Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America

14. The Age of Segregation at Its Zenith: The Racial System in a World of Colonialism

189 Chapter 14 The Age of Segregation at Its Zenith The Racial System in a World of Colonialism Black history since the defeat of the Radicals, despite hard-fought battles, had been a downward spiral of declining political influence, declining economic opportunity, and increasing violence. The Philadelphia Christian Recorder, on March 24, 1892, reported that in Arkansas during “the last 30 days there have been not less then eight colored persons lynched.”1 African Americans had reached the low point of their post-Emancipation history. But the horrors of lynching and racial oppression were far from the concerns of the nation’s leaders. Indeed, Senator Albert Beveridge thought that the United States provided a model for the world: “Our institutions will follow our flag on the wings of our commerce. And American law, American civilization, and the American flag will plant themselves on shores hitherto bloody and benighted, but by these agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright.”2 For most American leaders the “Negro problem” had been solved by disfranchisement and segregation, and it was now time to move on to a dazzling future. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the nation had been turned upside down. The once-dominant South had been devastated by war and its four million slaves freed. In the West, a land of tribal hunters had been conquered and transformed into a land that produced commodities for the world market. In the North, a world of farmers and villagers was becoming oriented to rapidly growing and industrializing cities. Yet by the century’s end, whatever else might happen in American society, the “place” of black Americans seemed forever the same. The Emerging Corporate Hegemony The victory of the Union had released the brakes that the Old South had put on theNorth’sindustrialmachine.Now,enteringthenewcentury,itwasracingpast all rivals. Much of the nation’s industrial success was due to its post-Reconstruction political system: two parties, funded largely by the same institutions and individuals. The new system began to operate when most Democrats adopted the Republican economic agenda, and Republicans acquiesced to southern white views on civil rights. The location of political power in the nation had shifted from the plantation big house to the corporate board room. Yet the one-party South still influenced national politics. In Washington, the South was represented by what came to be called the Jim Crow bloc. Since southern election laws discouraged voting, these congressmen were elected with few votes and sometimes elected unopposed. Nominally Democrats, they crossed over freely to vote with the Republicans on conservative issues, a practice that discouraged reform-minded factions in both parties. Corporate lobbies could count on the support of the Jim Crow bloc for measures that voter-intimidated congressmen of either party dared not endorse. If southern Democrats represented few voters, southern Republicans represented none at all. Their party in the South had been reduced to a circle of appointed federal officeholders who no longer took part in state elections. Yet they turned up at Republican national conventions, where they gave their support to the GOP national machine upon which they depended for their jobs. The “rotten boroughs” of the South provided conservative Republican national leaders with a bloc of captive delegates to combat the delegates from the upper North where, since the days of Lincoln, Republicans had had a strong grassroots constituency. A prophecy of John C. Calhoun was coming true. “It is impossible with us” in the South, he had told the Senate in 1838, “that the conflict can take place between labor and capital. . . . The blessing of this state of things extends beyond the limits of the South. It makes that section the balance of the system; 190 part 4: the racial system in a rising superpower the great conservative power, which prevents other portions, less fortunately constituted, from rushing into conflict.”3 The South did indeed function as the “great conservative power.” The failure of the Radical vision in the South had helped to make the two national parties the right arm and the left arm of corporate power. The Cultural Legacy of the Conservative Victory The position of the South as the bulwark of conservative power in national politics also influenced American culture. It shaped a memory of the Civil War that was different from the memory of any other American war. As wars require the sacrifice of life, humankind’s...