Racism in the Nation's Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America

Five: Wilsonian Praxis: Racial Discrimination in a Progressive Administration

Chapter Five Wilsonian Praxis Racial Discrimination in a Progressive Administration In September 1911, after a decade of clerking in the Census Bureau , George Harris Cox decided to make a final push toward finishing his medical degree. He received permission to work temporarily as a night watchman and began attending classes at Howard during the day.1 It was the kind of opportunity that government work in Washington had afforded many ambitious young men. By March 1913, however, the burdens of pursuing an education while trying to hold a job overwhelmed him, and he returned to census work.2 But theofficewas not as he had left it.The flexibility and relative egalitarianism had vanished. Segregated into the black section of the bureau, Cox was assigned to work he found to be largely meaningless . “The old clerks (colored) who have been in the office 10 and 16 years have had very little opportunity todo any field work,” he told his supervisor in 1916.3 More important, a promotion he had earned before his temporary absence was no longer available.Cox never completed his medical training, and into the 1930s, he labored without much responsibilityand for little pay, despite being the bureau’s “senior colored clerk.”4 Baby girl, I’m not trying to get rich before I come asking for you. I simply have a horror of being buried in Washington—not that I dislike the city, but the limitations. As soon as I can get fare and a few shekels, I see myself leaving. —Swan Kendrick to Ruby Moyse, January 27, 1914 114 A NEW RACIAL REGIME Stories like George Cox’s reveal racial discrimination in practice. The image that predominates in memory and in many history books is one of Woodrow Wilson ordering a sweeping spatial reorganization of government work to separate black and white workers. He never did, and the reality was not so simple. A panoply of humiliations—separate bathrooms, segregated lunchrooms, and separations between white and black employees doing the same work—did appear in places like Cox’s Census Bureau office. But the work of installing white supremacy across Washington’s federal offices was less complete, more personal, often difficult to pin down. There was resistance, or at least negotiation, among workers and even between administrators. And yet the results were even more devastating than a focus simply on physical separation could possibly convey. “Federal segregation” cannot capture what it meant for African Americans that the recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia was a white man for the first time in thirty-five years or that a clerk making $1,200 a year was suddenly reduced to a laborer at $500 a year.The cruelty of George Cox’s circumstances was registered in his exhaustion, mental isolation, and loss of pay. Black clerks like Cox were not simply fired or separated out: they suffered the pain of reduced status and income in a system that no longer valued their work. Discrimination in the federal government after 1912 involved the erection of a ceiling above black employees that capped their economic and social mobility. Further, it was all inflicted by supposedly logical and progressive mechanisms of administrative reform.This wasWilsonian praxis: bureaucratic initiatives that overran personal ambition, party loyalty, or basic justice. Adding to the complexity of organizing a bureaucracy according to race was the way in which the Wilson administration went about the work. The federal government, even in 1913, was a massive operation with layers of hierarchy that left room for great variation in office management. In its public explanations, the administration was neither candid nor consistent about segregation in part because there was little unanimity about how to deal with black employees. Even among the white supremacists of Wilson’s cabinet, the degree of vitriol toward black Americans varied, and it is difficult to connect an executive’s demands with a deputy’s actions. Official orders are rarely extant in archives. Letters between administration officials refer to verbal conversations obliquely, and in one of the only letters between Treasury secretary William Gibbs McAdoo and President Wilson in which segregation was mentioned, McAdoo suggested that they meet privately.5 A diary kept by Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Charles S. 115 WILSONIAN PRAXIS Hamlin is a rare and brief record of key talks about race and segregation within theTreasury Department, which employed the most African Americans among the executive departments in...