1. Jerome Dowd was a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at the time. Earlier he taught at Trinity College in North Carolina.
2. The reference to a “second Daniel” suggests the Bibilical Daniel who was protected by God when cast into a lions den as a test of his faith.
3. The Spanish-American War heroes were Admiral George Dewey (Manila), Rear-Admiral W. S. Schley (Manila), Rear-Admiral W. T. Sampson (Santiago), Lieutenant R. P. Hobson (Santiago).
4. Kelly Miller (1863–1939), educator and author, was a professor of mathematics at Howard University for forty-four years. Miller assisted W. E. B. Du Bois in editing The Crisis, and lectured throughout the nation on social issues. In addition to numerous articles, he authored Race Adjustment (1908), Out of the House of Bondage (1917), and The Everlasting Stain (1924).
5. “Geophagy” refers to eating clay. Recent studies have demonstrated that the practice was common among both blacks (slaves called it “cachexia Africana”) and whites, and is still found in the rural South. In moderation it apparently has little effect on one’s personal health. The source and cause of this uncommon practice is a matter of conjecture, and a phenomenon which remains inadequately understood.
6. For background on Booker T. Washington, see Vol. IV, note 8.
7. For Fisk University, see note 19.
8. For background on President Benjamin Harrison, see Vol. 3, note 63. De jure means “in law,” and de facto means “in practice.”
9 Dr. Washington refers to Booker T. Washington (see Vol. IV, note 8).
For background on Timothy Thomas Fortune, see Vol. III, note 10, and Vol. IV, note 119.
10. W. E. B. D Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia, 1899). For background on Du’Bois, see Vol. IV, note 136.
Black Codes (1865–66) were laws passed in the ex-Confederate states following the Civil War. These laws were passed to define the legal status of blacks after the abolition of slavery. They dealt with all facets of institutional life, such as vagrancy, apprenticeship, penalties for crimes, property rights, and marriage. The spirit of these laws was to reestablish a system of racial control which had been lost with the abolition of slavery.
For background on the Emancipation Proclamation, see Vol. I, note 14.
11. William L. Bulkley was one of the founders of the Committee on Industrial Conditions of Negroes in New York (1906). This organization, along with the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (1910), and the National League for the Protection Colored Women (1905), were merged in 1911 to form the National Urban League.
12. For background on President Grover Cleveland, see Vol. III, note 61. Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), 26th President of the United States (1901–09), was born into a prosperous New York family. Almost immediately upon graduation from Harvard University, he became active politically, serving in the New York Assembly, as a member of the Civil Service Commission, as police commissioner of New York, and as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Roosevelt became a household word after the national publicity given the “Rough Riders” which he lead during the Spanish-American War. Following the war he was elected governor of New York, and then assumed the Vice Presidency under President William McKinley (see Vol. III, note 37). When McKinley was assassinated, Roosevelt became President of the United States. A vigorous man both physically and intellectually, Roosevelt’s activities included explorations in the Amazon jungles as well as a four-volume history, The Winning of the West (1889–96). See also note 28.
The Mason-Dixon Line is the boundry between Pennsylvania and Maryland, latitude 39–43–26.3 North. It was surveyed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in 1767 in order to settle a continuing dispute between the two colonies over the exact location of the boundry. The line was a convenient demarcation between free northern states and southern slave states.
13. For background on Eugene V. Debs, see Vol. IV, note 3.
14. Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Clansman: an Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, was published in 1905 as the southern states were completing the process of installing segregation. To justify the subordination of the Negro an avalanche of writing poured forth which treated blacks as either too savage or too ignorant to enjoy equal citizenship. The Clansman was an immensely popular novel portraying the redemption of the South from these “black barbarians” by the Ku Klux Klan. The Clansman might have been forgotten as another third-rate novel had it not been adapted to the motion picture screen in 1915. The Birth of a Nation, produced by D. W. Griffith, was not only the first film spectacular, it also was the first to deal with a serious social issue. Thus it was a major social event in itself, but one which slandered the Negro race viciously.
15. Ida B. Wells-Barnett (see note 16) founded the Negro Fellowship League in 1908, and became its first president.
16. Author, social worker, and journalist, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1864–1931) was the pre-eminent anti-lynching crusader in America. She published numerous exposés on that phenomenon, the most important of which was A Red Record (1895). A civil rights activist, she held many responsible civic positions and helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
17. Samuel Chapman Armstrong (1839–93), educator, was commissioned colonel of the 9th Regiment, U.S. Negro Troops in 1864. At the end of the war he received brevet rank of brigadier-general, and because of his success in dealing with Negro troops, he was placed in charge of a Freedman’s Bureau camp near Hampton, Virginia. There he facilitated the establishment of Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute in 1868.
18. Richard Robert Wright, Jr. (b. 1878) was educated at Georgia State Industrial College, and received a B.D. (1901) and a Ph.D. (1911) from the University of Chicago. He also spent two years studying in Germany and two years as a research fellow in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. For many years he worked as a banker and financial consultant in Pennsylvania, and served in numerous racial uplift associations. Wright was a scholar of the first order, and he authored many studies including The Negro in Pennsylvania (1911), and The Negro in Industry in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (1913). The African Methodist Episcopal Church’s organ, The Christian Recorder, was also edited by Wright for many years. He eventually became an A.M.E. bishop.
19. For background on these and other Negro Colleges see The Moton Guide to American Colleges with Black Heritage 1974–1975, Moton Consortium Office of Admission and Financial aid (Atlanta, 1974). See also, James M. McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton, 1975).
20. For an excellent study of this strike, see Richard A. Straw, “The Collapse of Biracial Unionism: The Alabama Coal Strike of 1908,” Alabama Historical Quarterly, 37 (Summer, 1975): 92–114.
21. John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) built the family fortune into a colossal financial and industrial empire of J. P. Morgan and Company. During the depression of the 1890s he came into control of the largest group of railroads in the nation. In 1901 he purchased the steel interests of Andrew Carnegie (see note 60), and formed the U.S. Steel Corporation, the first billion-dollar corporation in the world. In 1912 a congressional investigative committee, the Pujo Committee, found that Morgan controlled seventy-two directorates and forty-seven large corporations.
John Davison Rockefeller, Sr., (1839–1937) established the Standard Oil Company while still a young man in his twenties. An astute and aggressive businessman, by 1890 he had created a global petroleum empire. This was broken up as a result of anti-trust suits which led to its dissolution in 1911 by the Supreme Court. Thereafter, Rockefeller preoccupied himself with planning the distribution of his fortunes through charitable organizations.
22. For background on John Mitchell, see Vol. IV, note 96.
23. For background on the National Afro-American Council, see Vol. IV, note 119.
The National Negro Business League was founded by Booker T. Washington in 1900 to foster business and industrial development among the race. It was founded on a faith in the classical economics of free competition and economic individualism. In this regime Negroes who offered a better product would be rewarded by the rational judgment of consumers.
