Hyphenate Americans and Invisible Men: The ‘Americanist’ Strategies of Wilson and Roosevelt in the Great War

Introduction
In 1915, a few months into the great European war, President Woodrow Wilson and former President Theodore Roosevelt delivered speeches defining and commending ‘Americanism.’ The term itself dates back to Wilson’s distinguished predecessor at Princeton College, John Witherspoon, who used it to refer to the dialect of the new independent nation. By the early 1800s Thomas Jefferson was already brandishing it in the ideational sense, associating it with the rule of reason. But by 1915 any such term might easily carry associations with nineteenth-century theories on nationality and race. Wilson and Roosevelt both understood this. They also understood that the war was in some sense the result of the heightened sense of nationality among rival Europeans, and that this national sense underlay the contest between political regimes—commercial republicanism and military monarchism—that were themselves held to be expressions of national characters.

Wilson and Roosevelt proposed to unify ethnically and racially diverse Americans in order to enable the United States to assume an elevated station among the nations of the earth. In so doing, they spoke to, and about, European-Americans, scarcely mentioning African-Americans. I shall examine the content of the two speeches in three ways: the very different conceptions of American greatness set forth by the two statesmen in the body of their work; their divergent policies toward African Americans; their largely convergent policies toward European Americans.

I. Wilson’s Americanism
In his speech accepting the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1912, Woodrow Wilson deployed a rhetoric of inclusion. “You see that these multitudes of men, mixed of every kind and quality, constitute somehow an organic and noble whole, a single people, and that they have interests which no man can privately determine without their knowledge and counsel. That is the meaning of representative government itself.” In a contemporary letter he assured an Italian-American leader that “The Democratic party would not, without forgetting its very origin, advocate an illiberal policy in the matter of immigration. The party may almost be said to have originated in opposition to the Alien and Sedition Laws….” Regulation of immigration, yes: Wilson advocated a policy similar to that advanced by Henry Cabot Lodge, who proposed to exclude the diseased, the defective, and those “unable to support themselves.” But illiberality, no. [1] However, as his opponents were quick to trumpet, in his voluminous scholarly writings Wilson had not treated immigrant peoples with uniform courtesy. “The huge stream of immigrants” prior to the Civil War had “deepened that habit of charge, of experiment, of radical policies and bold proposals, which was bringing the people into a frame of mind to welcome even civil war for the sake of a reform.” As recently as his 1902 History of the American People Wilson had exhibited a distinct asperity toward recent immigrants not born of the “sturdy stocks of the north of Europe.” [2] By 1915, ‘hyphenated’ Americans still posed difficulties for any would-be Americanizer, not least in the conduct of foreign policy. German-Americans and German-Jewish Americans tended to favor the Kaiser; so did many Irish-Americans, on the grounds that the enemy of our enemy, the English, is our friend Jews from central and eastern Europe were equally pro-German, detesting the anti-Semitic governments they had fled, which were allied with England and France. The Swedish-Americans of the upper Midwest also detested the Russians and sided with the Germans. Although not classed as hyphenates, Americans of English ancestry of course inclined toward the republics. Propaganda on both sides filled the newspapers. [3]

Wilson distinguished nationality from race, theoretically. In a Princeton letter he had explained that English and American writers mean by ‘nation’ what the Germans mean by ‘volk’: “community of organization, of life, and of tradition. By ‘race’ English and American writers mean what Germans mean by ‘nation’: natio or birth, “community of origin and blood.” Notwithstanding this scholarly distinction, in contemporary politics the two ideas are imbricated: “Race tradition… is for the most part contained in and transmitted by political associations. It is largely dominated by habits of allegiance.” Blood and tradition are “compounded” in modern “consciousness.” [4] Thus in his May 1915 speech on ‘Americanism’ before newly naturalized citizens in Philadelphia, Wilson described America as a nation “founded for the benefit of humanity”—founded for “a great ideal”—but solidly based upon populations drawn from all other nations. But this solidity is only potential unless the immigrants who comprise America perform an act of “will” to adhere to the ideal of service to their new nation. This “consciousness different from the consciousness of every other nation in the world” can bring peace to the world. Breaking with the Hegelian tradition that would overcome the bourgeois spirit with the spirit of the warrior, Wilson urged self-transcendence—the immigrants’ transcendence of their old nations—via the ideal of peace: “[P]eace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not.” Peace-loving not war-loving is the true thumotic passion: “There is such a thing as a man too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” [5] In Wilsonian rhetorical heights, the willed ideal trumps blood, even as in Wilsonian political science things are much murkier.

With respect to the warring nations of Europe, Wilson linked the patriotic pride of his motto, “American First,” with his policy of neutrality. Neutrality was “good will”—the same will that naturalized Americans were to share, namely, the will to peace intra-nationally and internationally. America is “the mediating nation of the world”: “We mediate their blood, we mediate their traditions, we mediate their sentiments, their tastes, their passions; we are ourselves compounded of those things.” America no longer sees territory, as it had as recently as Roosevelt’s administration. “We do not want anything that does not belong to us.” Her industrial resources, enhanced by the war, her financial resources strengthened, her consciousness of her nationhood—her “new union”—heightened, America can bring “new leadership” to war-weary Europe. “A nation made up out of the world ought to understand the world. No nation, I venture to say, constituted out of a single racial stock could undertake the task which the United States has undertaken, namely to stand, not for national aggression, not for hostile rivalry, not for the things that stir the antagonistic passions of mankind, but for the rights of mankind of every sort, everywhere.” [6] Woodrow Wilson, the leader of the leading nation, the leader whose mind synthesizes the minds of the citizens of the most grandly comprehensive nation on earth, can serve as a secular prophet of the living, agapic God, the Prince of Peace. [7]

