Promises and Patronage

Tapping into the same stream of social activism and political energy that animated the Progressive Era, the early twentieth-century civil rights movement gave rise to a number of organized advocacy groups including the National Independent Political League, the National Equal Rights League, the National Citizenship Defense Committee, and the National Association of Colored Women. Among these newly empowered organizations, none became as prominent as the NAACP. Founded in 1909, the NAACP helped to capture the voice of the nascent civil rights movement; this influence was due, in no small part, to W. E. B. Du Bois's own rhetorical gifts, which were displayed in the organization's monthly magazine, The Crisis. Du Bois, in the first edition of The Crisis, sought to exalt the collective-action strategy of this new reformist politics:

Wilson, therefore, not only entered the presidency on the heels of one of the most extraordinary elections in U.S. history—a contest that represented the cresting of the Progressive movement—but also while a strategy of direct action supplanted the more gradualist, “Atlanta-school” approach to civil rights reform.Footnote ²⁹ A Southern man who had established a national reputation as president of Princeton and reform governor of New Jersey, Wilson had made no strong commitments to the cause of racial equality. As an academic, Wilson's stance on civil rights fit neatly within his larger philosophy of political development. For Wilson, the bonds of social cohesion and the prospects of material advancement emerged from a system of laws both “impersonal and impartial,” a code of laws that “must say that every man who does such and such things must suffer the penalty.” Under such a system of just and equitable laws, diverse communities under a “constitution of liberty” could “search after the best adjustment.” Clearly, America had not yet fulfilled this promise of freedom; indeed, Wilson saw the potential for disorder and social regress. As he noted in his address to the African American college Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1897,

Wilson endowed the institutional presidency with great promise and rhetorical flourish, but he also had a well-considered appreciation for the limits of politics as well as incremental reformist politics, especially on the racial question. As Gary Gerstle notes, “the sentiments animating Wilson's 1897 Hampton speech mirrored those undergirding the famous Atlanta Exposition address that Booker T. Washington had given two years earlier.”Footnote ³¹ Yet by the time Wilson had decided to run for the presidency, Du Bois and others had become the new vanguards of racial progress.

Those leaders’ support of Wilson in the election of 1912 was one of desperation, stirred by the deafening silence of the Republican and insurgent Progressive platforms on racial injustice;Footnote ³² however, it was not one that was uncoordinated and haphazard. The incongruity between the goals of social activists and Wilson's racial thought was well understood. As Du Bois later recounted, there was a specific and coordinated three-pronged approach to persuade Wilson by appealing to his desire to build a less Southern-dominated Democratic Party; by exploiting personal relationships he had built during his career; and finally, in the event that all else failed, by appealing over his head and directly to the people.Footnote ³³

The beginning of Wilson's presidency demonstrates how well formed this complicated and divisive form of politics was during the Progressive Era. Today, presidential leadership is fueled through the merging of partisan goals and the demands of various social advocacy groups.Footnote ³⁴ But Wilson's administration witnessed the emergence of that distinctly new form of presidency-aligned politics that placed the executive in a political space between party and social advocacy. The importance of Wilson's support to a cause outside of the party platform led civil rights leaders to pursue some type of statement prior to the 1912 election. As Villard would later recount in his memoirs, “Knowing that Governor Wilson was in a politically fluid state so far as his opinions were concerned, much pressure was brought to bear upon him by liberals to induce him to go still further than he had.”Footnote ³⁵ They were ultimately successful and even though it was a private, intentionally broad promise whose leak angered Wilson, reform leaders publicized the statement widely in the 1912 campaign: “My sympathy with [the colored people of the United States] is of long standing,” Wilson wrote to Villard and Walters, “they may count upon me for absolute fair dealing and for everything by which I could assist in advancing the interests of their race in the United States.”Footnote ³⁶

For Bishop Walters, the words “absolute fair dealing” meant one thing in particular—jobs. Patronage was, of course, critical to maintaining the loyalties of both Democrats and Republicans, but while the number of jobs, and the actual dollar amounts of the positions never amounted to much, for African Americans struggling to find a secure position in either party at the beginning of the twentieth century, the quantity and quality of federal civil service appointments was a critical measure of racial equality. And so, upon Wilson's election, Walters immediately set to work on securing the dispensation of jobs to new black Democrats.Footnote ³⁷ There were far fewer loyal African Americans in the Democratic rank and file and such a strategy had risks, as the replacement of appointees, even if they were “colored positions,” subjected them to rejection by a Senate run by Southern Democrats. Still, the number of positions that would go to black Democrats was the subject of highly speculative talk. Democrats had not held the power to appoint since Grover Cleveland, and never had such a high percentage of African Americans volunteered their support to the Democratic Party. Contemporaneous estimates suggest that thirteen applicants applied for each of the more than 10,000 positions Wilson was able to appoint. And with Wilson's electoral victory resting on only 42 percent of the nation's vote, most Washington insiders ventured that the administration would not waste such prime jobs on building a black Democracy.Footnote ³⁸ Anxiety started to grow as, months into his presidency, Wilson had yet to make any effort to remove black Republicans from office, an issue symbolically rich in importance for how the new administration would treat his new partisan allies.Footnote ³⁹

By early July, the White House settled on Adam E. Patterson for registrar of the Treasury, one of the most prestigious “colored positions” in all of the federal government. Once the Oklahoma Democrat was selected, his Senator Thomas Gore, Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo, and Wilson worked for more than a month to secure endorsements and to find a propitious time to submit the nomination to the Senate.Footnote ⁴⁰ When finally announced on July 25, however, it soon became clear that no amount of preparation could overcome the fierce opposition that was waiting. Senators of Wilson's own party met the announcement with a mix of bafflement, anger, and opportunism. Leading the fight were two well-known “fire-eating” Southerners—James K. Vardaman of Mississippi and Coleman L. Blease of South Carolina. Despite, and perhaps as a result of, granting major concessions to the progressive wing of the party earlier in the congressional session, the Southern delegation was adamant in their opposition. Immediately after the nomination became official, Vardaman denounced Wilson's proposal, arguing that it was “beyond their political comprehension” why the Democratic Party would need to dispense patronage to the “colored brother.”Footnote ⁴¹ The policy of appointing African Americans to positions of such stature would, Vardaman claimed, “create in every negro in the country a hope that he may someday stand on social and political equality with the white man.”Footnote ⁴² In the face of such fierce opposition, Gore dropped his support of Patterson within a week—an unexpected embarrassment to the administration.Footnote ⁴³ Soon after, Wilson followed suit.

