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Steinbock-Pratt, Sarah
2019.
Educating the Empire.
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FORTY ACRES AND A CARABAO: T. THOMAS FORTUNE, NEWSPAPERS, AND THE PACIFIC'S UNSTABLE COLOR LINES, 1902–03
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2017
Abstract
In late 1902, exhaustion, financial distress, and the desire for a political appointment—combined with aspirations to serve as a broker for the export of African American labor abroad—led famed African American journalist T. Thomas Fortune to secure a temporary appointment with the Roosevelt administration to investigate trade and labor in Hawaii and the Philippines. In Hawaii, Fortune was fêted by the planter class, and allied himself publicly with the educational and political philosophies of Booker T. Washington. His hopes for black emigration and land ownership, however, were vigorously opposed by most newspapers connected to the oligarchy. Hawaii's robust in-language indigenous and ethnic newspapers, meanwhile, voiced their own position on black labor. In Manila, a fiercely entrepreneurial and militaristic American press attacked Fortune. Recent scholarship ties Washington's Tuskegee Institute to a kind of “Jim Crow colonialism” abroad. An in-depth look at Fortune's journey both supports and troubles such a view. Both men hoped U.S. “expansion,” and African American participation in it, might expose not only the power of race, but also its instability and vulnerability; Fortune, in particular, saw newspapers as vital to this task.
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- The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 98 - 120
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- Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2017
References
NOTES
For their kindness and support in the creation of this article, the author wishes to thank professors Catherine A. Jones, David Brundage, and Martin A. Berger at the University of California at Santa Cruz; the librarians and archivists at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Ateneo de Manila University Library, the National Library of the Philippines, and the Doe and Bancroft libraries at the University of California at Berkeley; and the anonymous readers for JGAPE.
1 T. Thomas Fortune to a gathering of African Americans in Washington, D.C. Washington Post, June 27, 1903.
2 Booker T. Washington, “The Educational and Industrial Emancipation of the Negro,” speech before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Feb. 22, 1903. In Harlan, Louis R. and Smock, Raymond W., eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 7, 1903–4 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 91Google Scholar.
3 Thornbrough's T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972)Google Scholar remains the most comprehensive examination of Fortune's life; for Fortune's overseas trip, see pp. 234–41. Alexander, Shawn Leigh skillfully analyzes and introduces Fortune's life and writings in T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator: A Collection of Writings, 1880–1928 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008)Google Scholar. Coleman, Jinx Broussard revisits Fortune's Pacific quest in African American Foreign Correspondents: A History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 32–39 Google Scholar. Guy Emerson Mount explores Fortune and other African American travelers of the Pacific, and government-level colonization schemes, in his forthcoming PhD dissertation, “The Last Reconstruction: Race, Nation, and Empire in the Black Pacific” (University of Chicago). Justesen, Benjamin R. profiles Fortune, Washington, Booker T., Walters, Bishop Alexander, and Congressman George Henry White in Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American Council (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. Mitchell, Michele reprints Fortune's photographic self-portrait from Luzon in Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 65Google Scholar. Murphy, Gretchen sees African American participation in empire as decentering the practices and discourses of U.S. imperialism in Shadowing the White Man's Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 8Google Scholar.
4 Coleman Broussard, African American Foreign Correspondents, 32–39.
5 Du Bois, W. E. B., “The Lash,” Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line (May 1907): 5–6 Google Scholar.
6 Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 65.
7 Zimmerman, Andrew, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, & the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 237CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 249. Also see Beckert, Sven, “From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton,” Journal of American History 92 (Sept. 2005): 498–526 Google Scholar; Navarro, Jose-Manuel, Creating Tropical Yankees: Social Science Textbooks and U.S. Ideological Control in Puerto Rico, 1898–1908 (New York: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar; and Paulet, Anne, “To Change the World: The Use of American Indian Education in the Philippines,” History of Education Quarterly 47 (May 2007): 173–202 Google Scholar.
8 Guy Emerson Mount considers Fortune's “white skinned African American male body” in “Building Multiracial Fortunes: Black Identity, Masculinity, and Authenticity Through the Body of T. Thomas Fortune, 1883–1907” (MA thesis, San Diego State University, 2011). One Associated Press cablegram described the journalist as having the appearance of a “cultured Spaniard.” (Hawaiian Gazette, May 19, 1903). Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly explores black leadership during this study's time period and finds that, counterintuitively, “for many mixed-race people, a Black identity … offered positions of power, upward mobility, and notoriety.” See Dineen-Wimberly, “Mixed-Race Leadership in African America: The Regalia of Race and National Identity in the U.S., 1862–1916” (PhD diss., University of California at Santa Barbara, 2009).
