Part 11
It seemed that the suspense would be ended quickly when the House under pressure of the rules passed the Hare Bill almost without debate: but when it came before the Senate it was evident at once that those dignitaries would take abundance of time to consider it,--if for no other reason than to prove to themselves they were the greatest deliberative body on earth.
However, with all the Senate's deliberation the very frenzy of the Wordyfellow crowd's screams evidenced their realization that their game was balked--and that, too, in a manner that was maddening: for it left them not the frenzied pleasure of fighting their precious battle against the negro out to the end and going down to harmless defeat in pyrotechnic glory. No; it placed them in a dilemma where they must humiliate themselves by a surrender before the battle, or fight it to a barren victory at the polls, which would not only bring actual benefit to the negro in the South but also give to the Northern States the lion's share of a large appropriation.
Facing this dilemma, they lost heart if they lost nothing of noise. In all of the interested States except Mississippi serious discussion of the question grew less and less rapidly, and was postponed until after the Senate should vote. In Mississippi, however, the tension was increased by the Senate's deliberation because the date set for the election on the proposed Wordyfellow amendment to the State constitution was some time before the Senate would be forced to vote. The Mississippians could not decide for their lives whether they preferred to vote on their amendment first or have the Senate vote first on the bill. With a faint hope that the bill might not pass, they were in obvious difficulties in either case.
Southern Senators were overwhelmed with all manner of conflicting and confusing petitions, and as a result about one half of them favoured the bill for one reason or another, while the other half more or less bitterly opposed it. The discussion, when the bill finally came out of committee, took the widest range,--from the constitutional objections raised by the Texas Senator (whose State, having a large school-fund income, did not need the appropriation) and the savage attacks upon the negro race generally by Senator Killam, to the purely pro-educational reasoning of most of the supporting Senators from the South--among whom was Senator Ruffin--and the pro-negro speech of the young Senator Rutledge.
The adjective _pro-negro_ may give an erroneous impression of Senator Rutledge's ideas. The term is the Senator's own. From his speech in full in the _Congressional Record_ the reader may determine for himself whether the term is apt.
*CHAPTER XVII*
Senator Rutledge gave notice that on February 23d he would address the Senate on the Hare Bill. On that day the galleries were crowded to hear him, his State's delegation in the House was present in a body, accompanied by many other representatives from North and South. No one knew how he would vote, for he had listened much and talked little. He said:
"Mr. President: There have been many terms used on this floor and in the public prints since this bill was introduced, by which to distinguish and define and lay open to public view the motives which are supposed to lie behind the votes that will be cast for and against it.
"We have heard 'unconstitutional,' 'anti-negro,' 'pro-educational,' 'watch-dog of the treasury,' and others equally descriptive if less parliamentary. I have not heard 'pro-negro.'
"So, to save my friends--and enemies, if I have any--the trouble of search and imaginings, I adopt that term, '_pro-negro_,' as descriptive of my attitude toward the matters affected by this bill.
"It is an open secret, Mr. President, that this measure, which bears the non-committal title of 'an act to promote education' is a White House production designed and introduced for the single purpose of defeating what is known as the Wordyfellow school-fund movement in the South generally, more specifically now in the State of Mississippi. Because I think it will accomplish that purpose, both general and special,--because I am 'for the negro,'--for him on his own account,--for his elevation as a race to the highest level which his essential nature in the purposes of God will permit him to attain,--because I believe the success of the Wordyfellow movement would mean his degradation, his hopeless continuance in his present low estate,--because, in a word, I am _pro-negro_; I shall vote for this bill.
"I should despise myself, sir, if I had within me other sentiments toward any man or race of men, and I feel, therefore, that it is not unbecoming in me to arrogate to myself the pure unselfishness of this motive. And yet, sir, if the love of one's race may be called a selfish passion, I must confess that right alongside of this unselfish desire for the negro's welfare, there lies in my heart a selfish passion for the progress, the multiplying prosperity and more abounding happiness of my own people, the white men and women of the South, which desire also with no less power but indeed with compelling forcefulness bids me to oppose the Wordyfellow idea with every faculty and expedient, and therefore to vote for this measure.
"I wish to make it clear at the outset that, while I shall heartily support this White House bill, I give not the slightest credit to the President for having prepared it and sent it here. He deserves none. The bill is a necessity, and as such I vote for it: but the President is the one man who has made it a necessity.
