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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 November 2017
This article explores the contentious and dynamic relationship between Woodrow Wilson and a nascent, diverse civil rights movement from 1912 to 1919. The pivotal relationship between Wilson and the early civil rights movement emerged out of two concurrent and related political developments: the increasing centrality of presidential administration in the constitutional order and the growing national aspirations of political strategies and goals among reform activists. Not only do we illustrate an early form of social movement politics that was largely antithetical to the administration's objectives, but we also trace how the strategies adopted by civil rights leaders were contingent on an early, still-to-be institutionalized administrative presidency. We highlight Wilson's involvement in the racial unrest that emerged from the debut of the film The Birth of a Nation and in the race riots that accompanied the Great Migration and World War I in his second term. These early twentieth-century episodes legitimized a form of collective action and helped to recast the modern presidency as an institution that both collaborated and competed with social movement organizations to control the timing and conditions of change.
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80. Thomas Dixon to Joseph Patrick Tumulty, May 1, 1915, Woodrow Wilson Papers, Series 4, Reel 332, Case File 2247, Library of Congress (emphasis in original).
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97. One of the major African American dailies, the Chicago Defender provided exhaustive coverage of these protests across the United States and into Canada. In no less than thirty-three major American cities did the Defender report instances of citizen protest—from May 1915 in Detroit to June 1916 in Pensacola, Florida. Many were unsuccessful, although some citizen groups managed to cut some of the most vitriolic scenes from the film. However, the film was banned—albeit temporarily—from production in Chicago (the next stop after the Boston premiers). The Defender also reports instances of “extralegal” protest: Reels of the film were destroyed in Mason City, Iowa, in December 1915, and large demonstrations turned into episodic violence when the film premiered in Philadelphia that September of the same year. The Defender's own view of its role in perpetuating the fight is most clearly evoked in an editorial in the September 11, 1915, edition, p. 8.
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141. Leonidas Dyer to Woodrow Wilson, July 23, 1918,” 61–62.
142. Wilson, Woodrow, “A Statement to the American People” July 26, 1918, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 49, ed. Link, Arthur S. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 97–98 Google Scholar.
143. “President Wilson's Proclamation Denouncing Lynching,” Afro-American, August 2, 1918, p. 1.
144. “President Wilson against Mob Rule,” Chicago Defender, August 3, 1918, p. 1.
145. “Our President Has Spoken,” Chicago Defender, August 3, 1918, p. 16.
146. Miroff, “Presidential Leverage Over Social Movements,” 14.
147. Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government, 68.
148. Riley, The Presidency; Sanders, “Presidents and Social Movements.”
149. Arnesen, “Reconsidering the ‘Long Civil Rights Movement,’” 265–88.
150. “Wilson Backs Amendment for Woman Suffrage,” New York Times, January 10, 1918, p. 1.
151. Stone, “Mr. Wilson's First Amendment,” 213.
152. Francis, Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State, 171.
153. Daniels was secretary of the navy during Wilson's two terms as president. FDR, famously following in his cousin's footsteps, served as assistant secretary of the navy under Daniels. Daniels's private diary informs us of the earliest conversations that took place inside the White House over the segregation of the civil service. In a letter to FDR, Daniels expresses Wilson's dismay for how he handled Trotter's second invitation to the White House, admitting to have “lost my temper and played the fool.” Josephus Daniels to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, June 10, 1933, F. D. Roosevelt Papers, Official File 237, Papers as President: The President's Official File, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum.
154. Langston Hughes, “Poem for a Man: To A. Phillip Randolph on Achieving His Seventieth Year,” April 15, 1959, in The Papers of A. Philip Randolph, ed. John H. Bracey and August Meier (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC). As Hughes exalted in this poem honoring Randolph on his seventieth birthday: “[He] played the checkered game of King jump King. And jump[ed] a president.”
155. On the development of a racial realignment during the New Deal era, see Schickler, Eric, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
156. Milkis, Sidney M., The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.
157. Milkis et al., “Rallying Force.”
158. Indeed, Neustadt's analysis of modern presidential power is the intellectual heir, and analytical extension of Wilson's political science. As Neustadt writes, “A President may retain the liberty, in Woodrow Wilson's phrase, ‘to be as big a man as he can.’ But nowadays he cannot be as small as he might like.” Neustadt, Richard E., Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: The Free Press, 1990/1960), 6Google Scholar.
159. Wilson, Congressional Government, 74.