24. John Rogers Commons (1862–1944), professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin from 1904 to 1932, is most noted for his studies of the American labor movement. Among his most significant publications is the multi-volume History of Labor in the United States (1918–35) which is regarded as a classic in the field. Legal Foundations of Capitalism (1924), and Institutional Economics (1934) expanded the discipline of economics into the realm of social science.
25. For background on John Brown, see Vol. I, note 41.
William Howard Taft (1857–1930) practiced law in Cincinnati, Ohio following graduation from Yale, and reached national prominence upon appointment as U.S. Solicitor General in 1890. He served as Secretary of War under Theodore Roosevelt (see note 12), and became the 27th President of the United States (1909–13). Taft was unable to continue the progressive programs of Roosevelt, and the party conservatives soon controlled his administration. Taft was retired at the end of one term, and thereafter taught law at Yale until he was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1921.
26. Charles W. Anderson was born in Ohio, but pursued a political career in New York. His efforts to involve more Negroes in politics resulted in the New York Civil Rights Law of 1895. He rose steadily in Republican circles, from state committeeman in 1900, state racing commissioner from 1898 to 1905, and with the aid of Booker T. Washington he served as collector of internal revenue in New York from 1905 to 1915. He remained a close protege of Washington throughout his career.
27. In 1905, W. E. B. Du Bois (see Vol. IV, note 136), who was then teaching at Atlanta University, issued a call for an organization which would vigorously oppose segregation. Twenty-nine Negro intellectuals and professionals responded, and in July 1905 they met at Niagara Falls, New York to found the Niagara Movement. In 1909, the Niagara Movement became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
28. President Theodore Roosevelt held the rank of colonel during the Spanish-American War. Although born to a wealthy family, he was a sincere progressive who advocated “trust-busting,” denounced the “malefactors of wealth,” and called for a “square deal” for American workers. He captured the popular imagination by vigorously championing the rights of the “little man.” See also note 112.
29. For background on Samuel Gompers, see Vol. IV, note 1.
30. For background on James Duncan, see Vol. IV, note 21.
31. John P. Frey (1871–1957), an iron molder, was elected president of the Worcester, Massachusetts local of the International Molders and Foundry Workers Union of North America in 1893. Thereafter, his ascent in labor circles was rapid, becoming a vice-president of the IMFWU in 1900. He served on numerous boards and commissions for both the American Federation of Labor as well as the federal government. A conservative trade unionist, he edited the Iron Molders’ Journal from 1903 to 1927, and authored several books.
32. Frank Duffy (1861–1955) immigrated to the United States from Ireland at age twenty, and settled in New York City. A carpenter, he joined the Greater New York United Order of American Carpenters and Joiners, and was elected president. The Order merged with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America in 1888. In 1901 Duffy became secretary-general of the UBC, and was elected to an American Federation of Labor vice presidency in 1918, an office he held until 1940.
33. Benjamin J. Davis, Sr., of Atlanta, Georgia attended Atlanta University in 1887–88, and founded the Atlanta Independent 1903. Publically he supported Booker T. Washington, although he was a highly independent man whose opinions could not be controlled by others. He criticized Negroes for their failures, while at the same time he advocated racial solidarity and self-help. For one who usually minimized politics in favor of economic uplift, Davis was exceedingly active in the Republican Party, serving as chairman of the Republican committee in Georgia’s second district.
34. For background on Frank Morrison, see Vol. IV, note 33.
35. Oscar Ameringer, a German from Wisconsin, was one of the outstanding white champions of racial equality in the Socialist Party. He was a union and socialist organizer in New Orleans where he became involved in the biracial brewery and dock workers’ unions, and after Oklahoma became a state in 1907, he went there to continue his efforts. In Oklahoma, Ameringer assumed the editorship of the leading party organ, the Oklahoma Pioneer, and consistently fought against racial inequality. He argued that blacks were not inherently inferior; the Negro’s degradation was the result of the capitalist system. He opposed segregation within the Socialist Party because it would encourage state legislators to enact additional Jim Crow measures. Ameringer wrote a plank in the 1910 Socialist platform which outlined the party’s opposition to the disenfranchisement of Negroes through the infamous “grandfather clause” technique.
36. Charles William Eliot (1834–1926) was a professor of analytical chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until Harvard University called him to be president. At thirty-five he began a distinguished tenure which lasted from 1869 to 1909, and made Harvard the model to be emulated. His Harvard Classics (1910), a fifty-volume selection of world literature, was designed to bring formal education to adults through self-study. When he retired, Eliot was considered the nation’s leading educator.
37. Mayor “Baerman” of New Orleans is properly spelled Behrman.
38. The Communist Manifesto, published in February 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was commissioned as a statement of principles of the League of Communists. It was the first significant popular statement of Marxism socialism. It declared that all history was explained as class struggle; that under capitalism that struggle was between the workers and owners of production; that the struggle would culminate with the workers’ victory; that the abolition of classes would then ensue; and that there would follow a society in which all people would be free.
39. A dispute between black and white screwmen’s unions on the New Orleans docks over a work-sharing agreement was marked by sporadic violence. Shortly after midnight on March 10, 1895, an armed mob of white men forced their way into a company storeroom for cotton packing tools (called “screws”), seized the tools being used by Negro screwmen, and threw them into the river. Actually, this dispute began in 1894 and continued into 1895. In October 1894, a similar incident occurred when about 200 armed white dock workers boarded six ships being loaded by black screwmen, and heaved ninety-six screws over the side. See Daily Picayune, March 10, 11, 1895; The Daily Picayune, October 27, 1894; Times-Democrat, October 27, 1894.
40. W. R. “Farley” is properly spelled Fairley. For background on Fairley, see Vol. IV, note 88.
41. Braxton Bragg Comer (1848–1927), was a merchant, planter, textile manufacturer, and governor of Alabama from 1907 to 1911. A wealthy Birmingham businessman, he served as president of the Alabama Railroad Commission. Known as a reform governor, he expanded social services, especially education, and although an opponent of child labor legislation, he signed a law prohibiting the employment of children under twelve. It was because of his public reputation as a reformer that the miners accepted him as a fair arbitrator in their dispute with the operators, but they misjudged his social views.
42. For background on the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, see Vol. IV, which is devoted to the era dominated by the Knights.
43. John P. White (1870–1934) served United Mine Workers of America, District 13, which included Iowa, as secretary-treasurer and then president from 1899 to 1912. From 1912 to 1917 he served as international president of the UMWA, but resigned to accept a position in the National Fuel Administration during World War I.
44. It was not true that Negroes were barred from the United Mine Workers of America in the fields north of the Ohio River. In fact, the first black member of the national board was Richard Davis of Ohio. See Vol. IV, pp. 118–247.
45. The United Mine Workers of America “Womans’ Auxiliary” was much more than a social sewing circle. When the miners went on strike their women were actively involved, often showing up on the picket line to denounce scabs and provide a solid front for the strikers. Although the wives of other workers also involved themselves in strikes, the small isolated mining communities enabled the auxiliary women to be much more influential.
46. Coal miners often were farmers themselves, or had numerous friends and relatives who were. Therefore, it was not uncommon to find farmers assisting miners when the latter went out on strike.