"If he had not injected into the situation his negro luncheon (and to that I will pay my respects before I have finished), my people would have defeated the Wordyfellow movement; for the battle was going our way. It is as little as President Phillips can do now to suggest this method, expensive though it is, to repair the damage he has done the negro's cause in the South. He comes praying us to pay the negro out of the difficulty in which he has involved him, and _as friends of the negro_ there is nothing for us to do but furnish the money, however much we may deplore the Executive folly that makes the outlay imperative.
"Now, Mr. President, let us inquire directly into the merits of the Wordyfellow plan. The proposed amendment to the constitution of Mississippi provides that the school fund shall be divided between the white and negro schools in proportion to the taxes paid to the State by each of the two races for school purposes. As there are six negroes to four whites in the State, and as the negroes pay less than ten per cent of the school taxes, such a division of the school fund will give the white children thirteen days' schooling to the negro's one.
"Such a proposition is illogical, pernicious, insane.
"Look at the logic of it. Governor Wordyfellow defends the general proposition by some scattering statistics which prove to his mind that education generally is not good for the negro; but he justifies the division of the school fund on the basis of contribution upon the supposed principle that the negro will get back all that he pays in and therefore cannot rightly demand more.
"That so-called principle will not hold water a moment. I would say to the gentlemen from the South, Mr. President,--to those who are supporting the Wordyfellow propaganda--that if they proceed on that theory they must give to _every_ man what he pays into the treasury: which means that the State must expend more for the tuition of the sons of the rich than the sons of the poor. If every man has a right to demand for his own children the taxes he pays for school purposes, then the State has no right to tax one man to educate another's child--and the promoters of this idea have pulled down the whole public school system about their ears.
"If such a division is proposed on the ground that no sort of education is good for the negro, and we believe that, then let us take away from the negro by constitutional amendment _all_ the money collected from him by the State for school purposes and give it to the white children. That would be logical, that would be sensible, that would be Scriptural. Let us be logical and sensible and fearless about this matter.
"But I cannot think these leaders of the Wordyfellow forces believe that, Mr. President, though I fear that they have persuaded thousands of their less intelligent following to believe it thoroughly. No, you do not believe it; but you do believe that some particular kinds of education--literary education, for example--is positively harmful to the negro, while some other particular sort--industrial education, perhaps--is beneficial and would uplift the negro race.
"If you admit that,--and it has been conceded on this floor by some of the leaders of the Wordyfellow movement that industrial education is good for the negro and will make a better man and a better citizen of him; then in face of the appalling menace of his ignorance and depravity which have been painted in such lurid colours here, _let us by constitutional amendment give him more than his per capita share of the school tax_. Yes, let us give to him proportionately in keeping with our keenest fears, our wildest terror, of the Black Peril--all if need be--to educate him _in that particular line that will uplift him_ and make a safe citizen of him, in order that we may save ourselves alive and escape the woes of that peril. All education administered by the State is given in the exercise of a sort of quasi police power--to protect itself from the violence of ignorance: and we would be well within an ancient principle if we should lay out extraordinary funds to police the black cesspools that threaten our civic life.
"It is clearly demonstrable, therefore, that upon any theory of the negro's inability or limited ability to be benefited by education, or upon the assumption of its positive hurtfulness to him, the Wordyfellow amendment is absolutely illogical. The whole Wordyfellow proposition is based upon a false assumption in the first place, and the Wordyfellow remedy does not have the merit of being true even to the fictitious Wordyfellow premises. For all this agitation against the education of the negro race proceeds upon the theory that the negro is not altogether a man, that he is without the one aptitude common to all other peoples, white, yellow or red--the disposition to be uplifted in civilization by the spread of a higher intelligence among his race.
"That theory, Mr. President, is false! And while I believe the great majority of my people reject it despite the insistence with which it has been in small measure openly, in large measure indirectly, presented to them for acceptance, I have thought it worth while to inquire closely and specifically into the effect of the _higher literary_ education upon the black men and women who have been so fortunate as to acquire it. I give to the Senators not only as the result of my investigation but as the result of my personal observation as a man brought up in the South, my sincere opinion that education of the negro in the usual literary studies from the kindergarten to the college, as well as along industrial lines, is as a rule beneficial and uplifting to him.
