@farmerman,
Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. was Civil Service Commissioner from 1889 to 1895. He and his life-long political ally, Henry Cabot Lodge, were radical Republicans (yes, there was once such a beast). As the party of Lincoln, both Roosevelt and Lodge considered it their duty to advance the interests of African-Americans. Although Roosevelt was largely concerned to end the political patronage aspect of civil service, he also desegregated the civil service. In 1913, shortly after he was inaugurated, Wilson received a delegation of women who worked in civil service, and complained that they were forced to work in the same offices as black women. Wilson immediately segregated the civil service once more, and returned a large measure of political patronage to civil service appointments, which meant white women were more likely to be appointed.
In 1915, Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent in Atlanta was accused of the murder of an adolescent "white" girl (as though Jews are not white), convicted (modern criminologists consider the evidence to have been poor at best) and sentenced to be hanged. The sentence was commuted, but a mob broke into the jail where Frank was held, and he was lynched. Jewish community leaders appealed to Wilson for an investigation--he ignored them. As a result of the Frank incident and inspired by Griffith's
The Birth of a Nation , a defrocked preacher, William Simmons, re-founded the Ku Klux Klan in a ceremony near Atlanta. Griffith's motion picture was based on the novel
The Clansman by a man named Dixon. The costumes of Klan members were based on Griffith's turgid melodrama. Black community leaders and preachers appealed to Wilson, who ignored them just as he had ignored Jewish community leaders.
Quote:In 1915 the film The Birth of a Nation was released, mythologizing and glorifying the first Klan and its endeavors. The second Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915 by William Joseph Simmons at Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, with fifteen "charter members". Its growth was based on a new anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, Prohibitionist and anti-Semitic agenda, which reflected contemporary social tensions, particularly recent immigration. The new organization and chapters adopted regalia featured in The Birth of a Nation; membership was kept secret by wearing masks in public.
Source at Wikipedia
Things just got worse. When the United States entered the Great War, Wilson created the Committee for Pubic Information by executive order. The brainchild of Wilson's campaign manager, George Creel, the committee was basically Creel, with the Secretaries of State, War, the Army and the Navy were
ex officio members, and it became the first political propaganda organ of the United States government. There was no internet, of course, but there was also no radio or television. Reporters who wanted information about government policies and programs had to play ball with Creel, or wait for other newspapers to publish. Creel used his power ruthlessly. When war was declared, the Army and the Navy used the newly created "IQ" tests, the Stanford-Binet tests (1913), to classify those enlisted and conscripted. Blacks were deemed substandard, unfit to serve as commissioned officers, and even unfit for combat. Traditional Army regiments, all-black regiments such as the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments, were included in the new dispensation. Condemned to act as stevedores, the members, most of them life-long professionals of the Regular Army, offered to serve the French, who were glad to get them. Of course, with the CPI, this sort of thing was only reported in the African-American press. Many black American soldiers served with great distinction, such as the Harlem Hellfighters, the 369th Infantry Regiment, and many were honored with the highest decorations of the French Army.
After the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Wilson returned to the United States as a hero in Europe, but facing business as usual in the Congress. Theodore Roosevelt was dead by then, but Henry Cabot Lodge was still alive, and headed the Republican Senate delegation. In an ordinary political passage, he went to Wilson to talk turkey. But Wilson would not bargain with him, and began a cross-country tour to promote his 14 Points, and to force the Senate to ratify the treaties signed in Paris. It takes two-thirds of the Senate to ratify a treaty, and this was political black-mail, as though Wilson could threaten the electoral success of Republican Senators. It was a miserable failure. The United States did not ratify any of the treaties, and significantly, did not join the League of Nations.
Meanwhile, black soldiers were returning to the United States, and what became known as "the red summer of 1919," red referring to the blood shed in race riots, beatings, lynchings and burnings. Called upon to intervene, Wilson ignored community leaders, and remained fixated on his doomed attempt to secure ratification of the treaties he had signed in Paris.
The Red Summer of 1919
Many highly-decorated Africasn-American veterans of the Great War were beaten, or murdered in the Red Summer of 1919. Wilson did nothing, he didn't even comment on these events.