Despite the very dim prospects for Patterson's confirmation, the nomination was viewed as a test of principle for Wilson. His silence and quick capitulation to the Southern element disappointed those who thought that the strong support of civil rights activists in the 1912 elections would spur the administration to openly “fight any movement of race discrimination started by the Bourbon element of their party.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Robert Wood, who was working with Walters to secure black nominations, wrote to Wilson, expressing exasperation and dismay. The president and his aides seemed all too willing to retreat in the face of resistance from the “untraveled, provincial, self-seeking politician from the South.”Footnote ⁴⁵ To the editorial board of the Afro-American, the failure to get the Patterson nomination through the Senate simply confirmed the naiveté of black Democrats:

Battling Segregation in the Federal Workforce

Wilson's hesitancy to replace Republican African American appointees with loyal Democratic men angered Villard, Walters, and Du Bois. It was one thing if Wilson lacked the skill and will to stand up to Southern politicians, but such ready acquiescence to Southern race-baiters made it seem as if the White House sympathized with their commitment to white supremacy. The sacrifice of Patterson also further implicated the president in the Democratic Party's larger plans to reverse African American progress by instating legally mandated segregation in the federal workforce. Indeed, as Jim Crow laws spread in the aftermath of the notorious “Compromise of 1877,” the push for codified racial segregation became not just a Southern, but a national issue; during the early days of the Wilson administration, this segregationist movement spilled over into the federal civil service.

Awaiting Wilson when he arrived in Washington, DC, was the newly established and inaptly named National Democratic Fair Play Association. Just as African American Democrats had eagerly awaited patronage positions in the new Wilson administration, so too did white Democrats show up to receive the spoils of a victorious presidential election. And, just as black civil service workers and the newly organized NAACP were fighting to desegregate parts of the civil service, an active and mobilized force was pushing for further segregation of the federal workforce. At major rallies held throughout the capital, rapturous applause greeted prominent members of Congress who capitalized on speaking to Fair Play rallies—none more infamous than Mississippi Senator Vardaman. A favorite talking point demanded that white men fulfill their responsibilities of protecting white women, who might work under the supervision of African American appointees, and segregate all federal offices and facilities.Footnote ⁴⁷ At one rally just over four months after Wilson's inauguration, Vardaman confessed to a crowd of civil service employees that he favored lynchings for crimes against white women over regular courts of justice, and that if he could not segregate African Americans in the civil service, he would quarantine whites.Footnote ⁴⁸

Efforts to extend Jim Crow to the federal civil service preceded the Wilson administration; but deliberate efforts to draw a hard and fast line between white and black federal workers intensified with the election of a Southern-born Democratic president. Moreover, Wilson's own conservative views of racial progress, coupled with his insistence on administrative efficiency, made him sympathetic to the claims that racial unrest in federal departments hampered the government's responsibilities.

Wilson could not readily escape his seeming hypocrisy. He had once lauded the president's unique ability to distill the disparate voices of a nation; now he had to contend with the fact that no “unified chorus” of public opinion existed—instead, warring factions increasingly engaged in the tactics of public demonstration.Footnote ⁴⁹ As soon as press reports indicated that Wilson was not living up to his promise of “absolute fair dealing,” Villard reached out to Wilson and for more than three months, the two engaged in direct correspondence on the issue of civil service segregation. The NAACP's leadership, speaking through Villard, had hoped to pressure Wilson into publicly involving himself in the conflict occurring in his administration before escalating their public relations campaign.Footnote ⁵⁰ Fellow NAACP board member, Moorfield Storey wrote to Villard approving of his back-channel campaign, writing “the President's [response] is much more hopeful than his previous communications and indicates that he feels the pressure.” Nevertheless, “we ought not to lay down our arms and wait on a very indefinite assurance … in the meanwhile the work of segregation goes on without change and I am not inclined to let our enemies do all the fighting.”Footnote ⁵¹ Villard heeded this advice and continued to pressure Wilson informally, conceding that even if the NAACP were to stop its publicity campaign, only the president's voice could “assuage this feeling of bitterness and humiliation, or induce them as a race to remain in cool and just equipoise.” As Villard pointedly reminded Wilson, “Vardaman, Tillman, Hoke Smith, and the other demagogues of this type will never for a moment remain cool and just on this issue” and that “nothing but a vigorous confronting of such men as these, and a ceaseless battling for the colored people's rights will prevent further discrimination of vast proportion and undreamed of bitterness.”Footnote ⁵²

On the same day Villard's missive was sent, Wilson received a large petition from African American civil service workers themselves, pleading for the president's personal involvement to stop segregation orders.Footnote ⁵³ Shortly thereafter, Wilson had an interview with one of Villard's reporters, currently working on a story about segregation in the civil service. The reporter, John Palmer Gavit walked away from his interview with appreciation for the delicate political situation that Wilson faced. As he would write Villard,

Gavit, confessing that he was “not entirely clear in my own mind as to what the President ought to do” on the “tragic situation culminating the crimes and hypocrisies of three centuries,” suggested that Wilson meet personally with Villard. Recognizing his own faults, or unsure as to what he could personally do, Wilson requested that Villard travel down to Washington to discuss the matter.Footnote ⁵⁵

At that meeting, Wilson confessed to Villard the same sentiments he had relayed earlier—that he “honestly thought segregation to be in the interest of the colored people” and that a “number of colored men with whom we have consulted have agreed with us in this judgment.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Villard, crediting such tacit approval to the more gradualist reformer Bishop Walters, was determined to convince Wilson that both the denial of African Americans of their fair share of appointments and segregation in the civil service were defended on white supremacist grounds. The NAACP's internal investigation of segregation in the federal government suggested as much: Conducted by May Childs Nerney, secretary of the NAACP, the report concluded that while “segregation is no new thing in Washington, and the present administration cannot be said to have inaugurated it. … The past few months of democratic [sic] party control have, however, given segregation a tremendous impetus, and have marked its systematic enforcement.”Footnote ⁵⁷ As Nerney pointed out, the lack of any official policy only served the cause of the bureau chiefs who wanted to segregate: “when no official orders have been issued in regard to this … should [colored people] make such complaint they would be merely asked to cite a discriminating order, and failing that would probably be told that the changes that had been made had been necessitated by exigencies in work, color having had nothing to do with it.” Wilson seemed intrigued and requested a copy of the report.Footnote ⁵⁸ Upon receipt several days later, he thanked Villard and promised to “make use of it as I told you I would.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Whatever Wilson's assurances were, Villard pressed his advantage. Fearing that Wilson might renege on his promise to make use of the investigation of the civil service, the NAACP went public with the report. At the same time, hoping that he could spur Wilson into action, he sent the White House a copy of a speech he planned to give at the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church before the Washington, DC, branch of the NAACP on the night of October 27. With Wilson out of town, McAdoo took the lead in defending the administration's record on race. In a letter that Villard would read before the crowd, McAdoo tried to point to the various attempts the White House had made to be “just and generous to the negroes,” including the attempt to appoint Patterson.Footnote ⁶⁰ Villiard and his audience showed contempt for the treasury secretary's guarantees that the administration was not complicit in the segregation of the civil service; to the wild applause of an estimated 7,000 members, Villard argued that, “What Mr. McAdoo does not appreciate, is that the slightest yielding on the part of a high Federal official will find a dozen imitators, who think by outdoing their masters to curry favor with those in power.”Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, Villard told the crowd that Wilson “may go down in history as the man who put in motion terrible forces for evil without adequate conception or prevision of the dangers he was inviting.”Footnote ⁶²

