Ragtime in the White House
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Ragtime in the White House

War, Race, and the Presidency in the Time of William McKinley

Eliot Vestner

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Ragtime in the White House

War, Race, and the Presidency in the Time of William McKinley

Eliot Vestner

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About This Book

History played a trick on McKinley. He has been consigned to the shadows between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, vilified or ignored by historians... It is a richly undeserved fate. As Eliot Vestner demonstrates in this narrative of the political life of William McKinley, there was much more to the twenty-fifth president's tenure in office than history books allow. He was a popular president, winning a second term with ease. But only nine months into it, he was assassinated by a self-described anarchist. What more he might have accomplished is anyone's guess. He had managed to successfully pull America out of one of the worst economic depressions yet experienced, the Panic of 1893. And his controversial tariffs strengthened industry and contributed to the overall wealth of the country, as did his return of the country to the gold standard. He also led the U.S. to victory in the Spanish-American war, and implemented the first steps toward building the Panama Canal, which his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, continued. Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of McKinley's presidency was his advocacy for black civil rights, and his challenge to the white supremacy of the south. As governor of Ohio, he fought against lynching. He signed a ground-breaking anti-lynching bill. Ironically, as president, he had a much more difficult time combating violence and racial injustice because of the use of states' rights as justification for voter suppression and terrorism towards blacks. He pursued opportunities to advance the interests of black Americans wherever he could, but his inability to stop the lynchings and disfranchisement of blacks was most regrettable. His successors had no interest in the race issue, which remained unresolved until the 1954 court decision in Brown v. The Board of Education. This book gives McKinley his due, and thereby helps us better understand a President of the United States whose work has seemingly been overlooked by most Americans today.

