America’s Racialist Moment, Part I:
The Radical Racialists

Editor’s Note: George McDaniel’s essay “America’s Racialist Moment: Racism as Reform” (TOQ, vol. 6, no. 1), belongs someday in an anthology of The Best of the Occidental Quarterly. The article is available in full elsewhere on this site. I am republishing it here in two parts, with illustrations and links, to bring it to the attention of readers of TOQ Online. It is a natural sequel to Lawson Wellborn’s “Rebecca Latimer Felton: Forgotten Feminist.” Part II will appear on Tuesday, June 16.

This presentation summarizes the history of racial attitudes of American whites toward blacks beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century and continuing until the aftermath of World War II. I call this period “America’s Racialist Moment,” the period in which the old, romantic ideas that whites held about blacks, either as faithful servants or as potential equals, were cast aside and whites began to see blacks in what many would consider a more realistic light. In response, two strains of racialism developed in America: the “Radical Racialists” and the “Scientific Racialists.”

What was Radical Racialism? Historians use this term to distinguish this group from the “Conservative Racialists” in the post-Reconstruction South, who still maintained paternalistic views of blacks. The Radical philosophy in fact expressed the prevailing opinion about blacks shared by the vast majority of whites, both North and South, during the period under study.

This view had been an implicit part of white psychology for almost as long as whites had been aware of blacks. It had only become explicit during the antebellum period. In its pro-slavery incarnation, this attitude held that blacks were an immature race incapable of either developing or sustaining civilization on their own, and hence they functioned best when bonded as servants to whites. After emancipation, Radical Racialists quickly gave up on the idea of ever returning to slavery. They also gave up on the possibility of any further black uplift. As many pro-slavery writers had predicted, blacks seemed to have regressed in the years since emancipation. Individuals who as slaves had been loyal and relatively productive had, as freedmen, descended into shiftlessness. What was worse, white perceptions of them had changed from regarding them as a seemingly benign presence to one now seen as immoral, sullen, alien, and dangerous.

Most of the major proponents of Radical Racialism were Southern politicians, exemplified by Ben Tillman of South Carolina and Jim Vardaman of Mississippi. Its most effective spokesman, however, was not (except briefly) a politician. He was the Baptist minister-turned-novelist Thomas Dixon. I will examine the work of each of these men in some detail.

But first, let’s set the scene in which these schools of modern racialism appeared.

In many ways, America in the 1890s was on the verge of finally being reunited after the War between the States and the even more divisive Reconstruction period. Reconstruction, with its black state legislatures, the tyranny of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and a thousand more indignities heaped upon Southern whites, had in the eyes of whites effectively removed any remaining vestiges of innocence from blacks. In 1876, with the withdrawal of Union troops and the end of Reconstruction — the event known as the Redemption — white Southerners began to deal with the presence of large numbers of free blacks for the first time.

The changing attitudes on the part of whites had been greatly accelerated by a wave of black violence. During Reconstruction, Negroes had lost their fear of whites. Instead, many began to act on a growing hatred of their former masters, initiating a decades-long spasm of violence that has lasted into the present, as those familiar with the New Century Foundation report The Color of Crime, can testify. And, as the recent events in New Orleans would seem to suggest, barbarous impulses among blacks stand ready to resurface any time white-enforced order is diminished.

Most horrendous in the eyes of whites, black violence in the early 1890s often involved the rape of white women. Within a short time, rapes of white women by blacks in the South went from almost none to one hundred or more each month. In response, whites adopted desperate measures.

Lynching

Rebecca Latimer Felton

Previously confined to the western states and usually carried out by whites against other whites, lynching grew more common in the South.   While in recent years leftist historians portrayed the phenomenon as a virtual sine qua non of all Southern history, more objective historians have discovered that lynchings of Southern blacks by whites were widespread over a period of no more than four decades. Lynchings became common in the South only in the 1890s and by the late 1920s had all but disappeared. (See, for example, Dwight D. Murphey, Lynching: History and Analysis.) Moreover, lynching was seldom if ever the baseless result of the spontaneous hostility of white mobs toward blacks. Lynchings were almost always motivated by strong and often well-substantiated suspicions of the target individual’s guilt, generally of crimes of sexual violence against white women. While sometimes appalled at lynching’s brutalities, the Radical Racialists often defended the practice in theory as the only way of punishing and deterring the scourge of rape. Rebecca Latimer Felton, the Georgian suffragist, reformer, and prohibitionist who would one day be the first woman to take a seat in the US Senate, issued the following advice to white farmers:

I warned those representative men of the terrible effects that were already seen in the corruption of the Negro vote. . . . That week there were seven lynchings in Georgia from the fearful crime of rape. I told them that these . . . would grow and increase with every election where white men equalized themselves at the polls with an inferior race and controlled their votes by bribery and whiskey. A crime nearly unknown before and during the war had become an almost daily [occurrence] . . . [I]f it takes lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week . . . .

Thomas Dixon

Thomas Dixon

Radical Racialist Thomas Dixon, in his first novel, The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance Of The White Man’s Burden 1865-1900, treats the lynching situation with surprising sensitivity. In fact, from his descriptions and in the words of the other Radicals, it is clear that they felt much the same way about lynching: It was a horrible, brutal crime brought about by a terrible necessity. All of them were adamant, however, that if vigilantism was the only way to protect white womanhood, then so be it.

In The Leopard’s Spots, Dixon’s hero Gaston attempts to prevent the lynching of a Negro named Dick, who has raped and murdered young Flora Camp. Gaston fails, however, and the lynch mob prevails. Afterwards, Gaston reflects upon the events:

Such crimes as Dick had committed . . . were unknown absolutely under slavery . . . . Now, scarcely a day passed in the South without the record of such an atrocity, swiftly followed by a lynching . . . . The encroachments of Negroes upon public offices had been slow but resistless. Now there were nine hundred and fifty Negro magistrates in the state, elected for no reason except the color of their skin. Feeling themselves entrenched behind state and Federal power, the insolence of a class of young Negro men was becoming more and more intolerable.

Thomas Dixon was born during the war years, in Shelby, North Carolina, and he spent his childhood under the yoke of occupation. In his autobiography, Southern Horizons, Dixon recounts a trip to the “Negro legislature” in Columbia, South Carolina:

It certainly was a Negro legislature. There didn’t seem to be a white man . . . anywhere  . . . in the building. . . . It was so funny to see such a bunch in the grand hall of the State House. Some of them, the better dressed ones, had evidently been waiters. You could tell by the way they stepped and bent over a desk as if they were balancing a tray.Some of them were preachers in frock coats. One funny little coal black strutted down the aisle wearing a tall stovepipe hat nearly as big as he was. Many of them were in overalls covered with red mud. A lot of them were barefooted. A member threw his feet in red socks on his desk and the Speaker rapped and shouted: “The Chair has ruled that all members must wear their shoes.  Put ‘em on!”

Dixon himself served in the post-Redemption North Carolina legislature while a very ambitious, and presumably appropriately shod, young man. Later he became by turns an actor, a Baptist minister, popular lecturer, pioneer film-maker, then finally a best-selling author of no fewer than twenty-two novels. His most famous, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, was transformed in 1915 by D. W. Griffith into the first great motion picture epic, The Birth of a Nation. Dixon’s novels and Griffith’s film together probably did more to enhance and embody the racialist movement in America than the work of any other person or group. Even today, they continue to generate interest and controversy. Until the 1960s, the film was still widely considered the greatest movie ever made, but political correctness has taken its toll. In 1998, the American Film Institute listed it at forty-one. By 2005, when Time magazine came out with its own top one hundred movie list, The Birth of a Nation failed to make the cut.

(Curiously, The Birth of a Nation is still shown on college campuses, albeit with a postmodernist twist. Making the rounds of the university circuit these days is something called Rebirth of a Nation, a remix intended to “deconstruct” the original film using contemporary music and multimedia, and is the brainchild of so-called “philosopher” D. J. Spooky.)

As a youthful state legislator, Dixon opposed the oligarchic Conservatives (or Bourbons, as they were also known), wealthy white Democrats who came to power in many Southern states in the late 1870s. As a youthful progressive, he somewhat naively introduced a bill to raise revenue through an inheritance tax, and also a measure to establish a state-funded agricultural college. Though both bills failed, they were in keeping with the progressive stand characteristic of the Radical Racialists.