Villard's widely publicized denouncement of Wilson and McAdoo precipitated a mammoth, multiorganization petition campaign, which less than two weeks later delivered close to 20,000 signatures to Wilson in opposition to racial segregation. William Monroe Trotter, now head of the National Equal Rights League, led the delegation that delivered the petition to Wilson, which called for a complete investigation into segregation of the civil service. Wilson, who had known about the issue for months, tried to appease Trotter at their meeting, and suggested that the matter was still understudied: “I am slowly making myself familiar with the matter with the hope that I shall see my way clear to do the right thing all along the line.” Even though the public relations campaign pushed by these civil rights groups made it impossible for the president to plead ignorance, Wilson still deflected responsibility, reminding Trotter that reports of segregation in the civil service were intricately related to the general mood of racial hostility in Washington: “You know what my endeavors have been on certain occasions; and in one instance, for example, I could not get a nomination confirmed in the Senate.” Echoing his Hampton Institute speech, he added that “There are these difficulties of which we must be patient and tolerant. Things do not happen rapidly in the world, and prejudices are slow to be uprooted.”Footnote ⁶³

To a foremost leader of a rising movement, Wilson's plea for patience and tolerance was intolerable—such forbearance had only encouraged the discriminatory actions of bureau chiefs and allowed organizations like the Fair Play Association to gain popularity. When Wilson tried to suggest that newspaper reports of segregation had been “exaggerated,” Trotter confronted him with a copy of a memorandum issued by an auditor in the Interior Department that explicitly ordered segregated lavatories.Footnote ⁶⁴ Confronted with hard evidence, Wilson assured the delegation that he would investigate that matter.Footnote ⁶⁵ According to Trotter's newspaper, the Boston Guardian, “The President was impressed by the protest and commented on its strength,” stating that, “it was deserving of, and should receive his careful attention.”Footnote ⁶⁶

How much attention Wilson personally gave the matter is conjecture, but the lack of a public response to the issue torpedoed the remaining trust between his administration and the social movement that had pressured him for months. Racial segregation continued to plague the civil service, although reports on its continued existence varied considerably. By January, the NAACP sent a telegram to Wilson welcoming “the report that segregation of colored employees in the Federal departments at Washington has been checked.”Footnote ⁶⁷ And over the next two months the organization's magazine, The Crisis, would summarize the news dispatches and investigations into the status of African American workers, suggesting that bureau chiefs would be held accountable for instances of racial discrimination in their offices. Yet, even if discrimination and racial animosities in the federal workplace diminished, Wilson's silence on the issue undermined any notion that he was moved by social activists’ persistent targeting of the White House.Footnote ⁶⁸ Perhaps hoping to vindicate these efforts, Villard told audiences of civil service workers that “President Wilson had stopped the segregation of the government employees.” But, for those employees still suffering under lower-level bureau chiefs who continued to overlook them for promotions and raises, Wilson's leadership was a huge disappointment—a betrayal of his campaign promise to deal fairly with African Americans.Footnote ⁶⁹

The growing militancy of the civil rights movement forced Wilson to grapple with a contentious issue that he and his administration had actively sought to avoid. Try as civil rights leaders might, however, Wilson continued to view the issue of civil service segregation as one that would maintain the relative order and “harmony” of a multiracial workforce, a sentiment that he most forcefully expressed when Trotter returned to the White House a year later in November 1914.Footnote ⁷⁰ Inside the Oval Office, Trotter explained that the forces in favor of segregation remained in full force despite the president's stated commitments, and that Wilson's equivocation on the subject made the problem worse: African Americans “realize that if they can be segregated and thus humiliated by the national government at the national capital the beginning is made for the spread of that persecution and prosecution which makes property and life itself insecure.”Footnote ⁷¹ But Wilson stubbornly refused to acknowledge the connection between segregation and humiliation. Once again, Wilson promised that he would look into specific injustices that the committee brought before him; but he clung to his previously stated notions that segregation was a secondary concern in dealing with the race question. “We are all practical men,” Wilson acknowledged. “We know that there is a point at which there is apt to be friction, and that is in the intercourse between the two races … nobody can be cocksure about what should be done. I am not cocksure about what should be done. I am certain that I have been dependent upon the advice of the men who were in immediate contact with the problem in several departments.”Footnote ⁷²

An angry Trotter would have none of this, telling Wilson, “We are sorely disappointed that you take the position that the separation itself is not wrong, is not injurious, is not rightly offensive to you … but that is not in accord with the facts, Mr. President.”Footnote ⁷³ Wilson had heard enough and pointed to the door, telling Trotter that “the other members of the delegation have shown a spirit in the matter that I have appreciated, but your tone, sir, offends me.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Failing to make his case on principle, Trotter reminded Wilson about the support that civil rights leaders gave him in the 1912 election. Yet Wilson insisted that his decision to condone ad hoc segregation was not a matter of partisanship or pandering to Southern Democracy. Insisting his position was a matter of principle, the president lectured, “Politics must be left out … that is a form of blackmail. You can vote as you please, provided I am perfectly sure that I am doing the right thing at the right time.”

In supporting Wilson in 1912, many African Americans hoped they had elected a politician who would embrace the opportunities and resources of a powerful social movement; but Wilson envisioned an executive office that could elevate itself above this direct form of political action. And yet, as his disastrous meeting with Trotter made clear, this determined elusiveness during Wilson's first two years in office only agitated and aroused civil rights leaders who blamed the president for the limited success they had in staving off the ambitions of Southern Democrats and the Fair Play Association. Although the promise of a fully cooperative relationship all but died by the spring of 1915, these same advocates still believed the power of the modern presidency was an essential ingredient of social reform. When Trotter stormed out of the Oval Office, he would take an unprecedented step to convince the president that his conception of the “right thing” was disastrously misguided. Speaking directly to reporters who lingered in the office of Wilson's personal secretary, Trotter relayed his account of the incident. This signaled civil rights activists’ determination, as Frederick Douglass had once urged his abolitionist allies in their contentious relationship with Lincoln, to “keep pounding the rock”—to persist, indeed double down on their efforts to leverage the modern president's public prestige to advance their cause.Footnote ⁷⁵

The White House Launches a Blockbuster

Wilson's involvement with the film's debut and its aftermath is part personal, part political. Thomas Dixon Jr. authored both the book, The Clansman, and the script on which The Birth of a Nation was based. Dixon was an old classmate of Wilson's at Johns Hopkins and remained a personal friend; indeed, Wilson nominated Dixon in 1913 to serve as ambassador to Italy.Footnote ⁷⁶ A tireless, self-seeking promoter of the film, whose short-lived notoriety belies the enduring cultural and political impact of his work, Dixon tried for months to secure a special screening of the film for the Wilson family in a public movie theater in Washington. The film's special screening at the White House came after weeks of lobbying by Dixon, an effort that only succeeded, as Wilson would recall, because it was “a courtesy extended to an old acquaintance.”Footnote ⁷⁷

A mark of the rising importance of the presidency, Wilson's opinion on the film, his rumored endorsement, and the significance of the film's screening in the White House, were central to the debates throughout the nation as to whether the film should be allowed to play. Nowhere were these debates more prominent than in Boston, home of Trotter, where the film was to debut on the fiftieth anniversary of General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Energized by the protests in Boston, and coordinated, in part, by the NAACP, demonstrations and censorship hearings followed the film's cross-country tour. Mayors, governors, and the press would routinely call on the White House for guidance or support in managing the film's disruptive premier. In this contest for Wilson's endorsement, Trotter would ultimately prevail, when he and other civil rights activists finally persuaded the president to officially denounce the film, a success they publicized in protest materials sent around the country. But this condemnation was preceded by a long silence, which the producers of The Birth of a Nation exploited in fighting against the national protest movement the film aroused.

