A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (100 page)

Without resorting directly to the law, white property owners in New York’s Harlem area, under John C. Taylor, organized to keep blacks from settling in their neighborhoods from Seventh Avenue to Fifth Avenue (although parts extended to the Harlem River) and from 139th Street to 130th Street. Taylor’s Harlem Property Owners’ Improvement Corporation attempted to force blacks to “colonize” on land outside the city (much like an Indian reservation) and encouraged residents to erect twenty-four-foot-tall fences to seal off white zones. On the other side of the issue stood a black Southern real estate developer named Phil Payton, who formed the Afro-American Realty Corporation in 1904 with the purpose of acquiring five-year leases on white properties and renting them to blacks. Payton’s company folded after four years, but he broke the race barrier, and opened the door to black residency.

Blacks began to settle in Harlem in 1902, and over the next two decades, Harlem got both blacker and poorer. Other disconcerting trends had appeared as well: W.E.B. Du Bois noted that in 1901 there were twice as many black women as men in New York, and that the rate of illegitimacy was high.
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Corruption, graft, and prostitution were rampant. One neighborhood, called by the preachers the Terrible Tenderloin—because the bribes paid to police to ignore the prostitution were so great that a captain could live on tenderloin steaks for a year—housed one of the worst red-light districts in the nation. The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr., of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, recalled that prostitutes lived “over me and all around me” and he shelled “pimps, prostitutes, and keepers of dives” with “gospel bombardments.”
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The audacity of the harlots and the susceptibility of the Johns, knew no bounds: Powell observed that they stood across the street from his church on Sunday evenings, shirts unbuttoned, soliciting male churchgoers on their way out of the service! It seemed surreal that only eleven years earlier there had been a Harlem Yacht Club, a Philharmonic Society, and a Harlem Literary Society.

More than 90 percent of blacks in New York worked in menial services. Many of the higher-paid black businesses had been replaced by foreign-born whites, especially in catering, where blacks had gained a solid reputation in the city.

As the black population of New York City rose from just under 92,000 in 1910 to more than 150,000 by 1920, virtually all of it in Harlem, it grew more dense. The city’s white population fell by 18 percent, whereas the black population soared by 106 percent, with blacks comprising 12 percent of Manhattan’s population, despite being just under 5 percent of the city’s population. By 1930, eleven of the twelve blocks from Park Avenue and West 126th Street to West 153rd Street on the River were 90 percent black. Nor were all the new arrivals in Harlem African Americans. Many came from Jamaica, Barbados, and other parts of the West Indies—more than 40,000 of them—joined in the 1920s by 45,000 Puerto Ricans in what was called the Harlem ghetto.

The crush of people, most of them with few assets, made for one of the highest-density areas in America: by 1930, 72 percent of all blacks in New York City lived in Harlem (164,566).
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That gave Harlem a population density of 336 people to an acre, contrasted with Philadelphia (ranking second in black population in the United States) at 111 per acre, or Chicago, with 67 per acre.
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Predictably, with such densities—including two of the most crowded city streets in the entire world—black sections of New York were among the sickest in the nation, with death rates 42 percent higher than the city’s average. In a harbinger of the late twentieth century, black-on-black violence rose 60 percent between 1900 and 1925.
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Outside of the largest cities, blacks found that although the law was infrequently an effective weapon for addressing racial injustice, the wallet worked somewhat better. African Americans realized that their buying power gave them important leverage against white businesses, such as when they staged boycotts against transportation companies in Georgia, foreshadowing the Montgomery bus boycott of the 1950s. African Americans set up their own insurance and banking companies, developed important networks, and formed their own all-black labor unions when barred by white unions. They had their greatest success in the South, where Georgia blacks built 1,544 schools that educated more than eleven thousand students, despite resistance from local cities and towns against building black schools. Long segregated from white Protestant churches, blacks had established the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in 1816, and by the end of the Progressive era, it had grown dramatically.