By May 1915, however, Realpolitik was drawing an ever more confining circle around Wilson’s policy of neutrality. As late as January, Wilson and Democratic Party leaders in Congress had agreed to reduce military expenditures in the coming year. Only seven U-boats could patrol the northern Atlantic at any one time; occasional attacks on American merchant shipping did not anger Americans sufficiently to be persuaded by the speeches of Roosevelt, Lodge, and others who advocated military readiness. But passenger ships were another matter. Three days before the ‘Americanism’ speech, the Germans sank the Lusitania, killing 1,198 passengers, including 124 Americans. ‘Preparedness’ spokesmen had their issue. Wilson’s catchy phrase, “Too proud to fight,” could now be described by Roosevelt as “the nadir of cowardly infamy.” Wilson himself rued the day: “That was just one of the foolish things a man does. I have a bad habit of thinking out loud.” By July, Wilson had ordered recommendations for increased military readiness from the relevant cabinet secretaries. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, the kindly old Populist-Party peace-horse, resigned in sorrow. In November Wilson presented a $1.6 billion naval construction program to the country. [8]

Wilson’s turn toward military readiness provoked a crisis in the Progressive movement, which, except for its northeastern fraction led by Roosevelt, remained strongly pacifist, convinced that war would bring the reversal of Progressive domestic reforms. Wilson temporized throughout the election year of 1916, and seemed to be negotiating improved relations with Germany. While publicly defending the preparedness drive, he could nonetheless campaign on the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of the War.” Progressives held firm in the November elections. Only after the Germans renewed U-boat campaign of 1917 did Wilson switch his slogan to “War to end war”—a formula that carried many of the Progressives, including organized labor (with the exception of the small, radical IWW) with him. [9] Wilson could now fight the war on essentially the same basis on which he had maintained neutrality. American would still enter at the decisive moment—now with force—and lead the world to a peaceful settlement. Wilson’s ‘Americanism’ argument held firm; if anything, war afforded hyphenates—especially those from the nations forming the Central Powers—the opportunity to prove their Americanness in deeds and not only in the profession of ideals. War became the ultimate melting pot.

Or it did—for European-Americans. Wilson’s ‘Americanism’ speech did not mention African-Americans. The glib explanation is that the speech was delivered to newly naturalized citizens, and none of them were from Africa. African-Americans did not need to be Americanized. They needed civil rights. Still, in a larger sense, Wilson’s silence expressed his preference for treating American blacks as invisible men.

Wilson’s admiring biographer Arthur S. Link duly notes his hero’s mild expressions of sympathy toward blacks, some dating back to the 1880s. [10] And indeed Wilson was no race-baiter of the James K. Vardaman stripe. But neither did he much advance the cause of civil rights. As a historian, he had presented the Confederate cause with considerable sympathy, describing it as an attempt to defend self-government rather than as an attempt to perpetuate slavery. He described slavery primarily as an economic drag on the South, even going so far as to suggest that the “stubborn” defense of the Southern “way of life” might have been a sort of noble sacrifice of the region’s “material interests”—a refusal of the fleshpots of Yankee industrialism. [11]  During Reconstruction, Wilson complained, “unscrupulous adventurers” from the North manipulated “inexperienced blacks” who ruled Southern whites so long as Northern armies enforced “the temporary disintegration of southern society.” The rise of the Ku Klux Klan mean that “one lawless force seemed in contest with the other.” Post-1876, “the determination of the Saxon race of the South that the negro race shall never again rule over them is… not unnatural, and it is necessarily unalterable.” It is not the dark skin of the Negro that offends the Southerner, Wilson maintained, but his dark, unenlightened mind. Compulsory education of Southern blacks can remedy this in time. [12]  One must conclude from Wilson’s argument that this is likely to be a very long time.

In Wilson’s account, Reconstruction reconstructed not the South but forged, for the first time, the American nation. “The law of the Constitution reigned until war came,” a civil war prosecuted by the North in violation of the confederal constitution of the American Founders. “[T]he ultimate foundation of the structure was laid bare: physical force, sustained by the stern loves and rooted predilections of masses of men, the strong ingrained prejudices which are the fibre of every system of government”—surely not the ‘ideals’ of natural-rights equality propounded by Jefferson and Lincoln. The war over and Reconstruction exhausted—the deconstruction of constitutionalist illusions completed—”the real revolution was not so much in the form as in the spirit of affairs.” Now, “statesmen knew that it was to be their task to release the energies of the country for the great day of trade and of manufacture which was to change the face of the world; to ease the processes of labor, govern capital in the interest of those who were its indispensable servants in pushing the great industries of the country to their final value and perfection, and make law the instrument, not of justice merely, but also of social progress.” “A citizenship of the United States was created,” founded not on the weak reed of natural-rights constitutionalism but on the strong historical tide of economic progress. “It is evident that empire is an affair of strong government, and not of the nice and somewhat artificial poise or of the delicate compromises of structure and authority characteristic of a mere federal partnership.” The “national spirit” arose from the detritus of the Founders’ constitutionalism. [13] Although Wilson made favorable remarks about Lincoln, he is in a sense Lincoln’s opposite, replacing the natural-right foundation of American constitutionalism with historicist teleology. The slaughterbench of history served as prelude for the most glorious idealism, an idealism solidly grounded in economic life. So it has been for America. So it shall be for the world of the Great War and after.