Dixon's attempts to use the presidency as a source of credibility and promotion began in preproduction. Wilson's historical works never appear in Dixon's The Clansman, but the film does invoke his History of the American People on three separate occasions to bolster its popular and historical credibility. Predictably, the quotations are spliced to maintain a narrative of redemption and fearmongering. Wilson certainly viewed the motives of Reconstruction, especially the widespread disenfranchisement of ex-Confederate soldiers immediately following the war, with great skepticism and regret, but the passions inflamed on both sides of the political question offended his Burkean commitment to social order and gradual social evolution. Conveniently overlooked by D. W. Griffith and Dixon was Wilson's treatment of the Ku Klux Klan in the History. Wilson did not denounce the Klan with any degree of moral fervor, indeed, his characterization of Reconstruction governments as corrupt and lawless seemed to justify the Klan's formation. Unlike the producers of The Birth of a Nation, however, he did not glorify its violent “redemption” politics. “The Ku Klux and those who masqueraded in their guise struck at first only at those who made palpable mischief between the races or set just law aside to make themselves masters,” he wrote; “but their work grew under their hands, and their zest for it. Brutal crimes were committed; the innocent suffered with the guilty; a reign of terror was brought on, and society was infinitely more disturbed than defended. Law seems oftentimes given over.” The Klan was “a very tempting and dangerous instrument of power for days of disorder and social upheaval,” Wilson conceded; but they were also “reckless fellows,” who “had plied their means of intimidation without scruple or principle or public object.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Whatever Wilson's view of the Klan, however, he was lured into the screening of a film in the White House that romanticized vigilantes as the savior of the nation's honor. With East Coast premiers scheduled for March 1915, Dixon worked tirelessly to arrange a public cinematic debut of the film for Wilson and his family.Footnote ⁷⁹ But when Dixon traveled from New York City on February 3, he treaded carefully around the film's controversial subject, requesting Wilson's help “as a friend and as a scholar.” As he would later write Wilson's aide Joseph Patrick Tumulty about the meeting,

Dixon and Griffith were both present at the White House screening on February 18, followed up by a special screening at the National Press Club for various members of Congress and other cabinet officials.Footnote ⁸¹ Only one brief, six-sentence announcement of the screening made it into the next day's papers, the leak going to the Washington Evening Star. Part of the press's inattention to the White House debut was a response to Wilson's deliberate request for Dixon not to use the occasion for the film's publicity. But even if Dixon had wanted to use Wilson's endorsement, there was nothing for him to quote. As Marjorie Brown King, the only survivor among the persons at the White House screening, later told Arthur S. Link, “Wilson seemed lost in thought during the showing, and … walked out of the room without saying a word when the movie was over.”Footnote ⁸² Wilson's silence and preoccupation are understandable. As the papers went to press the morning of the February 19, all news was on Germany's renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare in the English Channel. Indeed, White House correspondence for the entire week was overwhelmed with dispatches to and from Europe in an attempt to resolve this international crisis.

Nevertheless, the purpose of the White House screening on the part of Dixon and Griffith was made all the more apparent in the weeks that followed. Both men would write Wilson personally, thanking him for the honor. Griffith would specifically ask for the president's help to review a “proposed series of motion pictures dealing with matters historical and political.”Footnote ⁸³ Wilson was polite but evasive in his response, reminding Dixon that “there is always a violent possibility that I shall be absolutely absorbed and my attention preempted.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Dixon would persist, however, in his unremitting efforts to capture the president's attention, flooding the White House with newspaper clippings on the show's spectacular reception for weeks.

Dixon did not need to embellish or mislead Wilson on the film's reception—it was extraordinary. The scathing indictment of the film in Villard's own newspaper, The New York Evening Post, proved to be the exception rather than the rule. Upon debut, The [New York] Globe reported, “here is beyond question the most extraordinary picture that has been made or seen in America so far”; The New York American wrote that, “Mr. Griffith comes pretty near working a miracle”; The Evening World commented that, “the most dramatic events in our United States history have been reproduced with striking realism.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Perhaps no review better captured the filmmakers’ intent than that of the widely read and syndicated columnist Dorothy Dix who embraced the narrative, writing lavishly that

The widespread acclaim of the film is a testament to the persistent racial animosity that still marked American life during Wilson's presidency. African Americans would find cause and distress in battling segregation and patronage politics under Wilson, but the fight to prevent The Birth of Nation was larger than institutional wrangling. The film stained the heart and mind of every community in which it debuted. Its popularity and reception was not just a mark on the racialized politics of the country, but a barrier for future racial progress in all walks of life.

Civil Rights Activists Fight Back

The NAACP had started its legal battle against the film as soon as its Los Angeles debut was announced. They had been unsuccessful in their attempts to delay or prevent the film's premier, as the city council and Los Angeles Police Department refused to intervene, citing that the National Board of Censorship had approved the film. However, even after intensive lobbying efforts, the film debuted in New York City, on time, and to sold-out audiences for weeks. The film would move from New York to Boston within the first two weeks of April, where civil rights groups began to focus their efforts on what they hoped to be a more hospitable environment. At the behest of Trotter and other Boston-based leaders, Mayor James M. Curley agreed to hold a hearing to debate the film's merits against its potential disruption on April 7—two days before the film's scheduled premier.

