762 ★ CHAPTER 19 Safe for Democracy: The United States and WWI
Most settlement- house reformers accepted segregation as natural and
equitable, assuming there should be white settlements for white neighbor-
hoods and black settlements for black. White leaders of the woman suffrage
movement said little about black disenfranchisement. In the South, members
of upper- class white women’s clubs sometimes raised funds for black schools
and community centers. But suffrage leaders insisted that the vote was a racial
entitlement, a “badge and synonym of freedom,” in the words of Rebecca Felton
of Georgia, that should not be denied to “ free- born white women.” During
Reconstruction, women had been denied constitutional recognition because it
was “the Negro’s hour.” Now, World War I’s “woman’s hour” excluded blacks.
The amendment that achieved woman suffrage left the states free to limit vot-
ing by poll taxes and literacy tests. Living in the South, the vast majority of the
country’s black women still could not vote.
Roosevelt, Wilson, and Race
The Progressive presidents shared prevailing attitudes concerning blacks.
Theodore Roosevelt shocked white opinion by inviting Booker T. Washington
to dine with him in the White House and by appointing a number of blacks
to federal offices. But in 1906, when a small group of black soldiers shot off
their guns in Brownsville, Texas, killing one resident, and none of their fel-
lows would name them, Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge of three
black companies— 156 men in all, including six winners of the Congressional
Medal of Honor. Roosevelt’s ingrained belief in Anglo- Saxon racial destiny (he
called Indians “savages” and blacks “wholly unfit for the suffrage”) did noth-
ing to lessen Progressive intellectuals’ enthusiasm for his New Nationalism.
Even Jane Addams, one of the few Progressives to take a strong interest in
black rights and a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), went along when the Progressive Party convention
of 1912 rejected a civil rights plank in its platform and barred black delegates
from the South.
Woodrow Wilson, a native of Virginia, could speak without irony of the
South’s “genuine representative government” and its exalted “standards of lib-
erty.” His administration imposed racial segregation in federal departments in
Washington, D.C., and dismissed numerous black federal employees. Wilson
allowed D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan
as the defender of white civilization during Reconstruction, to have its pre-
miere at the White House in 1915. “Have you a ‘new freedom’ for white Amer-
icans and a new slavery for your African- American fellow citizens?” William
Monroe Trotter, the militant black editor of the Boston Guardian and founder of
the all- black National Equal Rights League, asked the president.