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JIM CROW LAW AT WASHINGTON
President Wilson, with good cause, resented and rebuked the offensive spokesman of the delegation of negroes who went to the White House to protest against the Administration's policy of segregation in the executive departments at Washingion. The wonder is that such a poor representative of his race as the impudent mischiefmaker from Boston was permitted the privilege of an interview with the President, and his exclusion for the future is well deserved.
But neither the offensive conduct of his caller nor the Presidents justifiable indignation will dispose of the issue raised by the protesting delegation. Until the Wilson Administration came into power there was no segregation of negro clerks at Washington; there was no necessity for it, there was no demand for it. In short there was no "segregation issue." The trouble began when the Secretary of the Treasury and the Postmaster General, with the aid and encouragement of the former's assistant, John Skelton Williams, gave ear to the agitation of a small group of Southern Democratic office holders and proceeded to fan into flame the fire of race hatred by quietly setting about the segregation of the negro clerks. The Transcript, as soon as the fact leaked out, protested against that procedure on the ground that it was un-American, unfair and unconstitutional. To a protesting delegation who visited the White House more than a year ago, the President promised an investigation of their charge that segregation was being enforced and left upon them the impression that he was wholly out of sympathy with such a scheme.
How at variance with that attitude appears his confession of yesterday in which the President, for the first time, admits the enforcement of a policy of segregation and seeks to defend it with soft words about the "humanity" of its purpose. Had the conditions at Washingion called for any such segregation as this Administration is enforcing, why were Presidents Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt and Taft blind to that necessity? Why was there no demand for it? If, as the President contends, there is nothing political about this discrimination against the negro clerks, why has the enforcement of that policy been so often denied?
The truth is that segregation began soon after Mr. Wilson entered the White House; that it has been completed in at least two departments with his knowledge and his belated and reluctant admission of the fact is as condemnatory as the fact itself is indefensible. The President's feeble resort to evasive rhetoric about the non-political character of the segregation issue is enough to tax the patience and affront the intelligence of even his heartiest well wisher. The segregation of the negro clerks is not only political, but it is sectional and partisan, and as unnecessary as it is unconstiutional.
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President Wilson and Secretary Garrison continue to carry out their excellent policy of promoting army officers of merit. On Saturday there were announced the selections of Brig.-Gens. Frederick Funston, Hugh L. Scott, and Tasker H. Bliss for the one existing and the two coming vacancies among the major-generals; of Gen. Scott, as Chief of Staff, in succession to Gen. Wotherspoon, retired, and of Cols. Henry A. Greene, William A. Mann, of the infantry, and Col. Frederick S. Strong, of the Coast Artillery, to be brigadier generals. These are all worthy officers whose fitness can hardly be questioned. Gen. Funston has not, of course, the standing of a regularly trained officer, but his service at Vera Cruz, with the fact that he has served thirteen years acceptably as brigadier-general, and has for years been the senior in rank in that grade, makes his advancement altogether justifiable. The army will, we believe, agree with us in asserting that it has had under no other President so square a deal in the matter of the distribution of high honors. The Wilson custom has been to promote those colonels who are recommended by a majority of the existing generals, and it would be hard to devise a fairer method. For one thing, it wholly eliminates political pressure. If Gen. Scott's rise to the position of Chief of Staff has been rapid, It is merited, for he has served long with troops and in the field, and has in addition acquired certain lore, about our Indians, for instance, which is unequalled by any other officer. Best of all is the fact that President Wilson absolutely refuses to countenance the promotion of any officers as generals who have not seryed acceptably as colonels.
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At the dinner given to Gen. William W. Wotherspoon in Washington on Saturday last, on his retirement from the army, that officer gave some admirable advice to the service. He urged the officers who are forever running to Congress for legislation to abandon the practice, and to leave to the proper authority, the Secretary of War, the duty of presenting the needs of the service to the legislative branch of the Government. It is a serious abuse to which Gen. Wotherspoon called attention, and it is coupled with another, the frequent talking of officers for publication. The War Department has expressed itself on the latter matter, but the President would do well to stop the constant agitation for larger armaments carried on by such officers as Gen. Wood, whose recent memorandum on the immediate needs of army expansion was published here on Sunday. As for the rushing to Congress, it would seem as if Secretary Garrison should be able to stop that by stringent order, but it is a veritable abuse at present. The difficulty is, of course, the presence of so many officers, active and retired, at the capital, who see civilians successfully agitating for this or that reform, and naturally seek to imitate them. Some day, we hope, a Secretary of War will be found who will remove from Washington every oficer not absolutely indispensable to the proper conduct of the service.
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THE BOSTON HERALD Published every day in the year at 171 Tremont Street, Boston, by Boston Publishing Co. Robert Lincoln O'Brien . . . . . Editor and Publisher James H. Higgens . . . . . . Treasurer and Genl. Mgr. Walter Emerson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Managing Editor ___________________________________________ Entered at the Boston (Mass.) Postoffice as second class mail matter. ___________________________________________ Address all communications to the Herald. Boston, Mass. Make checks payable to Boston Publishing Co. ____________________________________________ SUBSCRIPTION TERMS - BY MAIL DOMESTIC RATES Postpaid United States and Mexico and Island Possessions. Subscriptions for the Daily and Evening Editions delivered to the Canadian Provinces are received at the same rates as in the United States; Postage is 5 cents per copy extra on the Sunday. One cent extra per copy for postage is charged in the Boston postal delivery district.
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[right column] ONE PECULIAR PROBLEM OF THE DEMOCRACY.
We have had only two Democratic Presidents since emancipaton—Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson—one wholly a northerner in his point of view, and the other by birth and assoclation essentially southern. But they are alike in finding the race problem very much more troublesome than it can be to Republican Presidents, and it is never simple of solution.