The arguments presented to Curley's review committee had all been heard before, with the exception of one: Wilson's personal screening and approbation of the film. In front of the committee, John Cusick, representing Griffith and the production company, told the mayor, “This play has been produced in the East Room before the President and his Cabinet. I am in doubt whether I have permission to state it or not, but I can say this of my own knowledge from what I have heard, without quoting anything, that there was absolutely no criticism made by them in regard to that play.” Butler R. Wilson, law partner of Archibald Grimke and future president of the Boston branch of the NAACP was taken aback. The mayor asked Wilson if what had been said was true, and the attorney, unaware, could only respond that, “I don't know what Woodrow Wilson has done. … I don't know what that Cabinet is capable of doing. I hadn't heard that this had gone before them.” Cusick interjected a final endorsement—“They enjoyed it, and they thought it was one of the greatest things ever produced.”Footnote ⁸⁷

The transcript suggests that Curley was intrigued by the president's endorsement and at the end of all the testimony, he voted along with the rest of the committee to allow the film's premier, albeit only if the producers would remove certain scenes from the film. Days later, the film was released to sold-out audiences at the Tremont Theater, just down the street from a memorial to Crispus Attucks. The following morning The Boston Globe would report, “As a work of art it is so wonderful and so beautiful, and so full of life that it robs one of the power of criticism.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Still not satisfied, Griffith's production company saturated the Boston dailies with advertisements including a full-page ad touting the endorsement of U.S. senators, former governors, military officials, and reverends—even some New York schools, “who after hearing both sides concerning this picture viewed it critically themselves and made a request to have it exhibited to their children.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Legal methods having failed, Trotter moved to stage a massive demonstration in front of, and inside the theater the following weekend. Having received advance notice of the plan, the Boston police department stationed more than 200 plain clothes and uniformed officers in the surrounding area.Footnote ⁹⁰ When the box office refused to sell some of the remaining tickets to a group of African American men, police began to clear the lobby. Of those standing at the ticket counter, Trotter was the first to be arrested and was escorted away by four police officers. “Several hundred” men followed them down the street. Police officers drew their clubs and pushed the crowd through the adjacent Boston Commons, arresting ten other persons—nine of them black.Footnote ⁹¹ Upon his release, Trotter would give a prescient warning; his demonstration was not the “violence” the nation needed to worry about: “It is a rebel play, an incentive to great racial hatred … it will make white women afraid of negroes and will have white men all stirred up on their account. If there is any lynching here in Boston, Mayor Curley will be responsible.”Footnote ⁹²

The White House record shows that Wilson saw clippings of news reports on the protests the following day. His personal secretary, Tumulty, pressed Wilson to publicly denounce the film. Yet still feeling both regret and anger from his encounter with Trotter just months before, Wilson told Tumulty that, “I would like to do this if there were some way in which I could do it without seeming to be trying to meet the agitation which … was stirred up by that unspeakable fellow [Trotter].”Footnote ⁹³ America's social order was in peril, but a statement denouncing the film, while morally superior to silence, could legitimize, the president feared, not only a political gadfly but also the type of agitating protest he thought dangerous to the country.

Yet when reports of Wilson's rumored endorsement arrived on Tumulty's desk, fearful of his boss's reputation, he broached the subject again with Wilson.Footnote ⁹⁴ Wilson personally drafted the response—“It is true that ‘The Birth of a Nation’ was produced before the President and his family at the White House, but the President was entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented and has at no time expressed his approbation of it.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Those words would remain the official response for all other inquires coming to the White House over the following weeks.Footnote ⁹⁶

Over the next year and a half, communities of both white and black Americans—from Philadelphia to Juno, Alaska—greeted the film's arrival with legal petitions, massive rallies, and pleas to elected officials and censor boards to ban the film.Footnote ⁹⁷ Among the many resources available to these citizens groups was a highly heralded pamphlet published by the Boston branch of the NAACP—Fighting a Vicious Film. The 47-page publication features essays from Storey, Villard, Washington, and others along with public resolutions and censor bills serving as exemplars from other communities. Tucked between an essay by the historian John Morse and another by the famous philanthropist George Foster Peabody, detailing his own misattributed endorsement, lies a reprinted copy of Wilson's response under the bold heading—“Not Endorsed by the President.”Footnote ⁹⁸

Following his fateful White House meeting on Jim Crow personnel practices and witnessing Wilson's timidity on racial appointments, Trotter publicly condemned the president. Yet, he and members of the NAACP continued to recognize the value and potential of the president's “bully pulpit,” even if the president was hesitant to stand behind the podium. The fight over The Birth of a Nation was a watershed moment in the history of African American civil rights. African American leaders’ campaign against the film kept up a barrage of protest against its racist narrative, but despite their best efforts to play up Wilson's refusal to endorse The Birth of a Nation, they never received the full-fledged denouncement of the film from prominent national officials. Nevertheless, the spirited demonstrations of the NAACP, the National Equal Rights League, and myriad churches and local civic organizations vindicated a strategy of direct confrontation. The battles against extending Jim Crow to the federal service and The Birth of a Nation had unified and strengthened the civil rights movement, which ended its brief flirtation with the Democratic Party. As his reelection campaign began, Wilson lost what little support from the civil rights community he had managed to gain in the 1912 election. Even those who fought adamantly for African Americans to avoid “capture” by the Republican Party, and urged their brethren to take advantage of the two-party system to advance their interests, were largely demobilized and languid.Footnote ⁹⁹ Writing a month before the 1916 election, Du Bois summarized the collective feeling of political agnosticism that had fallen over the civil rights movement:

Opposed by a reunified Republican Party in 1916, Wilson won reelection by a much narrower margin. Charles Evans Hughes was able to resecure most of New England as well as some of the midwestern states (Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa) that Wilson was able to take with Roosevelt running as the Progressive standard bearer. None of the major publications at the time credited a dramatic shift in the African American vote as the cause of Wilson's loss of support. But surely, the narrative about the role of African Americans in politics had dramatically changed. In 1912, African Americans leaders were ready to be bold and experiment with a progressive candidate, even if he was a Democrat with Southern roots. In 1916, these same activists lamented that Wilson won because African Americans were so disenfranchised in the South that the entire Electoral College bore the taint of caste and prejudice.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Yet with America's entry into World War I, the bitter harvest of civil rights leaders’ support for Wilson in 1912 was less important than the challenges presented by events in Europe. Politics as usual was interrupted by the convulsive social and economic disruptions of total war.

The Battle to Make America Safe for Democracy

Wilson would ask Congress for a declaration of war on April 6, 1917, just months after winning reelection on a campaign that highlighted his success in keeping America out of an embroiled Europe. The rivalry between the White House and civil rights leaders during the first term now found a common cause with Wilson's international idealism and the necessity of maintaining a unified front at home. His early equivocation on race gave tacit endorsement to the seeds of race hate and violence that only grew with the social disruption aroused about America's entry into the war. Yet, facing the persistent pressure of the same group of social advocates from whom he kept his distance during his first term, Wilson finally recognized that his public image had become tarnished on the race question—a stain that would impede his domestic and international ambitions. The newly formed civil rights groups found a reluctant voice in fighting The Birth of a Nation; but Wilson now saw advantage in joining their cause of racial justice with his promise to make the “world safe for democracy.”

The swell of patriotism that came with the start of war quickly waned with the social upheaval that the Great War wrought. An estimated 300,000 African American soldiers eventually served in the military to assist the war effort.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ But most significantly, with expanding industry in the North and in the face of sustained racial prejudice in the South, over half a million African Americans migrated to the urban centers of northern America during Wilson's second term to take advantage of economic opportunities brought about by the necessities of waging “total war.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ These dramatic transformations added stress to an already weakened social fabric. In East St. Louis, that fabric would finally tear.