47. Miners who lived in company houses often were evicted by the company when the men went out on strike. Frequently they erected “tent cities” and under such stressful conditions black and white families did not concern themselves with the color of neighbors in the next tent. This was the “social equality” referred to. In this particular case, there was exceptional unity among the miners.
48. Thomas L. Lewis (1866–1939) began work in Ohio mines as a breaker boy, and was one of the founders of the United Mine Workers of America in 1890. He served as international vice president under John Mitchell, but was a competitor with the popular UMWA president. In 1908 he defeated William B. Wilson for the international presidency. An ambitious man, Lewis created a machine to further his own advancement. After a revolt of district officers against his rule, Lewis was defeated in 1911, and became a labor advisor to an anti-union operators’ association in West Virginia. He also published a trade journal, the Coal Mining Review.
49. On the night of August 14, 1908, a race riot occurred in Springfield Illinois, which resulted in widespread destruction of Negro property, numerous beatings, and the death of seven people. Racial tensions among white residents were heightened by the growing influx of blacks from the South, and when two black men were arrested, in separate incidents on charges involving the rape of white women, a white mob spent the night of the 14th venting their hatred. The state militia finally restored order, but thousands of black residents moved from Springfield never to return. Six months later, a conference of civil rights advocates met in Springfield to discuss the “Negro Problem” and established the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The conference was held on the cite of the riot, Abraham Lincoln’s hometown, and on the date of the Great Emancipator’s centenial.
50. Hoke Smith (1855–1931), a successful attorney of Atlanta, Georgia, became popular among the farmers as an anti-trust reformer. He was elected governor of Georgia in 1906, and his administration abolished the convict lease system, established prohibition, and reformed the penal, educational, and the judicial systems. He also presided over reforms which disfranchized Negroes.
51. The peonage system emerged in the southern states after the Civil War. Farmers would sign annual contracts, then took advances on their expected share of the crop. All too frequently, they ended the year with less earnings than debt and planters demanded that they stay until their debts were paid. Eventually, the planters had legislation passed to ensure their control over the mobility of their indebted workers. When planters used indebtedness as an instrument for compulsory labor, this system became peonage. While blacks were effected disproportionately, poor whites and immigrants also fell victim to this labor system. When such cases surfaced in the press, they stirred an outrage seldom displayed over black peonage.
52. Charles Nagel (1849–1940) graduated from Washington University Law School (St. Louis) in 1872 and began to practice law in St. Louis. Nagel entered politics and was elected to the state legislature, and president of city council. A member of the Republican National Committee, President Taft (see note 25) appointed him Secretary of Commerce and Labor (1909–1913)
Frank Harris Hitchcock (1867–1935), a prominent Ohio attorney, managed the presidential campaign of William H. Taft in 1908. Once elected Taft appointed him Postmaster–General, (1909–12).
George Woodward Wickersham (1858–1936), was a leading expert in corporate law. One of the closest advisers to President Taft, he served as U.S. Attorney General from 1909 to 1912, and led the administration’s drive against the trusts. In 1929 he was appointed Chairman of the Wickersham Committee, which conducted a path-breaking inquiry into the entire system of American jurisprudence.
53. The Erdman Act was passed by Congress in 1898. It provided for the voluntary submission of railroad disputes to mediators, and if that failed, to a board of arbitration. The board’s findings were binding upon both parties for one year. Actually, the law was unacceptable to both the companies as well as the unions. The former did not want novices interferring, and the latter did not want to be forced to labor on terms they found oppressive.
54. Lillian D. Wald (1867–1940) was a pioneer of public health nursing. In 1893 she organized a visiting nursing service which evolved into the famous Henry Street Settlement in New York City. She also founded the first public school nursing service in the world (1902), and at her urging the U.S. Children’s Bureau was founded (1912). Wald also involved herself with founding the Women’s Trade Union League, and the woman’s suffrage movement.
55. For background on Bishop Henry M. Turner, see Vol. II, note 2.
56. John Dewey (1859–1952) taught philosophy at the University of Chicago (1894–1904) and Columbia (1904–30). He formulated instrumental pragmatism, a philosophic system based on the notion that since human problems constantly change, the instruments for dealing with human problems must be constructed individually. Dewey revolutionized educational theory with The School and Society (1899), and Democracy and Education (1916), which postulated intelligence should be trained to alter environment. Dewey attacked metaphysics as the product of an outmoded aristocracy which was unsuitable in a democratic society. Through these and other books, Dewey delineated a break with tradition so sharp that it still stirs controversy.
For background on Bishop Alexander Walters, see Vol. IV, note 118.
John Spencer Bassett (1867–1928) was born in North Carolina and took his Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University. He taught at both Trinity and Smith Colleges (1906–1928). A prolific scholar, he authored fifteen books on American history. He was liberal on questions of race and he wrote at length about Afro-Americans.
57. Hilary Herbert (1834–1919) studied law in Alabama and was admitted to the bar in 1857. During the Civil War he became an officer in the Confederate Army. After the war he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives where he served from 1877 to 1893. President Grover Cleveland (see Vol. III, note 61) appointed Herbert Secretary of the Navy during Cleveland’s second term (1893–1897). A staunch segregationist, he contributed to Why the Solid South? (1890) and published The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences (1912).
Thomas William Hardwick (1872–1944) was a Georgia lawyer who served in the Georgia state house from 1890 to 1899, and from 1903 to 1914. He was elected to the U.S. Senate to fill a vacant seat in 1914 and served until 1919, but lost a campaign to be renominated. Hardwick then won the governorship of Georgia, and served in that post from 1921 to 1923. He was probably defeated because of his stern opposition to the revived Ku Klux Klan. He served as special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General from 1923 to 1924, and then retired from public office.
David Crenshaw Barrow (1852–1929) was born in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, and received his education at the University of Georgia. After serving as professor of mathematics and engineering at that university for many years, he became its chancellor from 1906 to 1925.
58. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the ghost of Banquo appears as Macbeth hosts a great feast, driving him to distraction by reminding Macbeth that he has murdered his friend Banquo. In the context of the document, “Banquo’s ghost” refers to a deed which comes back to haunt one’s conscience.
59. “Crackers” was a term referring to the poor whites of Georgia or Florida. Presumably the term was derived from the practice of cracking their whips loudly when urging on their mules, or their heavy reliance on cracked corn in the diet.
“Sandhillers” were poor whites who lived in the infertile sandy regions of the South, sometimes called pine barrens. The term usually connoted extreme ignorance and poverty.
“Woolhatters” were members of the working class who often wore coarse wool hats stiffened with glue because they were cheap. It had a political connotation, however. In the 1820s Andrew Jackson was popular among these people, and later Whigs continued to call these common people who supported democratic reforms as the “wool hat boys.” Over time hat styles changed, but the term was revived during the Populist era of the 1890s when Wool Hat, a Populist newspaper, was begun in Georgia.
60. Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) began his business career with the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1850s, and went into the iron industry following the Civil War, purchasing iron mills in Pittsburgh. In 1873 he built the largest steel mill in the country, and further endeavors built his holdings into an immense empire. He sold his assets in 1901 to the U.S. Steel Corporation for the unprecedented sum of $447,000,000. Thereafter, Carnegie devoted himself to philanthropy as he carried out his belief that the rich should act as trustees for the public benefit.
61. An excellent study of the migration is Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900–1920 (Garden City, 1976).
62. Anthony Crawford was only one of the seventy-eight black people lynched by white mobs in 1919. This represented an increase of fifteen over 1918 and thirty over 1917. For lynching and the attempt to pass legislation making it a federal crime, see Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia, 1980).
63. The reference to Akron residents from the border state being racially prejudiced is accounted for by the large immigration of people from the southern mountains into the north-central cities which began during this period. In mountainous states such as Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee, blacks were traditionally segregated, and the “hillbillies” retained their southern customs.
64. William Pickens (b. 1881), educator and author, graduated from Talledega College and then Yale University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After teaching language at Talledega for ten years, Pickens taught at Wiley University in Texas prior to his appointment as dean at Morgan State College in Baltimore. Pickens succeeded James Weldon Johnson (see note 99) as field-secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a position he held until 1941 when he accepted a position with the federal government. Among the books authored by Pickens are The New Negro, His Political, Civil and Mental Status, and The Ultimate Effects of Segregation and Discrimination.
65. The classic study of the East St. Louis riot is Elliott M. Rudwick, Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917 (Carbondale, 1964).
66. The standard study of the Chicago riot is William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York, 1970).
67. Ben Johnson (1858–1950) was a Kentucky lawyer. A Democrat, he was elected to the state house in 1885 and became speaker of the house in 1887. He was elected to the state senate in 1905, and then to the U.S. House of Representatives, serving there from 1907 to 1927. Johnson was Democratic national convention president from 1912 to 1920.
“Mr. Speaker” refers to Champ Clark who was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives in March 1911, and still held that post in 1917. A U.S. Representative from Missouri, Clark was a “peace Democrat” of the William Jennings Bryan stamp who had been in the house since the 1890s. He was a leading contender for the Democratic nomination for President in 1912, but lost to Woodrow Wilson.
68. John Edward Raker (1863–1926), a lawyer from California, served in various state offices as a Democrat. In 1911 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served until his death.
Martin David Foster (1861–1919) was a physician from Illinois. A Democrat, he was elected mayor of Olney in 1895, and 1902. In 1907 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served until 1919.
Henry Allen Cooper (1850–1931, a Wisconsin Republican, served in various state offices until 1893, when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served for thirty-six years.
69. Frank 0. Lowden (1861–1943) was a graduate of the University of Iowa (1885) and the Union College of Law (1887). He practiced law in Chicago, and became a professor of law at Northwestern University (1899). He served on the Republican national committee from 1904 to 1912, and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1906 to 1911. In 1916 Lowden was elected Governor of Illinois. Following the race riots in 1917, Lowden supported anti-race and anti-religious discrimination legislation.
70. Monroe Nathan Work (1866–1945), graduated from the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1898, and received a masters’ degree in sociology in 1903. He became famous by proving in his thesis that the city of Chicago was founded by a Negro, Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, who settled there in 1790. Work taught at the Georgia State Industrial College and later at Tuskegee. As editor-author of the Negro Year Book, the first of which appeared in 1912, he became a leading authority on matters pertaining to black Americans. As the compiler of statistics on lynching, he was the recognized authority on the subject.
71. In 1917 numerous race riots occurred in northern cities including those in Chester, Pennsylvania, Youngstown, Ohio, New York City, East St. Louis, and elsewhere.
Carcassonne is an ancient city in southern France, and considered one of the best surviving walled cities. It was settled by the Gauls, conquered and fortified by the Romans, and refortified by Medieval lords. In 1978 it celebrated its 2050th anniversary. Until modern times Carcassonne was considered impregnable. Thus, the reference here is meant to imply protection and security.
72. Jessie Redmond Fauset (1882–1961), poet, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University in 1905. She received a graduate degree from the Alliance Francaise in Paris. Literary editor for The Crisis for several years, she taught and wrote poetry and novels as a primary occupation.
73. Robert Russa Moton (1867–1940), educator, graduated from Hampton Institute in 1890. When Booker T. Washington died in 1915, Moton was called to the presidency of Tuskegee. President Woodrow Wilson (see note 92) selected Moton to investigate the complaints of Negro troops overseas during World War I. Moton published an autobiography Finding a Way Out (1920), and another book What the Negro Thinks (1929).
74. The Rev. Charles Stelzle was born in the tenement-house district in New York, and at eight years old went to work in a sweatshop, as a newsboy, and later became a machinist. With his background it comes as no surprise that years later, when he became a Presbyterian minister, Stelzle took up the workers’ cause. The “Apostle of Labor,” as he was called, was a very popular author and lecturer, and his columns appeared regularly in the labor press. Rev. Stelzle also served as the director of Christian sociology at Bible Teachers’ Training School, and chairman of the Committee on Church and Labor of the New York Federation of Churches and Christian Organizations, and as superintendent of the Presbyterian Department of Church and Labor.
75. Organized in 1911, the National Urban League’s purpose was to assist Negro migrants from the South in making the adjustment to city life and in finding employment. A nine-point program including housing, health, sanitation, recreation, self-improvement, and job assistance suggests the scope of its operations. From its inception the Urban League has been interracial, “a voluntary community service agency of civic, professional, business, labor and religious leaders . . . dedicated to the removal of all forms of segregation based on creed or color.”
76. George Cleveland Hall (1864–1930), a Michigan-born surgeon, was one of the founders of Provident Hospital in Chicago. Because Negro doctors had difficulty practicing medicine in the city’s hospitals, Hall and his colleague, the noted heart specialist Daniel Hale Williams, founded Provident Hospital so black doctors could improve their skills. Dr. Hall was the hospital’s chief surgeon. He also was active in civic affairs, serving as vice president of the National Urban League and helped found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in Chicago. Dr. Hall was a nationally recognized consultant on racial problems.
77. Walter Francis White (1893–1955) graduated from Atlanta University. He worked in the Atlanta branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and after distinguished field work was called to New York as an assistant to the executive secretary, James Weldon Johnson (see note 99). White’s field research for the NAACP was truly distinguished, and frequently dangerous. When Johnson retired, White assumed leadership of the organization, a position he maintained for many years. He published several books including his autobiography, A Man Called White.
78. Mr. Dooley and Mr. Hennessy were popular cartoon characters.
79. For background on the Union League, see Vol. II, note 5.
80. William Bauchop Wilson (1862–1934), a Scottish born miner of Pennsylvania, was elected secretary of a local miners’ union in 1877 and from 1888 to 1894 served as district master workman, Knights of Labor. One of the founding members of the United Mine Workers of America, he served as international secretary-treasurer of the UMWA from 1900 to 1908. In 1906 he was elected to Congress on the Democratic ticket, and became the first Secretary of Labor when Woodrow Wilson created that department in 1913, serving until 1921. He lost a bid for the Senate in 1926.
