W.E.B. DuBois is one of the names most associated with and well known among the brave and expansive list of people who fought and still fight to create a more equal and just society for all regardless of skin color or background. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, taught history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University, was an activist, founding member of the NAACP, socialist, historian, writer, and much more. He would die just before the civil rights movement of the 1960s reached its greatest achievements in social justice.
In 1921, DuBois wrote an open letter to the newly inaugurated president calling on him to be more than just another political leader - to be a bold voice for change in the situation of the oppressed, particularly those of African descent. DuBois makes reference to the campaign myth that Harding was of African-American background on one side of his family, and he mentions the contemporary situation in Haiti; both of these subjects were touched upon in previous blog posts if you are interested in learning some of the context, but I also recommend doing your own research to learn more than I can offer in these brief elaborations. DuBois rightly does not mince words when he explains the disgusting situation that faces the black voter and citizen - if he could be even called such a thing in the days of Jim Crow and a resurgent Klan. After the Wilson administration provided justification for such actions from the very top, it can be accurately said that Harding's approach was an improvement, but this is a misleading statement in such context. While Harding spoke his mind on the issue of lynching and the need for justice for the black population, his priorities were elsewhere most of the time. What measures did get near to success were shut down by an all too familiar method - the Senate's filibuster - allowing the regressive minority faction to keep white boots pressed down on black bodies figuratively and literally.
What follows is DuBois' powerful message that still rings with pain today:
Sir:
By an unprecedented vote you have been called to the most powerful position in the gift of mankind. Of the more than hundred million human beings whose destiny rests so largely with you in the next four years, on in every ten is of Negro descent.
Your enemies in the campaign sought to count you among this number and if it were true it would give us deep satisfaction to welcome you to the old and mystic chrism of Negroland, whence many mighty souls have stepped since time began.
But blood and physical descent are little and idle things as compared with spiritual heritage. And here we would see you son of the highest: a child of Abraham Lincoln and Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass; a grandson of Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams; and a lineal descendant of the martyred Fathers of the Free of all times and lands.
We appeal to you: we the outcast and lynched, the mobbed and murdered, the despoiled and insulted; and yet withal, the indomitable, unconquered, unbending and unafraid black children of kings and slaves and of the best blood of the workers of the earth—
WE WANT THE RIGHT TO VOTE.
WE WANT TO TRAVEL WITHOUT INSULT.
WE WANT LYNCHING AND MOB-LAW QUELLED FOREVER.
WE WANT FREEDOM FOR OUR BROTHERS IN HAITI.
We know that the power to do these things is not entirely in your hands, but its beginnings lie there. After the fourth of March, on you more than on any other human being rests the redemption of the blood of Africa and through it the peace of the world. All the cruelty, rape and atrocities of slavery; all the groans and humiliations of half-freedom; all the theft and degradation of that spirit of the Ku Klux mob that seeks to build a free America on racial, religious and class hatred—the weight of all this woe is yours.
You, Sir, whether you will or no, stand responsible. You are responsible for the truth back of the pictures of the burning of Americans circulated in European drawing-rooms; for the spectacle of 82% of the voters of the South disfranchised under a government called a democracy; for the hypocrisy of a nation seeking to lend idealism to the world for peace when within its own borders thee is more murder, theft, riot and crucifixion than was ever even charged against Bolshevik Russia.
In the name of our fathers, President Harding, our fathers black and white who toiled and bled and died to make this a free and decent nation, will you not tear aside the cobwebs of politics, and lies of society, and the grip of industrial thieves, and give us an administration which will say and mean: the first and fundamental and inescapable problem of American democracy is Justice to the American Negro. If races cannot live together in peace and happiness in America, they cannot live together in the world. Race isolation died a century ago. Human unity within and without Nations, must and will succeed—and you, Sir, must start bringing this to pass.
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A second major document from March 1921 is the transcript of Harding's speech entitled "Nationalism and Americanism".
Harding restates the intentions of founders like Washington to avoid "European entanglements" and to maintain a sovereign America not defined by the nations where its people once originated from. He recalls his experience in the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and he provides his insight that America will fracture if too much attention is paid to helping nations in Europe where migrants to America hail from. If national loyalty is not to America but instead to a nation of origin across the Atlantic, then Harding believed any harmony and peace domestically would be a fool's dream. This somewhat runs counter to the Madisonian notion that faction and liberty are inseparable, and that human nature requires government to acknowledge faction and ambition as inevitabilities or else remove the liberty or the free thought which are their causes. Harding seems from this speech to believe that faction among class and among ethnic background can be practically pushed into "silence" while America remains "free". Then again, this could still be interpreted in the framework of the Federalist if Harding means to say that government, the "land of adoption", can not pit ambition against ambition well if it favors lands in the Old World through policy, thereby tying domestic faction to events abroad. I think that neither explanation fully explains the relationship between government and the tumultuous and shifting allegiances of the people, but I doubt anything will ever adequately explain the many aspects of human nature. Both presidents make fair and wise points!
What follows is the transcript of the speech from March 31, 1921:
My countrymen, the pioneers to whom I have [oftentimes] alluded, these stalwart makers of America, could have no conception of our present day attainment. Hamilton, who conceived, and Washington, who sponsored, little dreamed of either a development or a solution like ours of today. But they were right in fundamentals. They knew what was safe and preached security. One may doubt if either of them, if any of the founders, would wish America to hold aloof from the world. But there has come to us lately a new realization of the menace to our America in European entanglements which emphasizes the prudence of Washington, though he could little have dreamed the thought which is in my mind.
When I sat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations* and listened to American delegations appealing in behalf of kinsman or old home folks across the seas, I caught the aspirations of nationality, and the perfectly natural sympathy among kindred in this republic. But I little realized then how we might rend the concord of American citizenship in our seeking to solve Old World problems. There have come to me, not at all unbecomingly, the expressed anxieties of Americans foreign born who are asking our country's future attitude on territorial awards in the adjustment of peace. They are Americans all, but they have a proper and a natural interest in the fortunes of kinsfolk and native lands. One cannot blame them. If our land is to settle the envies, rivalries, jealousies, and hatreds of all civilization, these adopted sons of the Republic want the settlement favorable to the land from which they came.
The misfortune is not alone that it rends the concord of nations. The greater pity is that it rends the concord of our citizenship at home. It's folly to think of blending Greek and Bulgar, Italian and Slovak, or making any of them rejoicingly American, when the land of adoption sits in judgement on the land from which he came. We need to be rescued from divisionary and fruitless pursuit of peace through supergovernment. I do not want Americans of foreign birth making their party alignments on what we mean to do for some nation in the old world. We want them to be Republican because of what we mean to do for the United States of America. Our call is for unison, not rivaling sympathies. Our need is concord, not the antipathies of long inheritance.
Surely no one stopped to think where the great world experiment was leading. Frankly, no one could know. We're only learning now. It would be a sorry day for this republic if we allowed our activities in seeking for peace in the Old World to blind us to the essentials of peace at home. We want a free America again. We want America free at home, and free in the world. We want to silence the outcry of nation against nation, in the fullness of understanding. And we wish to silence the cry of class against class, and stifle the party appeal to class, so that we may ensure tranquility in our own freedom. If I could choose but one, I had rather have industrial and social peace at home, than command the international peace of all the world.