The region of St. Louis had become the center of racial tension and prejudice that had permeated through all parts of American life. Responding to sporadic mob violence in June, Du Bois would comment that, “It is this attitude of many labor unions and Northern working men who make the mobs of East St. Louis, that keeps many Negroes living among Memphis lynchers. But it cannot keep them all. The stream of migration is large. It is going to be larger.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ One day before the outbreak of the largest riot that would hit East St. Louis, the region's defense board warned of escalating tension and impending violence in the region as a result of migration and strained economic pressures.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Unlike the urban riots that would engulf cities in the 1960s, aroused by the boiling over of blacks’ frustration with invidious social and economic conditions and police brutality, the race riots of early twentieth-century America were precipitated by white mobs terrorizing African American neighborhoods. Ongoing labor disputes and strikes in several industries had inflamed tensions between white laborers and black migrants, widely believed to have been imported to the region to expressly break organized labor. As municipal police routinely overlooked crime and violence perpetrated against African American communities, city blocks learned to self-arm and self-organize in response to rumored and reported mob violence. When church bells rang in an African American neighborhood of East St. Louis early in the morning of July 2, groups of heavily armed men gathered and accidently fired on a police van. As reports of gunshots spread throughout the entire region, mobs of white men and women—many employed in rapidly diversifying industries—marched into African American neighborhoods and began to set city blocks ablaze. Reporters in the streets relayed accounts of lynchings from telegraph poles, houses set ablaze, and local “militias” firing on fleeing residents, now trying to seek shelter in government buildings. Newspaper accounts describe a war-torn battlefield, far away from the trenches of Europe, with opposing armies clearly distinguished by the color of their skin.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Such dramatic violence did not escape the attention of the White House, yet Wilson, naturally cautious and uncertain of his authority, was hesitant to make a public statement on the matter. With a stream of letters pouring into his office, Wilson reached out to his attorney general, Thomas Gregory, asking if he “could exercise any jurisdiction in this tragical [sic] matter.” The president was determined to find this legal authority, for, as stated in his letter to Gregory, he was “very anxious to have any instrumentality of the Government employed to check these disgraceful outrages.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Arthur Capper, governor of the bordering state of Kansas, expressed sentiments in a letter to the president that Wilson “entirely” shared: “It is certainly a most humiliating circumstance that in the center of our own nation, in one of the great centers of population, a hundred or more helpless negroes, men and women, were butchered by white men while officers of the law were present.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

By the next weekend, delegations of African Americans, joined by senators and congressmen, began to call on the White House for meetings and official statements. Wilson's official response was to say nothing as he waited for a report from his attorney general.Footnote ¹¹¹ Yet, he remained in continual contact with the Republican congressman from St. Louis, Leonidas Dyer. Dyer shared Wilson's deep concern for the rule of law and eagerly pressed on the president and his congressional colleagues a way to authorize the federal government's involvement. Believing that the president lacked statutory authority to investigate lynchings and other acts of mob violence, Dyer introduced legislation that would specifically consider “whether the Constitution and laws of the United States were violated; and what legislation, if any, [was] needed to prevent like outrages.”Footnote ¹¹² Under existing constitutional interpretation, the Fourteenth Amendment confined the Department of Justice to areas of “public authority;” as lynchings were private actions, albeit often with the cooperation of local law enforcement, the federal government lacked grounds to investigate and prosecute the crimes.

As Dyer worked to secure meetings with Wilson to convey the concerns of various civil rights organizations, thousands of African Americans took to the streets of New York City to protest the violence in East St. Louis. In an act that seemed to directly foreshadow the philosophy and strategies of direct action of the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement, an estimated 10,000 men, women, and children silently marched down Fifth Avenue carrying banners that would resonate with a country at war abroad and with itself: “Make America Safe for Democracy;” “The First Blood for American Independence was Shed by a Negro;” “We Were First in France, Ask Pershing.”Footnote ¹¹³

The reference to Wilson's defense of World War I—“The world must be made safe for democracy”—revealed the civil rights activists’ hope to ally their cause with the president's international idealism, rather than to simply denounce its hypocrisy. A delegation of about twenty civil rights leaders from the Silent Protest Parade arrived at the White House days later to deliver a petition signed by 12,000 citizens, beseeching the president to deploy the prestige and powers of his office against mob violence.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Wilson did not meet personally with the delegation—a slight that would bring the president more ridicule in the African American press—but as he wrote Tumulty on the same day the parade delegation visited, he wished for his secretary to think about a public address to denounce mob violence and an appropriate occasion where his rhetoric would ameliorate rather than add to the tension—“I want to make [a speech] if it can be made naturally and with the likelihood that it will be effective.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Just as with The Birth of a Nation, Wilson believed that public remarks on the race question could be as deleterious and inflaming as beneficial to the cause. In this instance, however, his commitment to the law and the causes of the civil rights movement were more aligned.

Still, as his tentativeness to meet with the parade delegation suggested, Wilson remained cautious in flexing the rhetorical muscle of the modern presidency. Yet Alfred B. Cosey, who had worked alongside Walters in the stillborn efforts to build a black wing of the Democratic Party, understood that, on this issue, there was a critical space for Wilson and social activists to collaborate. A member of the Silent Protest Parade delegation that had visited the White House, Cosey wrote to Wilson urging him to, “use his great powers to [grant] us some redress for the grievances set forth in our petition … praying that the President may find it in his heart to speak some public word that will give hope and courage to our people, thus using his great personal moral influence in our behalf.” Two days earlier, Cosey had gone on the record denying press reports that Wilson had refused to initially see the delegation because they were black and that the delegation remained willing to meet with Wilson whenever convenient.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Their patience finally paid off when Wilson saw the delegation on August 16, where in a widely publicized statement he “expressed himself as shocked because of the riots and assured the delegation of his sympathy in their efforts to prevent recurrences.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

While Wilson conveyed to civil rights leaders and the press his outrage over the East St. Louis riots, he maintained pressure on his attorney general to investigate violations of federal law. As Dyer was seeking to expand the legislative authority of the federal government to prosecute lynching, Wilson requested that his attorney general deliver a full report of the federal government's existing responsibility to intervene and prosecute those who engaged in mob violence. Alas, from what the Department of Justice could conclude, no federal law was applicable to the facts as discovered by numerous local, state, and federal authorities. Yet, Wilson insisted that Department of Justice attorneys would remain in the city to aid state authorities, in the event that “a condition which would justify [federal action] may develop later on.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Perhaps Wilson's reluctance to stretch federal law was just cover for his unwillingness to meddle in racial conflict. But, while the rubble in East St. Louis still smoldered, a more exacting test of his forbearance arose: Racial violence would implode in one area where the authority of the commander in chief was unambiguous—the U.S. Army.