Blacks created all-black universities, such as Howard (1867), Spelman(1881), Fisk (1866), Tuskegee (1881), Morehouse (1867), Lincoln (1854), Atlanta (1865), and Hampton (1868)—the so-called black Ivy League or the elite eight—to overcome the reluctance of white universities to admit and educate black students.
Plessy v. Ferguson
spawned and bolstered several black public colleges, such as Alcorn State, North Carolina A&T, Tennessee State, Grambling, Delaware State, Southern University, Florida A&M, and Prairie View. These schools, while grossly underfunded, stood in the gap until mainstream white universities desegregated.
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Blacks held varied philosophies on how best to attain equality, and some even questioned whether equality with whites was a goal worth pursuing. Generally, the divisions broke down into three groups. Booker T. Washington, a former slave, preached a message of slow, steady economic progress. Blacks and whites would accommodate each other, gradually wearing their chafing conflict into comfortable communities. Yet Washington was no sellout—nor, in the modern (wrongly referenced) term, an Uncle Tom. He was under no illusions of white goodness, and his accomodationist message carried a quid pro quo: in return for black cooperation, whites would eliminate lynching and end segregation. Nevertheless, many African Americans found his tactics insufficient and his pace too slow. W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), a Boston-born, Harvard-educated black who had studied under William James, adopted the social-science methodology that had gripped so many of his generation. One of the founders of the NAACP, Du Bois taught at Atlanta University, where he emerged as an accomodationist. Du Bois rejected Washington’s approach, instead urging blacks to advance their economic and political power through what he called the Talented Tenth—a black intellectual and economic elite (with members like himself) who could lift the 90 percent to a position of full citizenship. His ideas foundered, partly because there were few blacks or whites as well educated as Du Bois, and partly because blacks were not only a small minority nationally, but were also disproportionately clustered in the Deep South, where the full weight of the political structures and economic trends were against them.

Younger than either Washington or Du Bois, Marcus Garvey offered a third road to black empowerment. A Jamaican, once inspired by Washington’s
Up From Slavery,
Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in 1914, but he soon parted with Washington’s moderate approach. Instead of living with whites, he maintained, blacks needed to reclaim their home continent, Africa, and establish themselves internationally through achievements that emanated solely from a black culture. A complex man, Garvey spoke with derision of Africans who lived on the Continent, arguing that American blacks could return to Africa and lift up the natives. Advocating a black nationalism in which American blacks separated to succeed, Garvey frequently appeared in a Napoleonic-type military uniform while attaching to himself a variety of quasi-religious titles, including reverend. He blended Jamaican Rastafarianism, New England reformist Unitarianism, and popular one-world notions, but with little consistency. His movement swelled rapidly, then declined just as rapidly after Garvey was finally imprisoned on charges of mail fraud. Unlike Washington, Garvey argued that the former status of slavery itself prohibited the two races from living together harmoniously: there was no example in history, he maintained, of a “slave race” ever rising to political equality with its masters, and thus American blacks had to leave—to reclaim Africa before they could prosper.

Theodore Roosevelt’s single dinner with Washington and his slighting of the role of the Tenth Cavalry regiment in his memoirs of Cuba hardly qualified him as a champion of race relations. In his racial attitudes, Roosevelt differed little from the vast majority of Americans at the turn of the century. The fact that the “slave race” had founded its own universities and businesses and had developed a sophisticated debate over the nature of a full and equal place for African Americans in society said just as much about the progress of blacks as Jim Crow,
Plessy v. Ferguson
, and the often two-tiered society said about the lack of progress in racial matters.

Despite the continued struggles of blacks, it was nevertheless the case that America by 1910 had successfully blended more—and more radically different—people than any other society in human history, and had spread over the lot of them a broad blanket of public protections, civil rights, educational support, and, equally important, civic expectations. In World War I, the willingness of German-Americans to fight against Germany, for example, convinced many of their complete Americanization. In addition, the fact that a Catholic could run for the presidency just a decade after that further underscored the melting-pot principle. Unfortunately, African Americans remained largely excluded from the “pot” for several decades, despite pandering by the administration of Teddy Roosevelt’s cousin Franklin. Well into the twentieth century, blacks remained divided over which of the three paths to follow—Washington’s, Du Bois’s, or Garvey’s.