81. Thomas Walter Bickett (1869–1921) graduated from Wake Forest College (1890) and was admitted to the bar in 1893. He served in the North Carolina state house of representatives from 1907 to 1908. Twice elected states attorney general, he served in that office from 1909 until 1917, when he assumed the governorship.
82. Sidney Johnston Catts (1863–1936) received a law degree from Cumberland University (1882) and practiced law briefly before entering the Baptist ministry. He moved to Florida in 1911 where he entered politics. Catts won a race for the governorship in 1916 on the Prohibition Party ticket and served until 1920. Subsequently, he lost a bid for the U.S. Senate and two more races for governor.
83. James Middleton Cox (1870–1957) worked as a teacher, newspaper reporter, and then as secretary to Congressman Paul Sorg (1894–97). He owned and published the Dayton Daily News (1898), and the Springfield Daily News (1903). From 1909 to 1913 he served as a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, when he resigned to assume the governorship of Ohio. Cox was elected at the height of the Progressive movement in Ohio, and affected widespread reforms in the government of the state. Cox was an unsuccessful candidate for president in 1920.
84. Augustus Owsley Stanley (1867–1958) graduated from Centre College in Kentucky (1889). He was admitted to the bar in 1894, and quickly entered politics. A democrat, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1903 to 1915. After an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in 1914, he won the race for governor in 1915. In 1919 Stanley resigned to take a seat in the U.S. Senate, but his bid for reelection in 1924 was unsuccessful.
85. Jesse Edward Moorland (b. 1863) was born in Ohio and received a D.D. from Howard University in 1905. He began his service to the Young Men’s Christian Association in 1892, and held positions in that organization for most of his active career. The Rev. Moorland became secretary of the International Y.M.C.A. in 1898. When the philanthropist Julius Rosenthal donated a large sum of money for the construction of Y.M.C.A. buildings for blacks in eleven cities, Rev. Moorland assumed responsibility for the fund. Making his home in Washington, D.C., he was a trustee of Howard University and a member of the American Negro Academy.
86. Nannie Helen Burrough (1883–1961) was the founder of the National Trade and Professional School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C. Following her work as associate editor of the Christian Banner in Philadelphia, she served as president of the Women’s Convention of the National Baptist Convention in Louisville, Kentucky. Ms. Burroughs also organized the Woman’s Industrial Club which specialized in offering short-term lodging to Negro girls and teaching them basic domestic skills. Through the National Baptist Convention, she started the National Trade and Professional School, which emphasized skills in housework, gardening, interior decoration, and allied vocational skills.
87. Eugene Kinckle Jones (1885–1951) received a B.A. from Virginia Union University in 1906, an M.A. from Cornell University in 1908 and an honorary LL.D. from Virginia Union in 1924. Jones served as the first executive secretary of the National Urban League and worked with that organization from 1911 to 1941. He served on numerous national boards and committees as advisor on Negro Affairs for the U.S. Department of Commerce, and as a member of the Fair Employment Board of the U.S. Civil Service Commission.
88. Channing Heggie Tobias (1882–1961) graduated from Paine College, and then attended Drew Theological Seminary and the University of Pennsylvania. Tobias returned to Paine College in 1911 to teach Bibilical literature. He also became active in the Young Men’s Christian Association, became chairman of the board of directors of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in 1946 was named director of the Phelps-Stokes Foundation.
89. For Dr. James H. Dillard, see pp. 255–56.
90. Dr. Aaron McDuffie Moore (1863–1923) graduated from medical school at Shaw University and in 1888 became Durham, North Carolina’s first Negro physician. A man of deep religious convictions and a unique philanthropic inclination, his selfless career is still remembered in the names of a variety of public works in Durham. In 1895 he helped to launch a pharmacy for Negroes, and thereafter was involved in virtually every business venture launched by blacks in that city. He also founded Lincoln Hospital in 1901, the Colored Library in 1913, and absorbed himself in the rural school movement for Negroes. In addition, he spent a large portion of his life working for charities of the Baptist Church. Believing that the Negro business movement was part of an overall program of racial uplift, Dr. Moore was one of the seven founders of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company in 1898, and served as its president from 1919 until his death.
91. “From Bunker Hill to San Juan Hill” refers to black participation in American wars. The hero of Bunker Hill was a Negro, Peter Salem. Negro troops of the 10th Cavalry made it possible for the “Rough Riders” to secure the top of San Juan Hill. Sgt. Horace W. Bivins, a black member of the 10th, received the Congressional Medal of Honor.
92. [Thomas] Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), 28th President of the United States (1913–21), graduated from Princeton University, and received a Ph.D. in government from Johns Hopkins in 1886. Wilson taught, and then became president of Princeton in 1902. In 1910 he won the governorship of New Jersey, and the Presidency of the United States in 1912. A reform Democrat, Wilson was successful in gaining the Federal Reserve System (1913), the Federal Trade Commission (1914), the Clayton Anti-Trust Act (1914), the Adamson Act establishing the eight-hour day, along with other reform measures. Wilson was unfortunate enough to be in office during World War I, but he tried to bring a new world order of peace out of the ashes of war by the creation of the League of Nations, forerunner to the United Nations. His record on civil rights for blacks, however, is generally conceeded to be unsympathetic at best.
93. Fred R. Moore (b. 1857), publisher and editor of the New York Age, was a self-made newspaperman of the highest quality. While working at the National Bank of Commerce, he purchased the Colored American Magazine, and in 1905, left the bank to become deputy collector of internal revenue in New York. A few months later he left to become an organizer for the National Negro Business League. Moore acquired the New York Age from T. Thomas Fortune and Jerome B. Peterson in 1907. A staunch friend of Booker T. Washington, he was appointed Minister to Liberia under President Taft (see note 25), but resigned before actually going to Africa. Moore was heavily involved in national political issues and served on numerous boards and committees.
94. Archibald H. Grimké (1849–1930) attended Lincoln University and received a law degree from Harvard University in 1874. He practiced law in Boston, wrote for several newspapers, and edited a weekly called The Hub. From 1894 to 1898, he served as consul to Santo Domingo. Grimké was president of the Washington, D.C. branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for ten years, and also of the American Negro Academy.
95 Robert L. Mays, a Chicago Negro, was president of the Railway Men’s International Benevolent Industrial Association, and executive officer of the Interstate Order of Locomotive Firemen, Yard and Train Service Employees and Railway Mechanics. He organized a convention of Negro railroad workers to combat the elimination of Negroes from railroad service by the white unions. Mays asked those in control of American industry to judge Negroes on their individual character rather than by race. See also pp. 461–62.
96. Mary Church Terrell (1863–1964) was a founder of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896, and a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She also served in many civic organizations and led a long and active life campaigning for the uplift of the race. A graduate of Oberlin College, Mrs. Terrell served on the Race Relations Committee and on the Interracial Committee in Washington, D.C. She was active in the women’s suffrage campaign, and in 1940 wrote an autobiography, Confessions of a Colored Woman in a White World. As the wife of Robert H. Terrell, one of the few black federal judges, Mrs. Terrell used her social position as a platform to articulate the needs of less fortunate Afro-Americans.