The practice, referred to by Ms. Felton, of seeking the Negro vote through liquor and bribery, was a hallmark of Bourbon rule. Principal among the Bourbons was Wade Hampton, a former Confederate general, who became governor of South Carolina in 1876. He and his fellow Bourbons were regarded as “conservative” racialists because they still felt a degree of paternalism toward the Negroes.

Radicals like Felton rightfully disapproved of the practice of bribing Negroes for votes in the belief that it led to unintended social consequences. One Radical who campaigned against this practice was Ben Tillman. Tillman, called “Pitchfork Ben” because he once promised to “poke old Grover” Cleveland with a pitchfork, succeeded Wade Hampton as governor of South Carolina, beginning a long and storied career, first as governor and then as a three-term US senator.

Ben Tillman

Ben Tillman

Ben Tillman came from an upcountry South Carolina farming family. His older brother George had served with the American filibuster William Walker in Central America. Another brother was killed in the Mexican War. Ben was a teenager at the start of the War between the States and, though anxious to get into the fight, was prevented from doing so by an infection that cost him an eye.

Tillman entered politics in the 1880s as a successful farmer. Originally a member of the Hampton faction, Tillman soon began to view the Bourbons as unconcerned about the welfare of white small farmers and businessmen. He was elected governor in 1890 over a conservative who had notoriously courted the Negro vote. Though that campaign was surprisingly free of racial division, by 1892 a growing number of rapes had hardened Tillman’s attitudes. He told an Aiken, South Carolina, audience: “There is only one crime that warrants lynching, and Governor as I am, I would lead a mob to lynch the Negro who ravishes a white woman.” Even Tillman’s opponents, however, admit that, as governor, he did what he could to quell lynching.

Tillman also took a stand against a law passed by the South Carolina elites that placed taxed labor recruiters who attempted to lure black workers to other states. Appalled that the state’s low-country planters would attempt to hold onto what Tillman regarded as South Carolina’s excessive black population, he succeeded in repealing the act.

Ben Tillman hit his full stride in 1895, when he took Wade Hampton’s seat in the US Senate. Tillman was a born public speaker and his speeches in the Senate won him a national reputation. Throughout his Senate career, Tillman’s focus was the crafting of segregation laws in any sphere affecting the federal government. In his more than twenty years in office, he successfully segregated the Post Office, the Civil Service, and many other departments of the federal service, as well as day-to-day life in the District of Columbia. Along with promotion of segregation, Tillman’s other primary message was that educating blacks was counterproductive.  It simply resulted in frustration and crime. “[T]he poor African has become a fiend, a wild beast, seeking whom he may devour, filling our penitentiaries and our jails. . . . Yet he can read and write. He has a little of the veneer of education and civilization, according to New England ideas.”

Tillman was by no means alone in his belief that education had only made the Negro more dangerous. John Roach Straton, a professor at Mercer University, wrote that black education since the war had resulted in

crime . . . and immorality . . . in even greater ratio. . . . [T]he more the Negroes live to themselves and the nearer they remain to a simple life . . . the better they are, while the . . . closer they come in contact with our civilization and the more they endeavor to take it on, the worse they become . . . .

Jim Vardaman

James K. Vardaman

It was Tillman’s Senate colleague, James K. Vardaman, who was the most vociferous opponent of the education of the Negro. Vardaman was elected governor of Mississippi in 1906 on a platform that called for the abolition of state aid for Negro education. Vardaman’s position was that educating the Negro was an injustice to him, since it made him unhappy in doing the only work he was suited for. The measure ultimately failed, but Vardaman was successful in several other efforts, most of them very progressive. For example, he opposed laws that would permit railroad mergers and increased corporate landowning. He attacked the banks and the railroads as “locusts, devouring the farmer by their usurious rates and exorbitant tariffs.” He supported state efforts to fight yellow fever and created a state department of agriculture to better look after farmers’ interests. He promoted penitentiary reform, and supported efforts to provide more educational opportunities for white children.  Vardaman even attempted to deal with the lynching problem, by increasing the penalty for rape. Through it all, Vardaman never lost sight of his ultimate goal: to improve the lot of his own people. He went so far as to say that if the protection of his people required it, “every Negro in the state will be lynched.”

(Another famous Mississippian, William Faulkner, toward the end of his life told an interviewer:  “[I]f it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes. After all, I’m not going to shoot Mississippians.” Incidentally, there are several characters in Faulkner’s novels named “Vardaman.”)