Another race-riot broke out on August 23, this time near Camp Logan just outside of Houston, Texas. Just months into the war, the Wilson administration was no stranger to the race question inside the U.S. military. As mobilization ramped up and as the army moved all-black regiments into military camps heavily concentrated in the Deep South, the race-mongering element of the Democratic Party saw an issue they could exploit. Precisely such a calculation was made abundantly clear in South Carolina Congressman Asbury Lever's response to rumors that African American and Puerto Rican soldiers would be stationed outside Columbia, South Carolina. Pleading for support, Lever wrote, “the enemies of the administration and me personally would want no bigger club; it would be almost fatal. The blame would be put upon me. I protest earnestly against it.” Wilson, likewise, grew concerned about the potential recriminations of his congressional foes, particularly Senator Blease, “and the passions he would rejoice to raise,” in exploiting the policy of stationing black soldiers into the South.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Lever, and indeed the entire Department of War, had correctly predicted the racial animosity that would greet African American units arriving in the South. When the 654 black soldiers of the Third Battalion of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Regiment arrived in Houston, relations quickly soured between the local community and enlisted men. Rumors broke out that a young corporal had been shot by local police, prompting roughly a hundred of the soldiers to march toward the nearby town of San Felipe, prompting white residents to break into hardware stores to arm themselves. Because of the presence of multiple National Guard regiments, the death toll in Houston did not match what had happened in East St. Louis; still, nine residents, four police officers, and two soldiers lay dead by morning. Anticipating the possibility of additional violence, battalion commanders acted swiftly to remove the entire contingent of black soldiers, sending them back to Columbus, New Mexico.Footnote ¹²⁰

Arrests were made and courts-martial scheduled for the sixty-three indicted soldiers, as secretary of war, Newton Diehl Baker directed a full investigation into the incident. The verdicts were announced on November 27: Fifty-four black soldiers were found guilty of all charges and specifications; thirteen were found responsible for masterminding the mutiny and orchestrating the march. They were “to be hanged by the neck until dead.”Footnote ¹²¹ Reactions to the sentences reflected the deep division in the country on the race question. The day following the execution of the convicted soldiers, the Los Angeles Times editorialized in its headline that the “Noose Avenges Riot Murders.”Footnote ¹²² In stark contrast, the editorial page of the Afro-American questioned how different the actions of the soldiers really were from those of crimes perpetrated against black civilians throughout the country:

The thirteen soldiers accused of plotting the insurrection were summarily executed without public notice. Days after, sixty more African American troops were summoned to be court-martialed. By the end of the year, five more soldiers were ordered to hang for their role in the Houston riot. In many ways, the swift action taken by the War Department mirrored the process taken after violence erupted outside of Brownsville, Texas, in 1906 between black soldiers and local white residents. As was the case in Houston, residents of the town were agitated by the African American soldiers’ arrival. They not only accused, but also planted evidence against the all-black Twenty-Fifth Infantry Regiment. Months later, President Roosevelt, animating protest that led to the founding of the NAACP, summarily signed the dishonorable discharges of all 167 black soldiers stationed at Fort Brown.Footnote ¹²⁴

But the remaining soldiers of the Houston riots received a surprising reprieve from the White House that stands in contrast to Roosevelt's decisions in the Brownsville case. In large part a response to the divisive reactions over the first round of executions, Wilson issued an order through the War Department that dramatically altered the procedural due process rights of accused soldiers. The Chicago Defender first broke the news that all further and scheduled executions of American soldiers, except for those serving overseas, would be reviewed in Washington before the sentences were carried out. Reporters who wrote for the African American press made the connection to the Houston riot clear—“there is no doubt but that the men executed were technically guilty and thus amenable to the law, but it is also true that the provocation was great and only possible of endurance under extraordinary circumstances … had the President's order been in force before the hanging of these men, the Race would not have had to suffer the pangs caused by their execution.”Footnote ¹²⁵

With the new order, the Wilson White House began a prompt review of the Houston riot courts-martial. For civil rights activists, this was more than a legal maneuver. The hundreds of letters and petitions that arrived at the White House are a testament to their public relations campaign that tied the fate of the soldiers to Wilson's personal involvement. As with the delegations from the Silent Protest Parade, Wilson hesitated to give the public remarks that these messages requested. Nevertheless, the soldiers’ fate galvanized the president's attention over the next several weeks. When James Johnson, soon to be executive secretary of the NAACP, personally delivered an independent report and collected petitions to the White House in February, 1918, Wilson wrote to Baker that, “this document … accompanied by a gigantic petition, that is, gigantic in the bulk of its signatures, has I must say moved me very much. I hope you will have time to read at any rate the portion which concerns the soldiers in the 24th Infantry. I believe I have already said to you that I would like very much to participate in the reconsideration of the cases.”Footnote ¹²⁶

With uncharacteristic, but necessary speed, Wilson granted an indefinite reprieve to the soldiers who had already been convicted of their role in the Houston violence and were awaiting the gallows.Footnote ¹²⁷ Over the next six months, attorneys at the Justice and War Departments reviewed their cases. In a lengthy memorandum Baker sent Wilson on August 22, 1918, he reported that, “I am obliged to concur with the unanimous judgment expressed by all who have examined these records, that they are without serious flaw as to matters of law, that the Court in each instance was properly constituted and composed of men of the highest character, [and] that all rights of the accused were safeguarded.” Yet, Baker recognized, “months have elapsed since the beginning of these trials … the time has passed and the execution now of these death penalties, it is said, would come as a shock and reopen an old race wound.”Footnote ¹²⁸

Taking Baker's advice wholesale, Wilson commuted many, but not all, of the death sentences and commuted several of the life sentences. In delivering remarks on his decision, it was clear that the massive petition drive and the hundreds of letters in support of clemency had their effect. As Wilson told reporters, “The offense of which these soldiers were guilty is one of the greatest difficulty … [yet] I desire the clemency here ordered to be a recognition of the splendid loyalty of the race to which these soldiers belong and an inspiration to the people of that race to further zeal and service to the country of which they are citizens and for the liberties of which so many of them are now bravely bearing arms at the very front of great fields of battle.”Footnote ¹²⁹

Speaking Out against Lynching

Wilson's decision to investigate the East St. Louis and Houston riots were consistent with his previous commitments to maintaining social order. World War I, however, had changed the context in which Wilson would strive to negotiate the demands of an increasingly energetic social movement, even amid the realities of a racially divided polity and a system of separated governing institutions. The fight in Europe for “democracy” opened up the rhetorical space for Wilson to speak for democracy at home. Nevertheless, absent the intense and sustained pressure of social advocacy groups, it is unlikely that Wilson would have found it necessary or beneficial to speak out against lynching. Yet facing a relentless campaign to enlist his support, he denounced mob violence in a widely lauded address on July 26, 1918.Footnote ¹³⁰

The antilynching cause was of the first priority for the NAACP, one that was also intricately connected to the organization's ongoing efforts to prevent the further release of The Birth of a Nation. It stemmed, in part, from the federal government's limited authority to prosecute lynchings in the states, and the belief that a presidential address could help advance such legislative authority in Congress. The NAACP's Johnson discussed as much with Wilson on the same day that he delivered the petitions in support of Twenty-Fourth Infantry soldiers. Referencing a recent lynching at Estill Springs, Tennessee, Wilson, as he did in response to East St. Louis, sought federal authority.Footnote ¹³¹ But, the attorney general was adamant, writing back to Johnson several days later that, “under the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Federal Government has absolutely no jurisdiction over matters of this kind; nor are they connected with the war in any such way as to justify the action of the Federal Government under the war power.” The lack of federal authority motivated, in large part, the desire to see Wilson denounce lynching in a formal address. As the NAACP's John Shillady wrote to Tumulty, “the President's inspiring moral leadership as a man, no less than his position as President, gives him the opportunity, and may we suggest respectfully, the responsibility of speaking out.”Footnote ¹³²

Shillady knew that Wilson deplored mob violence. The president's consistent and public reactions to racial violence in the summer of 1917 confirmed this; indeed, a year earlier, he joined the National Association of Colored Women in denouncing lynching. Dictating his response to Tumulty, Wilson's told his secretary to “say he [the president] deplores most earnestly and deeply the violence you alluded to and believes with you that it is a serious menace to the whole structure and spirit of civilization.”Footnote ¹³³ But Wilson's August 1916 “denouncement” did not have the persuasive force that other civil rights leaders hoped a more public statement would have.