97. The Associated Colored Employees of America was not “the first Negro labor union in this country.” There were “labor combinations” of black workers even in the colonial period, but the first organization which can be called a union was the American League of Colored Laborers, founded in New York City in 1850 with Frederick Douglass as a vice president. Its main object was to promote unity among mechanics, and to foster training in the industrial arts.
98. William II (Kaiser Wilhelm), German emporer, king of Prussia (b. 1859-d. 1941), showed sympathy for the workers and was called the “Labor Emporer.” He also favored a mild approach toward the socialists, a position which was opposed by Chancellor Bismark. The Emperor hoped to win the workers away from socialism through social legislation. Under his orders, industrial courts were established to adjust wage disputes. Rest days became obligatory, factories inspected, workers organized committees to negotiate conditions of employment, and a labor department was founded. The emperor was disappointed with the results, however, for socialism spread rapidly after the repeal of anti-socialist legislation.
99. James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) was admitted to the Florida bar in 1897 while living in Jacksonville and working as a school principal. He and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson wrote songs during these years, including “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” now widely known as the black national anthem. From 1906 to 1912 Johnson served as U.S. Consul in Venezuela, and then Nicaragua. He returned to the United States in 1912 and became field secretary, and then general secretary, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1930 he took a position at Fisk University as professor of creative literature. Johnson wrote numerous books, including The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), Black Manhattan (1930), and Along This Way (1933).
100. For the Fourteenth Amendment, see Vol. IV, note 84; for the Fifteenth Amendment, see Vol. II, note 8.
101. Hubert Henry Harrison (1883–1927 came to New York in 1917 from St. Croix, Virgin Islands. A socialist, he wrote pamphlets and espoused his ideas on the street corners of New York, founded the “Liberty League,” and edited a newspaper, The Voice. Marcus Garvey was influenced by Harrison’s ideas, as were the editors of The Messenger. In 1926, Harrison became a staff lecturer of the Board of Education of the city of New York, and for several years he edited Garvey’s Negro World.
102. Rev. George Frazier Miller (1864–1943), a black Christian socialist, was born in South Carolina and educated at Howard University and New York University. From 1896 until his death, he served as rector of St. Augustine’s Church in Brooklyn. Early in the twentieth century, he was elected president of the National Equal Rights League, an organization dedicated to combating disfranchisement, segregation, and every other aspect of second-class citizenship for black Americans.
103. George W. Harris was editor of the New York News, and a member of the New York City Board of Aldermen. He was closely associated with the Friends of Negro Freedom, a socialist oriented organization founded by the black socialists Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, editors of The Messenger. The distinguishing characteristic of the FNF was its commitment to the restructuring American society along socialistic lines.
104. In 1919, two blacks, T. J. Pree and R. T. Sims (see also note 137), attempted to organize a separate black labor movement known as the National Brotherhood Workers of America. Initial support came from the shipyard and dockmen of Newport News, Norfolk, and Portsmouth, Virginia. A. Philip Randolph was a member of the board of directors. The AFL opposed the Brotherhood, and it was finally dissolved in 1921.
105. John Mitchell, Jr. (b. 1863) was born a slave in Henrico County, Virginia. He graduated from high school in 1881. In 1883 and 1884 he worked as the Richmond correspondent of the New York Freeman, and on December 5, 1884, he became editor of the Richmond Planet, the most influential black newspaper in the state. Friends considered him courageous to a fault because of his strong editorial stands against racial injustice.
106. The United Hebrew Trades was founded in 1888 by Jewish socialists in the New York garment industry. Its purpose was to centralize and stabilize the trade union movement in order to challenge the deplorable working conditions in the industry. It was a central trades organization for garment-workers unions.
107. National Civic Federation Review was the organ of the National Civic Federation. It was established in 1901 by a number of industrialists and union leaders, including John Mitchell of the United Mine Workers and Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, who served as vice president of the group. Most of the energies of the group were aimed at promoting peace between capital and labor through mediation, conciliation, and collective bargaining. The leaders believed that industry needed organized labor in order to avoid social tensions and the interruption of production. The attempt to moderate industrial conflict was attacked from the left and right. Radical unionists believed the Federation threatened to undermine union militancy, while anti-union employers opposed the recognition accorded labor unions as collective bargaining agents. Both the left and the right believed that the interests of labor and capital were inimical, while the Federation sought common grounds for cooperation (see also note 130).
108. The National Association for the Promotion of Labor Unionism Among Negroes was founded by the socialist editors of The Messenger, Chandler Owen (see note 110) and A. Philip Randolph (see note 111). It was an interracial organization whose purpose was to encourage Negroes to join unions. Owen served as president of the organization, and its board included numerous white New York socialists.
109. Morris Hilquit (1869–1933), a New York lawyer and socialist leader, became a prominent defender of labor in the courts. He also was the leading theoritician of the Socialist Party, and his History of Socialism in the U.S. (revised, 1910) is a standard on the topic.
Rose Schneiderman was born in Russian Poland in 1891 and came to America at age nine. She went to work in a cap factory and boarded with a socialist family. Rose became a socialist herself, organized her sister workers into a union, served as secretary of the United Cloth Hat and Cap Makers Union (chartered in 1903) and as its representative to the Central Labor Union of New York. Then only twenty–two, she was elected to the union’s executive board, the first woman to hold such a position in the capmakers’ union. In 1905, while leading a thirteen-week strike against the open shop, she came into contact with the Dreier sisters, Margaret and Mary, who convinced her to join the Women’s Trade Union League. In 1912 Ms. Schneiderman became involved in the woman’s suffrage movement in Ohio. She agreed because she was “a socialist and a trade unionist who looked upon the ballot as a tool in the hands of working women with which . . . they could correct the terrible conditions existing in industry.” For a study of women workers during this era see Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I (New York, 1979).
110. Chandler Owen was a student of political science and sociology at Columbia University when he became an associate of A. Philip Randolph. Between 1914 and 1917 he gradually became a socialist, and joined the Socialist party. In 1917 he and Randolph edited the Hotel Messenger, but the magazine went out of business in several months, and the Headwaiters Union fired the editors. A few months later Owen and Randolph began to publish a new journal, The Messenger, an independent journal of radical economic and political thought among Negroes. Owen was deeply committed to organized labor, but felt that the leading union organization, the American Federation of Labor, practiced discrimination against Negroes. Therefore, he opted for an independent black labor movement, the National Brotherhood Workers of America, founded in 1919 (see also note 104).
111. A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979) organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925 and made it into the strongest of the black unions. Randolph himself rose to become the elder statesman of Negro labor leaders, and the only black vice-president of the AFL-CIO. During World War II he organized the March on Washington Movement to press for open hiring in industries with government contracts, and lobbied for a Fair Employment Practices Commission. A socialist who opposed World War I, he was imprisoned briefly, but continued to voice his views in The Messenger which he published during the 1920s with Chandler Owen. In 1960 he founded the American Negro Labor Council, and in 1963 was one of the leaders in the famous March on Washington. Those few porters who remain are now organized into the Airline Clerks Union and the BSCP has ceased to exist.
