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

Seven: Creating Normalcy: Washington after Wilson

Chapter Seven Creating Normalcy Washington after Wilson On May 30, 1922, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., was officiallydedicated.Gleaming white, theenormous neoclassical marble temple housed a larger-than-life statue of Abraham Lincoln, seated, with huge hands to symbolize the generosity he insisted upon and the bigness of his message. Stretching up to the ceiling along the inner walls were the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, his pithy paean to American democracy, union, and sacrifice. It was supposed to be a moment of national pride and sectional reconciliation: “Emancipation was a means to the great end—maintained union and nationality,” said President Warren G. Harding.To illustrate the unifying meaning, the temple’s thirty-six columns represented all of the states of Lincoln’s United States, and above them, forty-eight ornaments represented the Union’s members in 1922.1 Yet Republicans also sought to own the day: an event to honor a Republican president was chaired by another Republican president, William Howard Taft, and the keynote address was delivered by the Republican Harding. Former president Wilson had wired earlier in the day that he To live in a country where there is no hope of rising in the public service through education, through character, and conduct is to be “a man without a country.” —William H. Lewis to Calvin Coolidge, August 8, 1924 176 REPUBLICANS IN THE NEW REGIME would be unable to attend.2 It should have been a triumphant moment for African Americans too. Robert Russa Moton, who succeeded Booker T. Washington as principal of theTuskegee Institute and as blackdoyen of the GOP, was invited to eulogize the martyr to black freedom and citizenship. Indeed, African Americans were just as delighted as Taft and Harding that the White House and Congress were again under Republican control. The last eight years of Democratic rule had been far worse for them. But black dignitaries invited to attend the dedication—important and well-known Republicans like Whitefield McKinlay, Emmett J. Scott, Perry Howard, and Mrs. Emanuel Hewlett—discovered a nasty surprise when Tuskegee principal Robert Russa Moton speaking at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, May 30, 1922. It is no accident that Moton appears to stand so entirely alone against a white backdrop in this photograph. Despite the return of Republican rule in Washington and the occasion of honoring the “Great Emancipator,” distinguished black guests at the event were segregated out of sight behind white attendees. The betrayal signaled that the national Republican Party no longer held much interest in even symbolic pronouncements of egalitarianism in the nation’s capital. (Library of Congress) 177 CREATING NORMALCY they arrived: the opening of a monument to the Great Emancipator was a segregated event. Shelby Davidson reported that the African American guests were seated on a platform behind the white guests and roped off. Guarding them were “marines whoweredistasteful, discourteous, and abusive even to swearing in the presence of our colored women.”3 Outraged, many simply left. The Washington Post reported the next day that the event had gone off with “no mishaps,” but for African Americans, the takeaway was entirelydifferent.4 The South was still “‘in the saddle,’”said the Chicago Defender. For the Washington Tribune, the dedication offered a “full realization ” of Harding’s invocation to the NAACP that “colored men should fall in behind the leadership.”5 The 1920s were the years in which black civil servants were forced to construct different, less hopeful careers in the new racial regime. For some, it was a realization that citizenship for African Americans did not come with the right to play an important role in the civil administration, a sort of delayed end to the dreams of the Reconstruction era. For most, it meant that whatever luster and mobility that had once come with being a part of a democratic state apparatus was lost, leaving behind a fixed racial and working-class identity with little opportunity for rising. This is not to say that blackWashingtonians lost theirambition or their brains, their diversity or their style.What they lost was the hope that they could be different from black Americans elsewhere and theexpectation that theirUnited States was still interested in seeing them succeed. Changes in how the American state interacted with its own black workers played a dramatic role in the changing identityof blackWashingtonians and, indeed, of black citizens throughout the United States. Fighting Black Citizens When...