Volume V Part 15 (2/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]
Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton.
His oration on this occasion directed attention to Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton not only as a remarkable negro, but as a remarkable man. Born poor as could be and fighting his way to an education against every conceivable obstacle, he had at the age of forty distinguished himself as a business organizer, as an educator, as a writer, and as, a public speaker. His modesty, discretion, and industry were phenomenal, at once const.i.tuting him a leader of his race and rendering his leaders.h.i.+p valuable. He eschewed politics, avoided in everything the demagogue's ways, and never spoke ill of the whites, not even of Southern whites.
But, unfortunately, a great negro such as Was.h.i.+ngton stood like a mountain in a marsh, sporadic and solitary.
[Ill.u.s.tration: People walking in front of a large columned building.]
The Atlanta Exposition.
Entrance to the Art Building.
Save in West Virginia, Florida, and the black belts the whites at the South increased more swiftly than the blacks. Certain of what Malthus called the ”positive checks” upon population--viz., diseases, mainly syphilis, typhoid, and consumption--decimated the negroes everywhere.
Colored population drifted from the country to cities, which probably accounted for the fact that in 1890 more negroes lived in the North than ever before. In the South itself, on the other hand, the movement of colored population was southward and westward, from the highlands to the lowlands, so that Kentucky, along with western Virginia, northeastern Mississippi, and rural parts of Maryland, North Alabama, and eastern Virginia, had, in 1890, fewer colored inhabitants than ten years previous.
These confusing data explain why few were rash enough to prophesy the fate of the American negro. Such predictions as were heard, were, in the main, little hopeful. Colonization abroad was no resource. In 1895 the International Immigration Society s.h.i.+pped 300 negroes to Liberia, and in 1897 the Central Labor Union of New York 311 more, but no movement of the kind could be set going. In fact, the one certainty touching the American negroes' future was that they would remain in the United States.
From 1870 to 1880 the percentage of negroes to the total population had increased, but a century had reduced this ratio from 19.3 per cent. to 12 per cent. The climatic area where black men had any advantage over white in the struggle for life was less than eight per cent. of the country. White laborers competed more and more sharply. The paternal affection of the old slave-holding generation toward negroes was not inherited by the makers of the New South.
There was one hopeful force at work--Booker Was.h.i.+ngton at Tuskegee, in the very heart of the Alabama black belt. His personality, his example, his ideas were inspiring. He bade his race to expect improvement in its condition not from any political party nor from Northern benevolence, but from its own advance in industry and character. His great and successful college at Tuskegee, with an enrolment of 1,231 students in 1889, gave much impetus to industrial education among the blacks, turning in that direction educational interest and energy which had previously found vent to too great an extent, relatively, in providing negro students with mere literary training. The Slater-Armstrong Memorial Trades' Building, dedicated January 10, 1890, was erected and finished by the students practically alone. At least three-fourths of those receiving instruction at this school pursued, after leaving, the industries learned there.
The color line had ceased to be sectional. In 1900 mobs in New York City and Akron, Ohio, baited black citizens with barbarity little less than that of the worst Southern lynchings. Texas courts the same year affirmed negroes' right to serve as jurymen. After 1900 one noticed in several Southern States a tendency to oust negroes from official connection even with the Republican party, each State organization affecting to be ”Lily-White.” The Administration seemed to favor this movement by appointing liberal Democrats at the South to federal offices, allying such, in a way, with the Republican cause. This helped make President Roosevelt popular at the South, spite of the criticism with which the press there greeted his entertainment of Booker T.
Was.h.i.+ngton at the White House. When he visited the Exposition at Charleston, December, 1901-May, 1902, he was enthusiastically received.
CHAPTER X.
THE MEN AND THE ISSUE IN 1896
[1890-1896]
Early in 1896 it became clear that the dominant issue of the presidential campaign would be the resumption by the United States of silver-dollar free coinage. Agitation for this, hushed only for a moment by the pa.s.sage of the Bland Act, had been going on ever since demonetization in 1873. The fall in prices, which the new output of gold had not yet begun to arrest; the money stringency since 1893; the insecure, bond-supplied gold reserve, and the repeal of the silver-purchase clause in the Sherman Act combined to produce a wish for increase in the nation's hard-money supply. Had the climax of fervor synchronized with an election day, a free-coinage President might have been elected.
Only the Populists were a unit in favoring free coinage. Recent Republican and Democratic platforms had been phrased with Delphic genius to suit the East and West at once. The best known statesmen of both parties had ”wobbled” upon the question. The Republican party contained a large element favorable to silver, while the Democratic President, at least, had boldly and steadfastly exerted himself to establish the gold standard.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]
Senator Teller of Colorado.
Realignment of forces begot queer alliances between party foes, lasting bitterness between party fellows. Even the Prohibitionists, who held the first convention, were riven into ”narrow-gauge” and ”broad-gauge,” the latter in a rump convention incorporating a free-coinage plank into their creed. If the Republicans kept their ranks closed better than the Democrats, this was largely due to the prominence they gave to protection, attacked by the Wilson-Gorman Act.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait.]
Senator Cannon.
Their convention sat at St. Louis, June 16th. It was an eminently business-like body, even its enthusiasm and applause wearing the air of discipline. In making the platform, powerful efforts for a catch-as-catch-could declaration upon the silver question succ.u.mbed to New England's and New York's demand for an unequivocal statement. The party ”opposed the free coinage of silver except by international agreement with the leading commercial nations of the world.” ...
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