9 Alexander, T. Thomas Fortune, xiii.
10 Alexander, Shawn Leigh details Fortune's call for a national organization in An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)Google Scholar.
11 Justesen, Broken Brotherhood, 112.
12 Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune, 234–35.
13 Ibid., 235. Clarkson was a Republican party operative; a New York port surveyor; and, during slavery, had “established and operated a twenty-eight mile section of the ‘Underground Railway,’ helping more than 500 slaves from Missouri, Arkansas and Texas flee into Canada.” (New York Times, June 1, 1918.)
14 TTF to BTW, Nov. 3, 1902, in Harlan and Smock, BTW Papers, 6:571–72.
15 BTW to Roosevelt, Dec. 1, 1902, in Harlan and Smock, BTW Papers, 6:600–01. After securing Fortune's appointment, Clarkson wrote Washington that, “for once,” Fortune's “face has shown happiness.” In Harlan and Smock, BTW Papers, 6:588–89.
16 Morgan played a central role in the overthrow of Reconstruction in Alabama. See Fry, Joseph A., John Tyler Morgan and the Search for Southern Autonomy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992)Google Scholar.
17 Washington Post, Dec. 16, 1902. Willard B. Gatewood concluded that Roosevelt and Root, by appointing Fortune, were attempting to mollify Morgan while providing a long-wanted patronage position for Fortune. See Gatewood, , Black Americans and the White Man's Burden, 1898–1903 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 307.Google Scholar
18 For example, in 1890, Morgan had decried Fortune's push for the term “Afro-American” (to replace “Negro”), calling it a strategy by blacks to gain “incorporation, by marriage” into the nation's white families. Fortune shot back that only “Afro-American” could embrace “all the shades of color produced by the anxiety of the white men of the South to ‘secure their incorporation’ without marriage into the black families of the country!” Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune, 132.
19 See Fortune, , “Race Absorption,” AME Church Review 18:1 (1901): 54–66 Google Scholar, in Alexander, T. Thomas Fortune, 241–42.
20 New York Age, Oct. 31, 1891.
21 The Sun, May 3, 1899.
22 Steven Hahn explores the politics of black-run emigrationist movements in the rural South, and the real concessions from white planters these societies sometimes obtained, in Hahn, , A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
23 Chapin, Helen Geracimos, Shaping History: The Role of Newspapers in Hawai'i (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Hawaii became an incorporated territory of the United States in July 1898, achieving statehood in 1959.
24 Evening Bulletin, Dec. 18, 1902.
25 Hawaiian Star, Dec. 30, 1902.
26 Wright, Carroll D., Report: Commissioner of Labor on Hawaii, 1902 (Government Printing Office, 1903), 22Google Scholar, https://books.google.com/books?id=YBMZAAAAYAAJ (accessed Jan. 26, 2016).
27 Hawaiian Gazette, Dec. 19, 1902.
28 Maui News, Jan. 26, 1901.
29 See, “The Negroes Complain—Hold a Mass Meeting at Spreckelsville—Say They are Not a Lawless Crowd—The Feeling Between the Blacks and the Japanese,” Hawaiian Star, June 12, 1901.
30 Wright, Commissioner of Labor on Hawaii, 53.
31 Ibid., 33.
32 Ibid., 53.
33 Hawaiian Star, July 2, 1900.
34 Ibid., Dec. 19, 1902. Fortune's quoted words here may include editorializing by the (presumably white) Star reporter, but his discussion of different African American labor types is consistent across newspapers.
35 Hawaiian Gazette, Dec. 19, 1902.
36 Hawaiian Star, Dec. 19, 1902.
37 Hawaiian Gazette, Dec. 19. 1902.
38 The Dec. 19, 1902, Evening Bulletin expressed tentative support for black labor in Hawaii, if Fortune could keep Southern planters from exporting the “rag tag and bobtail of the country with the riff raff of the city thrown in.” The Maui News of Jan. 3, 1903, remained neutral on the plan but rejected the possibility of black homesteads.
39 “Fortune Will Look After Local Labor,” Hawaiian Gazette, Dec. 19, 1902.
40 “Stewart and Fortune Are Old Friends With Views That Differ,” Evening Bulletin, Dec. 19, 1902. For more on Fortune and Stewart's relationship, see Alexander, , An Army of Lions; and Albert S. Broussard, African-American Odyssey: The Stewarts, 1853–1963 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
41 Fortune, T. Thomas, “Politics in the Philippine Islands,” Independent 55 (Sept. 1903): 2266–68Google Scholar.
42 See Jung, Moon-Ho, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
43 The phrase is from Merleaux, April, “The Political Culture of Sugar Tariffs: Immigration, Race, and Empire, 1898–1930,” International Labor and Working Class History 81 (Spring 2012): 31 Google Scholar.