In such a time, is it any wonder that African-Americans were regarded by Wilson as no more than annoying details? In his mind, blacks were still in tutelage during a period when the fate of all humanity was being settled. At best, they were to be placated. During the 1912 election campaign, Wilson met with representatives of the National Independent Political League of Washington—actually a Democratic Party organization—and told them, “You may feel assured of my entire comprehension of the ambitions of the negro race and my willingness and desire to deal with that race fairly and justly.” Such ambiguous assurances swayed W. E. B. DuBois and others to back Wilson—Roosevelt had meanwhile capitulated to Southern interests at the Progressive Party convention. Democrats spent some $50,000 in New York to win the votes of African-Americans there, arguing that blacks had no profited from their loyalty to the Republican Party. Arthur S. Link contends that in the end it is likely that most African-Americans voted for Taft, not Wilson or Roosevelt, given the faithful support of black Americans for the party of Lincoln up until that time. [14]

Whatever his intentions, once in office Wilson had to face the political facts. Southern Progressives were anything but progressive on race issues—or rather they were, if one defines Progressivism in terms of ‘race theory,’ as many did. Wilson allowed several cabinet officers to impose segregation within their departments for the first time since the Civil War. Black postmasters were swept from office throughout the South. In a showdown meeting with Oswald Garrison Villard of the NAACP, Wilson could only claim, lamely, that segregation in federal employment was “in the interest of the colored people, as exempting them from friction and criticism in the departments.” To the hapless William Monroe Trotter of the National Independent Political League, Wilson intoned, “We are all practical men.” [I]t takes the world generations to outlive all its prejudices”—which is true enough, but not quite on point. “It is not a question of intrinsic equality, because we all have human souls. We are absolutely equal in that respect. It is just at the present a question of equality—whether the Negro can do the same things with equal efficiency. Now, I think they are proving that they can. After they have proved it, a lot of things are going to solve themselves.” One area in which that demonstration might have been furthered with Wilson’s help was in the implementation of the Smith-Lever Act, which provided for farmers’ instruction in soil conservation, crop diversification, and other farming practices. The program never quite got to black farmers, as that comparative radical, Booker T. Washington, rightly observed. [15]

In his second inaugural address, weeks before coming before Congress to request a declaration of war, Wilson again invoked national unity. “We are being forged into a new unity amidst the fires that now blaze throughout the world. In their ardent heat we shall, in God’s providence, let us hope, be purged of faction and division, purified of the errant humours of party and of private interest, and shall stand forth in the days to come with a new dignity of national pride and spirit.” After America’s entry into the war, and despite black participation in the war effort, racial antagonism continued with little opposition from the Wilson Administration. Pleas for intervention to protect blacks in a July 1917 St. Louis race riot went unheeded. Lynchings rose from thirty-eight to fifty-eight in 1918, at which point the Administration, alarmed that such unrest might disrupt the war effort, issued a proclamation condemning racial violence. Seventy blacks were lynched in 1919. At the Versailles Peace Conference in April 1919, Wilson opposed a move to require racial equality in each nation that would become a member of the League of Nations. “My own interest, let me say, is to quiet discussion that raises national differences and racial prejudices. I would wish them, particularly at this juncture of the history of the relations with one another, to be forced as much as possible into the background.” [16] Increased local violence against blacks should not be laid at the doorstep of the Wilson Administration, except perhaps in the vague sense that the Administration was perceived as ‘Southern’ in its orientation, and so may have increased the insouciance of race-baiters. But Wilson did nothing effectively to discourage such incidents.

Roosevelt’s Americanism
Roosevelt’s ‘Americanism’ speech, delivered five months after Wilson’s echoed themes he had sounded consistently throughout his career. Roosevelt had no need to put a thumotic face on pacifism because he had no use for pacifism in the first place. Not peace but strife forms nations. “The law of worthy national life, like the law of worthy individual life, is, after all, fundamentally, the law of strife. It may be strife military, it may be strife civic; but certain it is that only through strife, through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and by resolute courage, we move on to better things.” [17]  In 1890 he read Albert Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power in History, 1660-1763, which became a seminal book in ruling circles in America, Britain, Germany and Japan. Mahan was one of the first military strategists to grasp what we now call ‘geopolitics’: the idea of the world as one system, its parts all connected directly or indirectly, and therefore open to the projection of military, political, and economic power worldwide by nations with adequate technology and manpower. American commercial republicanism could for the first time be something other than a mere exemplar to other nations; it could enforce the Monroe Doctrine against them, challenge British naval supremacy on the high seas, open new markets in Asia. [18]

From that time forward, Roosevelt thought geopolitically. The German invasion of Belgium was a moral outrage, but Roosevelt understood that “the men who shape German policy take the ground that in matters of vital national moment there are no such things as abstract right and wrong, and that when a great nation is struggling for its existence it can no more consider the rights of neutral powers than it can consider the rights of its own citizens as these rights are construed in times of peace, and that everything must bend before the supreme law of national self-preservation. Whatever we may think of the morality of this plea, it is certain that almost all great nations have in time past again and again acted in accordance with it.” To this neo-Darwinian Realpolitik Roosevelt added the geopolitical point that Belgian neutrality had held the balance of power in western Europe. By invading Belgium, the Germans had outflanked the French and aimed a sword at Britain’s heart. German domination of Europe would in turn threaten the United States. Not only is it “a wicked thing to be neutral between right and wrong” (Roosevelt wrote, echoing Lincoln and scoring Wilson), it is also a stupid thing. Geopolitics permits no neutrals. And in moral terms, courage scorns the “base materialism” of “the coward who excuses his cowardice, who tries to cloak it behind lofty words, who perseveres in it, and does not appreciate his own infamy.” “The worst infamies of modern times—such affairs as the massacres of the Armenians by the Turks, for instance—have been perpetrated in a time of profound international peace, when there has been a concert of big Powers to prevent the breaking of this peace, although only by breaking it could the outrages be stopped. Be it remembered that the peoples who suffered by these hideous massacres, who saw their women violated and their children tortured, were actually enjoying all the benefits of ‘disarmament.’ otherwise they would not have been massacred….” [19] The moral distinction between a national massacre and a national conquest—the one evil, the other sometimes good, a sign of ennobling strife—evidently may be seen in the lack of resistance in the first case, courageous self-defense in the other.

