Portrait of a Scientific Racist: Alfred Holt Stone of Mississippi

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161 1. Information about the duration of Stone’s visits and where he stayed comes from various letters to Willcox in WFWP. The location and description of the Hotel Driscoll comes from postcards of the hotel purchased on eBay. 2. Correspondence between Willcox and Stone dated February 21, 22, and March 2, 1905, WFWP. 3. Stone to Willcox from Washington, DC, May 5, 1905. 10 FRANK, WITHOUT BEING OFFENSIVE Alfred Holt Stone spent most of 1904 through 1906 in Washington, D.C. He usually stayed at the boardinghouse just across the street from the Library of Congress. When Mary accompanied him, as she did in the winter of 1904–5 and again in 1905–6, Stone took a room at the Hotel Driscoll, a modern, five-story building at First and B Streets N.W., facing the Capitol and close to Union Station.1 Stone’s research was paying off, and his views on the race problem were becoming known outside the circle of academics with whom he interacted at the American Economic Association. In February 1905, Willcox invited him to speak at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.2 “My thesis is the influence of the numerical distribution of our negro population upon our respective points of view,” Stone informed Willcox on May 5, one week before he was scheduled to speak. The point he wanted to make was that people living in the North would develop the same prejudices concerning black people as southerners if they also lived in a place where African Americans accounted for a vast majority of the population. “My only hope is to suggest some line of thought that possibly may enable others to understand, at least a little better than before, why my people feel and act as they do,” as Stone put it. “Certainly I hope that I may induce my audience to believe with me that these people think merely as others think who are similarly circumstanced.”3 Stone’s talk was a success, in large part due to his desire to emphasize PORTRAIT OF A SCIENTIFIC RACIST 162 4. Stone, “Race Problem Contrasts and Parallels,” 4, 25, 32. Mary accompanied Stone on the trip to Cornell, where they stayed with the Willcoxes (Stone to “Dr. & Mrs. Willcox,” May 17, 1905, and Willcox to Stone and his wife, April 4, and May 2, 1905, all in WFWP). 5. “Race Problem Contrasts and Parallels,” 3–39. Stone gave the same paper again in 1906 when he visited the University of Michigan. 6. See Stone to Willcox from the Hotel Driscoll in Washington, D. C., April 24, 1906. “Completely” is qualified by “almost” because Stone continued to pursue his interest in the War Amendments. the similarities between white people in the North and white people in the South rather than focus on their differences. Furthermore, he distanced himself from the racial vitriol northerners were accustomed to hear from southern bigots. “I am not an extremist,” Stone assured his audience at the beginning of his talk, “and I long ago made up my mind to keep faith with myself in this, that I would not utter one word upon the perplexing question [the race problem] of which my conscience did not approve as the prompting of a desire to speak the truth for the truth’s sake.” Patiently, he spelled out why the South had found it necessary to adopt legislative barriers to the integration of the two races. “I can say that the white people of the South believe that where two races, as widely different as are the white and black, live together in large masses,” he explained, “public policy requires the observance of certain regulations in the ordering of the social relations between the two.” If the ratio of black people to white people in the North was the same as in the South, Stone predicted, the northern states would embrace Jim Crow too.4 Stone’s address at Cornell elaborated a theme he had articulated six years before in his first paper for the Mississippi Historical Society. Unless you lived in the Deep South, you could not appreciate the steps that were necessary to maintain harmonious relations between the two races. But the defensive tone of the earlier piece was gone when he spoke to his audience at Cornell. What Stone had discovered in the intervening years was that many well-educated white people in the North thought the same way he did when it came to the race...