Ballinger and Pinchot

A largely prosperous economy had insulated Roosevelt’s economic policies and corporate attacks for several years, but that threatened to change in 1907. The economy weakened in March of that year, the real blow coming in October, when the Knickerbocker Trust Company in New York closed. New York bankers shifted funds from bank to bank, staving off runs, until J. P. Morgan could step in. The panic dissipated, but in the process Roosevelt labeled businessmen “malefactors of great wealth.”
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By 1908 more than a few Republicans had concluded that Roosevelt’s antibusiness views had contributed to the effects of the downturn and damaged American enterprise.

At the same time, Roosevelt either ignored or contributed to (depending on the historical source) a deepening rift with Congress. A conservative majority felt betrayed by many of his actions, whereas the Progressive minority had grown increasingly restless at its inability to change policy fast enough. Riding his own personal popularity, Roosevelt assumed that he could bully his foes or, at worst, sidestep them. But the chaos he left ensured that anyone following Roosevelt was in for a tough term. That is,
if
Roosevelt did not run again…

The most critical indicator that he would not was his 1904 promise not to seek another term. Above all, Roosevelt stood for integrity, and despite his occasional theatrics, he understood checks and balances too. Having “used every ounce of power there was in office,” Roosevelt wanted to make that influence permanent by stepping down.
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To have run again would have tainted his integrity and, though he did not admit it, diminished his well-crafted image, making him little more than the power-grubbing pols he supposedly towered above. Therefore, Roosevelt decided to select his own successor, his secretary of war, William Howard Taft of Ohio.

The president had already placed considerable patronage selection in Taft’s hands. Aside from Elihu Root, who was too old, and Charles Evans Hughes, who was insufficiently aligned with the Progressive agenda, Taft had no real internal opposition. Known as a competent jurist from a Republican political family, Taft had worked his way up the party through a series of judicial appointments. Under Harrison, he had served as solicitor general. Under McKinley, Taft had his finest hour when he had served as civil administrator of the Philippines, where he improved the country’s roads, schools, and medical facilities, helping to extinguish the
insurreccións
there. This was made possible in part by Taft’s utter lack of prejudice, and willingness to incorporate the Filipinos into the islands’ government.

Then came Roosevelt’s “investiture” of Taft, placing the good-humored giant in a difficult position. He had already told his wife he did not want to be president, but his wife and family insisted. Actually, Taft had a longing for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, and Roosevelt offered him the position on three occasions, but each time Helen Taft pushed him away from it, largely because she wanted to inhabit the executive mansion. Somewhat unenthusiastically, then, Taft ran for the presidency. His opponent, the twice-beaten William Jennings Bryan, elicited only a tepid fraction of the enthusiasm he had had in 1896. Taft easily beat Bryan, even as the Republicans lost several congressional seats and governorships.

Upon assuming the presidency, Taft promptly packed his cabinet with as many lawyers as he could find, selecting them almost entirely without party input. Although a relatively obscure group, the cabinet members proved reasonably effective, possibly because they lacked outside obligations. He set to law the Roosevelt legacy and was every bit the Progressive TR was.

Taft found that Roosevelt had left him plenty of problems to clean up, not the least of which was the tariff. Tied up with the tariff came the thorny personality of Joe Cannon, the Republican Speaker of the House. A high-tariff man, Cannon wielded the rules of the House like no one since Henry Clay a century earlier, stalling legislation here, speeding it along there, depending on his fancy. Taft called him “dirty and vulgar,” welcoming the news that many House Republicans would not vote for him as Speaker.
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Openly siding with the “insurgents,” as the anti-Cannon forces were called, was dangerous. Roosevelt cautioned against it, but Taft plunged into the melee, convinced Cannon had betrayed the party’s lower-tariff platform. The insurgents held just enough of a margin to swing the vote away from Cannon on a critical procedural issue. Again, Taft shortsightedly offered them his support.