American needs ‘Americanism’ because “the patriotism of the belfry”—localism, sectionalism, “the spirit of provincial patriotism”—causes not only strife but disintegration, as seen in ancient Greece, medieval Italy, and modern South America. Smallness of territory comports with smallness of soul. American nationalism despises Know-nothingism, socialist class conflict, bourgeois money-grubbing, and ethnic divisiveness. “There is no room for the hyphen in our citizenship.” The children of immigrants “must forget their Old World national antipathies and become purely Americanized…. This is not to blind us at all to our own shortcomings; we ought steadily to try to correct them; but we have absolutely no ground to work on if we don’t have a firm and ardent Americanism at the bottom of everything.” Although he did not say so publicly, for Roosevelt Americanism was as much for old American stocks as for new. That is, whereas the new immigrants needed assimilation, the old immigrants needed toughening. “We [old-stock Americans] are barbarians of a certain kind, and what is most unpleasant we are barbarians with a certain middle-class, Philistine quality of ugliness and pettiness, raw conceit, and raw sensitiveness. Where we get highly civilized, as in the northeast, we seem to become civilized in an unoriginal and ineffective way, and tend to die out”—commit what Roosevelt elsewhere and famously called “race suicide.” [20]

By ‘Americanism’ Roosevelt meant primarily the natural and Constitutional rights of the American founding and their reciprocal obligations, along with patriotism and—here is the Progressivist element—”the democratization of industry so as to give at least a measurable equality of opportunity for all.” “Everything is in-American that tends either to government by a plutocracy, or government by a mob”—that is, anything that tends toward unjust divisiveness. By ‘preparedness’ Roosevelt meant preparedness “of the soul no less than of the body”: keeping Americanist principles of natural and constitutional right “steadily before us” while “train[ing] ourselves in practical fashion so that we may realize these ideals.” Preparedness for war increases the chances of obtaining and maintaining a just peace, as Americans learned (on the negative side) in the War of 1812, when Congress declared war but voted against increasing the number of Navy battleships. In his fifth annual message to Congress, Roosevelt had said what he was saying ten years later to the Knights of Columbus: “Our aim is righteousness. Peace is normally the handmaiden of righteousness; but when peace and righteousness conflict then a great and upright people can never hesitate to follow the path which leads toward righteousness, even though that path also leads to war.” The price of “peace at any price” is human and national rights. [21]  Preparedness need to require “Prussian militarism.” The Swiss system of military training will do; national service, for women and men, would form part of high school education and would continue for six months every year for youths aged sixteen to twenty-one. Such service would augment preparedness and national unity at the same time, bringing together youth of all classes and nationalities; it shall be “a potent method for Americanizing the immigrant” and will have “an immense democratizing effect” because rich and poor will serve together. [22]

Unlike Wilson, Roosevelt did mention African-Americans in his 1915 ‘Americanism’ speech. But he made only passing mention, citing slave emancipation during the Civil War. It was as if the race problem had been solved, and its solution served as a model for solving the immigrant problem. Of course, Roosevelt knew very well that the race problem hadn’t been solved. He wrote much more extensively on race than Wilson did, and also had more experience in race relations, traveling to Asia, Africa, and South America as well as Europe. His experience as a self-trained and respected amateur field biologist also put him in a position to think about racial pseudoscience.

Roosevelt endorsed the fashionable Anglo-Saxonism of his time; with Gustave le Bon, he regarded the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ as uniquely well-fitted to rule itself and others. [23]  According to his friend Owen Wister (a fine novelist but rather hidebound white supremacist from Charleston, South Carolina), Roosevelt doubted Wilson’s claim that self-government eventually would be earned by all races: “We are all unquestionably members of the human race, just as much at the North Pole as at the Equator. And trees are all trees, wherever they grown. But I am prepared to assert that you can give an apple-tree all the time you want and it wants, and it will not produce oranges.” [25]  If this reminiscence accurately reflects Roosevelt’s views, this would reflect a biological racism—essentially polygenicist. But in his actual correspondence with Wister Roosevelt undermined such biologism. “I entirely agree with you that as a race and in the mass [the Negroes] are altogether inferior to the whites…. But admitting all that can truthfully be said against the Negro, it also remains true that a great deal that is untrue is said against him; and that much more is untruthfully said of the white man who lives beside and upon him. Your views of the Negro are those expressed by all of your type of Charlestonians. You must forgive my saying that they are only expressed in their entirety to those who don’t know the facts.” In the same letter, he undercut “the latest scientific theory” of cranial measurement in two ways: by saying that it will “doubtless… be superseded by others” and by pointing out that whites and blacks have skulls much more like each other than either is like the skull of “the Mongolian.” To his English friend Cecil Arthur Spring Rice he remarked that language and race are unrelated. Moreover, the modern Turks are “just as much white people” as any other European nation, but are nonetheless “a curse to Europe” because of their “absolutely alien” creed, culture, historic associations, “and inherited governmental and social tendencies.” “The Turks are ethnically closer to us than the Japanese, but they are impossible members of our international society, while I think the Japs may be desirable additions.” [25]  Roosevelt combined natural-rights morality with Neo-Darwinism regarding international relations and probably, at most, a vague neo-Lamarckianism regarding (biological) race. But ‘nation’ and ‘race’ are often used interchangeably by him, so his Neo-Darwinism, his survival-of-the-fittest ideology, sometimes seems to bleed over into his writings on race relations.

A clearer understanding of Roosevelt’s view of race may be seen when he gets down to cases and discusses specific racial groups. Of these, none interested him more than the Amerindians, whom he had lived among as a young man in the American West in the 1880s.