112. The Adamson eight-hour day law was passed in 1916 in order to prevent a threatened nationwide shutdown of the railroads. Gradually, it was adopted throughout American industry as the standard work day.
113. George W. Perkins (d. 1934), a conservative craft unionist, rose in the cigarmakers’ union to become its president in 1891. He was closely associated with his predecessor in that post, Samuel Gompers, and was known as a member of “Sam’s gang.” As president of the Cigarmakers’ International Union of America from 1891 to 1926 he ignored the unskilled and women who labored in the industry. He was roundly criticized for encouraging mechanization, and presided over a twenty-year decline in membership to nearly one-fifth its peak size.
114. William Zebulon Foster (1881–1961) worked at a variety of industrial jobs as a youth. He joined the Socialist Party in 1900 but was expelled, and joined the Industrial Workers of the World. He was an IWW representative in Europe and used the time to study European labor movements. He served as a secretary for the Syndicalist League of America, business agent for a Chicago railroad union, and founded the International Trade Union Educational League during the years immediately preceding World War I. Foster acted as an organizer on many occasions, most significantly perhaps during the historic 1919 steel strike. He joined the Communist Party of America after the war, and stood as the Party’s candidate for public office with regularity thereafter, and also served as CPA national chairman from 1932 to 1957. Foster was the author of numerous books.
115. Agnes Nestor first went on strike in 1898 at age fourteen, when the women at the Eisendrath glove factory in Chicago walked out over a new piecework system. Later, Nestor led the glove workers to victory and headed the local which was established, served as a representative to the 1902 and 1903 Glove Makers’ conventions, and won fame as a keen union negotiator. She was heavily involved as a representative to the Chicago Federation of Labor, in the Women’s Trade Union League, and maintained a hectic speaking schedule in support of women’s rights and legislation to improve working conditions. Her autobiography, Woman’s Labor Leader, was published in 1954.
116. Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, 1918).
117. See pp. 483–89.
118. A. Mitchell Palmer (1872–1936) was President Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General. He organized a widespread series of raids against alleged alien radicals. In reaction to unsolved bombings he attacked radicals between 1919 and 1920 by using private spies to raid private homes and labor union offices in search of incriminating evidence of communism. He arrested nearly 3,000 people, held them incommunicado, and tried them often without due process. A few hundred supposed radicals were deported, but the vast majority were found to be harmless.
119. Two of the best accounts of the IWW are Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW (Chicago, 1969), and Philip S. Foner, A History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 4, The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905–1917 (New York, 1965).
120. For Covington Hall see Joyce Kornbluh (ed.), Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964), pp. 259–60; Oscar Ameringer, If You Don’t Weaken (New York, 1940), p. 209; and David J. Saposs, Left Wing Unionism (New York, 1926), p. 169.
121. The most thorough treatment of these events are found in James R. Green, “The Brother of Timber Workers, 1910–1913: A Radical Response to Industrial Capitalism, in the Southern U.S.A.,” Past and Present, No. 60 (August, 1973): 161–200, and his Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895–1943 (Baton Rouge, 1978).
122. Marcus Alonzo Hanna (1837–1904), a prominent Ohio industrialist, became interested in politics, and by 1890 he was the most powerful Republican in the state. He selected William McKinley and guided him to the Ohio governorship twice, and then to the Presidency in 1896. Hanna served in the U.S. Senate from 1897 to 1904, where he assisted organized labor when feasible, a position which earned the respect of many unionists. His own employee policies were enlightened for the times (he considered anti-unionism to be irrational), and he was able to persuade the coal operators to make substantial concessions during the historic anthracite strike of 1902.
For John Pierpont Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, Sr., see note 21.
The “Four Hundred” refers to an informal social ranking of genteel wealth. The extravagant wealth of the post-Civil War period called for a means for determining who was among the elect. Ward McAllister, a prominent socilite associated with Mrs. Jacob Astor, once said that there existed a solid core of older, wealthy families surrounded by looser circles of newer wealthy families. This older core, presumably more legitimately rich because of their tenure, McAllister claimed, numbered Four Hundred. The term continues to imply the most socially prominent of the rich.
The Masons, Knights of Pythias, and Odd Fellows were popular secret and semi-secret fraternal orders.
123. Rev. George W. Slater, Jr. remains an unknown figure, except for the articles he wrote for the Chicago Daily Socialist between September 1908 and March 1909. Slater’s articles marked the first time in American history that a socialist organ carried writings by a black American on a regular basis. He claimed that socialists were the “New Abolitionists” and that only through socialism could the problems of all workers, black and white, be solved. Slater was highly critical of Booker T. Washington and of black strikebreakers.
124. Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), German poet, dramatist, and aesthetic philosopher, was trained to be a surgeon. Surreptitiously he read revolutionary authors of the so-called Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) literary movement and shared their scorn for rigid autocratic discipline. Schiller wrote many plays, most of them dealing with historical themes, such as Wallenstein, Maria Stuart, and Wilhelm Tell. One of his earliest plays was Fiesco (1783) which dramatized the career of a sixteenth-century Genoese conspirator. It’s significance lies chiefly in the play’s forshadowing of Schiller’s later triumphs at historical drama.
125. “Industrial scalawags and carpetbaggers” referred to southerners and northerners (respectively) who sold out the plantation cotton-South to the “outside” industrial interests.
126. José De La Cruz Diaz (1830–1915) was born in Oaxaca, Mexico. After studying law he fought in the Mexican-American War (1847–48). In a successful coup of 1876 he became President of Mexico, and for the next thirty-five years Diaz remained in firm control. He became increasingly unpopular, however, ruling with an iron hand and inviting U.S. capital to invest in Mexico. In 1911 Diaz was overthrown by Francisco Madero, and went into exile. He died in Paris hated by Mexicans for his cruelty. For the Grabow Massacre, see note 133.
127. William Dudley Haywood (1869–1928), was a miner employed in various Rocky Mountain states. In 1894 he moved to Idaho and became an officer in the Silver City local of the Western Federation of Miners. He was elected to the WFM executive board in 1899, and became secretary-treasurer in 1900. A major figure in the bitter Colorado strikes at Telluride and Cripple Creek, he became a revolutionary industrial unionist. Haywood helped found the International Workers of the World in 1905, and was tried, but acquitted for murder in 1907. Purged from the WFM by moderates in 1908, he became a full-time IWW organizer. Following several successful campaigns, Haywood was elected general secretary of the IWW in 1915. He and other Wobblies were convicted in 1917 for violating the Espionage Act and imprisoned. Released two years later, he jumped bail in 1921 and immigrated to the Soviet Union where he remained until his death.