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Chapter 1

1890: The Federal Voting Rights Bill

ā€œOur black allies must neither be deserted nor forsaken. And every right secured them by the constitution must be . . . given to them.ā€ William McKinley, 1889.
In the spring of 1890, one year after McKinleyā€™s Memorial Day speech, Mississippi held a convention to amend its constitution and ā€œlegallyā€ eliminate black voting. Blacks held a meeting in Jackson to arouse their fellow citizens to the danger, to organize, and to elect delegates to the convention:
Every man who is not blinded by prejudice will admit that the negro citizen is entitled of right to representation in the . . . convention, but . . . it must be demanded! Vote in the election; demand as your right the privilege of a free ballot and a fair count.1
The Jackson Clarion-Ledger was dismissive: ā€œIt is well understood that the convention will be composed entirely of whites.ā€ To emphasize the point, Marsh Cook, a white Republican who was seeking election as a delegate to the convention from Jasper County and was encouraging blacks to organize, was gunned down by six men in the middle of the road in broad daylight.2 There were no arrests.
Judge Solomon Saladin Calhoon of Yazoo City, a former Confederate colonel, was elected president of the convention. Calhoon begrudgingly accepted that the war had ended slavery, but was determined that black men be excluded from Mississippi politics. Interviewed by the Clarion-Ledger, he said, ā€œNegro suffrage is an evil . . . It has been tried for over twenty years, and only heartburning and violence . . . have resulted.ā€ There is, he said,
no politics at the South now save the race question. The only sure remedy . . . repeal of the fifteenth Amendment . . . may come . . . That the negro fought for the Union is true, but he fought for his freedom . . . He has been awarded what he fought to obtain . . . and there was no warrant in his expecting to share in the governing power nor was there any such promise or previous design.3
The men who ran the convention, chief among them Mississippiā€™s U.S. Senator James Z. George, another former Confederate colonel, were well aware that the U.S. Congress was about to consider a federal voting rights law. They were anxious to move quickly and bar the door to federal interference. They intended to eliminate the black vote, not by more violence and fraud, which they found morally repugnant, but legally by constitutional amendment. There were concerns that the U.S. Constitution might stand in the way. Judge Wiley Harris, by reputation the leading lawyer at the convention, was asked for his views on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and on the stateā€™s pledge, given in 1868 as a condition of admission to the Union, that its constitution should never be ā€œso amended or changed as to deprive any citizen or class of citizens of the United States of the right to vote.ā€ The amendments and the pledge appeared to guarantee the right to vote against any attempt by Mississippi to disfranchise blacks.
Judge Harris thought otherwise. In his opinion Mississippi enjoyed full power to set its own voting requirements, so long as it was prepared to lose a few congressional seats and electoral votesā€”the penalties prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment for any state depriving a class of citizens of the voteā€”and provided the voting provisions in the Mississippi Constitution were on their face ā€œnon-discriminatory.ā€ As for the stateā€™s pledge on its re-admission to the Union, the judge said Mississippi had automatically gained all the rights of any other state and Congress had no power to discriminate against Mississippi or exact any additional pledge. It was one of the principles for which the South had fought a war: that the powers of the individual states trumped the powers of the federal government. The draftsmen of the new voting provisions followed the judgeā€™s guidance.4
The new constitution contained a long list of voting requirements, none of which singled out race: a secret ballot (ignorant voters would receive no guidance in the now secret voting booth, with just minutes to figure it out for themselves); lengthy state and district residency requirements; and a two-dollar poll tax (a large amount for a cash-poor farmer or sharecropper).
The most controversial provision, for which Senator George was largely responsible, was the so-called ā€œunderstanding clause.ā€5 The individual seeking to register as a voter would have to pass a literacy test by reading whatever section of the state constitution was selected by the local registrar and, if unable to do so, would have to demonstrate understanding of the section or ā€œgive a reasonable interpretation thereofā€ when it was read to him. The registrar, of course, would be a white Democrat fully in sympathy with the proposition that no black man should be permitted to vote. John Lynch, Mississippiā€™s black congressman, said, ā€œIt was plain to everyone that its purpose was to evade the fifteenth amendment so as to disfranchise voters of one race without disfranchising those of the other.ā€6 But the understanding clause, by empowering registrars to exclude anybody, white or black, also posed a threat to illiterate white men. For that reason, men whose grandfathers were entitled to vote before 1866 (a time when only white men could vote) were exempted from the requirement. That was not, however, a foolproof solution to the problem. Illiterate white men might be too embarrassed to admit to illiteracy before a registrar, or the registrar might reject a man for insufficient proof of ancestry, or just because he didnā€™t like him. There was a storm of protest from counties with relatively few blacks but many illiterate white farmers. Said the Port Gibson Reveille, ā€œIt opens the door wide to fraud . . . It virtually gives to registrars the power of granting or withholding the right of suffrage in the case of every man who is unable to read.ā€7 But the men running the convention, wealthy plantation owners from Mississippiā€™s ā€œblack belt,ā€ wanted neither blacks nor illiterate white men to vote. They intended to limit the franchise to a small group of educated, property-owning white men.
Judge Calhoon, presumably with a straight face, defended the voting provisions as genuine ā€œreform.ā€ They would, he said, do away with violence and fraud: ā€œIf the Negroes were disfranchised according to the forms of law,ā€ he said, ā€œthere would be no occasion to suppress their votes by violence because there would be no votes to suppress, and having no votes in the ballot boxes, there would be no occasion to commit fraud in the count or perjury in the returns as heretofore.ā€8 But there was opposition in the state to the new constitution, and the leaders were not at all confident it could stand the test of a popular vote. To avoid embarrassment, it was adopted by voice vote of the convention.9
The voting requirements did what they were intended to do. At the next presidential election overall voter participation declined from 61 percent to 39 percent; black voter participation declined from 29 percent to 2 percent.10 Blacks, who constituted more than half the population of the state, had voted in large numbers during the 1870s and ā€™80s but were now essentially eliminated from Mississippi politics, as were many illiterate whites. Most Mississippians would not participate in the political process, which would become the exclusive preserve of a small, white, Democratic Party elite.
ā€¢ ā€¢ ā€¢
In March 1890, Massachusetts Representative Henry Cabot Lodge introduced a bill in the U.S. House of Representativesā€”which the South promptly labeled the ā€œforce billā€ā€”that would enable one hundred voters in any congressional district to contest a congressional election and invoke the assistance of the federal courts, which would be empowered to appoint election supervisors and determine outcomes. The bill applied to all congressional elections, but its well understood purpose was to enable ā€˜s and white Republicans to challenge election results in the South. Lodge would manage the bill in the House; George Frisbie Hoar, also from Massachusetts, would manage it in the Senate. The Republican platform of 1888 had called for laws to protect voting rights, and the bill had the full support of President Benjamin Harrison. Since Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, it appeared likely the bill would pass and become law.
Like McKinley, Lodge and Hoar believed the federal government had an obligation to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment.11 They hoped the bill would be a vehicle for reviving the moribund Republican Party in the South. In the House, McKinley took the floor to speak against an amendment offered by Representative John Hemphill of South Carolina that would have gutted the Lodge bill by removing the power of the president to enforce it. ā€œIf this amendment is passed,ā€ said McKinley, ā€œit will deprive the president of a power which he has held since the foundation of the government to use the Army and Navy to execute the judicial processes of the federal courts.ā€ He rejected the southern argument that the bill was ā€œharsh.ā€ ā€œThe solution to that,ā€ he said, ā€œwas to let every citizen vote.ā€ He concluded with a passionate appeal f...

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