Roosevelt tells a multicultural story about a Chinook named Ammal, who listened to a white hunter tell of a Chinese laborer who fleeced some Indians at cards. One of them, an Upper Kootenai, killed the card sharp but was never punished, “as it did not seem any one’s business to avenge a mere Chinaman.” “Ammal was immensely interested in the tale, and kept recurring to it again and again, taking two little sticks and making the hunter act out the whole story. The Kootenais were then only just beginning to consider the Chinese as human. They knew they must not kill white people, and they had their own code of morality among themselves; but when the Chinese first appeared they evidently thought that there could not be any special objection to killing them, if any reason arose for doing so. I think the hunter himself sympathized somewhat with this view.” [26]  Whites and Amerindians of a certain type both agree on a sort of rough justice because rough justice exists across the lines of ‘race,’ however defined; Roosevelt conceives of civilizational level more than race as the key determinant of conceptions of justice. ‘Civilization’ is not identical with Anglo-Saxonism, although Anglo-Saxonism is a very good thing. As seen above, the Japanese are civilized but not Anglo-Saxon. The ‘winning of the West’ by Americans has been a victory for civilization won not by the civilized but by civilization’s barbaric advance guard.

“Many of the frontiersmen are brutal, reckless, and overbearing; most of the Indians are treacherous, revengeful, and fiendishly cruel. Crime and bloodshed are the only possible results when such men are brought into contact. Writers usually pay heed only to one side of the story; they recite the crimes committed by one party, whether whites or Indians, and omit all reference to the equally numerous sins of the other.” This error oddly mimics the unsubtle distinctions made on the frontier, where Indians and whites each tend “to hold the race, and not the individual, responsible for the deeds of the latter.” In the 1770s, in the Alleghenies (for example) “a race of peaceful, unwarlike farmers would have been helpless before such foes as the red Indians, and no auxiliary military force could have protected them or enabled them to move westward.” The civilized colonists needed “a living barrier of bold and self-reliant American borderers” for protection. In fact, a pacifist community of Dunkards and an equally peaceful community of Moravian Indians (converted to Christianity by the Quakers) both met the same fate: “Hateful to both sets of combatants, [and] persecuted by both,” each “finally fell a victim to the ferocity of the race to which it did not belong.” A civilization separated from its barbaric roots will weaken and be killed. Roosevelt’s ‘race’ stories reinforce his ‘preparedness’ and ‘Americanism’ urgings, and are represented as illustrative of universal truths that cross racial lines. [27]

The savagery of the Amerindians results not from some innate ferocity but from their socioeconomic order. “The Indians were formidable in warfare… because they were so few in numbers. Had they been more numerous they would perforce have been tillers of the soil, and it would have been far easier for the whites to get at them.” They could fight the most effective sort of guerrilla warfare, as “there was little chance to deliver a telling blow at enemies who had hardly anything of value to destroy.” By contrast, the Navajo of the late nineteenth century were an agricultural people, “stand[ing] far above mere savagery”; “everything possible should be done to help them help themselves.” Compared with the neighboring Indian tribes, they had already made a long stride in cultural advancement when the Spaniards arrived; but “they were shrinking back before the advance of the more savage tribes.” Roosevelt concludes, “As always when I have seen Indians in their homes, in mass, I was struck by the wide cultural and intellectual difference among the different tribes, as well as among the different individuals of each tribe, and both by the great possibilities for their improvement and by the need of showing common sense even more than good intentions if this improvement is to be achieved. Some Indians can hardly be moved forward at all. Some can be moved forward both fast and far.” Such differences could be seen among the three main groups of Amerindians in the Appalachian Confederacies of the 1770s: the Iroquois were the most warlike; the ‘Appalachians’ of the southern Alleghenies (Creeks and Cherokees) were non-nomadic, “barbarous, rather than in the merely savage state”; the Algonquins were in-between. [28]

Roosevelt accordingly wasted little sympathy or antipathy on the conquered Amerindians or the conquering frontiersmen who, by the time he wrote, were also vanishing. “[T]he world would probably have gone forward very little, indeed would probably not have gone forward at all, had it not been for the displacement of submersion of savage and barbaric peoples as a consequence of the armed settlement in strange lands of the races who hold in their hands the fate of the years. Every such submersion or displacement of an inferior race, every such armed settlement or conquest by a superior race, means the infliction or suffering of hideous woe and misery. It is a sad and dreadful thing that there should be such throes of agony; and yet they are the birth-pangs of a new and vigorous people.” Roosevelt looks at “savage and barbarous peoples” rather as Marx (an earlier Victorian) looks at the bourgeoisie, albeit with perhaps a shade less moral dudgeon. “The Indians should be treated in just the same way that we treat white settlers. Give each his little claim; if, as would generally happen, he declined this, why let him share the fate of thousands of white hunters and trappers who have lived on the game that the settlement of the country has exterminated, and let him, like these whites, who will not work, perish from the face of the earth which he cumbers. The doctrine seems merciless, and so it is; but it is just and rational for all that. It does not do to be merciful to a few at the cost of justice to the many.” [29]  Human groups adapt to new circumstances or die.