Southern Men in the cabinet and elsewhere naturally expect their point of view toward the negro to prevail under a Democratic administration. And yet its head can hardly afford—purely as politics—to yield so much as that. Not only do the negroes cast a large vote in states like Indiana and Illinois and Ohio, which is actually counted, but a considerable element of northern free traders, of whom the New York Evening Post is the best exemplar, are keenly sensitive to the wrongs of the negro.
Mr. Cleveland experienced no end of trouble on this score. Frederick Douglass was by him technically invited to a White House reception, at which he appeared with his Caucasian wife, to the great dismay of the southern peeple. The White House explanation of the episode was that a list of office-holders in the Blue Book had been furnished to the clerks for the issuance of invitations, and that, in carrying out this order, Frederick Douglass had been necessarily included. But the protests from the South were almost ceaseless. They provoked most of the discussion of Mr. Cleveland's availability for renomination in 1892, besides threatening to affect the electoral votes of some of the border states. No less a man than Fitzhugh Lee took up the issue for serious conference.
The northern negroes, on the other hand, are quite invariably disappointed with a Republican administration because doing so little for them. This gives the Democracy a good many votes on the rebound, which that party does not care to lose at the next election. It is no small misfortune to the country to have a considerable block of citizens in debatable states of the North quite regularly committed to voting against the party in power. Mr. Trotter was quite right in thinking they had deserted the Democracy on Nov. 3, but he would also be right in predicting that they would as surely desert the Republicans in 1918, were the party to be sucessful at the next election, because of slights sure to accrue in the [?] colored people turned against Mr. Taft primarily on account of Brownsville, but also by reason of his yielding to the so called "[?]white" element of the party in the South. Plans now under way for reducing southern representation in Republican conventions are [?]unfriendly to the negro, since these signalize an acquies-
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THE PRESIDENT AND SEGREGATION.
Bad manners are bound to hurt even a good cause, and the last place where disrespect is to be tolerated is the White House. If William Monroe Trotter was, as appears, insolent to Mr. Wilson yesterday, he has impaired his advocacy of the rights of the colored people and hurt them all as well. But Mr. Wilson, we feel, should make allowances, not perhaps for the hasty temper of a man whose passionate desire for justice for his race often leads him astray, but because of the genuine wrongs of which Mr. Trotter complains. It is a sad blot upon the Wilson Administration that it has tolerated, nay, drawn the color line, without real cause, save as Mr. Trotter truthfully put it, the racial antipathies of Messers Burleson, John Skelton Williams, and McAdoo. For an Administration which talks about a New Freedom and boasts of having bestowed a new liberty upon business men, not only to be blind to the wrongs of full ten millions of American citizens, but to add to them is truly discouraging. Mr. Wilson can feel keenly for the governmental wrongs of the "submerged 85 per cent." of the people of Mexico, of whom so many are Indians and of a mixed parentage, but he has yet to say a really sympathetic word about the wrongs of the millions in the South who are without voice in their own government. 84965
The difficulty lies, of course, in putting yourself in the other fellow's place, in having some appreciation of what it means to be the victim of prejudice and injustice, to be wronged without the power to remedy the wrong. That Mr. to visualize this is, we disappointing because jured persons with athize so underual vision and however, when [/left column]
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Wilson is unable repeat, the more there are so many whom he does symp standingly. His unusual imagination leave him, it comes to disinfranchis men and permitting his to inflict indignities upon American citizens in the immediate vicinity of the White House. If he could only have palliated the wrong done, as he is reported to have yesterday, by saying that segregation was enforced for the comfort and best interests of both races, in order to overcome friction. He would know then that it makes neither for the comfort nor for the best interests of the races, but invairably leads to added friction and creates deep and lasting unhapineess amoung the segregated. This problem has vexed him and caused him heartache more than once in his Administration, and it will not cease to plague him until he lays down the law that sets up equality of treatment of all employees in the Government service.
Again, Mr. Wilson is reported to have resented Mr. Trotter's statement that if this discrimination were not ended, the negroes who voted for him would vote the Republican ticket, and to have declared that this was political blackmail. But this is the time honored American way of showing disapproval of an elective official's conduct. When Mr. Wilson was a candidate for President in 1912, he declared: "Should I become President of the United States, they (the colored people) may count upon me for absolute fair dealing and for everything by which I could assist in advancing the interest of their race in the United States." On the strength of this many colored people and their white friends advocated Mr. Wilson's cause. who would rather have cut off their hands than have aided Mr. Wilson if they had known that he was intending to draw the color line in the de partments upon the excuse that there is a certain point in the relations of the races where friction must occur. To them that is neither absolute fair dealing nor advancing their cause, but putting it back, because it sets the stamp of governmental approval upon color prejudice. To expect after this that the problem can be kept out of politics, as Mr. Wilson is quoted as urging is to expect the impossible.
With Mr. Wilson's feelings as to the ultimate solution of the negro probiem we are not to-day concerned. He may or may not have a constructive programme to suggest. The issue is simply whether a hateful East Indian caste shall be established in Washington or not. We had supposed, after the investigations of last winter, that the vicious policy had been checked; we understood that it was to be abandoned gradually. In numerous instances the JimCrowing had, we know, been stopped. The more discouraging it is to find the President apparently apholding what the World justly calls the "foolish indiscretions of members of his Cabinet." There was no genuine complaint as to the conditions in Washington. Colored and white employees had worked side by side for fity years. Some of them had been appointed by Grover Cleveland—one of his appointees to high place being the father of Mr. Trotter, a veteran of the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts. But the Wilson Administration went out of its way to create the issue it now deplores, and cannot see its way clear to admitting
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