128. Phineas Eastman was a socialist editor of the revolutionary magazine, The Masses.
129. Joseph J. (“Smiling Joe”) Ettor was a leading organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World most noted for directing the more than 20,000 workers involved in the famous textile strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts. Although only twenty-seven in 1912, when he was called to coordinate the Lawrence strike, Ettor had gained experience organizing miners and migrant farmers in the West, and foreign-born steel workers in the East. Fragmented by nationalistic jealousies, sex, and craft biases, Ettor needed all of the experience at his disposal to unify the Lawrence mill workers. Ettor succeeded, but when a woman was accidentally killed during a demonstration, he was charged with murder. After a protest strike, the jury vindicated Ettor and he was released. He went on to organize the New York City hotel workers strike in 1913, and the Mesabi Range strike in 1916.
130. See Booker T. Washington, “The Negro and the Labor Unions,” Atlantic Monthly, 101 (June, 1913): 756–67.
Seth Low (1850–1916), graduated from Columbia University in 1870, entered his fathers import business, and later city politics. As mayor of Brooklyn (1882–1885), Low instituted the merit system, the first city successfully to do so. Later he served as president of Columbia, mayor of New York City (1902–1903), and as head of the National Civic Federation (see note 107) from 1907 to 1916.
131. For background on the Single Tax Plan, see Vol. III, note 16.
132. The “boys in jail” is a reference to the sixty-five timber workers who were arrested following the Grabow Massacre. A. L. Emerson was the union leader in charge of the Grabow meeting when company guards opened fire on the strikers. See also note 133.
133. A number of local unions of silver and lead miners were organized in
the Couer d’Alene area of Idaho during the 1880s, and in 1890 they came together to form the Consolidated Miners Union. By 1891 it controlled the entire area. In 1892 the operators locked out the union, and reduced wages by 25 per cent. Then the companies imported hundreds of scabs, and the mines resumed operations. Following a gun battle between company guards and the miners, the scabs were forced to withdraw from the pits. But when the governor complied with the operators’ requests and ordered federal troops into the areas, the strikebreakers returned and several unionists were imprisoned. But the scabs could not learn the miners craft, and eventually all of the union miners were rehired. These same imprisoned miners helped form the Western Federation of Miners in 1893.
Cabin Creek flows into the Kanawha River about ten miles east of Charleston, West Virginia, and extends southward through the mountains for twenty-five miles. In 1912–13 the first of several of the famous West Virginia “mine wars” was fought for union recognition and an improvement in conditions. The strikers, numbering about 7,500 soon witnessed the importation of large numbers of Baldwin-Felts guards whose job was to guard the mine property and scabs. Violence quickly erupted between the strikers and the guards and gun shots echoed in the mountains for months. At least fifty men lost their lives in the conflict, and the death toll from malnutrition among women and children was incalcuable. Martial law was declared and the National Guard set up camp along the creek. A military court was established and long prison terms given to some of the strike leaders. During the strike Henry Hatfield was elected governor. More sympathetic to the miners than his predecessor, he dictated the terms of a peace which gave the miners a partial victory.
The Brotherhood of Timber Workers affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World in May 1912, and almost immediately resumed its struggle for improved conditions by going on strike. The operators’ association responded by blacklisting the union men and locking them out. The operators conducted a campaign of terrorism against the strikers which peaked on July 7, 1912, at Grabow, Louisiana. During a demonstration outside one of the mills, company guards fired into a throng of union men, and the latter responded in kind. When the shooting was over, three men were dead and forty wounded, nearly all of whom were unionists. Nevertheless, the grand jury indicted the union men for the murder of a company guard. Sixty BTW men were held in a crowded and foul prison room of 42 x 30 feet. A jury acquitted the men and they were released in October.
The Ludlow Massacre was the central event in a fourteen-month strike of the United Mine Workers of America against the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. set policy from New York, while local barons presided over near slave conditions in the southern Colorado field. A UMWA strike broke out in 1904, but the instigators were deported to other states and the militia and company guards suppressed the others. After secretly organizing for two years, the UMWA called a strike in 1913 for union recognition and remedy of a list of other grievances. The miners and their families were evicted from the company houses and repaired to tent colonies. The Baldwin-Felts detective agency was employed to provide company guards, and these men, some of whom rode in an armored car equipped with a Gatling gun, terrorized the tent colonies. The National Guard was ordered to intervene. But they soon began to terrorize the miners as well. Under the command of Lieutenant Kenneth E. Linderfelt, the troops charged the tent colony at Ludlow shooting into the tents and, according to one eyewitness, “tried to kill everybody; anything they saw move, even a dog, they shot at.” The shooting over, tents were covered with oil and set on fire. Over thirty people were murdered at Ludlow, mostly women and children. Linderfelt and his men were tried and found guilty and punished by trifling changes in their eligibility for promotion.
134. John Sharp Williams (1854–1932), a lawyer-planter of Yazoo County, Mississippi, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1892 and served as Democratic minority leader from 1903 to 1909. He defeated James K. Vardaman for the U.S. Senate. Although an ardent white supremist, he favored a more moderate paternalistic approach to race relations than did Vardaman.
James Kimble Vardaman (1861–1930), a racist demagogue from Mississippi, served that state as a legislator (1890–1894), governor (1904–1908), and U.S. Senator (1913–1919). Mississippi was tightly controlled by a conservative Democratic elite, and after they rejected him twice for the gubernatorial nomination, he began to court the small white farmers. The strategy succeeded and Vardaman won the race for governor on a platform which in part called for the abolition of Negro education.
For Governor Hoke Smith, see note 50.
For Thomas Dixon and D. W. Griffith, see note 14.
135. T. Arnold Hill became the first director of the Urban League’s Department of Industrial Relations in 1925, after serving in various capacities since 1914. Hill believed in the importance of opening the labor unions to black workers. He worked incessantly toward that end, chiding blacks for their anti-union and pro-employer attitudes on the one hand, while lamenting the failure of the American Federation of Labor to be more aggressive against racial discrimination on the other.
136. The “Rand School of Socialism,” later the Rand School of Social Science, taught courses on and served as a forum for socialist ideas.
137. The “J. W. Sims” referred to is probably R. T. Sims, the first black organizer for the I.W.W. He attended the 1906 convention, was appointed to the “Good and Welfare Committee,” and introduced a resolution protesting lynchings and anti-black riots. The resolution was adopted. In 1919 the National Brotherhood Workers of America was formed by black representatives from twelve states and the District of Columbia. It was a sort of confederation of black unions patterned after the American Federation of Labor. R. T. Sims was elected vice-president of the organization. See also note 104.
138. Benjamin Harrison Fletcher (1890–1949) was the most important of the black organizers for the Industrial Workers of the World. Born in Philadelphia, he organized the city’s longshoremen into the Marine Transport Workers Union. Composed of more than 3,000 workers, primarily black, between 1913 and 1916 the MTW struck and won union control over the city’s docks. During the “Red Scare” of 1918–19, employers and the federal government launched a campaign to suppress the IWW. In 1918, a Chicago jury convicted more than a hundred Wobblies in less than one hour, and the judge sentenced Ben Fletcher to a ten year term in the Leavenworth, Kansas, penitentiary for conspiracy and violation of the Espionage Act. The Messenger and The Crisis conducted an editorial campaign to free Fletcher. President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence, and later Franklin D. Roosevelt pardoned Fletcher.