississippi, Alfred H. Stone, arguing

that the presence of mixed-race blacks—with superior intel igence

and leadership skil s derived from traces of white blood—was the

cause of current race turmoil.

New exhibits on primitive peoples made the American Museum

New exhibits on primitive peoples made the American Museum

of Natural History in New York City a scienti c temple to the

inevitability of white dominion over nonwhite races. The institution

was emerging as a hotbed of the embryonic concepts of eugenics

and "racial hygiene" that would eventual y lead to unimaginable

violence later in the twentieth century.

The St. Louis World's Fair in 1904 featured an exhibit of live

pygmies, transported from the Belgian Congo—then reaching a

gruesome apogee of colonial slavery under King Leopold strikingly

similar to that emerging in the U.S. South. After the fair, one of the

pygmies, Ota Benga, appeared brie y as an exhibit at the Museum

of Natural History, before transferring to the monkey house at the

Bronx Zoological Park—initial y sharing a cage with an orangutan

named Bohong. After several years as a freak curiosity in the United

States, Benga kil ed himself in 1916.13

The same year that Benga appeared at Central Park West, the

Carnegie Institution funded the establishment of the Station for

Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The

center eventual y became the Eugenics Records O ce and the

leading scienti c advocate of notions of racial superiority and

inferiority. With broad support from the federal government,

prominent jurists, and scientists at major universities, researchers

there pursued a decades-long, but scienti cal y awed, project to

col ect data on the inherited characteristics of Americans. (For the

next four decades, the work of the Eugenics Records O ce and its

leaders was the backbone of a highly successful campaign to

promote sterilization for "feebleminded" and other ostensibly

inferior genetic stock, strict laws against racial intermarriage, and

stringent limits on the immigration of Jews and southern Europeans