Roosevelt’s accounts of blacks in Africa and Mississippi are entirely consistent with these views. In Africa, his hunting companions “showed a courage and loyalty and devotion to duty which would have put to shame very many civilized men”; at the same time, “most of them were like children, with a grasshopper inability for continuity of thought and realization of the future.” These characteristics are cultural, not innate. Here as among the Amerindians, tribes range from “pure savages” to “races of a higher type” at “the upper stages of barbarism.” In Uganda, “the chief task of the officials of the intrusive and masterful race must be to bring forward the natives, to train them, and above all to help them train themselves, so that they may advance in industry, in learning, in morality, in capacity for self-government—for it is idle talk of ‘giving’ a people self-government.” Similarly, on a hunting trip to Mississippi, Roosevelt reports: “These negroes of the Black Belt have never had the opportunity to develop beyond a low cultural stage. Most of them with us were kindly, hard-working men, expert in their profession.” For them he recommended a Booker T. Washington-like program of education, self-help, and law-abidingness. To Roosevelt’s neo-Darwinian eye, such (to us) modest efforts are the realistic alternative to racial extermination. The “mercifulness” of the dominant (in this case white) race “would disappear instantly if any of the inferior races began to encroach” upon them in any violent way. Violence had already occurred in local areas of the South, in response to “insurrectionary movement[s]” by blacks, and in the frontier West. “Of course the central or home population… would always clamor” against such warfare, “but if [an insurrection] became sufficiently strong to jeopardize white control I think this clamor would be hushed, and it would certainly be disregarded.” [30]

Roosevelt’s conception of Americanism, based as it was on natural right as conceived by the American Founders, excluded the worst forms of racial prejudice. For example, as a Northerner and a Republican, Roosevelt felt no need to write an apology for slavery, “a grossly anachronistic and un-American form of evil.” In a children’s history book he co-authored with Henry Cabot Lodge, he celebrated Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, commander of an African-American regiment during the Civil War, who defied “the prejudice against the blacks” that “was still strong even in the North.” The Confederate general’s order “to bury [Shaw] with his ‘niggers,’ which ran through the North and remained fixed in our history, showed, in a flash of light, the hideous barbarism of a system which made such things and such feelings possible.” Roosevelt himself commanded black troops in Cuba in 1898, “who did as well as any soldiers could possibly do.” [31]

At the beginning of his first term as president, Roosevelt approached white-black relations with blunt modesty: “I have not been able to think out any solution of the terrible problem offered by the presence of the negro on this continent, but of one thing I am sure, and that is that inasmuch as he is here and can neither be killed nor driven away—treated like many of the Indians—”the only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less than he shows himself worthy to have…. [I]f I am , then all my thoughts and beliefs are wrong, and my whole way of looking at life is wrong…. I do not intend to offend the prejudices of anyone else, but neither do I intend to allow their prejudices to make me false to my principles.” [32]. These last brave words played out to some degree in practice. Roosevelt’s time in the White House saw several collisions with the race issue: his October 1901 dinner with Booker T. Washington, which agitated Southern newspaper editors for months thereafter; his closing of the Indianola, Mississippi post office after local whites forced the resignation of Mrs. Minnie M. Cox, the black postmaster; the appointment of Dr. William D. Crum to the position of collector of the Port of Charleston in 1902. In each of these incidents Roosevelt acquitted himself honorably, at one point lecturing the Charleston mayor that “the question raised by you [concerning the Crum appointment] is simply whether it is to be declared that under no circumstances shall any man of color, no matter how upright and honest, no matter how good a citizen, no matter how fair in his dealings with all his fellows, be permitted to hold any office under our government. I certainly cannot assume such an attitude, and you must permit me to say that in my view it is an attitude no man should assume, whether he looks at it from the standpoint of the true interest of the white men of the south or of the colored men of the south—not to speak of any other section of the Union.” Roosevelt vigorously and lengthily denounced lynching in a letter to Governor Winfield Taylor Durbin of Indiana on the grounds that lawlessness must not be tolerated; his rough treatment of the black soldiers of the 25th U. S. Infantry after violence committed in Brownsville, Texas in 1906 was the opposite side of the same coin, in his view. [34]

Roosevelt could not understand the racial animosity of Southern whites as expressed in their overheated rhetoric in response to the Washington, Cox, and Crum incidents. “[A]s regards the race problem in the South I have been greatly puzzled,” he wrote to the venerable liberal Carl Shurz, who had complained about Southerners’ effectual nullification of the Civil War amendments to the Constitution. “I do not mean that I was puzzled as to whether what I did was right”—and indeed he rarely was—”for I have never been clearer about anything. But I have been greatly puzzled to account for the yell of bitter anger caused by my action, and I have found it difficult to know how far I ought to go at certain points, and exactly what I ought to say.” In his last years as president he continued to insist in public speeches that whites and blacks in American would rise or fall together, and that justice should be done to individuals regardless of race. [34]

In the 1912 presidential election campaign, however, Roosevelt sacrificed much of the good will he had built up on racial issues. Although many Southern blacks initially joined the new Progressive Party, Roosevelt’s chief Southern adviser, John M. Parker of Louisiana, persuaded him that the party could never get anywhere in the region by appealing to black voters. Roosevelt attempted to please white Southern Progressives by excluding Southern blacks from the Progressive Party convention. At the same time, Roosevelt welcomed Northern blacks to the convention. During the subsequent campaign, he lauded the Progressives’ “good faith” and “entire frankness and sincerity” toward African-Americans. Predictably, his machinations gained him nothing among whites or blacks. [35]  By the time of the 1915 ‘Americanism’ speech, Roosevelt had become, if not a lonely figure in American public life, a man of much reduced popularity, advocating preparation for intervention in the European war to a people who were still profoundly isolationist. Unlike Wilson, he had remained quite consistent in his views on race and nation, but also unlike Wilson he was in large measure unwilling to adjust to ever-shifting public opinion. The new “racial type” or nation, the American, had proved himself too bourgeois for Roosevelt’s arguments, and Southerners had proved themselves too recalcitrant to embrace Americanism as Roosevelt defined it.

 

Conclusion

Wilson and Roosevelt both spoke for the nationalism, although not for the nativism, current in post-Civil War America. As John Higham observes, nationalist sentiments reacted to labor-capital strife and immigration. [36]  Nationalism also probably represented an attempt to heal the lingering injuries of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Both Wilson and Roosevelt were acutely conscious of those injuries. Wilson was the first Southern president since the war; Roosevelt repeatedly umped his head against intractable Southern ‘difference.’ The careers of both men illustrate the constraints that public opinion places on political actors, even those noteworthy for bold invocations of ‘leadership’ and ‘stewardship.’