"It is true that a smattering of education in some instances gives a negro the idea that he is to get a living without work, and that such notions would not be wholesome if prevailing among a population which must do manual labour. This need not alarm us, however; for it is not an unusual thing for a college education to give a white boy the same notion. We do not limit his education on that account. In the post-graduate school of Hard Knocks he always finds out--and no less surely will the negro boy of similar delusion learn--especially as education becomes more and more a possession of the masses and not a privilege of the few--that the great majority of men, whether black or white, lettered or unlettered, must work, and work with their hands.
"Let me add, lest I be misunderstood, that while I believe the negro race as a race will be hewers of wood and drawers of water for generations to come, and that education will be beneficial to them as a toiling class, I am not of those who believe that when by education you spoil a negro field-hand you have committed a crime. I have no sympathy with a sentiment that would confine any man to a limited though respectable and honourable work when he has within him the aspiration and the ability to serve his race and his time in broader fields.
"Those, in a nutshell, Mr. President, are the primary reasons why I am opposed to the Wordyfellow movement, and shall vote for this bill. The secondary reasons are hardly less forceful.
"I want this bill passed and passed quickly in order to avoid the pernicious incidental effects of the agitation of this question among my people. It has bred and is breeding antagonisms between the white and black races in the South such as did not result from the horrors of reconstruction or the excitement of negro disfranchisement. In those issues the negro truthfully was told and well may have believed that the white man was driven to protect himself against the ignorance and depravity of the black. In this case, however, the negro feels, and rightly, that the white man would condemn him perpetually to that ignorance and depravity. From the negro's view-point the white man's motive is now what it never was before: base, worse than selfish, wantonly, vindictively cruel.
"Again the propagation of the Wordyfellow idea teaches incidentally that in this democratic country, where by the very nature of our institutions the welfare of each is the welfare of all, where forsooth a Christian civilization has reached its highest development, even here, the strong may desert the weak and leave them to their own pitiful devices and defences.
"It teaches also the doctrine--more potent for evil--that the government may take note of racial classes for the purpose of dealing out its favours and benefits with uneven hands, preferring one to the other. If it may do this when the class differences are racial, it is but half a step to the proposition that it may do so when the differences exist whether they be racial or other. It takes no seer to see that after that proposition--no, _with_ that proposition--comes the deluge.
"Such, Mr. President, are some, not all, of the incidental effects of the propagation of the Wordyfellow idea which clearly and with vast conservatism may be called pernicious. But there is yet another effect which will be inevitable upon the adoption of the Wordyfellow plan, and which has been in large measure produced already by the discussion of it, in the light of which deliberate advocacy of the Wordyfellow idea fairly may be called insane; and that is the severing of all bonds of sympathy and good-will between the races when the negro is told by white men, 'Here, take the pitiful portion that is yours, and go work out your own bitter, black salvation, alone--if you can.'
"All this agitation, all our concern, is predicated upon the deadly menace which this people, numbering one-third of the population of the South and gathered in many sections in overwhelming majorities, is to our civic and industrial happiness and progress: and it does seem the sheerest insanity to sever the bonds of sympathy and helpfulness which now bind the races together, surrender all our interest and right to control in the method of the negro's uplifting, and leave him to develop along any haphazard or dangerous lines without sympathy, respect, or regard for us, our ideas, or our ideals.
"The negro has been enough of a problem and a terror to my people with all our ability to control him through his ignorance, his fears, his affection and his respect for us. We have been careless at times perhaps as to how we made use of these instruments for his management. The more fools we if we now throw away his affection and his respect, cut loose from him entirely, and leave him to develop under teachers of his own race who with distorted vision or prejudiced heart will replace his ignorance with a knowledge at least of his brute strength, and cancel his fears with hate.
"My people give freely hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly to the degraded of other lands in whom they have only the interest which Christians have in universal humanity, and they place in the calendar of the saints the names of the godly men and women who go to work personally to uplift the heathen. I do not think that in their cool senses their Christian impulses, to which is added the motive of self-interest, will permit them to cut off their contributions to and support of any instrumentality which will elevate the degraded in their own land whose depravity is so pregnant with dire possibilities to them. I pray the day to come when, among my people, it shall be thought just as praiseworthy, as noble, as saintly for a Southern white man to give his life and energies to the personal instruction, uplifting and redemption of the negroes in America as of the negroes in Africa or the heathen in any land.