The Radicals and Progressivism

An examination of the careers of Felton, Dixon, Tillman, and Vardaman makes clear that Radical Racialism should be viewed as a distinctively Southern manifestation of the national Progressive movement.  To quote historian C. Vann Woodward, from The Strange Career of Jim Crow:

The omission of the South from the annals of the progressive movement has been one of the glaring oversights of American historians. . . . [I]n some particulars the Southern progressives anticipated and exceeded the performance of their counterparts in the West and East. They chalked up some spectacular gains against the bosses and machines, the corporations and railroads, the insurance companies and trusts. They democratized politics with direct and preferential primaries, with corrupt practices and anti-lobby acts, with initiative and referendum. They scored gains in humanitarian legislation for miners, factory workers, child labor, and the consumer. . . .

Having said this, Woodward adds:

[T]he typical progressive reformer rode to power in the South on a disfranchising or white-supremacy movement. Racism was conceived of by some as the very foundation of Southern progressivism.

While Professor Woodward might approve of the progressive ideas and disapprove of the racialist views, and others might think the opposite, in fact to the Radical Racialists and their supporters the two ideologies went hand in glove. The Radicals championed, with no apologies, what can only be called white supremacy. At the same time, they supported progressive social and economic legislation on the federal level. If we now know that there were risks in empowering the central government thereby, it is through the benefit of hindsight.

The Radicals and the Imperialists

It was difficult to predict which side the Radicals would take in regard to the national government’s overseas adventurism. Tillman opposed the Spanish-American War on the very reasonable grounds that any successful campaign would bring under US purview many more members of the colored races — which it did, to the tune of about eight million. Thomas Dixon, however, supported the war, and Vardaman even volunteered for it, serving for a time in a cavalry unit in Cuba.

At any event, the consensus among historians — for what it’s worth — is that the Spanish-American War and other imperialist adventures only served to bolster the growing opinion of Americans, Northern and Southern, that the white race should have dominion over the colored races. The federal government acted as though it felt so, too, treating the subject colored populations as apparent inferiors. As C. Vann Woodward observes, quoting an exasperated Boston newspaper of the time, “The Southern race policy was ‘now the policy of the Administration of the very party which carried the country into and through a civil war to free the slave.” At which point we can imagine the proper Bostonian editor throwing up his hands in despair.

Movement Outliers

There are two figures associated with both the Radical and the Scientific branches of the racialist movement that I call movement outliers. Both were Negroes. One of them, Marcus Garvey, was of Jamaican birth and was closely associated with various figures on the Scientific side. We will take a look at Garvey shortly.

William Hannibal Thomas

The other outlier was a mulatto named William Hannibal Thomas. Thomas had been a free black living in Ohio at the beginning of the War between the States. He joined the Union Army and eventually lost an arm in the fighting at Wilmington late in the war. After the war he busied himself in various carpetbagger activities, always more or less with the aim of assisting the freedmen of the South. The ensuing decades, however, brought Thomas into contact with his more purely black kinsmen and, by the turn of the century, he had had enough. Fed up with what he saw as the abysmal lack of progress and even regression exhibited by the Negro, he wrote a book analyzing his wayward brethren.

Entitled The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become: A Critical and Practical Discussion, the book is an often scathing description of the Negro race as seen by Thomas at the turn of the century. Refusing to make excuses and refusing to blame whites oppression and mistreatment, he puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of the blacks themselves. He cites the tendency to violence on the part of black males and the tendency to licentiousness of black females. Both traits had grown worse since emancipation, he asserts. Thomas’s conclusions are much the same as those of Tillman and Vardaman and others: The Negro race is at best a static one, and without guidance from whites, may be regressing toward barbarism.

The Radicals welcomed Thomas’s contribution. Ben Tillman was said to have purchased a hundred copies of the book for distribution among his friends and associates.

Needless to say, the liberal elements of the day did not take kindly to this message from a man recognized by everyone, including himself, as “colored.” Thomas was ostracized by the black community and savagely attacked in the liberal press. He became a “man without a race,” according to his biographer John David Smith, who doesn’t much like him either. Smith’s 2000 biography bears the unambiguous title Black Judas.