Examination of the complete published writings of Wilson and Roosevelt confirms Higham’s account of the ‘Americanization’ movement as an event that remained for the most part within the scope of political liberalism [37], although it is well worth remarking that the moral foundations of that liberalism were shifting from natural to historical rights. This is especially noticeable when American is contrasted with the contemporary regimes in Europe, liberal and illiberal alike. The presence of large immigrant populations in the United States required a mixture of rousing rhetoric about ‘American ideals’ with a simultaneous moderating rhetoric of inclusiveness. This duality of the rhetoric reflects the ‘hyphen’ itself; to dissolve the hyphen one must not let (for example) the word ‘German’ slip too far into a pejorative connotation, lest such new Americans be goaded into further collaboration with their country of origin.

In this effort of the 1915-1918 period, both Wilson and Roosevelt tended to treat African-Americans as invisible men and women. Earlier, as president, Roosevelt had taken some tentative steps toward advancing black interests—steps he could afford to take because Republicans weren’t getting many votes in the South, anyway. After the 1912 debacle in which he reversed his field, he kept his mouth shut on race, preferring to campaign for ‘preparedness,’ comprehensively conceived as Americanism.

As a Southern Democrat, Wilson operated under still tighter constraints. He seems not to have been much discomfited by these constraints. Whereas Roosevelt publicly endorsed much of the Booker T. Washington program—putting himself rather in the better portion of white American politicians of the period—Wilson did not even go that far. Most disappointing was his failure to reverse segregation orders governing federal workplaces, orders enacted by his own cabinet officers.

Unlike the Civil War and the Second World War, World War I did little to improve race relations in America. This was so because World War I was prosecuted by Americans of the generation born around the Civil War who came of age during Reconstruction and the backlash against Reconstruction. Republicanism being only as good as the republicans who compose it, elected politicians had very little room to maneuver on race issues, given the sectional realities of American politics. Reaching out to immigrants did nothing to make this better; most immigrants were not in the South, and most immigrants had no affection for African-Americans, with whom they competed for jobs. The ‘melting pot’ of pre-war and wartime preparedness rhetoric, designed for European-Americans, may well have helped to achieve its intended purpose, but that purpose did not include justice for African-Americans, which was neither a priority for white politicians nor a concern of ordinary white citizens at the time. Disenfranchised by post-Reconstruction restrictions, African-Americans lacked the political and economic power to make racial justice a concern, over and above whites’ intentions.

Significant improvements in race relations had to await shifts in public opinion that accompanied demographic and socioeconomic shifts, some of which (e.g. black migration to Northern cities) began during the war. In the wake of the Great Depression, the construction of a powerful national state that eventually overruled state-sponsored Jim Crow laws, along with factionalism among Southern elites, gave New-Deal progressives far better opportunities than did the circumstances of 1900-1920.

 