"That prayer, Mr. President, which is sincerely from my heart, brings me to the discussion of President Phillips' negro policy. I shall not expect to see the prayer answered so long as the Chief Executive of this nation shows a disposition to deal so carelessly, so arbitrarily, with such cock-sure flippancy, with the convictions, prejudices if you will, of the brave and generous people who are face to face in their race problem not with a far-away academic question about which they may safely speculate and theorize, but face to face with a present, tangible, appalling issue in whose solution is life or death to them.
"To my people the consequences are so vital that they sometimes are led perhaps beyond what is really necessary in the way of defence,--for any sane man prefers to be doubly guarded against death. So it has been that while they are not favourable to the Wordyfellow plan they have been stampeded to it by the Phillips negro luncheon.
"Let me explain that when I speak of the President's negro policy I do not mean to include his appointments of negroes to office. I think we of the South have in these matters to some extent confused the issues, and proportionately weakened our position before the outside public. Not that I approve of appointing negroes to office in the South, for I do not. I think the weight of all considerations is against it. But the considerations either for or against it are considerations of expediency. They are not vital. If the President wishes to vindicate his negro appointments on the ground that his appointees are of his party, the best men of his party, and fairly efficient,--let him. Such reasons have been given for political appointments time out of mind, although they are not conclusive in any case and especially not in the matter of negro office-holding in the South. _But let him not_ go into cheap heroics such as were indulged in by a recent negro appointee, who tragically exclaimed that if his appointment was not confirmed his race would be set back thirty years!
"Such rant is only ridiculous. Office-holding is not a recognized or an actual instrumentality for uplifting or civilizing a people; and it is not a theory of this or any other form of government that its mission or method is to uplift its citizenship, white or black, by making place-holders of them. It is not closing any legitimate door of hope to negro or white man to refuse him a Presidential appointment. The 'door of hope,' whatever else it may be to white or black, is not the door to a government office.
"The real basis of the race issue, Mr. President, has nothing to do with politics or political appointments, with office-getting or office-holding. If by some trick of chance a negro--some prodigy lofty in character and in the science and wisdom of statecraft--were President of this nation to-day, and were by unanimous consent a model Executive, the real race problem would not be affected a feather's weight. The world must understand that the Southern white people in the measures they have taken and will take to protect themselves against the negro are impelled by weightier considerations than the pre-emption of the dignities or emoluments of politics. It is true that they have taken the governments of the Southern States into their own hands, away from negro majorities in many sections. It may be true that in order to do this they have nullified provisions of the Federal constitution. But they have done so from no such small motive as a desire to hold public office.
"My people have all respect for the wisdom of the makers of the constitution, who framed an instrument perfectly suited to the conditions as they existed at the time and continued to exist for eighty years, prescribing the method of majority rule for a people who were of an approximately equal civic intelligence and virtue. But when the conditions were changed and a vast horde of illiterate and--in the hands of unscrupulous leaders--vicious voters were added to the electorate, stern necessity forbade them longer to give a sentimental support to so-called fundamental principles in the constitution and permit ignorance to rule intelligence and vice to rule virtue.
"The 'fundamental principles' in that constitution, Mr. President, are nothing more or less than wisely conceived _policies_ which were tried, proved, and found good under the conditions for which they were devised. The 'fundamental principle' upon which the race problem of the South may be solved will have been discovered with certainty only _after_ a solution has been accomplished by the conscientious effort and best thought of Southern white men.
"And they will solve this problem. It can never be settled, of course, till Southern white men acquiesce in its settlement. They will settle it in righteousness and will accept with gratefulness any suggestion which their fellow countrymen have to offer in a spirit of sympathy and helpfulness. But it may as well be understood that any such exhibition as the President's negro luncheon, which affronts the universal sentiment of the final arbiters of this question, must necessarily put further away the day of settlement. The negro problem cannot be worked out by any simple little rule o' thumb, and the negro will always be the loser by any such melodramatic display of super-assertive backbone and misinformed conscience.
"The President would settle this matter upon a purely theoretical academic basis, this matter that in its practical effects will not touch him nor his family nor his section, but will affect vitally the happiness, the lives, the destiny of a chivalrous people whose ideas, traditions, sentiments and convictions he carelessly ignores or impetuously insults. Such exhibitions do not become a brave man. They betoken, rather, a headstrong man, an inconsiderate man, a thoughtless man, a fanatical man. It does seem that President Phillips would have learned wisdom from the experience of his illustrious predecessor, President Roosevelt, who did somewhat less of this sort of thing once--and only once.