To help push the issue on the White House's agenda, Du Bois dedicated dozens of pages in The Crisis to the antilynching cause, from illustrating with gruesome horror instances of specific violence, to detailing with quantitative accuracy the number of occurrences and their frequency by state. Dozens of other organizations and those who had pressured Wilson for years now also enlisted in the effort. In March, Trotter and other members of the National Equal Rights League joined the growing chorus of voices calling on Wilson to exercise his rhetorical role as the voice of the people. Framing the crisis of public mood and growing racial animosity that jeopardized America's fight for democracy, these leaders escalated the call for Wilson to publicly denounce lynching and to remove The Birth of a Nation from theaters, which was still drawing large audiences three years after its initial screening.Footnote ¹³⁴ Wilson refused to respond immediately, but Tumulty continued to press the subject. Eventually, in a private, but leaked, letter to his secretary Wilson would confess that, “I have always felt that [The Birth of a Nation] was a very unfortunate production and I wish most sincerely that its production might be avoided, particularly in communities where there are so many colored people.” Tumulty pressed the president to elaborate, suggesting to him that “you may perhaps care to say more than this.” But Wilson, perhaps not wanting to further fracture his relationship with the NAACP, or perhaps fearful that his intrusion might escalate the tension, responded to Tumulty in a handwritten note: “No. This will do.”Footnote ¹³⁵ The historical record does not demonstrate whether this brief but firm denouncement was effective in quelling racial tensions or in stopping the further production of The Birth of a Nation. However, it reveals that Wilson, in the context of war, was pushed to publicly condemn the film, a testament to an incipient joining of executive authority and social activism.

Indeed, when civil rights leaders framed the lynching issue as deleterious to the war effort and social order, Wilson began to consider a more public commentary on racial injustice. Later, in May, the Equal Rights League would press the issue further, and in no uncertain language:

The National Citizenship Defense Committee, a pro-war organization led by prominent African American politicians and businessmen from Chicago, explicitly requested presidential action as a “war measure.” In an open telegram they declared, “we hold that the government which exacts allegiance is under obligations to give protection in return … as a war measure, we respectfully request and urge the President and the Congress to take some immediate and effective steps to abolish lynching and mob violence and thus secure the hearty and solidified support and cooperation of all the patriotic peoples of the United States to win the war for civilization and to make the world safer for democracy.”Footnote ¹³⁷ This message was echoed by R. R. Moton, who as principal of Tuskegee Institute had developed a congenial relationship with White House. As he wrote the president, “The one concrete suggestion that I wish respectfully to make is that, I think a strong word, definitely from you on this lynching proposition will have more effect just now than any other one thing, and I think you could say that word in such a way as not to offend the South or the North or the Negro.”Footnote ¹³⁸

Moton's appeal came after Wilson had already made up his mind to make some sort of public declaration, but the White House was still debating the timing of the pronouncement. What is clear, and significant, is that Wilson had decided against a mediated platform—he wanted to make a strong statement directly to the people.Footnote ¹³⁹ Wilson's experience in dealing with the fallout of The Birth of a Nation forced the president to learn two important lessons. First, although the power of modern media created a new political environment especially ripe for fearmongering, the same technological developments facilitated massive, organized resistance to these campaigns. Second, the president's image was inescapably connected to these disputes, even if they took place largely outside of formal politics. Wilson's comprehension of these lessons figured prominently in his decision to finally denounce lynching after months of waiting for an opportune moment. Wilson had hinted several times over the spring and early summer of 1918 that he had remarks ready should an occasion arise that merited a presidential address.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ That moment arrived when the German government began running propaganda following the lynching of a German American, Robert P. Prager.Footnote ¹⁴¹

In a statement reprinted in almost every major newspaper, Wilson joined the demands of civil rights advocates with his commitment to protect and advance abroad America's idea of self-government. He began by counseling his readers that he would speak “very plainly” about an issue that “so vitally affects the honor of the Nation and the very character and integrity of our [American] institutions.” Referencing the “disgraceful example” of the German army, Wilson reminded Americans that, “we proudly claim to be the champions of democracy. If we really are, in deed and in truth, let us see to it that we do not discredit our own.” Wilson's peroration clearly tied his condemnation of a mob's murder of Prager to the larger cause of racial violence:

The address was first-page, above-the-fold, headline news, reprinted in its entirety in many newspapers. Its long passages of flowering rhetoric made Wilson's “Statement to the American People” suitable material for editorials, which continued for weeks.Footnote ¹⁴³ The Chicago Defender took the opportunity to note that “Embodied in the President's appeal to the country can be found the principles enunciated by this paper for the past twelve months in its fight for a clarity of Race conscience.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The editorial continued its praise onto the back pages: “The coming of this message from President Wilson, a Democrat, was like a bolt out of a clear sky, a bolt intended to strike our enemies a stinging blow; a bolt intended to bring these wreckers of order and law to a realization of the fact that they are deserving of the same consideration from true American citizens as that shown for the Huns, who are endeavoring to kill democracy.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵

The success of various civil rights leaders in persuading Wilson to publicly denounce lynching is most certainly a surprising and significant moment in the history of social advocacy. It helped to legitimize a strategy of direct confrontation with the White House necessary to promote the goals of racial equality in an era of mass politics. Because his actions were bounded by the early twentieth-century restraints on the executive's administrative discretion in matters of social policy, Wilson's most consequential impact on the lives of African Americans was less pronounced. Nevertheless, Wilson's reluctant but ultimate condemnation of a scurrilous film and mob violence against African Americans followed from a deliberate strategy by civil rights leaders to push the president. Civil rights activists forced Wilson to become involved in matters of racial injustice so that the White House, already engaged in a major war, was compelled to broker a balance between social reform and maintaining the status quo. Indeed, Wilson's stance foreshadows the delicate situation of his successors. As Miroff has argued, for most of the twentieth century, presidents increasingly sought to find a “symbolic balance point” where they could champion the goals of social movements to a limited extent all the while maintaining a “special commitment to law, order, and the general good.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