Notes

1. Speech Accepting the Democratic Nomination, Sea Girt, New Jersey, August 7, 1912, Link 1966-95 (hereinafter citied as PWW), 25.7; Letter to Anthony Geronimo, August 16, 1912, PWW 25. 40-41. A few years later, Wilson would invoke the remaining piece of the Alien and Sedition Act, the Alien Enemies Act, as soon as war was declared in 1917 (Higham 1955, 210).
2. Wilson 1961, 141; Link 1947-65, I. 381; Clements 1992, 20. See also Higham 1955, chapter 7.
3. Link 1947-63, 3. 23.
4. Notes for Lectures in a Course on the Elements of Politics, March 1898, PWW. 10. 471.
5. Compare Friedrich Nietzsche: Human All Too Human, II. section 284, “The means to real peace.”
6. Remarks to the Associated Press, New York, New York, April 20, 1915, PWW. 33. 38-39; An Address on Preparedness to the Manhattan Club, New York, New York, PWW. 35. 169-170; “America’s Opportunity,” unpublished essay, July 1917, PWW. 37. 500-501; Address to New Citizens, Chicago, Illinois, October 19, 1916, PWW. 38. 490-491.
7. On Wilson’s Christianity—specifically, Presbyterian Christianity, the Christianity of the ‘secular saint’—see Link 1965 and Link 1971, passim.
8. Link 1947-65, 3. 358, 366-375,420-425; Link 1954, 174-179; Cooper 1983, 407 n. 3; Heckscher 1991, 360-366.
9. Link 1947-65, 4. 26; Link 1954, 180-181; Cooper 1983, 298; Mayer 1958, 346-350.
10. Link 1971, 29-30.
11. Link 1971, 29-30; Wilson 1961, 110-113, 117; “John Bright,” essay, March 6, 1880, PWW. I. 618-619; “Marginal Notes,” July 19, 1880, PWW I. 664-665; Address to the New York Southern Society, Washington, D. C., December 12, 112, PWW. 25. 596; Remarks to the Confederate Veterans, Washington, D. C., June 5, 1917, PWW. 42. 451-452.
12. Wilson 1961, 222-224; Wilson 1906, 4. 58-59, 64; “Stray Thoughts from the South” (unpublished essay), February 22, 1881. PWW. 2. 28-29.
13. “The Reconstruction of the Southern States,” essay, March 1900, PWW. 11. 460, 466, 473-479; Wilson 1906, 5. 300.
14. Link 1947, I. 502, 505; Link 1971, 259-271.
15. Link 1947, 2. 248; Link 1954 64-65; Clements 1992, 45-46; 59-60 (on Booker T. Washington’s reaction); Remarks by Wilson to William Monroe Trotter, PWW. 31. 301-303.
16. Second Inaugural Address, WPP. 41. 335; Clements 1992, 160; Remarks Upon the Clause for Racial Equality, Paris, France, April 11, 1919, WPP. 57. 268.
17. “America’s Part in the World’s Work,” Speech at Lincoln Club Dinner, New York, New York, February 13, 1899, Hagedorn 1923-26 (hereinafter cited as WTR) 16. 475.
18. See Burton 1997, 56-57. Although Roosevelt’s foreign policy was and is often called ‘the policy of the big stick,’ and is associated with international aggression, Roosevelt himself denied this, reminding his readers that the full slogan was “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” “[W]e lay equal emphasis on the fact that it is necessary to speak softly; in other words, that it is necessary to be respectful toward all people and scrupulously to refrain from wronging them….” (America and the World War [1916], WTR 20. 30.) On balance, Roosevelt historians are inclined to agree, pointing to Roosevelt’s secret negotiations with Germany over Venezuela in 1902, mediation in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, his participation in the 1906 Algeciras Conference on Morocco, counterbalancing his spectacular acquisition of Panamanian territory for the (Mahanian) purpose of canal-building. “Behind both the appearance and the reality of his public stances, the president led an almost secret life as a sensitive, subtle diplomat” (Cooper 1983, 72-75; see also Buehrig 1955, 151). Roosevelt spoke loudly in public, softly in the back channels.
19. America and the World War (1916) WTR 20. 18; Buehrig 1955, 160-161; Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916) WTR 20. 239, 322, 363; Autobiography (1913) WTR 22. 606. In a letter to his friend the British ambassador Cecil Arthur Spring Rice, Roosevelt confided: “Wilson is, I think, a timid man physically. He is certainly a timid man in all that affects sustaining the honor and national interests of the United States and justice by force of arms…. He believes that in the course he has followed he will keep the pacifists with him here at home and placate the German vote and the Irish vote…. Furthermore, he believes that whatever sense of injury the British may like to show they won’t show it, that when the time comes they will turn to him for help and that he will then gain great glory as the righteous peacemaker. I think this is very probably a correct estimate of the future on his part. I think it very probable that he will profit by his wrongdoing [because] England and France will find that his own misconduct has made him available for action as a mediator between them and Germany.” (Letter, November 121, 1914, Morison 1951, 8. 841). In promoting military intervention in the war, Roosevelt deliberately chose what he took to be the losing side. (On another claim, we now know Roosevelt was mistaken: genocide can be perpetrated in war as well as in peace, as Hitler demonstrated in the 1940s.)
20. The Strenuous Life (1900), WTR 15. 18, 34; The Great Adventure (1918) WTR 21. 329-330; Letter to Osborne Howes, May 5, 1892, Morison 1951, 8. 278-279; Letter to Cecil Arthur Spring Rice, Morison 1951, 1. 648-649.
21. Letter to S. Stanwood Mencken, January 10, 1917, Morison 1951, 8. 1143-1144; American Ideals (1897) WTR 15. 240-259; Fifth Annual Message to Congress, WTR 17. 346-348.
22. America and the World War (1916), WTR. 20. 104-109; The Great Adventure (1918) WTR 21. 278; Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916) WTR 20. 297-299.
23. Beale 1956, 27. See also Higham 1955, 10 on Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons.
24. Wister 1930, 362.
25. Letter to Owen Wister, April 27, 1906, Morison 1951, 5. 226; Letter to Cecil Arthur Spring Rice, June 13, 1904, Morison 1951, 4. 832-833.
26. The Wilderness Hunter (1893) WTR. 2. 131-132.
27. Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888) WTR 4. 484-485; The Winning of the West (1889-96) WTR 10. 114-115; WTR 11. 6-7. See also Ibid. 10. 78. For an application of the same lesson to Europe, see “The World Movement,” Lecture at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910, WTR 14. 275-276.
28. The Winning of the West (1889-1896) WTR 10. 46; WTR 11. 287; A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916) WTR 4. 28-29, 39. The founding generation in the United States also distinguished between the ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ Amerindian nations and tribes, a distinction the Washington Administration followed in dealing with southeastern Indians.
29. The Winning of the West (1889-1896), WTR 11. 389-390; Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885) WTR 1. 20-21. Moreover, the very life that Roosevelt himself enjoyed, the life of the cattle rancher, :the free, open air life” that is “the pleasantest and healthiest life in America, is from its very nature ephemeral.” Even “the most powerful ranches, owned by wealthy corporations or individuals,” may not last to the end of the twentieth century. (Ibid. 1. 21.).
30. A Book Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916) WTR 4. 120, 132; African Game Trails (1910) WTR 5. 4, 363; Gould 1991, 238; Letter to Charles Henry Pearson, May 11, 1894, Morison 1951, 1. 377-378.
31. Thomas Hart Benton (1887), WTR 8. 117; Hero Tales from American History (1895) WTR 9. 141-143; The Rough Riders (1899) WTR 13/ 109-110.
32. Letter to Albion Winegar Touree, November 8, 1901, Morison 1951, 3. 190.
33. Gatewood 1970, 36-38; 63-66, 82, 89, 91-104; Letter to James Adger Smith, November 26, 1902, Morison 1951, 3. 385; Letter to Winfield Taylor Durbin, August 6, 1903, Morison 1951, 3. 540-543; Mowry 1958, 212-213. See also Wister 1930, 117-118.
34. Letter to Carl Schurz, December 24, 1903, Morison 1951, 3. 680; Speech at the Lincoln Day Dinner at the New York Republican Club, New York, New York, WTR 18. 464; Sixth Annual Message to Congress, Washington, D. C., December 12, 1906, 413-415.
35. Link 1971, 244-247; “The Progressives and the Colored Man,” article, August 24, 1912, WTR 19. 412, 415.
36. Higham 1955, Chapter 4.
37. Higham 1955, Chapter 9.

 

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