44 Independent, Jan. 2, 1903. Testa also edited the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Makaainana (“The Commoner”). In an adjacent editorial in the same issue, he strongly defended Chinese in Honolulu against charges that Chinatown was a source of plague.
45 Home Rula Repubalika, Sept. 2, 1901. Translated for the author by Kamalani Johnson, University of Hawaii at Hilo.
46 Ke Aloha Aina, Dec. 27, 1902. Translated for the author by Kamalani Johnson, University of Hawaii at Hilo; and Pomai Stone, Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian Languages.
47 Hawaiian Star, Dec. 30, 1902.
48 Ibid.
49 BTW to TTF, Feb. 3, 1903. In Harlan and Smock, BTW Papers, 7:29.
50 See Gatewood, Williard B., “Theodore Roosevelt and the Indianola Affair,” Journal of Negro History 53 (Jan. 1968): 48–69 Google Scholar. Black activists were encouraged by Roosevelt's refusal to back down on these two appointments; they would feel betrayed in the fall of 1906, after Roosevelt's dismissal on “weak” evidence, of three companies of black regular troops accused of involvement in a shootout in Brownsville, Texas. See Harlan, Louis, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, vol. 2, 1901–1915 (London: Oxford University Press, 1983), 295Google Scholar.
51 BTW to TTF, Feb. 17, 1903. In Harlan and Smock, BTW Papers, 7:80–81.
52 Root's speech to the Union League Club can be accessed online at https://archive.org/stream/addressofhoneli00root#page/n1/mode/2up.
53 Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Francis Parkman Prize Edition, History Book Club, 1988 [2005]), 283–85Google Scholar.
54 BTW to TTF, Feb. 17, 1903. In Harlan and Smock, BTW Papers, 7:80–81.
55 Booker T. Washington, speech to Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Feb. 22, 1903. In Harlan and Smock, BTW Papers, 7:85–97.
56 Harlan, Louis first explored Washington's interest in exporting Tuskegee farming methods and staff to Africa in “Booker T. Washington and the White Man's Burden,” The American Historical Review 71 (Jan. 1966): 441–67Google Scholar.
57 Hawaiian Star, Dec. 19, 1902. Washington was appointed head of the American branch of E. D. Morel's Congo Reform Association in 1904.
58 BTW to TTF, June 15, 1902. In Harlan and Smock, BTW Papers, 6:481.
59 Harlan, “Booker T. Washington and the White Man's Burden,” 448.
60 Ibid.
61 Booker T. Washington, “Signs of Progress Among the Negroes,” The Century Magazine (Jan. 1900): 472–78, www.unz.org/Pub/Century-1900jan-00472 (accessed Jan. 24, 2016).
62 Evening Bulletin, Dec. 27, 1902.
63 Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Dec. 29, 1902.
64 Edwin A. Start, New England Magazine 6 (1892), quoted in Okihiro, Gary Y., Island World: A History of Hawaii and the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 105–6Google Scholar.
65 Okihiro, Island World, 134.
66 T. Thomas Fortune, “The Filipino: A Social Study in Three Parts,” Voice of the Negro (Mar. 1904): 47.
67 Evening Bulletin, Dec. 27, 1902.
68 Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman, “Of the People Who Love the Land: Vernacular History in the Poetry of Modern Hawaiian Hula,” Amerasia Journal 28 (2002): 85–108 Google Scholar, in Silva, Noenoe K., Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 182Google Scholar. Ka Makaainana and Independent editor F. J. Testa printed a subversive book of traditional and nationalist songs, Buke Mele Lahui, in 1895; it is now a key source for the study of nineteenth-century Hawaii. See http://www.ulukau.org/elib/collect/melelahui/index/assoc/D0.dir/doc3.pdf
69 BTW to TTF, Jan. 26, 1903. In Harlan and Smock, BTW Papers, 7:14.
70 Gatewood, Black Americans, 204.
71 Richmond Planet, May 28, 1898.
72 Savannah Tribune, Mar. 18, 1899.
73 See Gatewood, Williard B., Smoked Yankees and the Struggle for Empire: Letters From Negro Soldiers, 1898–1902 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971)Google Scholar.
74 Freeman (Indianapolis), Feb. 4, 1899.
75 See Harris, Paul W., “Racial Identity and the Civilizing Mission: Double-Consciousness at the 1895 Congress on Africa,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 18 (Summer 2008): 157–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
76 T. Thomas Fortune, “Politics,” 2266.
77 Anglo-American newspapers include the Manila American, the Manila Freedom, and the Manila Cablenews. By 1901, the Filipino press was split into three groups: pro-U.S. annexationists, a weak conservative Hispanic faction, and an original party of Nacionalistas. See Purisima Kalaw Katigbak, “The Press, Propaganda, and Twelve Years of American Sovereignty, 1898–1910: A Study of the Filipino and American Newspapers Published in the Philippines” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1962), 87.
