279. The pendulum's farthest point
The Supreme Court's second-most influential civil rights decision attempted to fix some of the damage the Court inflicted on the nation with its most influential civil rights decision. (See post 219.) The triumph of Brown v. Board of Education wasn't that it ended segregation - when Martin Luther King was thrown in jail nine years later, it wasn't out of nostalgia - but that the Court finally acknowledged, albeit without accepting blame for, the evil it had wrought with Plessy v. Ferguson, the separate-but-equal case in which it forbade American courts from enforcing the 14th amendment's equal protection clause.
For most of the post-Civil War period, the justices saw their task - and occasionally even articulated it (see post 252) - as reconstructing the legal culture in which they had been trained, restoring the pre-War status quo - in short, surrendering the Union victory. (See post 244.) With Plessy, after 30 years of sapping, they finally achieved their goal. As of 1896, the only remaining trace of the Civil War's constitutional revolution was that slavery could no longer be legally enforced under that name.
But it would be wrong to think that the Supreme Court alone was responsible for the pendulum swinging as far as it did in the first half of the 20th century. The words of a politician of the era who is today almost universally venerated for his progressive idealism clues us in to the warped world in which the Court worked its black (or, rather, anti-Black) magic.
During the Civil War, this idealistic historian wrote in his celebrated 1902 history of America, Northerners "had not noted how quiet, how unexcited, how faithful and steady at their accustomed tasks, how devoted in the service of their masters the great mass of the negro people had remained amidst the very storm and upheaval of war." Consequently, Northerners wholly misunderstood the phenomenon of "contrabands of war" - that is, self-liberated slaves fleeing to the Union Army camps: "to feed them was but to increase their numbers, as the news of bread without work spread through the country-sides."
This well-known idealist wrote of the freed people during Reconstruction,
Their ignorance and credulity made them easy dupes. A petty favor, a slender stipend, a trifling perquisite, a bit of poor land, a piece of money satisfied or silence them. It was enough, for the rest, to play upon their passions. They were easily taught to hate the men who had once held them in slavery, and to follow blindly the political party which had brought on the war of emancipation.
They had to be "taught to hate the men who had once held them in slavery" because that's not the kind of thing they could have learned on their own during the years of slavery, since "they had the easy faith, the simplicity, the idle hopes, the inexperience of children. Their masterless, homeless freedom made them the more pitiable, the more dependent, because under slavery they had been shielded ... [They] had never learned independence or the rough buffets of freedom."
So what inevitably occurred as a result of Northern meddling in Southern affairs?
The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes ... There was no place of open action or of constitutional agitation, under the terms of reconstruction, for the men who were the real leaders of the southern communities. Its restrictions shut white men of the older order out from the suffrage even. They could act only by private combination, by private means, as a force outside the government, hostile to it, proscribed by it, of whom oppositions and bitter resistance was expected, and expected with defiance. ...
They began to do by secret concert and association what they could not do in avowed parties. Almost by accident a way was found to succeed which led insensibly farther and farther afield into the ways of violence and outlawry. In May, 1866, a little group of young men in the Tennessee village of Pulaski, finding time hang heavy on their hands after the excitements of the field, so lately abandoned, formed a secret club for the mere pleasure of association, for private amusements, - for anything that might promise to break the monotony of the too quiet place, as their wits might work upon the matter, and one of their number suggested that they call themselves Kuklos, the Circle. Secrecy and mystery were at the heart of the pranks they planned ...
It threw the negroes into a very ecstasy of panic to see these sheeted "Ku Klux" move near them in the shrouded night; and their comic fear stimulated the lads who excited it to many an extravagant prank and mummery.
But, this famously idealistic politician acknowledged, over time the ex-slaves' "comic fear" rather over-stimulated the Ku Klux Klan:
The objects of the mysterious brotherhood grew serious fast enough. It passed from jest to earnest. Men took hold of it who rejoiced to find in it a new instrument of political power: men half outlawed, denied the suffrage, without hope of justice in the courts, who meant to take this means to make their wills felt.
But lest you think this celebrated academic, one-time president of an Ivy League college, made excuses for the KKK based solely on antipathy to Black Americans, here's what he had to say about the Chinese:
The law which excluded Chinese immigrants [enacted in 1882] had been passed at the urgent solicitation of the men of the Pacific coast. Chinese laborers had poured in there, first by hundreds, then by thousands, finally by hundreds of thousands, until the labor situation of the whole coast had become one almost of revolution. Caucasian laborers could not compete with the Chinese, could not live upon a handful of rice and work for a pittance, and found themselves being steadily crowded out from occupation after occupation by the thrifty, skilful Orientals, who, with their yellow skin and strange, debasing habits of life, seemed to them hardly fellow men at all, but evil spirits, rather.
Oh, but that's not all. He didn't just hate, despise and fear African-Americans and Asians. Describing the America of 1890, this person didn't hold back about southern and eastern Europeans, either:
Immigrants poured steadily in as before, with an alteration of stock which students of affairs marked with uneasiness. Throughout the century men of the sturdy stocks of the north of Europe had made up the main strain of foreign blood which was every year added to the vital working force of the country, or else men of the Latin-Gallic stocks of France and northern Italy; but now there came multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence; and they came in numbers which increased from year to year, as if the countries of the south of Europe were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.
All of these quotes are from A History of the American People by Woodrow Wilson, our near-great President. He was a contemptible man, and his fluke election and squeaker re-election were national tragedies. It's no defense to say he was a man of his time, not only because he did so much to make those times as they were, ensuring that indifference or outright hostility to minorities would be a distinguishing characteristic of the Progressive program (see post 197), but because he was so much more odious than most people of his era.
In 1916, seeking reelection against a Supreme Court justice, he didn't hesitate to play the race card, telling voters in East St. Louis that Republicans were wickedly "'colonizing' imported black voters in a fraudulent attempt to pad the electoral rolls", according to David M. Kennedy. By absolutely no coincidence, East St. Louis was the site of horrific anti-Black violence the following year, with the first of the great "race riots" - pogroms, really - of the 1917-1923 era.
That was only part of Wilson's legacy, of course. Another part was his introduction of racial segregation into the federal civil service. Soon after Wilson was inaugurated, Black employees of the federal government
That's from Nicholas Patler's Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration: Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century, which documents how committed Wilson remained to racial discrimination as federal policy even in the face of organized resistance. Black journalist William Monroe Trotter, who had naively supported Wilson in the 1912 campaign, confronted Wilson two years later in the White House. Wilson replied: "Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit," adding to the uppity editor: "Your manner offends me."
The disaster of the reactionary Supreme Court, topped by the catastrophe of the Wilson presidency, produced some very bad times in America. But it's when the pendulum is at its farthest point that its potential energy is greatest, and this ponderous pendulum began its return movement soon after Wilson finally died.
Because the Supreme Court had done so much to produce the truly dreadful conditions in so many areas of the country, it had the power to contribute to making them less dreadful by repudiating its own prior mistakes. Finally, a century after the Civil War amendments were added to the Constitution, the Court was ready to start permitting the country's courts to enforce them.
And while I don't for a moment wish to criticize the Court for joining the 1870s, I just wish it had done so in the nineteenth century.
Saturday, June 16, 2007 at 04:37PM in Founding contradiction
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