78 The Manila American, Feb. 10, 1903.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid.
81 Manila Freedom, Feb. 23, 1903.
82 T. Thomas Fortune, “Politics,” 2268.
83 TTF to BTW, Feb. 26, 1903. In Harlan and Smock, BTW Papers, 7:100.
84 Fortune, “Politics,” 2267.
85 Forbes to Brigadier General Frank McIntyre of the Bureau of Insular Affairs. In Larry Arden Lawcock, “Philippine Students in the United States and the Independence Movement 1900–1935” (PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1975), 641, note 72.
86 In 1907, a bicameral Philippine Legislature was established, with the Commission as the upper house and a popularly elected Philippine Assembly as the lower.
87 John W. Galloway, Twenty-fourth Infantry, San Isidro, Philippines, Dec. 30, 1899, in Gatewood, Smoked Yankees, 252.
88 Kaplan, Amy, “Black and Blue on San Juan Hill” in Cultures of U.S. Imperialism, eds. Pease, Donald and Kaplan, Amy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 235Google Scholar.
89 Robinson, Michael C. and Schubert, Frank N., “David Fagen: An Afro-American Rebel in the Philippines, 1899–1901,” Pacific Historical Review 44 (Feb. 1975): 68–83 Google Scholar.
90 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign People at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 252Google Scholar.
91 Williams's diary entries were reprinted in Williams, Daniel R., The Odyssey of the Philippine Commission (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1913), 287–88Google Scholar.
92 Taft's speech is reprinted in Devins, John Patrick, An Observer in the Philippines, or, Life in Our New Possessions (New York: American Tract Society, 1905), 393Google Scholar.
93 Gabaccia, Donna R., Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 79Google Scholar.
94 Amy S. Greenberg finds among nineteenth-century white anti-annexationists in Hawaii a “restrained manhood,” a “manly Christian” who had the upper hand, at least in the mid-1800s, over the more aggressive “martial manhood” style of filibusterers in Central America and the Caribbean. See Greenberg, , Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 232, 254–61Google Scholar.
95 Katigbak characterizes La Democracia in “The Press, Propaganda, and Twelve Years of American Sovereignty,” 87.
96 La Democracia, “La colonizacion negra – El cuestionario de Mr. Fortune,” Mar. 2, 1903.
97 Ibid., “El cuestionario de Mr. Fortune,” Mar. 4, 1903.
98 Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune, 237.
99 T. Thomas Fortune, “The Filipino: A Social Study,” 93. The classic work on Orientalism is Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978 [1994])Google Scholar.
100 Online at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174629
101 Fortune, “The Filipino: A Social Study,” 94.
102 Ibid., 94.
103 T. Thomas Fortune, “The Filipino: Some Incidents of a Trip Through the Island of Luzon,” Voice of the Negro (June 1904): 243.
104 Ibid., 240.
105 Ibid., 241.
106 The Manila American articles are reprinted in the Evening Bulletin (Honolulu), June 5, 1903.
107 Fortune, “The Filipino: Some Incidents,” 246.
108 Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune, 240.
109 T. Thomas Fortune, “Politics,” 2268.
110 The Colored American, Jan. 16, 1904.
111 The Gazette (Cleveland), Apr. 21, 1900, in Gatewood, Smoked Yankees, 263–64.
112 “Victim of Japs Has Given Life to Army—Capt. Robert G. Woods, 72, Was Key Man When Nips Entered Manila,” The Afro-American (Chicago), May 12, 1945, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2211&dat=19450512&id=UB0mAAAAIBAJ&sjid=wP0FAAAAIBAJ&pg=3820,4860938&hl=en (accessed Jan. 22, 2016).
113 Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 34.
114 T. Thomas Fortune, “The Filipino: The Filipinos Do Not Understand the Prejudice of White Americans Against Black Americans,” Voice of the Negro (May 1904): 199.
115 The Filipino Students' Magazine 1:1 (Apr. 1905): 25. Even the Voice of the Negro (June 4, 1903) printed a joke about black preachers in dialect at the bottom of Fortune's third installment on the Philippines.
116 See Brian Shott, “Mediating America: Black and Irish Press and the Struggle for Citizenship, 1870–1914” (PhD diss., University of California at Santa Cruz, 2015), 117–175.
117 Muhammad, Khalil Gibran traces the early racialization of crime in The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
118 See Welke, Barbara Young, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
119 New York Age, Oct. 8, 1905.
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